The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “I’m not a programmer!” Griffith’s voice startled her. She stopped the scrolling and went to see what was wrong. She had to push herself out of her chair.

  “You’re the one who mentioned Trojan horses!” Victoria said.

  In the hallway outside J.D.’s office, Victoria folded her arms and glared at Marion Griffith.

  “No, I’m not,” Griffith said. “I said if there was something like that, it would probably work more than once. I’m not a programmer. I don’t know how to write a horse, or what it would say. I don’t know what to suggest you look for. If you gave me a program, and said, ‘get this into a computer,’ then — look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t talk about this sort of stuff.”

  Victoria blew her breath out in frustration, turned her back on Griffith, and disappeared into her office. Griffith, watching her go, noticed J.D. watching him. She expected him to snarl at her and stamp away, or ignore her completely, as he had on the transport coming up to the starship.

  He shrugged, dispirited.

  “I’m always saying the wrong thing up here,” he said.

  “I think...”

  J.D. hesitated, ready to back off, but Griffith waited for her to continue. Till now she had estimated his age to be at least thirty-five, and perhaps over forty. Now she revised both limits downward five years. When he came out of his “I’m just an accountant” pose, he acted with an absolute assurance that matured him. The uncertainties of the past few days had stripped away both the assurance and the air of maturity.

  “Mr. Griffith, it seems to me that if you expect us to believe you’re on our side, you’re going to have to be more open than... than perhaps you’re used to.”

  “I’m not —” He stopped. “I see what you mean.” His forehead creased in concentration. “The trouble is, I honestly am not a programmer.”

  “What are you?” J.D. asked.

  “I’m an accountant.”

  J.D. thought of a couple of Stephen Thomas’s choicer epithets, but instead of cursing made a brief, sharp whistle that meant, superficially, “very rotten fish,” with the connotations of wasted time, disgust, and ridicule.

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me,” he said. “I don’t know what you just said, but I’ll lay odds it means you don’t believe me.”

  “You’d win,” J.D. said, and went back into her office.

  o0o

  In the sailhouse, Feral let himself drift toward Iphigenie. He watched her huddle over the hard link; he wished he could be of some use to her.

  She glanced toward him. Their gazes met.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she cried, startling him with her anger. “Stop criticizing me, stop—”

  “I’m not doing anything!” he said.

  “—Stop... thinking about what a failure I am.” Her voice fell, and she turned away.

  “Iphigenie, please, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you. You’ve been through more than I can imagine. I only wish I could be of some use to you.”

  “I’m frightened,” she whispered. “I’m so frightened.”

  He moved closer and put his arm around her shoulders. Her hair’s thin braids drifted against his sleeve.

  “I’ve tried to connect with Arachne,” she said. “But I just can’t do it.”

  He remembered her cold hands, the beaten look in her eyes, after the web crashed with her deeply involved in it.

  “Keep using the hard link,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

  “I don’t know,” Iphigenie said. “I hope so. We had so much more data on the first cosmic string, and it was moving much more slowly. I’m afraid we’ll get near transition point, and we’ll need a change that I can’t do fast enough through the hard link. I’m afraid I’ll hook in... and the web will crash again.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find the flaw. It won’t crash.”

  Iphigenie shook her head. She spent so little time in the false gravity of the cylinder that she never got out of the habit of shaking her head or nodding.

  “They couldn’t check all Arachne’s systems in a hundred years, my friend. In a hundred years they’d still have more to look at than they started out with.”

  She slipped from within his arms, and returned to her work.

  Feral stayed near her. But he trusted Arachne’s reconstruction. He wandered through the web, exploring, testing, searching. So far, he had found nothing definite, nothing to use as evidence for the cause of the crash. He put most of his attention into searching through the information files that Stephen Thomas had gotten him access to.

  Occasionally he checked on the progress of several of his stories. Being old-fashioned on the subject, he planned to do the writing himself, but he let Arachne gather some information for him. He took a moment to query his interview list: several positive responses from people he had asked to talk to, though most of them wanted to wait for calmer circumstances.

  Have to see if I can talk them out of waiting, he said to himself. Derjaguin — of course he said yes. Orazio. I wonder if she still has any sympathy for us at all. The interview with Infinity Mendez turned out well. Follow up on that one. No reply at all from Chancellor Blades. Damn.

  He composed a second request to the chancellor, aiming for a perfect balance of urgency and courtesy.

  After he had sent it, he thought, I wonder if I can get Stephen Thomas to introduce me? That might be the key I need.

  A pattern shift caught his attention. He moved closer within the web, pushed by excitement. He had nothing definite yet, just the sensation of information waiting to be discovered, to be attached to the proper connections, to resonate.

  Without warning, his access shut down.

  Feral yelped with shock and pain.

  Dazed, he struggled to maintain consciousness. He opened his eyes to a flash of scarlet, then blurred, light-spattered blackness.

