The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Satoshi kissed Stephen Thomas’s lips, his cheek, his throat, nibbling at the thin gold chain around his neck. The crystal slid along the chain and landed against his collarbone, cool as water. Stephen Thomas pulled Satoshi closer, and rubbed the small of his back with one hand. He loved the way Satoshi’s muscles moved beneath his fingers.

  “You still didn’t tell me why you don’t like Blades.”

  “I don’t know why I don’t like him. I just don’t. Maybe I don’t like his aura.”

  “Very funny,” Stephen Thomas said. Satoshi did not believe in auras. “His aura was just fine.”

  “Hmm.” Satoshi kept his voice neutral. He knew when he had teased Stephen Thomas enough. Neither Satoshi nor Victoria would even try to look for auras.

  The blue sparks of anger faded from Satoshi’s aura. A gold glow of excitement flashed around him, and scarlet contentment shimmered beyond the gold.

  Satoshi pushed Stephen Thomas’s hair away from his forehead, caressed his face with both hands, and kissed him again, quickly, then harder. He slid his knee up Stephen Thomas’s thigh. Stephen Thomas dragged his fingers down Satoshi’s belly and ruffled his dark pubic hair with his fingernails. Satoshi’s body was like a furnace, blasting out heat, when he was sexually aroused.

  “Blades —”

  “I don’t want to talk about Chancellor Blades anymore,” Satoshi said. He clenched his teeth and his back arched. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. He laid his hand over Stephen Thomas’s, guiding him. Stephen Thomas forgot about everything except his partner’s pleasure.

  In the health center, Stephen Thomas closed his eyes and brought himself back to the present. Leaning against the doorjamb, he imagined making love to Feral.

  Though they had never had a chance to go to bed together, they had made an immediate connection. It would have happened. And they had been well on the way to a close, solid friendship. Stephen Thomas had imagined their making love, and he had imagined inviting Feral to join the partnership. Satoshi and Victoria liked him. The family needed another member, and Feral fit in well. Someday they all had to stop grieving over Merry.

  But what Stephen Thomas had done, by making friends with Feral, was put him in danger.

  The health center was warm and pleasant and deserted. All the people injured in Arachne’s first crash had recovered and gone home. Only one person was hurt in Arachne’s second crash, and the one person was Feral.

  Stephen Thomas passed through the deserted rooms. No one was around to ask him what he wanted, or whether he needed help. The mobile health AIs had been disabled just like the ASes.

  He expected the morgue to be cold, but it was the same temperature as the rest of the health center. When he opened the drawer where Feral lay, chill air washed over him.

  He drew back the shroud. Feral stared up at him with dull, open eyes. Dry blood smeared his face and streaked in caked rivulets from his nose. Blood from his ears matted his curly chestnut hair.

  Stephen Thomas stepped back, in grief and despair.

  Everybody had too much to worry about when Feral died, Stephen Thomas thought. Too much to do, to think about one dead man, to worry about what death would do to his gentle brown eyes.

  And what did I do? I shut down, got on the Chi, and flew away.

  Stephen Thomas took a ragged breath and returned to Feral’s side. He touched his friend’s cold cheek, his forehead; he drew his webbed hand down over Feral’s eyes. The stiffness of death had passed from Feral’s body, and his eyelids closed easily.

  Stephen Thomas got a washcloth and cleaned the dry blood from Feral’s skin and hair. Feral’s expression was somber, but Stephen Thomas could imagine his full, mobile lips ready to smile. His chestnut hair curled around his face.

  Stephen Thomas had been telling himself all along that he only planned to come to the health center and say goodbye to Feral. But he had been lying to himself.

  “Gerald can go fuck himself,” Stephen Thomas said. “I’ll be damned if I’ll leave you here.”

  Feral’s clothes had been ripped and cut away during the attempts to revive him. Livid bruises mottled his chest. Stephen Thomas found a clean sheet and wrapped it around Feral’s body. The health center lay well up the side of Starfarer’s end hill, where the gravity was very low. When Stephen Thomas picked Feral up, his body felt absurdly light, as if death had taken away his substance.

