The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Infinity stood up.

  This was bad.

  o0o

  Griffith paused outside General Cherenkov’s front door. He had never been to the cosmonaut’s house; he had never been invited. He knocked, and waited.

  No answer.

  Griffith had been sitting with the general during J.D. Sauvage’s discussion. He could not figure out where Nikolai Petrovich could have disappeared to. Griffith was trained to keep an eye on people.

  He knocked again. His impatience got the better of his shallow courtesy. He moved across the balcony that fronted Kolya’s house, in the third story of the hillside. He looked through the floor to ceiling windows, cupping his hands around his face to shield his eyes from the reflected glare of the sun tubes.

  The front of the house was deserted. The floor plan of Kolya’s house was probably the same as Floris Brown’s. Three front rooms with a wall of windows, a back hallway, a bathroom, and storage space. The two houses probably were alike, since Brown’s was on the first level of this stepped back triplex arrangement. Like most houses on Starfarer, it was built within a hill. Griffith had been inside Brown’s house, during her welcoming party, and he had taken the opportunity to snoop. He had been through a couple of deserted houses, too.

  Griffith waited; still, Kolya did not appear.

  Griffith returned to the front door, hesitated, and reconsidered. He had been good at his job. Good enough to be wary of a man who had been a guerrilla fighter. Or a terrorist, according to the government that had put a price on his head.

  Griffith did not expect Kolya’s house to be booby trapped. Kolya lived in space because he wanted peace. He had told Griffith that he was the only human being who was safer on the deep space expedition than on Earth. The Mideast Sweep was still very much in power in Kolya’s homeland, and it had a long memory.

  Griffith did not expect to encounter traps. But he did expect Kolya to leave ways of detecting intruders. He did not want to risk his fragile new friendship with the man who had been his hero all his life.

  If we are friends, Griffith thought bitterly. Some kind of weird friend. He talks to me. He advises me. He asks for my opinion. Then threatens to kill me because of it. Then he apologizes. And then he disappears.

  At least he admitted I was right.

  Fuck it, Griffith thought. Why do you keep trying to make friends with these people? Most of them still believe you crashed the web. Even though they know Blades was responsible. None of them care that you sacrificed your career and your marriage for their expedition. They don’t care that you’ll be the first one in jail when — if — we ever get back to Earth.

  He turned away from Kolya’s deserted and probably unlocked home — no one, except Griffith, locked doors on campus — and headed down the long curving flight of stairs.

  As he passed Floris Brown’s apartment, a dapple-gray miniature horse squealed and kicked up its heels and galloped away from Brown’s front porch. The yearling filly raced across the open field and past the herd, alerting and exciting them. The whole bunch of them burst into a run, tangled manes and tails flying and bobbing like dreadlocks.

  Floris Brown sat in the shadows of her deep porch, bits of carrot bright against the black of her knee-length tunic. She blinked at him like an aged, prehistoric lizard, her eyes beady within their rim of dark eye makeup. Fox, one of the graduate students, sat at Brown’s feet and leaned companionably against her leg.

  “You always frighten things,” Floris Brown said to Griffith, her voice accusatory. “You frighten people and you frighten creatures. Why didn’t you go home?”

  He almost said, Because I was trying to figure out a way to keep you disorganized anarchists from getting blown out of the sky.

  Instead, he said nothing, but turned away and strode stiffly back toward the guest house.

  If he had told her what he had tried to do, she would not believe him anyway.

  These people, Griffith thought, are driving me crazy.

  o0o

  Infinity left the administration building and hurried along a path that spiraled around the interior of Starfarer. The anomalies he kept seeing in the growth patterns of the plants added to his distress. A lot of the flowers had been bred for long-lasting blooms: the snow irises and the crocuses lasted well into spring; the daffodils came up so early that back on Earth, the threat of snow would not have passed. On Starfarer, it seldom snowed more than an artistic sprinkle.

  He had gotten used to the long bloomings, when Starfarer was half finished, during its muddy first spring.

