The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “I’m coming in after you,” Victoria said.

  “No. Stay there.”

  “But —”

  J.D. pressed her hands against the wall. It yielded. Unlike the floor of the chambers higher up, it remained supple. The constricting band stretched. Thinking about what this must look like to all her colleagues, J.D. blushed and released the band. She dreaded hearing Stephen Thomas make one of his offhand, off-color remarks.

  But when he remained silent, it troubled her even more. He had been silent a lot, since Feral’s death.

  “I think I could force my way out,” J.D. said to Victoria. “In either direction. But I’m not quite ready to try. I don’t think I’m in any danger —”

  “You’re in the middle of the world’s biggest spiderweb, that’s all! And the spiders are closing in!”

  “I don’t feel like a fly just yet. It wouldn’t make sense. You’d get awfully hungry, orbiting Sirius and waiting for dinner to come along, what — ? Once every million years?”

  “Especially if you cultivated a reputation for not being interesting to visit,” Satoshi said.

  “Satoshi’s right. And Europa said the —” It occurred to her suddenly that her hosts had not referred to themselves as “squidmoths.” Europa, representing the interstellar civilization, had done so, but she had spoken of them with contempt. For all J.D. knew, “squidmoth” was civilization’s version of an ethnic slur. She decided not to repeat it. “She said the beings here wouldn’t talk to us — she didn’t say they were dangerous.”

  “Quite true,” Victoria said dryly. “But she was wrong about them talking to us, eh?”

  “Um, yes.” The alien human was wrong about a lot of things, J.D. thought, but she felt, stubbornly, that she should wait and see what happened.

  “I don’t want you to compromise your safety,” Victoria said.

  J.D. chuckled. “But Victoria... this is my job.”

  A hissing sound, a classic raspberry, interrupted her. At first she was embarrassed, then startled.

  Oh, no, she thought. A leak in my suit — ?

  Instead of fading out, the noise of the raspberry increased.

  The suit ought to seal — ! J.D. thought.

  “Behind you again,” Victoria said again, more calmly this time.

  More creatures surrounded the other end of the bubble where she was trapped. They loosened the constricting band. J.D. could not be sure, but she believed their shapes were different from the creatures who had trapped her. The sphincter had relaxed enough to let gas spurt into J.D.’s cocoon.

  She giggled, involuntarily.

  “What?” Victoria said.

  “Nothing,” J.D. said quickly. The first image to come to her mind was hardly something she wanted to admit to her colleagues, to the records Starfarer’s control computer was making, and by way of Arachne, to history. The image was far too undignified.

  For once, Stephen Thomas was giving some thought to propriety, for he remained silent too.

  J.D.’s giggling fit vanished.

  “It’s an airlock!” she said. “I’m in an airlock!”

  “Could be...” Victoria said.

  “It makes sense — Satoshi, you said this place must have a reservoir of oxygen and nitrogen. I just found the reservoir.”

  “The craters do show a lot of outgassing,” Satoshi said. “Enough to give the asteroid a very thin atmosphere. Nothing like Europa’s ship.”

  Europa’s starship, similar in size and gravity to the starship of the squidmoths, had looked like a miniature Earth: land masses, surface water, a normal atmosphere, plants and animals and topography.

  The tunnel before J.D. relaxed, opened, and smoothed. The forward constriction disappeared; beyond the translucent wall, the creatures receded and vanished. The constriction behind her remained tight.

  J.D. waited, hoping the alien beings would communicate with her. Her suit radio received only silence.

  But at her feet, a second guide thread took up where the first had ended. The second thread was darker and thicker, like a strand of glossy black hair.

  J.D. followed the thread deeper into the tunnel.

  The soft silk floor silenced J.D.’s footsteps, but she clapped her gloved hands together and heard the dull thunk. The spun walls absorbed and deadened the sound, but it was a sound. Earlier, she had been in vacuum; now she was in air. She linked briefly with one of the LTM transmissions and read the analysis: Majority gas nitrogen. Minority gas oxygen, a couple of percentage points higher than on Earth. Trace gases: carbon dioxide, ozone, hydrogen sulfide, a spectrum of hydrocarbons and fluorocarbons.