  Stephen Thomas easily carried Feral’s body to the hub of Starfarer. The gravity continued to diminish, till it was barely perceptible. He floated himself and his burden to the ferry station, boarded the capsule, and strapped Feral’s body on the back platform.

  He had not been to the wild side since the wild side’s previous spring. Spring on the wild side was fall in the campus cylinder. Summer had passed in the wilderness, winter had passed on campus. A short trip would take him from campus spring into wild side autumn.

  o0o

  Infinity crossed the lawn in front of the chancellor’s house. Three exterior ASes, silver slugs, sprawled like shiny boneless rhinoceroses in front of the building and guarded its front door. All the house’s other doors, its windows, its balconies, had been covered with ugly, irregular slabs of overlapping rock foam. The secret tunnels leading from it had been plugged with rock foam.

  The exterior ASes were the only mobile artificials left working. The chancellor had disrupted the campus by recalling the service machines. He must have thought that would be a minor irritation compared to Arachne’s crash; maybe he thought it would be the last straw for the expedition members.

  But his petty irritation had backfired on him. He had not realized the silver slugs could work inside as well as outside — they could work almost anywhere — and had released them to finish repairing Starfarer’s damaged hull.

  The oversight had been his downfall, for once Stephen Thomas and J.D. traced the sabotage of Arachne to Blades, the silver slugs had driven the chancellor from the administration building, through the underground tunnels, and trapped him in his house. He was cut off from Arachne now. The computer had activated its immune system and destroyed Blades’ neural node, and the silver slugs had cut the house’s hard links.

  Infinity wished Blades had been stopped before anyone died.

  Blades could communicate by note. He could ask for anything he liked, and a silver slug would carry it to him. Anything but electronic communication, or company. The slugs guarded his door for the protection of the expedition, and for his own protection as well. They let no one pass in either direction.

  Infinity approached the chancellor’s house, crossing behind a rough sculpture of tumbled chunks of raw moon rock.

  Like the manicured yard in front of the administration building, the green turf around the chancellor’s house showed the scars of an angry, milling crowd. The tracks of the silver slugs gouged wide, shallow trenches in the earth.

  Infinity paused at the edge of the swath of grass. All three silver slugs lay facing the same direction, an odd alignment.

  Curious, cautious, he moved forward. One of the silver slugs, a lithoclast, reared up to sense him. The slugs knew him. He had called them in from repairing Starfarer’s outer surface; he had set them to guarding Blades. But they would not let him into Blades’s house, even if that was where he wanted to go.

  The lithoclast subsided. Its bulk eased onto the ground and spread out, shimmering. It rested, waiting, its senses trained on the group of rocks. The smell of crushed grass, green and light, filled the air.

  In a recess in the tumbled stone, Iphigenie Dupre sat staring past the silver slugs at the open door of the chancellor’s home. Infinity watched her uneasily, reluctant to disturb her solitude, but more reluctant to leave her here alone.

  It was unusual to see her on Starfarer’s inner surface. She preferred zero gravity, and stayed in the sailhouse or near the axis as much as she could. Arachne ordered her out of free-fall every so often. She complied, reluctantly.

  Infinity had not been surprised t
o see Jenny Dupre in the waiting room, when the Chi returned from Nemo’s web. But he had been surprised when she joined the discussion group. He was more surprised to see her still here.

  She leaned against the rock, her long, delicate hands lying with fingers outspread beside her. She wore her hair in narrow black braids caught up at the back of her head. They fell to her shoulders, the bright glass beads an uneven fringe. In weightlessness, the braids fanned out and the beads clicked together softly, constantly.

  Infinity joined her and sat beside her, watching Blades’s house. The chancellor remained out of sight. The slugs would let him come to the door, but no farther. He could not cross the threshold.

  He had been nearly as reclusive before they penned him in.

  “Something has to be done,” Iphigenie said abruptly.

