The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  She could say it all to Zev. He would find it perfectly comprehensible and natural. Except for her reluctance to admit how she felt. He would find it so natural that he would probably tell Stephen Thomas. J.D. could see nothing coming from that but embarrassment all around.

  She took a bite of the fish. It was perfectly cooked; the flakes evaporated in her mouth.

  “This is wonderful,” she said to Zev. “What did I ever do without you?”

  He grinned. “You were an ordinary human being before you met me,” he said. “And I was an ordinary diver.”

  o0o

  Infinity showed Professor Thanthavong what he had found in the administration building. She called the assistant chancellor.

  Gerald Hemminge arrived a few minutes later. He hesitated halfway down the stairs, then strode purposefully the rest of the way to the basement.

  Infinity explained what had happened. As Gerald listened, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “How can we remedy this?” Thanthavong asked, her voice sharp. “How could the chancellor do something so stupid, so petty —”

  “Please don’t yell at me, professor,” Gerald Hemminge said. He looked as unhappy as she did. He glanced across the dark basement, over the heads of the artificials, toward the shadowed corners. “I didn’t know Chancellor Blades had done this. I would have stopped him if I could.”

  “We may have to get along without them,” Thanthavong said. “Regrowing the brains... that may take resources we can’t spare. We’ll have to do their work ourselves.”

  Gerald made a sound of satisfaction, and a wry grin cut through his distress.

  “It will amuse me to see Stephen Thomas Gregory beating his shirts against a rock in a stream.”

  “You and Stephen Thomas should put aside your differences,” Thanthavong said. “The expedition can’t afford them.”

  “I would if he would. It won’t hurt him to do his own laundry. He has too high an opinion of himself, and his provocative manner —”

  “He has a right to his high opinion,” Thanthavong said. “He’s a talented young man. My observation is that you provoke each other.”

  “It isn’t just the laundry,” Infinity said, feeling provoked himself.

  Thanthavong and Gerald stopped their back and forth needling. They both looked at Infinity. Gerald had a habit of cocking his head and listening with an expectant, faintly skeptical expression, as if he already knew everything anyone could say to him, as if he were merely waiting to dismiss it.

  “The ASes clean up, sure,” Infinity said. “But that’s just part of keeping everything working. They repair things. They plant the gardens and weed the vegetables and harvest them and cook them — when’s the last time you had a hot meal?”

  “I’ve been eating crackers and cheese,” Gerald said. “On the run. I haven’t used the central cafeteria — are you saying nothing can be cooked?”

  “I’m saying we’ll have to do a lot more work than you think if we can’t fix the ASes.”

  Thanthavong rubbed her chin thoughtfully with one knuckle.

  “Somebody’s got to grow the food,” Infinity said.

  “Dig in the dirt?” Gerald said.

  “If you want to stay out here longer than the preserved stuff lasts.”

  “And how long is that?”

  “I don’t know. Arachne doesn’t even know exactly what we came away with and what we left behind —”

  “For heaven’s sake —”

  “Don’t blame Infinity,” Thanthavong said sharply to Gerald. “I told you Arachne lost backup information in the crashes. Some of this data the web may never even have had. We’ll have to take inventory. We’ll have to...” Her voice trailed off as she considered, then she brought herself back abruptly. “We’re lucky someone is looking past the boundaries of their responsibilities,” she said to Infinity.

  “I suppose so,” Gerald paused. He stared at the dead artificials again, but the dark corners drew his gaze. He caught his breath, but covered the reaction with a cough. “Can you repair the artificials? Or must we turn Starfarer into a primitive hunting tribe?” He glanced at Infinity. “No offense.”

  “What?” Infinity kept himself from laughing. What could he say? That his mother’s people had been agriculturalists for thousands of years? That the hunting tribes had been a lot of things, none of them “primitive”? That he would truly like to see Gerald in the wild cylinder, trying to play pukka sahib with the shy, rare deer?

  They would all be much better off gathering than hunting. A large proportion of the plants growing within Starfarer were edible. He wondered if Gerald had noticed that.