  “If you took your helmet off, you could breathe,” Victoria said. “Not that I’m suggesting it.”

  J.D. glanced over the trace gases again. “I wonder if all this stuff is meant to make me feel at home?”

  The air on Europa’s ship had been crystalline and pure. Earth, as Satoshi had said, before the Industrial Revolution. Earth, from the time of Europa’s birth, nearly four millennia ago. Europa and Androgeos had been rescued from Knossos, after the eruption of Santoríni on Thera. They had been saved to welcome human beings to the interstellar civilization.

  Some welcome, J.D. thought.

  The air in the squidmoths’ ship was closer to the air of Earth in the present day, pollution and all.

  Or maybe, she thought, the beings who live here just like it that way.

  “I wouldn’t want to strike a match here.”

  J.D. pressed further and deeper into the webbing. She wondered if the silk could burn. She hoped not. The high concentration of oxygen would feed a fire into a rage.

  As far as she knew, nothing she carried with her could produce an open flame, or even a spark. She was glad the Chi had landed at a good distance. Suppose it had come too close, and the heat of its engines had set the complex structure on fire? That would have been worse than back in the Tau Ceti system, watching the alien museum collapse. Worse, because alien people lived here. A fire would kill intelligent creatures, the only members of interstellar civilization to welcome human beings.

  J.D. continued onward. When the guide thread quivered, when she thought she heard the scrabble and scuffle of small feet on the silken floor, she forced herself to maintain her deliberate pace. Whatever or whoever she was following, she did not want to scare it again.

  Why are the squidmoths taking the risk of welcoming us? J.D. asked herself. We’re outcasts, and our invitation to interstellar space has been withdrawn. Europa fled so she and Androgeos wouldn’t be cut off along with us. The same thing might happen to the squidmoths.

  Europa had spoken of the squidmoths with contempt and dismissal. Were they so isolated, so lonely, that they would take such a risk just to talk?

  The light grew brighter, and the tunnel surface more convoluted, with strands and sheets of silk stretching and overlapping in all directions.

  The tunnel abruptly ended, several meters up the side of a huge chamber. J.D. stood at the top of the slope, gazing out at a visual cacophony of glowing lines and overlapping, curving, rippled membranes. She felt as if she had walked into a sculpture made of light.

  The light-bearing cables focused here. The silk carried the light of Sirius from the surface of the planetoid to the center of the web, softening its harshness while its brilliance remained, shedding a bit of its energy burden on its way into the depths. J.D. had reached a focus of the illumination.

  “This is amazing.” Satoshi’s voice was soft, but excited. He was a geographer: his work involved mathematical analyses of the interaction of people with the environments they created for themselves. J.D. suspected that Satoshi would be studying alien beings who created every detail of their surroundings.

  The slope was steeper than the previous descents. J.D. climbed down the soft rumpled silk. The guide thread disappeared into the most concentrated light.

  J.D. steadied herself, grasping a glowing, wrist-thick strand. Her suit registered warmth, but her glove pro
tected her from the sensation. This was like swimming with the orcas in a wet suit: removed, alienated.

  Interleaved silk curtains curved around the concentration of light. J.D. moved carefully between the soft, bright sheets of fabric, hoping she was not entering a maze. The mazes of Europa and Androgeos had been quite enough.

  The guide thread led her in a switchback pattern of arcs: between two curtains, to the edge of one, around the edge, along the next closest arc to the center. The lifeline unreeled behind her, creasing the end of each successive curtain.

  J.D. rounded a final curtain and stepped out into an irregular area formed by the overlapping draperies.

  A tiny creature, trailing a glossy black thread, riffled across the floor and vanished beneath a sheer membrane. The membrane fluttered, then smoothed itself against a massive form.

  J.D. saw the squidmoth.

  “My god,” Satoshi said, in amazement.

