The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “That doesn’t sound like J.D. Whatever did you say to her to make her react like that?”

  “It told her,” Griffith said, “that I’m an accountant.”

  Kolya started to laugh.

  “Dammit, it’s true! Why does everybody laugh or swear or both when I tell them the truth?” He drained his mug and set the glass down hard. “GAO would be a lousy cover to use if I weren’t an accountant.”

  Still chuckling, Kolya said, “For someone expert in manipulating people, you are terribly naive.”

  Griffith looked away. “I’m not used to trying to manipulate people... with the truth.”

  “Stop trying to manipulate them at all.”

  Griffith frowned curiously. “Then how do you get them to do what you want?”

  In frustration, Kolya ran his hand through his streaky gray hair.

  “Marion, sometimes they won’t do what you want. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Is it?” His voice was cold, determined. “I know... a lot of ways to manipulate people that don’t have anything to do with words.”

  Kolya’s sharp anger was far hotter than Griffith’s had been. For a moment he managed to hide it.

  “And just who would you choose to torture?”

  “That weaselly vice-chancellor might be a good place to start. I’d have to look at the transport passenger list, too...”

  Kolya flung his beer mug down the stairs and across the garden. It crashed against a rock and exploded into tiny, sharp shards. Griffith was on his feet, poised for defense, before the end of the startling sound. Kolya had made no move toward him. Griffith straightened up, confused.

  “If you lay hands on anyone on board,” Kolya said, “anyone... I will kill you. Do you understand me? I’m the only person on the starship who would make that threat. And I’m the only person on the starship who can carry it out.”

  Shocked, humiliated, bewildered, Griffith backed up, staring at him. When he was five meters distant, he turned, in silence, and walked away.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas’s vision blurred. Translated code fled past him, unseen, incomprehensible. He had been looking at it so long that it no longer meant anything — if it ever had meant anything. He froze the display and put the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids, trying to force away the burning.

  His vision was changing, like his body. The changes both intrigued and frightened him. Victoria and Satoshi had tried to talk to him about what was happening, and he had put them off. How could he talk to anyone when he did not know what he thought himself?

  Professor Thanthavong had offered, hesitantly, reluctantly, to do a subtraction comparison between Zev, Stephen Thomas, and a standard human genome. Lacking Stephen Thomas’s medical record, she could use the comparison to try to single out the DNA sequences that had inserted themselves into his chromosomes.

  A subtraction comparison was a risky procedure. It offered no assurance of a correct solution. Stephen Thomas did not trust it to take out only the diver genes and leave his own uniqueness alone. Trusting himself, his originality, perhaps even his personality, to a subtraction comparison scared him much more than it scared him to change into a diver. At least as he was, he would be himself with something added. The other procedure could leave him as himself with something missing.

  Someone’s hands touched his shoulders, the taut, sore trapezius muscles, and kneaded deftly.

  Stephen Thomas relaxed.

  “God, Feral, that’s wonderful.”

  “Looked like you could use it.” He pushed Stephen Thomas forward in his chair so he could rub his back. His thumbs dug deep, seeking out the aches, intensifying them, pressing them away. Feral slid his hands under the azure silk shirt. His hands were warm and powerful. Stephen Thomas pulled his shirt off and leaned forward to pillow his head on his arms and the tangled silk.

  “Stephen Thomas, I think I found something —”

  “What! Where? When?” He raised his head. Feral moved his hands lower on his back, digging his thumbs into the tight muscles beneath his shoulder blades.

  “I can’t pinpoint it. I was right on the edge of something. Then the access you got for me cut out. It was... kind of a shock. Was there a limit on it?”

  “Hell, no.” Stephen Thomas’s eyelids fluttered. His display changed abruptly; he opened his eyes and leaned forward, peering intently into it. “You’re right, your access got frapped. Damn! The system’s still not finished healing.” One word changed, and the new display riffled through successive layers of interconnected updates.

