The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus
Page 64
She wrapped one arm around Europa’s knees and reached up and touched her cheek, suppliant, pleading.
Europa shivered back, then steadied herself.
“I don’t have power over your life,” she said.
“You do,” Alzena said.
“Will you die if you stay here?”
“Yes.”
“Then, come,” Europa said abruptly, and drew her into the airlock. The door sealed shut.
“Alzena!”
J.D. touched Satoshi’s arm, not holding him back, but stopping him anyway.
“Let her go,” J.D. said. “She meant what she said.”
As the alien human’s strange little craft rearranged itself for flight, Miensaem Thanthavong propelled herself into the waiting room. Stephen Thomas, damp, grass-stained, and bedraggled, followed close behind.
“Alzena!”
“She’s gone,” J.D. said.
“How could you let her?” Thanthavong said. “How could you?”
“How could we stop her?”
Thanthavong started to retort. Instead, she hesitated.
“I was too late,” she said. “Perhaps it’s... No. I was too late. We’ll leave it at that.”
Stephen Thomas let himself drift to Victoria’s side.
“Where were you?” Victoria exclaimed. She noticed his muddy clothes and unkempt hair. “Stephen Thomas, what happened?”
“That... would take a while to explain,” he said.
“You should have been here,” Satoshi said.
“I know.” He looked disconsolate. His breathing was ragged. “I know. No excuses.”
Zev moved close to J.D. “I don’t understand anything, I think,” he said. “What are we going to do now?”
J.D. had no answer. She hugged him instead.
As the alien human’s craft accelerated away from Starfarer, the rest of the members of the deep space expedition joined the alien contact team in the zero-g waiting room. Gerald, Senator Orazio, even Senator Derjaguin; Kolya Petrovich, Chandra, Crimson Ng, Griffith and Florrie Brown and Fox and Avvaiyar and Iphigenie, Infinity Mendez and Esther Klein, the faculty and staff and students. Everyone but Blades. And Feral.
“That’s a good question, Zev,” Victoria said. She faced their colleagues. “What are we going to do now?”
o0o
Starfarer’s great sail turned, catching the bright strong light of Sirius A. The starship began a slow, steady acceleration.
The alien humans’ ship fled toward a nearby coil of cosmic string. Starfarer could not catch the worldlet, not in the normal dimensions of space-time. But the starship could track the alien humans; it could follow them into transition. Once there... who could tell? Perhaps they would reach the destination before their quarry, perhaps after. Perhaps the alien humans were traveling to civilization, to report on the actions of the expedition; perhaps they were traveling to the galaxy’s version of a desert. It did not matter. Starfarer would keep moving, keep searching. It would — everyone hoped — remain one step ahead, one transition ahead, of the powers trying to isolate it.
o0o
J.D. strapped herself into her couch in the observer’s circle. As the Chi departed from Starfarer, heading starward, Zev took J.D.’s hand. His swimming webs surrounded her fingers like warm satin.
Starfarer would not reach its new transition point for several weeks. In the meantime, the alien contact team planned to explore in the system of Sirius A.
The ship of the squidmoths was a tiny point of reflected light ahead; it was an image, detailed yet mysterious, in the center of the observer’s circle.
The Chi accelerated toward it, carrying the alien contact team. Five members, instead of four, Zev’s tacit acceptance confirmed. J.D. wished for a sixth member of the department.
Feral was right, she thought. We should have brought a journalist along.
Stephen Thomas, in his usual place, remained withdrawn from them all. He rubbed the skin between the thumb and forefinger of one hand with the fingertips of the other, massaging the itchy new swimming webs. His skin had just begun to take on the darker hue of a diver; he glowed with a pale gold tan. All his injuries had healed. His physical injuries, at least.
Victoria and Satoshi bent over the image of the squidmoth’s ship, extracting esoteric information from its shape, from the imperceptible veil of molecules escaping from its interior, from the light reflecting off its surface. Victoria’s concentration had intensified; Satoshi’s cheerful self-possession had sobered.
J.D. found her own anticipation tempered with prudence, not with joy.
“A waste of time!” J.D. repeated Europa’s words, still amazed by them. “A waste of time!”
Victoria grinned at her. “A challenge, J.D., eh? To talk to beings who don’t talk to anybody?”
“Maybe nobody ever talks to them,” J.D. said. “I wonder if Europa considered that?”
“At least if they don’t talk to us,” Satoshi said, “we won’t have done worse than anyone else.”
J.D. chuckled wryly. She looked through the edge of the observer’s circle, seeking out the luminous silver-gray pinpoint of the second alien ship.
Here I am again, winging it, she thought. I wish I didn’t have to; I wish I knew more about where we were going.
In spite of everything that had happened, J.D. felt more intrigued than apprehensive.
She thought: Squidmoths?