  Victoria’s response was feeling, rather than words: a deep, astonished joy flowed from Victoria, through Arachne, to touch J.D.’s internal link.

  “J.D., it’s wonderful!” Zev said.

  Stephen Thomas said nothing.

  Strangely enough, J.D. had no doubt that she had come into the presence of one of the intelligent beings who inhabited this starship. Back on Europa’s ship, in familiar, Earthlike surroundings, J.D. had wondered if she should try to converse with everything: the ground cover that surrounded the landing platform, the aurochs that had chased her up a hillside, the meerkats who had watched her flee. When she finally encountered Europa and Androgeos, who were very nearly ordinary human beings, she was shocked beyond words.

  “Hello,” J.D. said to the squidmoth. She stopped, and waited.

  The squidmoth said nothing.

  It lay in the focus of the light-conducting curtains. bathed in a bright and gentle illumination. Light that would have driven off an ordinary ocean creature heightened the vivid peacock iridescence of its skin. And yet its shape did hint at an origin in the sea.

  The alien’s body was at least three meters long, and probably much bigger. It lay cushioned and cradled and partly concealed within and beneath the folded layers of silken web. Its glossy, leathery body flattened at each side into membraneous fins, where the guide-thread creature had vanished. The edges of the fins rippled gently, exposing feathery undersides and delicate jointed appendages. Vestigial legs? Gills, and legs that would be functional in very low gravity, or underwater? J.D. resisted making assumptions. The squidmoth did not look like it walked anywhere, ever, for its fluted lower body disappeared into the wrinkled floor. It looked like it had grown from the chamber, as if it were the intricate exposed root of some life form even larger and more complicated.

  J.D. took a step toward it, cautious, moving slowly, keeping her hands in plain view.

  She wondered if the being even understood hands. The squidmoth itself had tentacles, a number of short, thick ones and three long, slender ones. The long tentacles lay in a coiled and tangled mass before the being. A creature the size of J.D.’s hand scuttled down the curtain beside the squidmoth. Scaled skirts hid its legs; its carapace bore an explosion of feathery plates.

  The end of one of the squidmoth’s long tentacles writhed free, rising like a snake, probing the air. The tentacle caressed and guided the creature toward a large silken pouch that lay crumpled on the floor. Finally, the creature burrowed beneath the edge of the pouch, and inside.

  “Thank you for the invitation to visit you,” J.D. said.

  The skin above the squidmoth’s tentacles shifted and wrinkled. The leathery, peacock-blue skin split — J.D. started — and opened. A narrow flap of skin wrinkled upward, and the squidmoth gazed out at her through a row of glittery, faceted eyes. The wrinkled skin circled the bulge above the being’s tentacles. J.D. tried not to assign familiar body parts to a creature built on a completely different body plan from any she was familiar with. For all she knew, she was approaching the being from behind, the tentacles were its feet, the vestigial, segmented legs were its hands, and the eyes sparkling at her from beneath the mobile brow were sensors of smell or hearing or some sense she did not even possess.

  But she found it very hard not to think of the bulge as the squidmoth’s head, the tentacles as its organs of manipulation.

  Slow down, she told herself; she was giddy with joy and apprehension. Hold on. Remember how embarrassed you were, when you were a kid and you finally looked up horseshoe crabs in the field guide: the long pointy thing was the tail, not its sensors or its whiskers.

  J.D. took another hesitant step toward the alien being.

  “Hello,” she said again.

  A voice transmission whispered into J.D.’s suit radio.

  “Do not fear me,” said the same flat voice that had invited Starfarer to visit it.

  “I don’t,” J.D. said. “Yes, I do. A little. Can you hear me?” She was broadcasting through her suit radio, but broadcasting might not be necessary if the squidmoth could hear her through her spacesuit.

  Do squids have ears? she asked herself. She had no idea; even if they did, that would not mean the alien being followed any similar specifications.

  “My vibratory sense responds to very low frequencies.”

  “Then you don’t hear me — but you receive my radio transmissions.”

  “I receive your transmissions.”

