We thought we had time, Infinity thought. We thought we had six months.
He closed his eyes to concentrate, trying once more to reach Arachne, trying to find a way to bring Starfarer back to night. The web gave him a strange response, not quite a rebuff, but a request for him to restate his question. He did so, and Arachne refused to understand him.
Infinity was staff, not faculty; he lacked the technical credentials that would allow him to alter the environment.
Infinity left Alzena alone, concerned about her, but more concerned about the starship. He opened the door, bracing himself for heat like the Santa Ana, the unpredictable hot desert wind of California.
Darkness welcomed him.
Beyond the shelter of Alzena’s porch, Infinity stood with his head thrown back, staring into the sky. The glow of house windows speckled the far-side hills, but the sun tubes reflected nothing. Before, the light had been too much. Now it was too little. The sun tubes reflected nothing, not even specks of starlight.
At least the temperature was dropping, and a shut-down of the tubes was less dangerous, temporarily, than their blasting the cylinder with heat.
But whatever was wrong, with Arachne or with the mechanism itself, had better be tracked down and fixed, fast. Or Starfarer would be a tin can full of dying and dead vegetation. The animals, humans included, would not be far behind.
o0o
Victoria slipped quietly into the cool, dark bedroom. Stephen Thomas lay in his rumpled bed, the patchwork quilt pulled over his head. Now that the light outside had dimmed, returning night to its proper place, Victoria opened the curtains. Fresh air poured past her face.
She sat down on the edge of the futon. Stephen Thomas did not move; there was no motion except his breathing and the gentle drift of the curtains in the breeze, Starfarer’s breath.
She was worried about him. Her distress, over Stephen Thomas and over the persistent flaws in Arachne’s control of Starfarer, warred with Victoria’s feelings of utter elation at the decision to continue the expedition. She wanted to leap up and cheer.
But she did not want to wake Stephen Thomas.
Professor Thanthavong promised that no pathogens had been growing in the lab. Her attention to safety was legendary; still, suppose she was wrong? Suppose one of the geneticists had been doing research the head of the department did not know about?
Feeling slightly embarrassed, Victoria touched Arachne and asked for a health AI. A few tests could not hurt, and Thanthavong had no reason ever to hear of them. They would ease Victoria’s mind.
As she rose to rejoin the others, Stephen Thomas turned over and pulled the blanket down just far enough to look out at her. The purple and green bruising around his eyes had faded to sickly yellow. Under the transparent bandage, the gash in his forehead was nearly healed.
“Hi,” Victoria said.
He made a hoarse, inarticulate sound; maybe it was “hi.”
“Love,” Victoria said, “you sound almost as awful as you look. I hope you don’t feel that bad.”
“No, I feel that bad too.” His voice was a croak. “My throat hurts. My hands itch.”
She sat down beside him and pushed his hair off his forehead. He was feverish and sweaty. She had never heard of any flu that made your hands itch.
“Can I get you anything?”
He moved around so he could put his head in her lap. The sheet slid away from his bare shoulder. Victoria tucked it around him.
“I asked the housekeeper, but that seems like a long time ago.”
“Maybe it’s recharging.” Victoria queried, but got no reply from their household AS. She frowned. Unusual for it to be this stupid, but perhaps it had run its batteries down to zero. It did that once in a while. Victoria kept trying to remember to track down the glitch, but had never gotten around to it.
“I just want something to drink,” Stephen Thomas said.
“I’ll get you something. What would you like?”
He looked up at her. “Isn’t champagne supposed to be good for treating the flu?”
“Grow up,” Victoria said fondly.
“Champagne’s a grown-up drink.” His voice cracked, as if he really were an adolescent.
“I have no idea if it’s good for treating the flu, but I do know alcohol dehydrates you. So I doubt it.”
“Oh.” He was so hoarse now that she could barely hear him.