The End
Dedication
For:
Samuel R. Delany
Harlan Ellison
David G. Hartwell
Fritz Leiber
Joanna Russ
James Sallis
Kate Wilhelm
And, especially,
Robin Scott Wilson
Thank you all for the summer of 1970
In Clarion, Pennsylvania
The Starfarers Quartet
Starfarers
Transition
Metaphase
Nautilus
Acknowledgments
I’m very grateful to the many people who have given me their time, their knowledge, and their advice (sometimes all three) for Transition and for Starfarers before it. Both novels benefited from the intelligent readings and the information, on everything from genetic technology to cosmic string, that my friends offered so generously. Thanks to Kristi Austin, geneticist Dr. John H. Chalmers (who also helped me keep my sanity in graduate school, all those years ago), Dr. John Cramer, Jane Hawkins, Marilyn Holt, Orca researcher Jeff Jacobsen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Schaefer, Carol Severance, Jon Singer (I know him too), Sandra M. Smith, classical archaeologist and fellow writer Irene Wanner, and of course the Marmots: Steven Bryan Bieler and Nancy T. Reynolds and Deborah Wessell.
The background of the campus of Starfarer depends heavily on the work of Gerard K. O’Neill and the Space Studies Institute.
Any errors and infelicities that remain are my own responsibility.
Publication Information
Transition
First published by Bantam Books 1990
Bantam Books reprint 1994
Copyright © 1990 Vonda N. McIntyre
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Metaphase
Vonda N. McIntyre
Chapter 1
J.D. Sauvage, the alien contact specialist, pic
ked her way across the rough surface of a rocky planetoid.
A gossamer thread, shining blue-white in the actinic glare of the star Sirius, stretched across the stone beneath her feet. She followed it. A coarser line, her lifeline, unreeled behind her.
The planetoid was more or less spherical, so small that its pitted and scarred surface curved sharply away to nearby horizons. At first glance, it looked like a barren, airless asteroid, weathered by primordial meteors; after a first glance, it would be easily overlooked. J.D. and her colleagues in the alien contact department almost had overlooked it.
The silken strand thickened, branched, and intertwined, gradually forming a lacy gauze. Not wanting to damage the fabric, J.D. followed it without stepping on it, as if she were walking beside a stream. This stream flowed upward, climbing a steep escarpment. J.D. climbed with it, moving easily.
The low gravity was far higher than a natural rock this size would create. The least of the small world’s anomalies, the gravity hinted at a complex interior, perhaps even a core of matter collapsed to neutronium.
The planetoid repaid a second glance. Great masses of webbing filled a dozen of its largest craters. J.D. was walking on an extraordinary asteroid. The worldlet was the starship of alien beings.
Iridescent fibers wove together, forming a solid ribbon that led through a cleft in the escarpment. J.D. stepped cautiously onto the fabric. It gave slightly, a springy carpet over solid rock.
The band of silk guided her to the edge of one of the web-filled craters. Somewhere within it, the alien beings waited.
The message from the squidmoths had been brief and direct.
“You will be welcomed.”
J.D. scrambled up the last steep slope to the edge of the crater. Her destination lay below.
The silken pathway blended into a convoluted surface, filling the wide, deep crater. Valleys and ridges rumpled the webbing, and half a dozen trails twisted into it from where she stood. To proceed, she would have to walk off the edge of the crater and let the web alone support her weight.
She hesitated, listening and hoping for another message from the squidmoths.
“I’m here,” she said softly. Her spacesuit radio transmitted her voice.
In the silence, waiting for a reply, she knelt down and slid her hand across the smooth webbing. The faint shussh of her touch transmitted itself through her glove. She wished she could feel the silk with bare fingers, but the atmosphere was far too thin for her to remove her suit.
A single filament, darker silver than the rest, crossed the surface and disappeared along one of the trails.
J.D. rose, lifting the thread, holding it carefully across her palm. Starlight spun along its length.
She slid one foot gingerly forward. The floor yielded, then tightened, bouncing gently in the low gravity. She felt like a skater crossing ice so thin it flexed beneath her. She feared her touch would rip the silk; she feared a dark tear would open beneath her, and she would fall fifty meters to the bottom.
Most of all, she feared that her presence would cause the structure to self-destruct. She had watched Tau Ceti’s alien museum destroy itself rather than admit human beings. Rather than admit her.
But the squidmoths had invited her. The thread in her hand acknowledged her existence.
J.D. moved farther onto the silk, following the thread into the labyrinth. Her boots left no marks.
The path dipped into a meandering valley. J.D. descended through a cleft of delicate cascades. The fluttery fabric responded to her footsteps, trembling, vibrating. The cascades closed together overhead, and she found herself walking upon one horizontal sheet, and beneath another, past and through translucent tissue-thin layers like huge fallen parachutes that filtered harsh starlight. The membranes formed tunnels and chambers; cables and strands connected the membranes. The sheets rippled silently as she passed.
If a suspension bridge and a Gothic cathedral had interbred, this construction might be their offspring.
Without the filament, she would have no idea which way to go. If it broke, only her lifeline would lead her out.
