The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “And Stephen Thomas is different from you all,” Nemo said.

  “I’m changing into a diver,” Stephen Thomas said. “I’m about half and half at this point.”

  “Maybe someday J.D. will decide to change, too,” Zev said.

  A spinner crept from a fold. Nemo’s tentacle snapped out and grabbed it and teased it into spinning and urged it in a tight circle and started to weave another pouch.

  “Can we look around?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “You would like to see other parts of me.”

  “Yes.”

  “The attendants will take you to what you wish to see.”

  Three lifeliners crept into the chamber.

  o0o

  The lifeliners led Victoria, Satoshi, and Stephen Thomas out of Nemo’s chamber through the same path. At the first split in the path, two went one way and one went another.

  “See you guys later,” Stephen Thomas said. He strolled after the spinning creature and disappeared between two curtains.

  Victoria started to call after him.

  “He’ll be all right,” Satoshi said.

  Victoria stepped back, took a shallow breath of the fetid air, and blew it out abruptly.

  “I know,” she said. “But I’d feel easier if our guides didn’t look so much like scorpions.”

  Intellectually she understood all the reasons for believing they were safe with Nemo. Emotionally, she had a harder time. She was very glad Nemo had not offered them all decorative food.

  I wonder how you turn it down if you don’t want it? she said to herself. Maybe you say, Thank you very much, but I don’t care to be decorated.

  Satoshi grinned. “They do look like scorpions, don’t they? Not as mean, though, or they’d be beating the hell out of each other right now.”

  The other two lifeliners scuttled down the path. At the next fork in the corridor, they diverged.

  Satoshi grabbed Victoria in a quick, fierce hug, then hurried after his lifeliner.

  o0o

  Victoria descended through twisting tunnels, curving tubes of watered silk that spiraled steeply downward. The color-shot patterns quivered beneath her footsteps, and the lifeliner scuttled drunkenly along the shifting floor.

  Victoria jumped, experimentally, cautious because of the low gravity. She hit the ceiling, pressing into the warm, slightly sticky fabric. She broke away from it with a faint ripping sound, bounced to the floor, and rebounded. By the time she came to a sprawling halt she was laughing at the position she was in, and even at her fear.

  Above her, the ceiling darkened where she had hit it. A shape passed over the bruise. The silk dimpled from the other side as one of Nemo’s attendants stepped lightly across the upper curve of the tunnel. It was like being underwater during rain. The brief shadow of the cloud, the quick touch of raindrops sweeping delicately across the surface. The shadow faded; the bruise disappeared.

  Victoria continued down the tunnel.

  The air grew sharp and clear. Ozone tinged it. When she touched her hair, static electricity crackled.

  And the gravity grew stronger.

  At first she thought she was imagining the gradual effect, but it was real.

  It makes sense, she thought. Grade-school physics. I knew there had to be something inside Nemo’s ship at least as dense as neutronium. And I’m getting closer to it.

  The LTM sensors registered a slight increase in the radiation level. Nothing dangerous yet. Victoria knew she should not stay long, but curiosity drew her on.

  The lifeliner scrambled onward and downward, leading her toward a lambent glow.

  Victoria followed the creature around a bend in the tunnel.

  The creature stopped. The tunnel ended its spiral and curved abruptly straight down.

  Victoria glanced back. Her escape route was open and clear. She crossed the last few meters to the sharp curve of the tunnel, passing the lifeliner.

  A thick panel of transparent webbing covered the end. She knelt on the floor and gazed down through the clear surface. It was like looking into a well, a well lit from below, or through a pane of old, wavery glass.

  A shining sphere lay in the center of Nemo’s planetoid. A curving pattern of pale cables suspended it and held it in place — held the planetoid in the proper relationship to it. Here and there, more of Nemo’s creatures crept about. They looked like the lifeliners, but they had much heavier carapaces, shorter spinners, legs nearly invisible. They picked their way across the suspension cables. In front of them, the white cables flexed in response to the spinners’ motion and the faint occasional vibration of Nemo’s sphere. Behind them, they left dark metallic rope of twisted wire.