  “Great, I’ve got it. Thanks.” He rubbed the small of Stephen Thomas’s back. His touch lightened as he made connection with Arachne.

  “Can I see what you were looking at when you got thrown off?”

  “Sure...” But after a moment, Feral scowled and came out of his communications fugue. “No. It’s gone. I can’t even describe it. It was just a feeling, a way I can look at patterns...”

  “Where were you when this happened? Physically, I mean.”

  “Out in the sailhouse. Jennie — I think she’s more comfortable with somebody around.”

  “Yeah,” Stephen Thomas said, “I can understand that. I don’t know how you got frapped, Feral. A stray cosmic ray? The sailhouse should have stopped it. Maybe Arachne got whacked with one. I just don’t know. At this point nothing would surprise me. We’re thinking of changing the name of the ship to Murphy’s Law.”

  Feral chuckled in bleak appreciation.

  “I’ll keep looking,” he said.

  Stephen Thomas straightened up. Feral hugged him, hiding his face in Stephen Thomas’s hair.

  Stephen Thomas felt a thrill of yearning. Reluctantly, he held it in check.

  “I missed you guys,” Feral said. “Your house was so quiet while you were gone. Back on Earth, I live alone. It never bothered me that there wasn’t anybody around to talk to. But it bothered me here.”

  “We missed you, too.”

  “Did you? That’s good to know.”

  Stephen Thomas suddenly thought of something.

  “Did you put my still away?” When he boarded the Chi, the distilling equipment was sitting in the middle of the partnership’s main room, waiting for him to get around to dismantling it. Now it was gone.

  “Yes. It’s in the storeroom. Is that okay?”

  “It’s just fine. Thanks.”

  “I’ve been trying to make myself useful,” Feral said. “But I wondered...”

  Feral sat on the edge of his desk, facing him. Feral’s elbow edged into the frozen display. With a touch to Arachne, Stephen Thomas moved the image sideways. He put his shirt back on.

  “I wondered...” Feral said, “if I ought to move. Get out of you guys’ way.”

  “I guess the housing committee can reassign the vacant houses...”

  “Oh,” Feral said, crestfallen.

  “I mean I could understand it if you wanted a place of your own,” Stephen Thomas said quickly. “I don’t mean you should move.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It gets pretty crazy around our household sometimes. But it’s great having you there. It’s great having somebody in that room.”

  No one had ever lived in the fourth bedroom before Feral arrived; Stephen Thomas had begun to wonder if the family partnership were going to keep it empty forever, a memorial shrine to their late eldest partner. Stephen Thomas still missed Merry... but Merry had never slept in the fourth bedroom. Merry had never even been into space.

  “I’d like to stay.”

  “I want you to. Feral, you’re the world’s best house guest. Among other things.”

  Feral grinned. He had a terrific smile. “Okay.”

  Stephen Thomas stretched. “I guess I better get back to work.” He gestured toward the frozen display. “For all the good it’s going to do.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up right now...” Feral said.

  Stephen Thomas barely managed not to
sigh.

  Why is it always me? Stephen Thomas wondered. Every time he turned around, someone wanted to tell him deep personal troubles. He was the first to hear about it when J.D. thought she might have to leave the expedition to help Zev’s people. His graduate students told him the messy details of their personal lives. Even Fox, who was Satoshi’s graduate student, had come to Stephen Thomas for advice on staying with the expedition even though she was under-age.

  Stephen Thomas usually said what he thought, but when someone came to him for sympathy or advice, he found it impossible to send them away. He could not even cultivate the cool distant listening that looked like sympathy, but discouraged continued confidences.

  Of course he said nothing to stop Feral. Even if he could stop people from telling him their troubles, he wanted to listen to Feral.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just...” Feral clenched his fingers around the edge of the desk. His gentle brown eyes looked hurt.

  “Tell me,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “If you were going to take people along who weren’t with the expedition, why only Zev? He can’t do what I can for the team and for Starfarer! I could document everything. I’m a good writer, Stephen Thomas—!”