  After a moment of panic he remembered that he was floating free in the sailhouse. His body turned, pushed by a random air current. The speckles of colored light resolved themselves into the mass of the Milky Way. He pressed his hand against his face, his eyes. At least he could move.

  His heart pounded so hard it scared him; he relaxed, making his pulse slow. The draft pressed him toward Iphigenie. Feral drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  Iphigenie heard him. Huddled over the hard link, she glanced toward him. She frowned.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I... I don’t...” he said, stumbling over the words.

  “Feral, what’s wrong?”

  He did not want to frighten her any more, but he did not want to keep information from her, either. That was too dangerous. He reached out, hesitantly, to Arachne, ready to pull back.

  The computer responded, smooth and strong, with no hint of any problem. Except that his access level had gone back to guest status, and he could only make superficial contact.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Jennie, what happens when you ask Arachne for information it doesn’t want to give you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, puzzled. “Its purpose is to give information. There’s nothing secret about what it holds. I suppose it would escort you back to a public area, if you asked it for something private or personal.”

  “Escort” was not the word Feral would have used for the heave-ho he had just been given.

  “What were you doing?” she said. “Nosing about where you oughtn’t?”

  “I didn’t think so,” Feral said. “But I just had my access level lowered.”

  “That is odd.”

  “I’m going down to campus for a little while,” he said. “I won’t be gone long.”

  I need to talk to Stephen Thomas, he thought.

  o0o

  “Satoshi!”

  “Huh? What?”

  He flung his arm across his face to shut out the light. It was too early to get up, and he was still sleepy.

  “What are you doing here? Wake up!”

  He sa
t up, remembering where he was, but still groggy with sleep. Gerald Hemminge shook him again.

  “Wake up!”

  “All right, I’m awake.” Satoshi rubbed his face and combed his hair back with his fingers.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m waiting to talk to you. Or the chancellor.”

  “He isn’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I think I’d best not say. You don’t sound particularly rational to me just at this moment.”

  “It’s you I want to talk to. Gerald, what do you know about the impound of the artificials?”

  “They’re being reserved for emergencies.”

  “Emergencies! If this doesn’t qualify as an emergency, what will?”

  “You are all such hardy conspirators. Deprived of your mechanical servants for an entire day —”

  “Now, look, Gerald —”

  “Satoshi, do your own laundry. It would make me very content to see Stephen Thomas Gregory beating his fancy shirts on a rock.”

  “Wait,” Satoshi said. “You don’t know the whole story, do you?”

  “I believe I have a fair grasp —”

  “It isn’t just the interior artificials that are impounded. The silver slugs are down, too. Did you pull them off the repair site? Gerald — we’re flying with a hole halfway through our skin!”

  “I —” He stopped.

  Satoshi had startled him, but whether it was because the assistant chancellor had miscalculated or because he was covering for the chancellor, Satoshi could not tell.

  “Even if we did what you want, and returned home, Starfarer needs its structural integrity! The stresses on the cylinder are going to keep up no matter what we do. That crater has got to be fixed. Anything else is suicidal.”

  Gerald Hemminge could be pompous, and he could be disagreeable. He was not, however, stupid; his intelligence made him tolerable in Satoshi’s view.

  “I’m sure this is an oversight,” Gerald said.

  “Okay. Let’s go talk to the chancellor and get it straightened out. Or,” he said, hopefully, “can you do it on your own authority?”

  “I’ll talk to the chancellor,” Gerald said. “That’s all I can promise.”

  Satoshi folded his arms, unwilling to leave without more assurance.

  “I could just wait here,” he said stubbornly. “He’d have to pass me sooner or later.”

  “Do you think so?” Gerald asked. “Didn’t you ever teach at university, back home? Surely you don’t think administrators give up their favorite amenities just because they’re on board a starship.”

  “What favorite amenities? Gerald, don’t you want some help? I can back you up, if you’d like.”

  “I shall deal with it. I’m in a most unpleasant position.”

  “I understand that. But if the starship comes apart around us and we never get home at all, it’s going to be hard for you to prove the rest of us are wrong.”

  “I shall deal with it. Don’t make it worse.”

  He passed Satoshi, opened the door to his office, and went inside.

  Satoshi was halfway across the reception room before he remembered that he had promised to question Chancellor Blades’ orders as well as the artificials’ impound. He went back.

  Gerald’s door stood ajar. Satoshi knocked once and opened it.

  “By the way, Gerald —”

  Gerald’s office was empty.

  Satoshi looked around, confused.

  Then he realized what Gerald had been talking about when he referred to administrators and their favorite amenities: Satoshi had taught at a regular university, and he had heard the rumors.

  He had been a junior member of the faculty at the time, not someone regularly invited to fancy administration dinners, fund-raisers, awards ceremonies, or confidential meetings. He had always assumed the rumors to be the usual exaggerations of faculty and students who considered administrators their natural enemies.

  But maybe not. The rumors were that the administration buildings all contained hidden hallways, inaccessible to anyone without the right keys, or identification, or status. Hidden hallways that university vice-presidents, say, could use to get from one room to another, even one building to another, without exposing themselves to the hoi polloi.