Silvery-gray illumination surrounded her, suffusing the space with a luminous glow. The spun silk carried the light within its strands.
Deep within the crater, she paused at the top of a slope that plunged into light. Afraid she would slip, fall, and slide sprawling to — wherever the hillside led — she wrapped her fingers around a supporting strand and tested its strength. It gave, then contracted, as if to embrace her hand. Like the floor, the fiber was elastic and strong. She reached for another strand, an arm’s length farther on, and ventured deeper into the web.
“No more communication yet,” J.D. said, though her colleagues in the alien contact department and everyone back on board Starfarer could see and hear all that she was witness to.
Don’t say things just because you’re nervous, she told herself firmly. You’re supposed to be the professional, bravely facing the unknown.
Some professional: you’ve only been certain for a week that your profession really exists.
She did not feel brave. Being watched and recorded only made it worse.
J.D. concentrated on climbing down the smooth silken slope. Even in the low gravity, it was painstaking work. Her metabolic enhancer kicked in, flooding her body with extra adrenaline and inducing extra adenosine triphosphate. Not for the first time since the expedition started, she was glad she had decided to maintain the artificial gland. When she left the divers and the orcas, the long days of swimming naked in cold salt water, she had assumed she would not need to enhance her metabolism anymore.
Thirty meters down, the slope curved to a nearly horizontal level and she could again walk upright on its springy inner surface. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Because of her helmet, she could not wipe the perspiration away.
Within the webbing, thick silk strands glowed brightly, filling the corridor with a soft pink light that imitated some other star than Sirius. J.D. knew, by inference, that the squidmoths had not evolved beneath this star. Other than that, she knew very little about them. They were intelligent beings, reticent. They drifted through the galaxy in their small massive starships, ignored and apparently despised by the interstellar civilization.
Maybe they’re outcasts, just like us, J.D. thought.
The squidmoths had, at least, invited humans to visit them. The rest of interstellar civilization had ordered Starfarer to return to Earth, so human beings could spend the next five hundred years growing up.
This they had declined to do. In response, in retaliation, the cosmic string by which Starfarer traveled had begun to withdraw. If Starfarer stayed in any one place too long, it would be stranded there forever.
The passage curved and branched. The guide thread passed into the central tube. J.D. followed it. Behind her, her safety line snaked along the floor and pressed against the convex wall. The line creased the silk, an anomalous, coarse dark strand.
J.D. thought she saw the guide thread move. She hurried forward, but the tunnel’s curve straightened and she saw nothing but the guide thread lying motionless on the floor, disappearing into the tunnel’s next descent.
But her spacesuit replayed for her what she had seen. The thread had moved.
She stopped and leaned sideways, pressing her helmet against the tunnel wall. Could she hear a faint scuffling, or was it her imagination? Replayed and amplified, the phantom sound vanished into background noise.
Increasing her pace, she tried to catch up to whatever was laying the guide thread. But the delicate strand grew even thinner, dangerously thin, as if it were being stretched as it was created. J.D. slowed down, afraid she would cause the thread to break.
She rounded a curve and confronted a complete constriction of the passageway. She stopped. The end of the guide thread lay in a tangle at her feet.
“Damn,” J.D. muttered.
She asked for a visual display of the radar traces of the tunnels around her. Her suit obeyed. Up u
ntil a few minutes ago, this tunnel had continued, leading deeper into the web.
“Victoria?” J.D. said.
“I’m here.” Victoria spoke softly into her ear through her suit radio. “Shall I follow you in?” Victoria was J.D.’s backup; she waited outside the Chi, the explorer spacecraft, at the home end of J.D.’s lifeline.
“Not yet. There’s no threat of danger.” Disappointed and confused, J.D. smiled sadly. “Maybe I just misunderstood what I was supposed to do.” Recently they had misunderstood, and been misunderstood, more often than not.
“J.D.!” Zev exclaimed.
The backward-watching recorder, a little tiny machine that clung between J.D.’s shoulder blades, flashed an image to the Chi and to J.D.’s display.
Zev whistled a sharp warning in true speech, the language of the orcas and the divers. The shrill sound raised the hair on the back of J.D.’s neck. She spun around.
The tunnel was slowly constricting. She took one step toward it.
Outside the translucent wall of the tunnel, creatures moved.
J.D. stopped, her heart pounding. She glanced at the LTM display in her helmet, but the recorders saw the creatures no more clearly than she did.
Around her, vague shapes made deliberate motions. Legs or feelers or tools pressed the tunnel inward, cinching it with a narrow band that grew progressively smaller.
The tunnel puckered, lifting her lifeline and the guide thread off the floor till they hung in the air, drooping from the closed sphincter.
“J.D., get out of there!” Victoria said.
She was trapped in a silken cocoon, a twist of the tunnel.
“No,” she said. “Not yet. Victoria, Zev, I’m all right.”
She was frightened, but she calmed herself and slowed her thudding heartbeat. The creatures that had immobilized her came no closer.