  But other plants had other rhythms, and many of these were disarranged. Crossing a warm microclimate, he entered a grove of orange trees. They were heavy with fruit. Though the cafeteria was empty of fresh food, in the absence of the ASes, no one had thought to pick any oranges. Infinity smelled not just the sharpness of the oranges, but the heavy sweetness of a profusion of orange buds and blossoms.

  The orange trees looked healthy, but their burst of blossoms worried Infinity. Plants under stress reacted like this, with an extravagance of reproduction.

  Honeybees harvested the pollen, and more dead bees lay on the ground.

  Farther along the path, in a cooler microclimate, Infinity passed through a field of spinach that had already begun to bolt.

  He was worried for a lot of reasons when he reached the edge of the tumbled patch of ground where the genetics department had been.

  Lithoclasts crawled through the broken building, dissolving the shattered walls, eating them away. The place had been disinfected. Everything that could be salvaged had been brought out. A great deal of work had been lost, not only experiments in progress but some of the back-up embryonic tissue meant to support Starfarer’s biological diversity.

  Miensaem Thanthavong, the head of the genetics department, stood at the edge of the broken building, staring at it, her shoulders slumped.

  Infinity glanced at the lithoclasts again, gauging their progress. It would be a while before they finished cleaning up. After that, the geneticists would call in the lithoblasts, the rock-makers, to rebuild the shell of their building.

  Every silver slug that came inside, whether to work or to carry out someone’s whim, meant one less attending to the constant job of maintaining the strength and stability of Starfarer’s main cylinders. He wondered if the scientists had thought of that.

  Professor Thanthavong saw him and greeted him. She looked tired.

  He was used to seeing her on a screen, or in a holographic projection. He always forgot how slight and delicate she was. Informal as Starfarer could be, he never knew what to call her. Few people called the Nobel laureate by her given name.

  “I found the artificials,” he said.

  “Oh, good. We can use some here. Are they —” Her eyelids flickered as she linked to Arachne’s web.

  “I’m still not getting...” She stopped. “What is it?”

  “I think their brains are fried.”

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas smoothed the earth over Feral’s grave. He leaned against the shovel and rested his forehead against his hands. Sweat dripped down his face and over the sensitive webs between his fingers.

  He had chosen a spot on a hilltop within a grove of young oak trees. He chose the spot because he liked it, not because he felt certain Feral would have liked it. He had not known Feral long enough, well enough, to be sure what he would have wanted. Feral had left no instructions. Arachne preserved a record of his EarthSpace waiver, accepted and agreed to, probably without a second thought. Where the record asked for next of kin, Feral had written, “None.”

  Stephen Thomas sat down and rested against one of the oak saplings. The thin trunk would grow into a mature tree in twenty years, fifty. If Starfarer survived, the oak trees would still be here at the end of the exile.

  Sunlight poured down between the brilliant red and yellow leaves. Just as spring was hot back on campus, autumn was hot on the wild side.

  “Feral, I wish I ha
d a marker for you,” Stephen Thomas said aloud. “I’ll get somebody to make you one, as soon as I can. I just couldn’t stand to think of you lying there in the morgue...”

  He hooked his finger through the thin chain around his neck. The delicate links made a cold line of pressure across the nape of his neck. The crystal pendant swung against his thumb. In some light it was red, in some it was blue, and once in a while it turned black. He stared into it, twisting it back and forth, watching the colors change.

  Stephen Thomas thought about Feral. He thought about looking for his aura. Feral had been unique, surrounded by changing rainbows.

  “Victoria’s probably right,” Stephen Thomas said. “There’s no such thing as auras. I make them up to go along with my feelings. To explain them, maybe.”

  Stephen Thomas wrapped his fingers around the crystal and tugged at it, gently at first, then harder.

  “When I met you, I felt the same way I felt when I first met Merry,” Stephen Thomas said. “I love Victoria and Satoshi. But that’s different. That was slower, and steadier. We all had to work at it. Merry, though... sparks. Explosions. All those clichés.

