The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Jenny —” Victoria said.

  “No,” Iphigenie said, her voice high and tight. “I won’t. I can do it this way.”

  I’ll have to do this myself, Victoria thought. She immersed herself in the songs, wrestling them toward perfection.

  The last discord remained, stubbornly resistant, growing louder with every effort Victoria made to fix it. Starfarer plunged toward transition, a fraction of a fraction of a degree off its true course.

  “We’re going to miss!” Victoria said. “Jenny, please, I need you in the web.”

  “No!”

  This isn’t going to work, Victoria thought. We’re going to have to come around and try again. Then maybe we’ll catch up to the alien ship, or maybe we won’t, maybe it will have moved on, maybe it will always remain beyond our reach.

  Maybe it doesn’t even exist.

  She snarled with despair and dived back into the symphony, trying to find the source of the error. She felt as if she were swimming against the current of a multicolored, multidimensional stream of musical notes. If she had not been so angry and baffled and aggravated, she might have found it funny, but the sound, growing painfully loud, overwhelmed her senses.

  “Let me buffer you,” Feral said to Iphigenie. “You can port your orders through me. Whatever happens, you’ll be cushioned.”

  It took Victoria a moment to disentangle Feral’s words from the screaming music; it took her another moment to realize that Iphigenie’s hesitation meant acceptance rather than refusal.

  “All right,” Iphigenie said.

  Her eyelids flickered.

  “Feral,” Victoria cried, “stay out of the web!”

  The sensor chords sank to a whisper of perfect harmony.

  Starfarer’s magnetic claws stretched out to the cosmic string, touched it, grasped it. They began feeding on its limitless stores of energy, using the remnants of the creation of the universe to bring the starship toward transition potential.

  “Get out fast, the web’s going to crash!”

  An emergency message, with J.D.’s voice and personality, flashed through the web to everyone involved in it.

  “We found it. We found it, get out fast. We found it!”

  Victoria responded by reflex to the urgency in J.D.’s voice. She pulled back from the web, from the warning of danger.

  But Feral and Iphigenie remained hooked in. Iphigenie’s shields blocked the warning, or Feral took a terrible risk to prove himself to Victoria, or they both pushed past the limits in order to finish the approach.

  “Feral! Iphigenie! Get out of the web!”

  She stroked toward them, grabbing at the air. Weightlessness, for once, defeated her. She floundered, out of reach of any solid object.

  Light reflecting from the silver sail silhouetted the figures of her two friends, holding hands. As Victoria struggled toward them, calling their names, the sail began to furl, majestically folding and twisting into its storage configuration. Feral and Iphigenie had been dark shapes against brightness; now they were pale shapes against space and stars.

  The symphony ended.

  The web crashed.

  o0o

  J.D. felt a moment of disorientation. In her imagination she had been standing, but her physical body was sitting. Her perceptions from within Arachne and the real world flowed together.

  She opened her eyes. Zev sat cross-legged in front of her, peering closely at her, worried. When he realized she had returned, he smiled. He touched her face, brushing the back of his fingers against her skin. She covered his hand with hers, pressing his warmth to her cheek.

  Satoshi sat on her left, Thanthavong on her right, Avvaiyar and Stephen Thomas across from her.

  The neural node map by which they had all been orienting themselves hung in the center, a complex, nearly transparent tracing of interconnections. It reminded J.D. of the labyrinthine alien message. But the path to its center had disappeared; Arachne had already attacked the oncogene, destroyed it, dispersed its components.

  Stephen Thomas leaped to his feet and lunged for the hard link in the corner of the room. He snatched his recording module out of the machine.

  “Got you, you bastard,” he snarled. “Proof.”

  The node map trembled and dissolved.

  J.D. flinched, physically, as her connection with Arachne dissolved in a small hot point of pain. She was not in direct communication with the link, but its constant, reassuring potential vanished from her perception.