  J.D. moved a few steps closer to the squidmoth, fascinated. She wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. Remembering how disinclined Europa and Androgeos had been to answer any questions at all, she decided to take things slowly.

  She understood the “squid” part of the being’s name, but not why Europa had called the being a squidmoth. Moth, because of its vestigial legs? Then why not form the second part of its name from some sea-living arthropod, a crab or a shrimp or a lobster?

  The being’s eyelid opened widest in the direction facing J.D. Beneath it, several small round faceted eyes peered steadily at her. More of its eyes — J.D. could not help but think of them as eyes — glittered through the half-closed edges of the eyelid. J.D. deliberately moved to the side as she approached the being. Instead of shifting its position, the squidmoth rippled its eyelid open farther toward the back of its head. It must have vision in a complete circle.

  “How do you communicate with other sq —” J.D. caught herself in time —”with others of your kind?”

  “I communicate with all intelligences as I communicate with you.”

  Its tentacles moved. The row of short tentacles quivered, and their tips oscillated in a wave that began at one side before it ended on the other, so that two different waves moved along its shorter proboscises. The squidmoth looked like it had a thick, rubbery mustache.

  The tips of the three long tentacles rose like the heads of snakes. One moved absently to the pouch on the floor, guiding a small silk-spinning creature across its surface to lay new threads in a bright pattern.

  J.D. was nearly ten meters from the squidmoth. Its tentacles shifted and untangled, coiled and writhed.

  She thought she had stopped well out of its reach.

  She was wrong.

  The tentacles whipped toward her. J.D. gasped and jumped back, surprised and frightened. The tentacles stopped short. They were not yet fully extended; they could reach her. Trembling, J.D. forced herself to stand still.

  A month ago, a week ago, she would have been surprised, but she would not have been scared. Meeting Europa and Androgeos had profoundly changed J.D.’s assumptions about what the citizens of an interstellar civilization would be like.

  Did you expect them to be perfect? she asked herself, with a tinge of sarcasm. She answered her own question: Yes. I did.

  She took a deep breath and moved a step closer to the squidmoth.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You frightened me.”

  The ends of the tentacles rose, weaving like mesmerized cobras. J.D. held her ground. The tentacles bore no obvious sensory organs: no eyes or o
rifices, no hands or fingers. Instead, the tips looked soft, furry, feathery, cloaked in a corona of iridescent purple fur.

  Sensory cilia? J.D. wondered.

  “I frightened you by moving toward you.”

  The squidmoth’s voice remained flat, expressionless, and uninflected.

  “You frightened me by moving without warning me,” she said, treating its statement as a question. “You frightened me by coming so close, so fast.”

  The tentacles drew back.

  Great, J.D. thought. Now I’ve offended it.

  “You prefer more distance.”

  “I prefer more warning. What do your tentacles do?”

  “They touch.”

  “My hands do that for me.” She extended her arms, spreading her gloved fingers.

  “I know that.”

  “Do you know everything about us?” She could not help but think, What’s the point of my coming here, what’s the point of the deep space expedition, if Civilization already knows more than they ever wanted to know about us?

  J.D. had spent her adult life preparing to be the first human to meet aliens. But she was not the first. Europa and Androgeos had preceded her, by thirty-seven hundred years, and that distressed her more than she wanted to admit.

  “No, but I want to,” the squidmoth said.

  J.D. smiled. She still had some knowledge to offer the alien being.

  “We’re even, then.”

  “You want to know everything about you.”

  “That, too. But I meant I’d like to know everything about you.”

  She hesitated, wondering how forthright she could be in what she said. In all the years she had thought about making contact with an alien intelligence, she had never thought that the first time she stepped into a room with it, it would be able to converse in English. Back on board Starfarer, J.D. kept programs and diagrams, introductions to humans based on physics, on math, on biology, on art. She had thought about communicating with a being that conversed by color, by smell. Her colleagues had done similar work, even before she joined the department a few weeks back, experimenting and speculating on the difficulties of communication. Some people believed alien beings would be so different from humans that they would never be able to communicate at all.