“Don’t talk any more, Stephen Thomas,” she said. “It hurts to hear you, so I can imagine how you must feel. Let me up, so I can straighten the sheets.”
He started to move, then collapsed back into her lap.
“Shit!” he whispered. “God, Victoria, it hurts just to move.”
She felt helpless, and she was beginning to feel scared.
Stephen Thomas saw her eyelids flicker. “What are you doing?”
“Asking Arachne about a health AI. I got a busy signal.”
“I don’t need...” His voice failed him completely.
“Just a little personal attention, hmm?”
He grinned sheepishly. With Victoria’s help, he moved to the edge of the bed. She pulled the bottom sheet straight, then shook out his quilt and smoothed it over him.
“You can’t be sick for long,” Victoria said. “This is way too domestic for me.”
He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. His grip was strong. She patted his fingers gently. The bones felt sharp beneath his skin, and the skin looked red and irritated.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. She wondered when he had last had anything to eat.
He stroked her arm all the way to her fingertips as she rose to leave, but he did not try to hold her.
o0o
Feral had started to make breakfast; it smelled like French toast. Satoshi lounged near, kibitzing while Feral cooked.
Victoria hurried into the main room.
“How is he?” Satoshi asked.
“He’s awake. He sounds terrible.” She opened the refrigerator.
Feral had ordered some food to put in it. No one in the partnership was much of a cook. That had been Merry’s province. And now, maybe, Feral’s.
“He asked for champagne,” Victoria said.
Satoshi chuckled. “He’s got the right idea. A celebration.” He yawned. “He can’t be too sick.”
“I don’t know. This isn’t his usual hypochondria.”
She got out some fruit juice, found a glass, and poured the juice into it.
“I’ll put his breakfast on a tray,” Feral said.
“Don’t give Stephen Thomas too much chance to send you fetching and carrying,” Satoshi said. “He’s the world’s worst patient. The housekeeper could take stuff to him, but he likes the attention.” Satoshi glanced toward the electrical plug where the household AS recharged its batteries when it was idle. The machine was not there. Satoshi had not seen it puttering around the house, and he knew the bedrooms were tidy. Except Stephen Thomas’s, of course, but Stephen Thomas had programmed the housekeeper to leave his things alone.
“Where’s the housekeeper?” he said.
“Haven’t seen it,” Feral said. “But I haven’t been looking.”
“I haven’t seen it either,” Victoria said. “And I can’t get any answer from the health AIs.”
Satoshi put out a query. To his surprise, he received no reply.
“You don’t supposed Gerald really did take emergency authority? He wouldn’t pull in all the artificials?”
“After the way everybody laughed at him when he suggested it? I doubt it.”
Outside, J.D. crossed their yard and stopped at the open window. Zev stood in the darkness behind her.
“I just stopped to see how Stephen Thomas is feeling,” J.D. said.
“He’s been better,” Victoria said.
“Breakfast’s almost ready,” Feral said. “Would you like some?”
“Come on in,” Satoshi said. “Visit the house of pain.”
J.D. entered through one
of the open floor-to-ceiling windows that formed most of the front of the partnership’s underground cottage. Stephen Thomas was the only one who regularly used the door with the fan-shaped top. Zev hovered on the threshold.
“The house of pain?” J.D. said curiously. “Do you read Wells?”
“Satoshi, are you sure you feel ok?” Victoria asked.
“Sure, why shouldn’t I?”
“Because I don’t know what kind of bug Stephen Thomas has. I don’t know where he got it.”
“Professor Thanthavong said —” Feral said.
“I know that!” Victoria said. “Everybody screws up once in a while, though. Maybe even Nobel laureates. Maybe somebody was working on something she didn’t know about.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Satoshi said.
“You might have broken some culture dish without noticing—”
“Victoria, we were up to our knees in spilled stuff,” Satoshi said. “It was melting all over the floor. I noticed it, I just didn’t worry about it after Professor Thanthavong said not to. And, look, I’m okay. If there was something there to get, I’d’ve gotten it, right?”