  Apparently the rumors were true.

  o0o

  Kolya Petrovich returned to his house, amused. Infinity Mendez had ordered him home to get some rest.

  For someone who claimed not to take well to leadership, Infinity was doing quite a good job.

  Halfway up the stairs, Kolya saw Griffith sitting on his porch, waiting. Kolya hesitated, then continued.

  “Are you speaking to me?” Griffith said.

  “I suppose I am. All deals are off, these days, including the one I made with you. Come inside.”

  Griffith followed him. Kolya got out some bread and cheese. He did not ask Griffith if he were hungry; he made sandwiches and handed one to Griffith.

  “Beer?”

  “Sure,” Griffith said, surprised. “I didn’t know you had beer here.”

  “Several people brew it. Quite well. They take their hobbies seriously. Cheerful competition.”

  He carried his sandwiches and beer onto the porch. Infinity had made a good decision. There was still work to do out on the surface, but it was not quite so pressing now that the silver slugs promised to return.

  The human beings would function better for rest and real food. It was possible to eat in a space suit, but the sustenance came in tubes, semi-solid, barely edible, much less palatable.

  “Did you find the malfunction?”

  Kolya bit into his sandwich, savoring the sharp cheese, chewing it slowly, swallowing.

  “We found nothing.” He wondered how long the cheese would last, whether Starfarer carried stores of it. There were no cows on board the starship. He wondered if anyone had started making goat cheese.

  Not that it matters much to me, Kolya thought. He was not partial to feta.

  Griffith wolfed a bite of his sandwich. Kolya started to regret wasting the good cheese on him.

  “I’d like to help with the inspection when you go back out,” Griffith said. “I had Arachne put me through the spacewalk orientation.”

  “There’s no mechanical malfunction of the sun tubes.”

  “You know that for sure? What did you find?”

  “We found nothing. And I doubt Victoria and her colleagues will find anything in Arachne’s programming. They’ll be overwhelmed with information.”

  Griffith put his sandwich down.

  “Something is wrong?” Kolya asked.

  “Not with the sandwich.” Griffith stared into the mug of beer. It was dark and thick, nearly opaque. “Arachne could crash again. We don’t know what the signal was, or who sent it, so there’s no way to stop it if somebody wants it to happen again.”

  “There’s no way to stop it by looking for mechanical malfunctions or corrupt programming.”

  “They’re going to blame me. Again.”

  “Yes, probably. I’m sorry that it’s true. But you made yourself the most likely suspect.”

  “Will you help me prove I’m innocent?”

  “I’ve done what I can, Marion,” Kolya said, and this time Griffith did not object to the use of his given name.

  “If somebody’s watching me when the system crashes again—”

  “‘When’? You’re that sure it will?”

  “It would if I’d had anything to do with planning its reactions, and I’m not nearly the sneakiest person I ever worked with.”

  “You aren’t, hmm?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think I could do? You don’t react like most people, when you connect with Arachne. Your communication is invisible. Your attention doesn’t wander, you don’t close your eyes. You can carry on a conversation.”

  “I worked hard on that.”

  “To your disadvantage. If I can’t even
tell when you’re connecting under ordinary conditions, how do you expect me to tell if you were, or weren’t, telling the system to shut down?”

  “I’ve thought about that. Maybe I should have my link removed.”

  Kolya flinched. The idea of removing one’s link with the web felt like a threat of blindness, deafness, lack of sensation.

  “Or paralyze the node I’m connected to.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you would.” He paused, looking at Kolya hopefully, expectantly.

  “You expect too much of me,” Kolya said. “As usual. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an engineer.”

  “Won’t you even try to help me?”

  “I will, if you wish, if I’m not needed elsewhere, and if you can think of a way. How can I defend you against the charge that you could place a delayed trigger within Arachne’s web?”

  Griffith shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you mind if I make a suggestion?”

  “Please,” Griffith said gratefully. “Please do.”

  “I think you’d be better off to spend your energy helping Victoria and the others find the real trigger. If it is one of us —”

  “You don’t want it to be, do you?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want! What matters is the truth. I think it unlikely that Arachne is programmed to crash itself. I think someone has to pull the trigger. I think we have to find that person. If it’s one of us, all the more important.”

  “If I helped track the person down, would everyone trust me?”

  “People might stop distrusting you so emphatically.”

  “Victoria Fraser MacKenzie thinks I’m a jerk.”

  “That is possible.”

  “Thanks.”

  “She’s devoted to the deep space expedition. You worked against it. What do you expect of her?”

  Griffith shrugged. He picked up his sandwich again, took another bite, and swallowed, barely chewing.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you to chew your food?”

  “No,” Griffith said, suddenly angry, dangerous again.

  Kolya did not press him. Griffith changed the subject.

  “I did try to help, but I can’t tell them what they need to know because I don’t know what it is. Jesus, I barely opened my mouth to J.D. Sauvage and now she thinks I’m a jerk, too.”