  Inside the partnership’s house, the lights went out.

  Outside, the light from the sun tubes faded. Starfarer plunged into darkness.

  o0o

  Starfarer entered transition.

  The web stretched and frayed and exploded.

  Iphigenie cried out.

  Feral convulsed, his back arching, spasming, his arms and legs shuddering. He made a single sound, a desperate, groaning gasp.

  The holographic map dissolved and vanished. In response to Arachne’s crash, to the absence of instructions, the sailhouse walls went to safety default. They darkened to opacity, shutting out the intense, hypnotic sight beyond and cutting off the light.

  Victoria’s momentum took her to Feral’s side. She grabbed him, as if she could physically drag him away from the web crash.

  His body went limp.

  “Feral!” She pleaded for a response. “Feral — ?”

  Without thinking, forgetting that the only free artificials were the silver slugs outside, she tried to call a health center AI. She reached out for Arachne and tripped into the mental hole of the computer’s absence. She jerked back, startled, disoriented in the darkness.

  “Is he all right?”

  The sailhouse walls luminesced, filling the chamber with a cool green illumination. Iphigenie took Feral’s slack hand.

  Victoria felt for his pulse. She found nothing. His skin was clammy and cold, his eyes white crescents beneath half-open lids. Blood smeared his face: his nose and ears bled. Opaque scarlet droplets quivered in the air.

  “He’ll be all right,” Iphigenie said. “It’s just shock—”

  “He isn’t breathing! Use the hard link and get us some help.” Victoria searched her memory for the zero-g update to CPR training. Breathe for the patient. Compress the chest: one hand on the patient’s back, one on the sternum, push hands together hard. She had to alternate between breathing and compression. Awkward. But Iphigenie was making one attempt after another to find someone, something, who could respond.

  o0o

  J.D. felt her way outside into the garden. The spicy, sweet fragrance of carnations surrounded her. Zev joined her, snuggling in the crook of her arm.

  “I wish I were out there to see transition again,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “But, J.D., there is time. There will be another time. Now we can travel wherever we like.”

  “I hope so. I hope you’re right.”

  Power from the auxiliary systems began to flow. Light shone, soft, from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind them, laying shadows to the carnation-covered bank that surrounded the yard.

  The door crashed open. J.D. jumped in fright. Stephen Thomas sprinted past her.

  “Stephen Thomas, what’s the matter?”

  He disappeared into the night.

  “It’s pitch dark out there,” J.D. said. “He’s going to trip and kill himself.

  “No, he isn’t,” Zev said. “He can see. Like I can.”

  Without replying, J.D. returned to the house.

  “What happened? Where did Stephen Thomas go?”

  Satoshi dug through a drawer, pulling out crumpled papers, a pocketknife, a couple of pencil stubs, the sort of thing one always intends to throw away, but keeps for just one more use. The litter bounced to the floor.

  “I know there’s a flashlight in here someplace —”

  J.D. looked from Thanthavong to Avvaiyar. Avvaiyar turned away; Thanthavong had drawn in on herself. J.D. hardly ever thought about or
noticed how elderly she was; but right now the senior geneticist looked old, and frail.

  “It’s Feral,” Thanthavong said. “He was caught in the web crash. Out in the sailhouse. It’s bad.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Here’s the damned thing.” Satoshi turned on the flashlight. It threw an intense beam across the room, cutting through the somber emergency light. “Let’s go.”

  “I can go faster,” Zev said. “Should I follow Stephen Thomas?”

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “Go on. Go. Hurry.”

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas slumped beside the stretcher where Feral lay.

  If I’d just been with him, he thought, I might have been able to...

  If I’d just had more time, I might have figured out how to boost the antibodies so the web didn’t crash...

  If I’d just been able to think of a way to prove who did it, without letting it crash again...

  If I hadn’t given him more access to the web, he wouldn’t have been there at all...