  “Christ, Feral, I know that! Practically everybody on board reads your stuff.”

  Feral glanced away, pleased by the compliment, but still unhappy.

  “Taking Zev wasn’t deliberate,” Stephen Thomas said. “Shit, I should have realized how you’d feel. Everything was so confused when we got to the Chi. Zev had only just got here, he didn’t have his bearings...” He stopped. “Forget all that. I sound like there was some plan to it. You know. ‘Zev doesn’t know his way around, so we better take him with us.’ But that isn’t how it was. He was just... there.” He grinned. “And attached to J.D. at the hips.”

  “Oh. Is that how it is?”

  “I think it is now. I don’t know for sure about before, when they were back on Earth.”

  “Will he go with you next time?”

  “I doubt it. Victoria was uncomfortable about his being with us. He doesn’t have any training, and he’s awfully young.”

  “I asked the wrong question,” Feral said. “What I want to know is, how do I get to go, too?”

  “The official answer is probably, you don’t,” Stephen Thomas said. Feral’s expression made him wish he had dissembled for once. “You could apply to the team. Ask for auxiliary status.”

  “What are my chances?”

  “Hey, if it were only up to me, a hundred percent. But it’s not.”

  “Okay. I understand. Thanks.” He brushed his fingertips across the back of Stephen Thomas’s hand, pausing where the skin was hot and red and itchy.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not much. Itches like hell.”

  “You are so damned lucky,” Feral said.

  “Tell me so again, when the skeletal changes start. That’s supposed to feel like growing pains, cum laude.”

  He changed the display back to the search pattern. His shoulders slumped. His eyes burned, and he could not even rub them because of the bruises.

  “I better get back to this. For all the good it will do.”

  “Too bad you can’t backtrack what happened,” Feral said, in sympathy.

  “We could have, at the time, if we’d been ready. Too late now...” He stopped. An idea blossomed in his mind, and he reacted to it with his whole body: it felt like a glow inside him, a burst of laughter, a groan of ecstasy. All his best projects had started with exactly this feeling. “Damn, Feral,” he said. “That might work.”

  o0o

  The scrolling display froze of its own accord. J.D. straightened up, too tired to be surprised. Her eyes hurt. Her head hurt. Her tailbone hurt.

  An image overrode the display. It was Stephen Thomas.

  “This is a waste of time,” he said. “I have an idea. Everybody meet me in the sailhouse.”

  His image faded.

  “The sailhouse — !” The last thing she would have expected was to have Stephen Thomas call a meeting in zero gravity.

  J.D. let the frozen display fade, not at all sorry to send it away. She stood, stiffly and slowly.

  Zev rose from where he had been napping, in one of the too-soft fabric-sculpture chairs that J.D. had inherited from her predecessor on the alien contact team.

  “Did you fix it?” he said.

  “I wish,” she said.

  He stood very close to her, his body radiating heat. He could have been touching her, caressing her, for the way he made her feel. When J.D. headed for the sailhouse, Zev came along with her. He maintained his land manners. Difficult as it was, so did she.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas and Feral were waiting with Iphigenie in the sailhouse when J.D. and Zev arrived.

  “Why are we meeting out here?” J.D. asked.

  “That’s a complicated question — No, it isn’t, but it needs a complicated answer. Let’s wait till the others get here.”

  Victoria and Satoshi and Professor Thanthavong arrived a few minutes later, and Avvaiyar floated in soon thereafter.

  “How’d you get the slugs going?” Stephen Thomas asked Satoshi.

  “Sweet reason,” Satoshi said.

  The harmonies of the sailhouse sang around them. The volume increased.

  “Is that necessary?” J.D. shouted. Her ears hurt, and the noise intensified her headache. Zev looked like he was in intense pain.

  Stephen Thomas let a couple of sound-dampers loose to float around them. The dampers went to work creating sound-waves out of phase with the music, canceling it in a bubble around them. The music vanished, except for faint and random wisps.