  The sailmaster hated the chancellor with cold outrage. She believed, with good reason, that he had tried to kill her. His attack on Arachne had caused the first system crash, which injured Iphigenie. His second attack had killed Feral.

  Infinity considered her statement, careful not to answer too fast, too certainly.

  “Isn’t that enough?” He gestured to the foam-covered house with his chin.

  “No,” she said. “No. It isn’t. He murdered Feral. He meant to kill me. He’s dangerous.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What if he gets back inside the web?”

  “Arachne’s immunized against him.”

  “And the web was uncrashable!” Iphigenie snorted in disgust. “He’s been talking to Gerald. And to the American senators. I saw them from the hill.” She gestured back toward the end of Starfarer’s cylinder. “But when I came down here, they went away.”

  The two senators had been passengers on Esther’s transport, heading home after a fact-finding tour of Starfarer. They were along for the ride, now, and none too happy about it.

  “What do you think we should do?” Infinity asked. Isolating Blades in his house had felt like a good compromise to him, when he had thought of it. At least it had stopped the riot Iphigenie had tried to start, and no one else had been hurt.

  “I think,” Iphigenie said, “that you don’t want to know what I want to see. The best I can hope for, I suppose, is a trial.”

  “We aren’t exactly prepared to try anybody. Is anybody even a lawyer?”

  Iphigenie shrugged.

  Starfarer had left Earth orbit precipitously, six months early, without the long burn-in period the faculty and staff had planned. Maybe during the burn-in, they would have had to handle anti-social, even criminal, behavior. Maybe then they would have been better prepared for it. But the glow of optimism and cooperative spirit led them to the tacit, naive assumption that every problem could be solved by talking about it, by the meetings they held to discuss other sorts of problems.

  The faculty and staff had agreed to continue the deep space expedition, in defiance of orders from EarthSpace, at a meeting. They had held a meeting to decide whether to go after Europa and Androgeos.

  “I’m worried about you,” Infinity said.

  Jenny looked directly at him, gazing at him intently. Always before, until he broke up the mob she created, she had glanced at him briefly, dismissing him. People liked to pretend Starfarer had no hierarchy, but it did. And the hierarchy separated a millionaire solar sail designer from a gardener by quite a distance.

  “You are remarkable,” she said.

  He looked away, embarrassed. He did not like to stand out. He was not sure he wanted to know exactly what she meant. She probably did not mean what she said as a compliment.

  “Feral shouldn’t have died,” she said.

  “Nobody should have died.”

  “I mean — if anyone died, it should have been me. A sacrifice to Artemis, to the wind. Maybe that’s why Blades directed his sabotage toward me.”

  “A sacrifice?” Infinity said.

  “Yes. My namesake escaped, but the gods always take their due, in the end — don’t you know your mythology?”

  “That isn’t my mythology,” Infinity said.

  “Oh,” Jenny said. “No, I suppose not. I’m sorry.”

  “If you want to know about Amaterasu, or Coyote...” Infinity shrugged. “But not Iphigenia.”

  “Her father was supposed to sacrifice her to Artemis, for a favorable wind. She escaped. Artemis waited. I escaped. Artemis tired of waiting. She took my young wild friend instead.”

  “Everybody feels lousy about what happened to Feral,” Infinity said. “But if any one of a dozen things had happened differently, he’d be okay.”

  “Blades is responsible.” Her eyelids flickered as she cut off her conversation with Infinity to communicate with Arachne.

  The faint perception of a small spot of heat told Infinity he, too, had a new message. It was Jenny’s meeting proposal, broadcast through Arachne to everyone on board.

  Infinity did not add his second. He thought things would be just fine the way they were. For as long as it took Starfarer to be able to return home. Then the legal system could deal with Chancellor Blades.

  On the other hand, it was just as likely that the United States would give the chancellor a medal and arrest everyone else as hijackers and terrorists. Maybe Jenny wanted to be certain of some justice, or revenge.