“I guess so. I probably would have, too. And Zev. Zev, are you feeling okay?”
“I am well,” he said. “I am always well.”
He spoke in a defensive tone, which Victoria thought strange.
“I must sound completely paranoid,” Victoria said. “It’s not as if I think we’re in some horror movie being stalked by The Creature from the Genetics Lab.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She started for the hallway, carrying the fruit juice. “But I sure never heard of any kind of flu that makes your fingers itch.”
J.D. came in and sat down, but Zev remained in the doorway.
“Come on in, Zev,” Satoshi said.
Zev hesitated before he replied.
“I’d rather go swimming,” he said finally.
“Are you afraid of getting whatever Stephen Thomas has?” Satoshi asked. “If he caught something in the genetics department, and you and I were exposed, we ought to have it by now. If he caught the usual transport flu, that goes around Starfarer more or less at random.”
“I am not afraid of getting ill,” Zev said. “But... “ He backed onto the terrace. “I need to swim.” He walked away fast, his baggy pants legs flapping around his bare ankles.
“What’s the matter with him?” Feral asked.
“He’s just a kid, Satoshi,” J.D. said. “He’s in an environment that’s alien to him and he’s not used to having anything to worry about. It’s the older divers, and mostly the women, who make the decisions where he’s from.”
“Do you want to go after him?” Satoshi asked.
“I guess I’d better.” She glanced wistfully at the kitchen nook, and smiled at Feral. “But I’m famished, and that smells awfully good. I don’t suppose it will last long—?”
“It’ll last long enough.” Feral grinned at her. “I’ll make sure of it. Come back when you find him.”
o0o
J.D. set off across campus. It was still dark, but the sun tubes had begun reflecting starlight again. J.D. hoped that the malfunction was minor, a remnant of Arachne’s crash or a control sent out of true by the impact of the missile.
J.D. missed the Earth’s moon, and all its different phases and shadows. She wondered if any of the plants or animals on board reacted to the rhythm of the moon; she wondered if people would react to its absence. The salt marsh had artificial tides...
She touched Arachne and sent Zev a message, asking where he was. She received no answer.
J.D. climbed a small rise. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. Starfarer’s herd of miniature horses dozed in the meadow, fifty meters away. J.D. was beginning to get used to them, but she still did not feel entirely comfortable about miniature horses. People liked to have animals around, and Alzena, who had designed the interior, had forbidden mammalian predators. She had only recently allowed an eagle, a few falcons. The starship contained no ferrets, no rats, particularly no dogs or cats. But people liked to have pets.
J.D. found it difficult to think of horses as pets.
She received no answer from Zev through Arachne. She asked the computer about the nearest body of water that was deep enough to swim in. Her eyelids flickered as she concentrated on the map she got in return. It appeared as a three-d image in the visual center of her mind, a curving plane that she could follow all the way around to her starting point. She remembered the difficulty she had had in drawing a map for one of her novels. Her characters had lived in an O’Neill colony, a larger version of Starfarer’s rotating cylinder. Mapping it presented none of the problems of distortion that occurred in representing a sphere on a flat surface. The problem, instead, was where to slice the cylinder and still preserve spatial relationships. She had never found a perfect solution.
A lake lay half a kilometer away. The wetlands were at the far end of the cylinder, at least an hour’s walk away. She had not yet had time to visit them. Hoping Zev had chosen the freshwater lake, she set off in its direction.
Sand slid softly beneath her feet. Wavelets lapped at the shore. Frogs groaned and crickets chirped, and far off across the water, something splashed on the surface.
“Zev!”
She called his name in a hoarse whisper. She had no idea how far sound carried on Starfarer. It was five o’clock in the morning. If anyone lived on the shore of the lake, and had managed to go back to sleep after the meeting, after all that had happened, J.D. did not want to wake them up.