  He searched for the strength to rise. His forearms rested on his thighs; his hands hung, limp, between his knees. He stared at his hands, hardly seeing the red, irritated skin between his fingers, hardly feeling the itching, barely aware of the ache in all his joints. The pain of the changes blended with and disappeared into the pain of loss, the pain of his grief.

  Though Stephen Thomas was aware of the other people in the room, his partners nearby, J.D. and Zev, Professor Thanthavong and Avvaiyar, he felt completely alone.

  Feral noticed things no one else noticed, and asked questions other people were afraid to ask. It was unfair, it was ridiculous, it was impossible, that he should be dead.

  Victoria came over to Stephen Thomas and laid her hand on his head, stroking his long fair hair.

  “I’m so sorry, love. I tried...” Her voice shook. She fell silent.

  “How could this happen?” Stephen Thomas cried. “Last time nobody even got hurt! Not like this, not permanently.”

  “It crashed harder. Faster. The designer knew the antibodies would give Arachne some protection.”

  Stephen Thomas gripped Feral’s cold hand. A harder, faster crash, but a shallower one, one intended to disrupt the starship’s course without causing any more damage to its systems. One intended to force it to return home. Oh, and incidentally, only incidentally, to destroy any human being caught in the web.

  “He was still alive when you got him here.”

  “His body was. Just barely.” Victoria hesitated. “He was gone, Stephen Thomas. Everything that made him who he was, everything that made him unique...”

  “Please, stop,” he whispered.

  She started to cry. Stephen Thomas put his arms around her. Satoshi knelt beside him and hugged them both.

  Stephen Thomas held his partners in his arms, dry-eyed, overwhelmed with rage and despair.

  Every academic skill I have is a joke, he thought bitterly. I can create life from chemicals. I can turn myself into something that’s not really a human being anymore... but the best thing I can do for someone I love is to concur in his death. Even now, I could make him live. I could repair the arteries that burst, regrow his heart, regenerate his brain.

  And then I’d have an infant in an adult body, a child with a quarter of his life already used up. I’d have a new person, but I’d want to turn him into a replica of someone I once knew.

  He pushed away the whole perverse idea, disgusted with himself for resenting Victoria because she was strong enough, ethical enough, to let Feral die.

  “Oh, god,” he said. “I’m going to kill Blades.”

  “No,” Satoshi said.

  Stephen Thomas glared at his partner. “I expected you to say, ‘I told you so’! When did you get to be his defender? What should we do? Let him stay chancellor? Declare him king?”

  “We should make certain he can’t do this again. Then we should decide what justice is, and carry it out. Justice. Not revenge.”

  “You can have the justice. I’ll settle for revenge.”

  Satoshi grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen to yourself! We can’t let ourselves turn into barbarians!”

  “I don’t care!” Stephen Thomas shouted. “I don’t —”

  “I’m sorry,” Satoshi said. “I’m sorry. I know how you felt about him, how he felt about you.”

  “He was our friend, too,” Victoria said.

  Across the room, Avvaiyar made a sound of surprise. Everyone felt the quick light touch as Arachne began to revive. The crash had been quick and hard, but shallow.

  The change made Stephen Thomas almost too angry to speak. “That was quick,” he said. “The fucking computer twitches for a couple of minutes and comes right back to life. The inferior human being dies.”

  “Take advantage of it,” Victoria said, “Put the transcript in the web. As soon as Arachne comes back to strength, everybody will see it. And then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “The chancellor must lose his access to the web,” Thanthavong said.

  Stephen Thomas rose, moving out of Satoshi’s arms, cold to his comfort.

  “I can take care of that,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “This is a task that should be done impersonally. Not in blind fury. Show Arachne the evidence. Arachne will do it.”

  Stephen Thomas stopped, knowing she was right, unwilling to admit it.

  “You have another job to do, Stephen Thomas, you and your teammates,” Thanthavong said. “Starfarer will complete its transition soon. We don’t know what’s on the other side. The alien contact team should be ready. For anything.”