  “I don’t know,” Stephen Thomas said. “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid. But I don’t trust Arachne anymore, and I don’t trust the buildings not to be bugged. This was the best I could think of.”

  Avvaiyar groaned. “If you extend your fears, we can’t even trust ourselves. We might be spied upon through our links.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “I wish I hadn’t thought of it.”

  The group formed into a sphere, heads in, feet out. Stephen Thomas had none of his usual trouble joining in; he moved comfortably in zero g. J.D. searched him for signs of the changes. It was tempting to ascribe his ease to becoming a diver, but it was simpler to assume it was due to forced experience during the trip around Tau Ceti II.

  “We’re wasting our time,” Stephen Thomas said. “We’re looking for stuff that Arachne is protected against. The damned computer is vaccinated and backed up and crammed full of mole traps and supplied with every redundancy technology can offer. And it still crashed. The backups crashed. Stored data got garbaged. I think it’s going to happen again.”

  “I think you’re probably right,” Victoria said. “If I wanted Starfarer to return to Earth, I’d crash the web... and keep crashing it until everybody gave up and did what I wanted them to.”

  “Which means Griffith wasn’t making up paranoid fantasies,” Stephen Thomas said. “Or maybe he was... but they were accurate paranoid fantasies.”

  “You think a crash routine is built in?” Victoria said. “Programmed in, deliberately? Why can’t we find it?”

  “Because it would be a routine Arachne needs, but one you could invoke at the wrong time or the wrong place or in the wrong amounts. The biological metaphor is an oncogene—”

  “An oncogene!” Thanthavong exclaimed, horrified.

  “It’s possible,” Stephen Thomas said, defending his speculation. “The bioelectronics are so complicated —”

  “I don’t doubt it’s possible,” Thanthavong said. “But who in their right mind...”

  J.D. knew something about oncogenes. She made it her business to know something about as many subjects as she could. Oncogenes were ordinary genes that mutated slightly, or mutated in their control regions, and transformed the cells they affe
cted into tumor cells.

  They caused cancer.

  And as Professor Thanthavong had asked, Who in their right mind would build self-destruction into a computer?

  “Stephen Thomas,” Thanthavong said, “this is an appalling idea. Imaginative, but appalling. Very difficult to accept. Someone quite responsible in the hierarchy of EarthSpace would have had to plan the expedition’s failure.”

  “Not planning our failure,” J.D. said. “Just... planning. Planning for all the possibilities.”

  “Griffith,” Iphigenie said, her tone strained and angry.

  “No,” Victoria said. She continued quickly, interrupting Iphigenie’s objection. “He probably would have done it if he could. And maybe he triggered it. But he isn’t the one who designed the code. If he could, he’d be too valuable, eh? To send out as a regular spy?”

  “No doubt that’s true,” Thanthavong said. “It takes talent to design a system that’s useful under most circumstances, but pathological in others.”

  “Or one that can be easily mutated into the computer equivalent of a neuroma,” Stephen Thomas said. “It wiped out all Arachne’s higher functions almost instantaneously. That’s one hell of a rate of metastasis.”

  “Oncogene,” Iphigenie said. “Mutation. Metastasis. These are the terms one uses for cancer. Arachne has... a brain tumor?”

  “That was the effect, yeah. The tumor’s got nothing to grow on but neural tissue. So the result is confusion, memory loss — psychosis.”

  “And Arachne is still running the starship? We’re still linking with its web? Why haven’t you warned us before this?”

  “Because Arachne’s already healed itself,” Stephen Thomas said. “Besides, I only just figured out what must have happened,”

  “It might give us cancer,” Iphigenie said.

  “Of course it won’t,” Victoria said. “That’s impossible, Iphigenie. You’re not physically connected with Arachne. Besides, you could hardly catch an organic disease from a bioelectronic entity.”

  “A psychosis, maybe.” Stephen Thomas started to laugh, then stopped, realizing he had, for once, gone over the line in saying what he thought. “Bad joke,” he said. “Very bad joke.” Even his charm could not erase this misstep.