Again, she received no answer. She kicked off her shoes and unfastened her pants, then glanced around, a bit nervous, a bit embarrassed. She saw no lights nearby, no sign of habitation. She might have been back in the Puget Sound wilderness. She took off her pants and her shirt and her underwear and left them on a distinctive rock.
She waded into the cold water.
It felt wonderful. She waded deeper. She paused when the water was chest-deep. It always amused her, that men hesitated when the water reached crotch-high, and women hesitated as the water touched their breasts. She pushed forward and stroked down into the dark water. It flowed through her hair, over her skin. The metabolic enhancer had already kicked in, fortifying her body against the chill.
She broke the surface and took a breath.
She wondered what it must be like to be a diver and swim here. She wondered what it would have been like if she had accepted the divers’ invitation to join them, to become a diver herself. And she wondered what she would have done if she had decided to become a diver, and Victoria’s invitation to join the alien contact team had come after that.
I probably would have joined the expedition anyway, she thought. Because having a diver on the alien contact team is not a bad idea. I wonder if I can persuade Victoria to let Zev join us officially?
She dove again. Underwater, she called Zev’s name in true speech.
Lying quiet in the water as she rose toward the surface, J.D. listened carefully for an answer. She wished she had her weight belt, her artificial lung.
Perhaps she could get a lung grown for her. Except the equipment would have been concentrated in the genetics department...
We must have backups, she thought.
The distorted echoes of her voice traced out the size of the lake, the topography of its bottom. A sparkle of sound revealed a school of fish; a shimmering surface gave her the location of a stand of water-weed.
The water parted across her back, cold water giving way to cool night air and the chill of evaporation across her skin. She turned over to breathe; she floated in the quiet darkness, grateful for a few moments to rest, to stop thinking, to stop worrying about Zev, even to stop rejoicing about the expedition.
She heard a splash near shore. A moment later, a gentle touch stroked her from her heel to her shoulder. Startled, she splashed over and trod water. Ripples from her motion spread out across the lake. J.D. pulled herself under
with powerful strokes.
She called Zev again, and this time the notes of the cry of his name-sound traced out his body. She felt the low-frequency tones of his voice against her skin. She gestured upward and surfaced again.
Zev rose beside her. The water was not deep enough for him to accelerate from the bottom, leap into the air, and land with an explosive splash like an orca. He hovered before her, water dripping from his short pale hair. He reached out and touched her again. J.D. took his hands and held them against her. His warmth radiated against her body, arousing her.
“I was worried about you,” she said.
He wrapped his arms around her and rested his head against her breasts. Her body was buoyant but Zev’s was not; J.D. had to kick to keep her head above the surface, and kicking was difficult with Zev’s legs twining about hers. His claws slid carefully over her calf.
“Zev, I don’t have my lung here, I can’t breathe underwater now.”
He let her free and floated nearby.
“Come on.”
She swam to shore. She and Zev sat in the sand, waist-deep in warmer water. He drew his legs up, let his forearms rest on his knees, and slumped forward. He combed his hair back, unnecessarily, with his long fingers.
“Where were you?” J.D. asked. “I couldn’t hear you in the lake.”
“I was up the beach a little. I was coming to find you. How did you know I was here?”
“It’s the nearest place to swim. If you weren’t here I was going to look for you in the wetlands.”
“The water’s all very shallow here, J.D.,” he said sadly.
“I know, Zev. I told you it would be.”
He gazed across the lake. The surface was very still.
“Tell me what’s the matter.”
He put his hand flat on the water, spread his fingers to extend the webs, and moved it up and down like waves. Ripples radiated from his fingertips. The water rose and fell against J.D.’s breasts.
“I know what’s wrong with Stephen Thomas.” Zev spoke in a rush. “It shouldn’t have been possible. I never did it on purpose. I only just figured out what happened when he said his fingers itched. I’m sorry, J.D.”
“Stop apologizing,” J.D. said gently, “and tell me.”
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 50