  Victoria ignored the faint scratching noise behind her. She wished she could see into the sphere, but she knew it was protecting her from radiation and energy flux that would kill her, and all her colleagues, and probably Nemo as well. The sphere hid the engine that powered Nemo’s voyaging.

  The lifeliner scratched persistently at the floor. Victoria finally noticed the sound and glanced over her shoulder.

  The creature huddled over a tangled tracery of silk. It scratched again, ran a little way up the tunnel, stopped, and ran back toward her. It did not turn; it ran both directions with equal ease. Wherever it moved, it trailed a line of silk. Its scorpion tails twitched, fore and aft.

  “Okay,” Victoria said. “You’re right. It’s time to get out of here.”

  She rose, glanced one last longing time into the center of Nemo’s starship, and followed the lifeliner back toward the surface.

  “Thank you for showing me,” she said aloud to the creature and silently to Nemo, using her internal link.

  “You are welcome,” Nemo said.

  o0o

  Satoshi followed the small scuttly creature spinning black silk before him. He wanted to get close to the life-liner, to pick it up and inspect it, to subject it to the electronic gaze of the LTM clinging to his shirt. J.D. had asked him to be careful, and he approved of her caution. But he wanted to see and understand every facet of the environment surrounding him.

  The wide, low corridor narrowed, the deep-fissured walls smoothed, and the firm, springy floor dropped into a slope. Satoshi climbed downward. The light began to fade. The slope ended in a tall, cylindrical chamber hung with heavy, fibrous curtains and pierced with two more tunnels slanting up and out, like the one through which he had descended.

  The lifeliner stopped and huddled against the wall.

  Satoshi sat on his heels beside the creature. The lifeliner rubbed against the wall, severing the silk.

  “Is this the end of the road?” Satoshi said softly.

  He walked around the edge of the chamber, touching the long bright swaths of drapery.

  They open, he thought.

  He looked up.

  Long-lidded glittery eyes looked back.

  Satoshi started and spun around.

  At the top of each set of curtains, a creature clung to the vaulted ceiling. If Satoshi had not met Nemo, he might not have recognized them as creatures, or the circular fissure as their eye-slits. The creatures hugged the wall, arching long legs overhead till they touched at the center of the ceiling. The legs pressed upward and outward like an arch, holding the creatures in place.

  The mouth parts of the creatures, tremendously enlarged, formed the curtains.

  One of the sets of curtains suddenly billowed wetly outward. A blast of oily, pungent air swept over Satoshi, knocking him down and slapping him to the floor. The pressure pushed the hot fumes up his nose. He sneezed convulsively, three times, four.

  The curtains fell back and the tempest vanished.

  Satoshi lay flat, catching his breath, breathing shallowly. His eyes and throat stung. A second set of curtains quivered. He ducked and buried his head beneath his arms as the curtains billowed and a second blast crashed over him.

  He looked up and around just in time to see the third set of curtains quiver. He watched long enough to see t
hem open, pulling apart in the center, remaining closed at top and bottom. Beyond the curtains, acid dripped down color-striped stone, dissolving it, releasing roiling clouds of gas.

  He ducked again as the hot, polluted air filled the chamber and billowed out through the tunnels. The curtains fell closed with a wet slap.

  He pushed himself cautiously to his feet. He felt damp and greasy. The curtains hung motionless.

  “Nemo!” he said through his link. “What’s going on down here?”

  “Fresh air,” Nemo said.

  Satoshi started to laugh. “That’s more fresh air than I can handle all at once,” he said. “This place is amazing — but do you mind if I leave before the next storm?”

  “I’ll wait till you’re safely away.”

  “How long do I have? Can I look around?”

  “I must hold my breath.”

  “Oh. Okay, I’ll hurry.”

  As he headed for the exit tunnel and the silken guideline, he took one last look around, at Nemo’s lungs, at the symbiotic creatures who not only pumped air through Nemo’s body but created the air as well.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas strolled after his lifeliner. When he was well out of sight of his partners, he stopped at the intersection of several tunnels. The creature beetled on and disappeared around a curve.