  Victoria glanced gratefully at Thanthavong. She had been afraid to make the same demand of him.

  In his mind, Stephen Thomas retreated to the same place he had gone when Merry died, when the partnership trembled on the verge of dissolution, stripped of its center and its stability. He made himself solid. He walled part of himself off behind windows, placing himself above and to one side of his physical body. Sound came through the windows. A little light came through. Nothing else. No warmth, no fragrances, no breezes. And no pain. He watched Victoria from his new, distant vantage point, wondering what she had feared he might do.

  “We’d better go out to the Chi, then,” he said. He did feel something, he still could feel something: a mild surprise that his voice sounded so calm.

  He surprised Victoria, too. She took his hands and looked into his eyes.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  If he had not fallen apart when Merry died, he would not fall apart now.

  “Yes,” Stephen Thomas said again. “There’s nothing I can do to help Feral.” And though he knew it was true, he knew he would always question his own actions in the events leading to Feral’s death.

  “All right,” Victoria said. “If we’re going to do it, we’d better do it.”

  She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and left the health center to go up to the Chi’s dock. Satoshi followed, but Stephen Thomas hesitated before Professor Thanthavong.

  “You won’t let Blades back into the web,” he said.

  “No. You can be sure of that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My friend —”

  He tensed, and she stopped.

  “What?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Never mind. It will wait. Good luck.”

  o0o

  Infinity Mendez felt no sense of movement or direction, except the ordinary, inescapable spinning of the cylinder.

  Transition looked nothing like space. He had not known what to expect out here, and because of Arachne’s crash there were no visual records of their first encounter with it. Infinity had — he thought — brought no expectations. So he surprised himself by wanting, by searching for, evidence of their tremendous relative speed through space.

  “Where are we?” he asked Esther, who sat nearby on the inspection net. Kolya sat apart from them, gazing outward, tran
sfixed.

  “Beats me,” Esther said.

  “Don’t you understand —” He waved his hand out, down —”this?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a pilot.”

  “Don’t have my rating for this stuff,” Esther said, a laugh in her voice. “Maybe Victoria MacKenzie understands it. She’s probably the only one on board who does.”

  Above lay the rumpled rock of the missile crater, nearly repaired, if not quite restored to its original state.

  “The silver slugs are waking up,” Infinity said.

  The silver slugs huddled in crevices, their skins reflecting an occasional glimmer of transition’s unusual light. When the web crashed, they all shut down, fastening themselves securely to Starfarer’s skin, waiting for instructions. Now that the computer was returning to life, the slugs flexed and stretched and prepared themselves for work. They were oblivious to transition, concerned only with their obligation to maintain the starship.

  The drive to keep Starfarer repaired was programmed into the slugs like an instinct. Except for the hours during which the administration had shut them down — Infinity still did not understand the reasoning behind that — they had worked constantly since Arachne returned from its first crash.

  They would continue to work, because the ship had not yet regained its full structural strength. Infinity believed, and hoped, that it had achieved enough stability to survive transition, and the inevitable stresses of the sail’s deployment at the other end of their voyage.

  There was no point in dwelling on the other possibilities. He had done his best; the silver slugs had worked to their limits. People sometimes thought he was fatalistic. Whatever happened now, happened. Infinity thought that the best one could do was approach it with composure.

  “Do you see the same things as I do?” Esther asked.

  “Sure,” Infinity said, his voice low. “Why wouldn’t I?” Then, “How would I know if I didn’t?”

  “That’s what I mean.” She replied in the same soft tone, as if their conversation might disturb Kolya. They both knew better. Either he had his transceiver turned on, and could hear them no matter whether they whispered or shouted, or he had it turned off and could not hear them at all. Infinity suspected that the cosmonaut had it turned off, that he was experiencing transition in his own private way; and perhaps he was listening for the music of the spheres.