  “But Merry’s dead. And you’re dead. God damn it, Feral, I’m so sorry...”

  The chain snapped in his hand. He stared at the broken necklace. A film of blood reddened the gold along a finger’s length near the clasp. Stephen Thomas touched the back of his neck and found the long scratch where the clasp had cut his skin. Salty sweat stung the shallow abrasion.

  The bloody red-gold chain lay in his hand, tangled around the crystal.

  Stephen Thomas spilled the necklace onto the bare earth of Feral’s grave.

  Nearby, a silver slug rustled the scatter of dry gold leaves on the ground. Stephen Thomas had called it inside to help him carry Feral’s body. Stephen Thomas had been able to manage in the microgravity of the hub. Even coming down the hill, where the perception of weight increased with every step, Feral’s weight had been manageable. But he had needed some help in regular gravity.

  The lithoclast rippled uncomfortably, impatiently, waiting for him to tell it what to do.

  Stephen Thomas did not need it any longer. He dismissed it and watched it crawl away. He only wished he could as easily command the slugs guarding Blades’s house.

  How could I have been so wrong about that guy? he wondered.

  The heat enervated him. He asked Arachne the reason for producing such an intense Indian summer here in the wild cylinder. Both cylinders ordinarily had mild weather. The temperature range of winter overlapped the temperature range of summer. It seldom froze, and seldom came within complaining distance of body heat. People did sometimes complain that the weather bored them.

  Arachne replied that steps were being taken to moderate the temperature.

  Satoshi would like it over here today, Stephen Thomas thought. Being from Hawaii, Satoshi often complained that Starfarer’s weather was too cold. Victoria, on the other hand, had spent much of her childhood in Nova Scotia. She thought that Starfarer had no weather worth mentioning, merely climate.

  At the bottom of the hill, an access tunnel opened. The silver slug oozed through it and disappeared, on its way back to its regular maintenance job on the cylinder’s outside skin. The tunnel closed. Its hatch, disguised by rocks and dirt and a wilting flower, disappeared against the hillside. The sharp cry of a bird made Stephen Thomas glance up. When he looked down the slope again, he could barely see where the hatch had opened.

  He should go home. He should go back to the lab, where the alien cells grew and divided on nutrient plates. By now they had probably produced enough for some analyses to begin. Stephen Thomas tried to find the excitement he should be feeling, but it was too remote. In order to experience elation he would have to open himself to grief as well, grief for Feral and grief for Merry.

  He had not been able to fall apart when Merry died and he could not fall apart now. The partnership could not afford it.

  Chapter 7

  Stephen Thomas woke. A cold and refreshing wind cut the humid, heavy air and rustled the gold leaves overhead. White light speared through the branches and speckled the dry grass.

  Back on Earth he would have looked for thunderheads, a thunderstorm, but gentle rain was as extreme as weather ever got on board Starfarer.

  Stephen Thomas stretched — and froze. He made himself relax until the ache subsided. He sat up, as cautious as an old man.

  “I’ll be fucking glad when this is over,” he said.

  It was possible to change from a diver back to an ordinary human being. For a decade or so, the U.S. government had aimed a good deal of propaganda at the divers, trying to persuade them to convert.

  No diver had ever changed back.

  Stephen Thomas could change back if he wanted to, but the viral depolymerase would make him violently ill for weeks. As he was, he could function.

  Another factor kept him from the reverse metamorphosis. Arachne’s crash had destroyed his medical records and his genetic profile; the destruction of the genetics department crushed his hard-copy backup beyond retrieval. Without the records, there was no sure way to separate the diver genetic material from his own genes.

  A wind devil of dry leaves whirled past, paused over Feral’s grave, and dissolved. The dry leaves fluttered to the ground.

  He pushed his hair behind his ears, climbed to his feet, and stood at the edge of the fresh earth of Feral’s grave.

  “I’ll ask Crimson about a headstone,” Stephen Thomas said. “And Infinity will know something to plant.”