  Stephen Thomas deliberately turned down a different tunnel.

  He made it about a hundred meters. The lifeliner’s carapace scraped the floor behind him as the creature scuttled after him, spewing thread.

  “Think you’re going to stop me, huh?” Stephen Thomas said. “Just how the fuck are you going to do that?”

  It closed the gap, spinning out a lifeline of increasing slenderness and delicacy.

  “Stephen Thomas,” Nemo said directly to the internal link.

  Stephen Thomas stopped. J.D. had adapted easily to direct communication. But Stephen Thomas wished he had brought a portable radio headset.

  “I hear you,” he replied.

  “It’s hard to follow you when you go so fast.”

  “That’s all right,” Stephen Thomas said. “I won’t get lost, I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “You do not wish to study genetics.”

  “I — What?”

  “My attendant will take you to where you can study genetics.”

  “Can I take samples?”

  “You have a sample.”

  Great, Stephen Thomas thought. A few alien bacteria off a shred of string. They probably have as much relation to Nemo as E.coli does to human beings.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “Oh, fuck it,” Stephen Thomas muttered aloud.

  When the lifeliner went into reverse and trailed a thread parallel to the one it had left coming in, Stephen Thomas shrugged and followed the creature wherever it wanted to take him.

  “Suppose I’d kept going,” Stephen Thomas said to Nemo through the link.

  “I suppose you’d kept going,” Nemo said.

  Stephen Thomas waited. Finally it occurred to him that Nemo had done exactly what he had suggested.

  “If I’d kept going,” Stephen Thomas said, “what would you have done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Would you let me go anywhere I wanted?”

  “I’d warn you of dangerous spots.”

  The lifeliner stopped in a gap among several curtains. Light shined out into the corridor, brighter than the light from the optical strands woven into the walls. The new light shimmered, like reflections from water.

  The lifeliner leaped, trailing silk, and disappeared.

  Stephen Thomas moved forward curiously. Warm, pungent air flowed toward him. Sulfur and hydrogen sulfide and other, more complicated chemicals made him breathe shallowly through his mouth. If the air got much worse, he would have to turn back. He tapped into the analysis of the LTM clinging to his pocket, and scanned the chemicals. None of them would kill him in their current concentrations. Not immediately.

  The curtains created a spherical chamber around and above a water-filled depression, and trapped the heat and the stench. Stephen Thomas stood on the bank, inspecting the place curiously. Sweat beaded on his forehead, on the back of his neck.

  The lifeliner’s thread vanished into the oily, organic sheen floating on the pool. The light was so bright, the surface so obscured with rainbow brilliance, that Stephen Thomas could not see to the bottom.

  Nemo likes water as scungy as the air, Stephen Thomas thought. If I’m supposed to dive in after the lifeliner, forget it.

  He lifted the thread. Its end emerged, broken, from the water.

  Broken or dissolved, Stephen Thomas thought.

  “Hey, critter,” he said aloud.

  The water shivered at his feet. He stooped down, expecting the lifeliner to answer his summons.

  The surface splashed upward, spraying him with the scummy soup. He shouted in shock and flung himself back. His feet slipped into the water.

  “Shit!” He jerked his feet back and scrambled for the entrance. He reached safety. He pulled off his shirt. The front and the arms were stained — he was glad that for once he had worn a long-sleeved shirt and long pants — but the back was clean. He used it to wipe the liquid from his face and hands.

  The pale blue silk of his shirt discolored to brown.

  “Jesus, Nemo, what’s — oh, fuck!”

  His sandals were smoking. He snatched them off and threw them into the corridor and rubbed his feet on the remnants of his shirt.

  “What’s going on down here?”

  “Genetics.”

  “Survival of the fittest?” I knew there was a good reason to study molecular genetics, he thought. “You told me you’d warn me of dangerous places.”

  “But you asked to observe, not interact,” Nemo said.

  “I didn’t mean to fall in your damned pond.”