  Infinity settled for a shrug. “I’d prefer hunting and gathering to cultivating rice by hand,” he said.

  The other half of Infinity’s heritage was legally Brazilian and ethnically Japanese, but Gerald obviously had no idea what Infinity was talking about. He gave Infinity a blank look.

  “Can you repair the artificials?” he said again to Thanthavong. He was sweating.

  He doesn’t like it down here, Infinity thought. He doesn’t like it down here at all.

  “Theoretically, of course I know how to regrow the brains,” Thanthavong said. “But the technical aspects... Obviously, Infinity is correct. We shall have to free resources to repair these creatures. If Arachne’s memories of their training are whole, the problem may not be too difficult. If the architecture has to be redesigned from scratch...” She lifted her hands, palms up, in a gesture of resignation.

  Once more, Gerald glanced around the dark basement. The shadowy artificials surrounded them like a ghostly band of supplicants. Gerald hunched his shoulders.

  “I shall have to research the best way to go about the repair,” Gerald said. “If you’ll excuse me.” He hurried up the stairs and disappeared.

  “We’d be in a pretty mess,” Thanthavong said to Infinity, “if you hadn’t noticed this.”

  “Somebody would have.”

  “I wonder. We’re so wrapped up in what J.D. experienced... Would we all of a sudden look around and see it was too late?”

  What she had said to him she had meant as a compliment. But she made him wonder if he had badly overstepped his bounds, and she made him wonder if she thought he was uninterested in Nemo and the alien ship-nest.

  He wondered if aristocrats always had that kind of effect...

  “Your mother is Japanese?” she said.

  “My father.”

  “How did you come to be named Mendez?”

  “My whole name’s Infinity Kenjiro Yanagihara y Mendoza. But Mendez is easier for people to remember, and it’s the original spelling. From before my mother emigrated.”

  “Why do you use your mother’s name?”

  He shrugged. “It’s less confusing. I don’t look very Japanese. In Brazil it didn’t matter, there are a lot of us mongrels around. Most folks knew me as Kenny Yanagihara.”

  “Did your father grow rice?”

  “No, ma’am,” Infinity said. “He’s... he’s a lot of things, but not a farmer. Ronin is more like it. He doesn’t grow rice. His family probably never grew rice.”

  “My father did,” Thanthavong said. “In Cambodia. A hundred years ago. With a water buffalo.”

  She brushed her fingertips across the carapace of the artificial, a touch of sorrow or farewell, and walked toward the stairs.

  Infinity followed her out, nonplused by her comment. A hundred years ago? With a water buffalo?

  He was not sure of her age, but he knew she was old. Eighty, maybe.

  Her father could have been a rice farmer, in Cambodia. A hundred years ago.

  With a water buffalo.

  o0o

  Carrying the shovel, Stephen Thomas headed home. He had not meant to stay so long, and he wondered how things were going in the genetics department. He checked with Arachne, but found no messages from his students or from his boss.

  Involved with Arachne, he stumbled on the roug
h trail. He dropped the link and put his attention to negotiating the path. He had forgotten how quickly darkness fell in late autumn on board Starfarer. Back in the campus cylinder, where it was spring, the twilights as well as the days were growing longer.

  He could not get lost: the sun tube reflected starlight at night, and Arachne could always guide him back to the access if the sky clouded over. As it was doing now. The clouds were thicker and darker than any Stephen Thomas had ever seen here. The temperature had fallen rapidly.

  He kept going, following the trail in the darkness as best he could. He touched Arachne now and then to be sure he was headed in the right direction, but he could not stay in constant contact with the computer. He had to keep most of his attention on the trail.

  The rain began, a few scattered drops that patted against the dry leaves of the young trees. A rumble of sound rolled over the land.

  Thunder.

  Stephen Thomas looked along the length of the wild cylinder, amazed to see lightning flicker across the clouds. A break in the sky cover exposed the sun tube, bright with stars, and the far-overhead clouds.