  The crystal glowed black against the drying surface of the disturbed earth.

  “Goodbye, Feral.”

  o0o

  Nemo’s chrysalis pulsed gently for hours. It shuddered violently. J.D. sat forward, staring intently at the LTM transmission, enlarging it. The chrysalis hardened into a solid shell, an abalone turned inside-out, swirled and knotted with iridescent blue and green mother of pearl.

  Nemo’s nest grew quiet and still.

  J.D. rested in the window seat of her house, watching the LTM transmission, waiting for Nemo to call her back. The nest drew her. But when she returned, Nemo would die.

  She felt so strange. Ever since inhaling the link enhancer, she had disconnected from her body as if she were drunk. Arachne informed her that the reaction was within the tolerable range of effects.

  “Tolerable for you,” J.D. said aloud. Arachne, of course, did not reply. Starfarer’s computer did not engage in rhetorical conversations.

  Getting the metabolic enhancer was so easy, she thought. After a couple of days, a couple of biocontrol sessions, I could already call on more energy. I thought enhancing the link would be the same.

  She shifted her position in the window seat.

  Her head spun. The light felt too bright. The light was too bright, but it had not bothered her so much before.

  A faint breeze drifted through the open windows. It felt good. The weather was too hot.

  Zev crossed the yard, coming from the river, a fish in one hand and J.D.’s string bag in the other. He saw her, grinned, and waved the fish. J.D. waved in return.

  He took the steps to the porch in one stride

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I am,” she said. That was a difference from being drunk. If she were drunk, she would not be interested in food.

  He came into the living room and sat down at the other side of the window seat. He offered her the fish.

  “Zev... I’d like to cook it, if you don’t mind.”

  She tried to get up. She nearly ran into the LTM display.

  Whoops, she thought, bad manners!

  She giggled, blinked the display out of her way and reappeared it at arm’s length.

  Her knees shook. A wave of heat passed up her face. She began to sweat. She sat back down.

  Zev watched her with alarm.

  “Maybe I won’t cook it,” she said.

  “I’ll cook it,” Zev said.


  “You’ll cook it?”

  “Sure. We do, sometimes.”

  “You never did when I was with the divers.”

  “It was summer.”

  “Oh.” I guess that explains it, J.D. thought, wishing her head would clear.

  Zev handed her an orange from the bag.

  “Eat that while I cook. There’s not very much growing that’s ripe yet, it’s too early. But there’s lots of oranges.”

  “You didn’t have to forage,” J.D. said. “I’m sure the central cafeteria has plenty of supplies.”

  “I guess,” Zev said doubtfully. “But I went by, and nobody’s there to ask. It was easiest to go fishing.”

  He took the fish into the kitchen nook. J.D. lay back in the window seat, enjoying the unusual occasion of having someone make lunch for her.

  “That smells terrific, Zev.”

  She peeled the orange and ate a section. She pressed the spicules against the roof of her mouth; they burst, and the sweet, tart juice flowed over her tongue.

  To her relief, her head stopped spinning. She did not much like the sensation of being drunk, of having the world whirl around while she stayed still.

  She suddenly groaned.

  “Did I really say that to Stephen Thomas?” she said in distress.

  “Say what to Stephen Thomas?”

  “That his hair was down.”

  “You did say that.” Zev joined her, carrying two plates of broiled trout.

  “Oh, no.”

  “His hair was down, what’s wrong with telling him? You ought to tell him to cut it.”

  J.D. touched Zev’s pale hair fondly. It was short enough to stay out of his eyes when he swam, long enough to fan out around his head when he was in the water.

  “I think he likes it long,” she said.

  Zev rested his head against her hand, then quickly kissed her palm.

  “I think you like him,” Zev said. He handed her one of the plates. J.D. gave him part of the orange.

  “Of course I like him. I like Victoria and Satoshi, too.”

  She thought she had mastered her reaction to Stephen Thomas. She did not want to talk about it. In her present state, she would say more than she meant to.