  Stephen Thomas got the distinct impression that the squidmoth was laughing at him. Scowling, he sat crosslegged well above the waterline, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned his chin on his fists.

  The caustic liquid had not discolored the skin of his feet, or of his hands, even the delicate new swimming webs, so he supposed his face was not disfigured either.

  The splashing creature had submerged, unseen. But the surface roiled slowly, as if gentle whirlpools drifted across it, now and then colliding, mixing, separating.

  From the safety of the entrance, Stephen Thomas could not see what was going on. He rose and went cautiously nearer the edge. He bent just far enough to peer into the pool.

  The lifeliner burrowed into the bottom until nothing showed but its two scorpion tails. Dark blue filaments, slender at the root, wide and flat in the center, and tapered at the ends, grew from the bottom like kelp. They stretched toward the center of the pond. Just above the root, each bore a cluster of scarlet flowers.

  A tantalizing array of entities crawled and swam and burrowed among and below the kelp. Stephen Thomas wished he had a protective suit. He was not going swimming unprotected in Nemo’s pool. He doubted even his spacesuit would help. It might keep out the noxious liquid and gases the pool was emitting... then fail catastrophically as soon as he entered vacuum.

  Another unfamiliar creature ploughed toward the lifeliner. It was shaped like a sowbug, but the size of Stephen Thomas’s cupped hands. Several rows of spines ran down its back. They wavered, pressed backward as the creature crossed the muddy bottom.

  The spined sowbug lunged forward, straight between the lifeliner’s extended scorpion tails. Silk burst from the tails, erupting onto the spines, and the tails flailed at the attacker. But the sowbug fastened on. Silt spewed up, obscuring the fight. Trails of yellow blood filmed the water. The lifeliner humped up out of its burrow, flexing its body spasmodically. One tail crushed a patch of spines. The sowbug shuddered, then clenched.

  The lifeliner relaxed and grew still. As Stephen Thomas watched, the sowbug bore down on it. It
fell apart in battered pieces, leaking guts and golden blood.

  Stephen Thomas backed away from the pond. He felt sick. His vision blurred. He stumbled out into the corridor, fighting for breath.

  Don’t throw up, he told himself. Not here, not now. Whatever you’ve seen, whatever it signifies, don’t let it affect you.

  He grabbed his shirt and his sandals and fled from the soft vicious sounds of struggle.

  o0o

  J.D. and Zev remained with Nemo.

  One of the armor-scaled creatures flowed up to Zev’s bare foot and extended its frilly mantle, rippling out to touch him. Zev watched it curiously. Then, fearless, he picked it up and turned it over to look at it. Its feathery appendages waved frantically, and a stream of fluid spurted from its underside. Zev laughed. An old hand at catching creatures who used water jets and ink and even tiny poison darts for defense and escape, he had been holding it at an angle. The liquid jet missed him and spattered, pungent and oily, on the floor. Zev put the creature down, and it zipped off under one of the silk-sheet walls.

  Zev crossed the distance to Nemo. He knelt down and touched Nemo’s sleek side, stroking the iridescent skin. Nemo blinked slowly. The long eyelid closed. Nemo reminded J.D. for all the world like a huge mutant cat being petted. The long tentacles moved languorously, tapping against the silk floor, the spinners, Zev’s leg.

  Nemo plucked one of the honey ants and gave it to Zev, plucked another and handed it to J.D. J.D. ate hers slowly, preparing for the rush and dizziness. Zev popped his into his mouth and crunched it.

  “Oh, I like that,” he said out loud, his voice breathy. He returned to using his link. “Thanks, Nemo! I wonder if you’d like beer.”

  Nemo’s long eyelid opened; the glittery eyes peered out. The long tentacles surrounded Zev, touching and stroking him.

  “I eat only insubstantial food,” Nemo said.

  Zev sat quiet and interested as Nemo’s tentacles explored his body.

  The tentacles touched and probed his body through the thin fabric of his shorts and shirt. Zev, not in the least uncomfortable, stroked Nemo’s back and played his fingers along the shorter proboscises that formed Nemo’s mustache.