  Lightning spiraled down the length of the wild side.

  As thunder rumbled around him, Stephen Thomas cursed the lightning, the rain, and Arachne. The trail led up a small hill. He stopped, looking for a way around the base. He had no intention of becoming a human lightning rod. He asked for directions to an access hatch, so he could find shelter underground, but received no reply. The storm cut him off from the web, isolating him from any help. The wind rose, whipping fallen leaves past his ankles. The raindrops hit the ground, coated themselves with dust, bounced back and splashed his legs, and turned into mud. His sore feet slid around in his wet sandals.

  The clouds opened. Rain crashed down: the huge, heavy drops fell so fast the air felt like solid water.

  A bolt of lightning blasted the earth nearby. The air reeked of ozone, broken cedar, smoke. The rain sizzled and hissed against flames; the fire died with a stench of wet ashes.

  Rivulets coursed down the hillside and coalesced into a stream. Stephen Thomas followed the rippling water, looking for shelter. He was soaking wet, and cold, his long hair plastered against his face and straggling down his neck. He wiped rainwater from his eyes.

  A lightning flash illuminated the land around him. His eyes and his mind retained a high-contrast picture. The stream was leading him into a gully: he was about to trade being a target of the lightning for being the prey of a wall of water. Even a diver might not survive a flash flood. He dropped the shovel and climbed the rough slope to higher ground, scrabbling up the rock, cursing, scraping his hands on stones.

  Out of the reach of the gathering flood, he hunkered under a scraggle of prickly scotch broom. It gave some protection from the wind, but none at all from the rain. The crisp colorful fallen leaves had turned to a slick, sopping brown mat.

  The rain stopped as it had begun: a deluge abruptly changing to a scatter of droplets, then nothing. Stephen Thomas looked up. The clouds had rained themselves away, and the stars bloomed brightly all along the sun-tube.

  Rushing brown water washed through the gully below him.

  When Stephen Thomas stood up, the scotch broom swept him with another shower. He swore at it, looked around to get his bearings, and picked his way along the edge of the gully toward the trail. The electrical interference with his link had disappeared, for all the difference it made now. He did send a general, irritated note to Arachne about the weather. Arachne noted that the fire danger had ended.

  Stephen Thomas hiked through a stand of bushy young trees that showered him with water and dead wet leaves. The trees ended abruptly at the edge of a meadow. The meadow stretched to the steep hill that formed the end of the cylinder. The ferry back to campus waited at the top of the hill, the axis of the cylinder.

  When he reached the edge of the boggy field, Stephen Thomas saw someone halfway up the hill, descending in long strides through the low gravity.

  Stephen Thomas stopped in the shadows of the trees. The person coming down the hill probably could not see him.

  It was Griffith.

  Griffith unnerved him. Stephen Thomas reminded himself that auras were a figment of his imagination. His perception of Griffith as lacking one meant absolutely nothing. As Victoria had pointed out, Florrie Brown told them all that Griffith was a narc before Stephen Thomas ever thought to look for his aura.

  Griffith made him nervous because Griffith made everybody nervous. He had been the first suspect in Arachne’s crash. He was innocent of that charge.

  Griffith said he was an accountant for the Government Accountability Office. Few believed he worked for the GAO, and nobody believed he was an accountant. Like everyone else, Stephen Thomas believed he had worked against the expedition.

  Stephen Thomas moved deeper back among the trees.

  Griffith crossed the meadow. He carried a makeshift bedroll. Stephen Thomas wondered why he had not taken a tent and sleeping bag from the storeroom. It was communal property — but Griffith probably had even less conception of communal property than he had of governing by consensus.

  What do I care if he gets wet on his camp-out? Stephen Thomas said to himself.

  He stood very quiet as Griffith approached. He was only a few paces from the government agent, and he felt a spark of satisfaction in watching the man, unobserved, from so close a distance.

  Griffith stopped.

  “Come out of there.” He faced Stephen Thomas.