  Infinity still did not want Blades prosecuted here. The memory of the mob stayed with him. His friends and acquaintances had put on unrecognizable masks of anger. He did not want to see that again.

  He stood up.

  “Are you okay? Do you need any help?”

  “No,” Jenny said.

  “Then goodbye, I guess.”

  He left her sitting among the rocks, and continued on to the administration building.

  o0o

  As soon as J.D. ended the discussion group, Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov slipped away from the clump of people and fled to the nearest access hatch. He had not been able to resist listening to J.D. as long as she would talk about Nemo. But the press of people made him uncomfortable and nervous.

  Kolya climbed down the ladder, past ground level, into Starfarer’s skin. He strode along the dim, cool-smelling corridor, toward the nearest elevator.

  Until he reached the safety of the elevator cage, he expected at every second to see Griffith behind him, hurrying to catch up. He was sick to death of Griffith’s following him around, trying to worship him.

  He was rather surprised to have escaped Griffith. He would probably be pleased with himself, if he did not feel so dreadful.

  He had not had a cigarette in two days, and he was at the height of nicotine withdrawal.

  The elevator slowed and stopped and the floor settled beneath his feet: Kolya perceived gravity as pulling backwards against him, then sliding down to settle in the proper place.

  Does anyone ever get used to the sensation of riding an elevator inside a rotating space station? Kolya wondered. I’ve lived in space longer than anyone, and I never have.

  He put on his spacesuit, entered the airlock, and climbed down through the outer shell of Starfarer’s campus cylinder. The airlock opened. He climbed down onto the inspection net.

  Starfarer loomed over him; the stars spun beneath his feet. The motion of the cylinder took him through darkness, into the hot white light of Sirius, and back into shadow as he plunged into the cleft between the campus cylinder and its twin, the wild side. On the far edge of the valley, he burst into the light reflected by the solar sail. If he looked in just the right place he could see the bright crescent of Nemo’s starship, tagging along with Starfarer toward transition.

  Kolya eased himself down onto the cables of the inspection web, grateful to be back out in space. He had spent too much time with other people lately, too much energy trying to understand them. They admired him for reasons that had very little to do with him and much more to do with situations in which he had found himself by chance and luck.

  Usually bad luck, he said to himself.

  It felt
good to be alone. He looked forward to reclaiming his hermit status, now that the controversy was over and Starfarer was safe in the hands of people who would use it for its true calling.

  o0o

  Infinity ducked through the hole in the front door of the administration building. The door had not yet been repaired. When Chancellor Blades locked himself inside, the silver slugs, the lithoclasts that dissolved rock, had munched their way through the wood-finished rock foam.

  The trail of the slugs led through the wide foyer and up the curving stairs to Blades’s office. They had eaten through his door, and herded him through the underground tunnels to his house.

  But the ASes and the mobile AIs would not be on the upper floors. The only place big enough for them all was the basement.

  Infinity went through the building to the back stairs. The halls were cold and deserted.

  “Lights on,” he said, and the stairwell brimmed with light.

  In the basement, hundreds of small robots hunkered together in a random pattern, motionless and silent, like paralyzed hands and blinded eyes.

  Infinity blew out his breath in relief. The chancellor could have destroyed all the mobiles while he was locked in with them. They were sturdy, but they were not designed to stand up to deliberate abuse.

  But as Infinity moved between several squatty housekeepers, a carrier, and a plumber, he felt like he was walking among dead things. The usual faint electronic sound and electromechanical smell had vanished.

  Infinity sat on his heels beside a housekeeper. Out of habit, he tried to touch it through his link to Arachne. He got no response. After a moment of fumbling, he found the power switch. It was off. He turned it on. No one ever turned household robots off. No one noticed household robots enough to think of turning them on and off. The ASes went about their business and plugged themselves in to recharge when they had nothing else to do. They were practically invisible.

  This housekeeper had nearly a full charge, yet Infinity could not get it to respond.

  When he tried the housekeeper’s self-test, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No motion, no signal to Arachne. Not even any error messages.