  Stephen Thomas hesitated, then shrugged and stepped out from beneath the trees. What could Griffith do to him? Arachne knew he was out here. Stephen Thomas made sure the computer knew Griffith was out here, too.

  “You look like hell.” Griffith sounded annoyed. “What are you doing in there?”

  “Avoiding you,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Griffith’s expression froze.

  “What are you doing out here?” Stephen Thomas said.

  “None of your damned business.” Griffith started away, his shoulders stiff with anger.

  “Hey,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Griffith’s pace checked, but he kept going.

  “How’d you know where I was?” Stephen Thomas called after him.

  Griffith turned back. He looked Stephen Thomas up and down, critically, contemptuously.

  “You could have been more obvious,” he said. “But... only if you’d left your scat.”

  o0o

  Victoria hesitated on the path to J.D.’s yard. It was later than she had thought. She had spent all day in Physics Hill, analyzing her journey into Nemo’s interior. What a strange conglomeration she had come back with. Neither she nor Avvaiyar knew quite what to make of it.

  Delicate light poured through the tall windows of J.D.’s main room, and flowed over the wild garden. The huckleberry bushes rustled, their small oval leave quivering, and something — an owl, a bat? — flew past on whispered wings.

  Victoria knocked on the front door of J.D.’s house. Like most of the houses on Starfarer, it had been built and then covered with a hill. Its whole front was windows, except the door. Looking in someone’s open windows was bad form.

  Backlit by the cool glow, Zev opened the door.

  “Hi, Victoria.”

  “Hi, Zev. Where’ve you been all day?”

  “Professor Thanthavong told J.D. to rest.”

  “Is that Victoria?” J.D. asked.

  “Hi,” Victoria called.

  Zev stood aside and let her in. She kicked off her shoes at the door.

  Larger than life, the image of Nemo’s chrysalis filled the center of the room, illuminating it. Victoria had kept the same image, much smaller, hovering nearby all day while she worked.

  Nothing had changed.

  The image overlapped the boxes that remained stacked in random piles in the main room. J.D. had not been here long enough to unpack all her belongings.

  Victoria felt comfortable with J.D., and fond of her. It surpr
ised her to remember how brief a time the alien contact specialist had been on board the starship.

  J.D. sat in the windowseat, leaning against the side so she could look out the window or at Nemo’s image. She had arranged a few things around her: some of her books, a reading light limpeted to the wall, the woven mat Satoshi had given her at her welcoming party. The light was off; J.D.’s attention was on the image of Nemo.

  Zev joined her, sitting right-angled to her in the center of the cushioned seat,

  Victoria smiled. “You look comfy.”

  “I feel so strange,” J.D. said. “Like I’ve had too much to drink. I was saying silly things to everybody I saw. I thought I’d better hide out till I felt like myself again.”

  “Your system’s taking a bit of a shock,” Victoria said. “I got so involved in analysis — I should have come by to see you earlier.”

  “I’m okay. Come sit down.”

  Victoria perched on the other side of the windowseat, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Zev’s body radiated heat.

  Stephen Thomas will be like that, soon, Victoria thought.

  Zev curled his feet over J.D.’s; his claws gently dimpled her skin above the instep.

  “I know the prep is working,” J.D. said. “But I don’t feel any change in my link.”

  “Arachne’s not set up to dump more information to a person than the regular link can handle,” Victoria said. “Not... not under normal circumstances.”

  The safeguards had not worked for Feral. It should have been impossible, but somehow Arachne had overloaded him. His blood pressure had soared, so fast and hard that it blasted open his arteries, his capillaries. The bleeding had simultaneously crushed his brain, and starved it.

  J.D. was attempting something very risky.

  “Please tell Nemo to be careful when you try this,” Victoria said. She knew better than to ask J.D. to reconsider.

  “I will. Don’t worry.” Her gaze drifted to the image of the chrysalis. “It’s so quiet,” she said. “I got used to the attendants always fluttering around. Did you notice, you could always hear them even if you couldn’t see them?”