The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “I’m extremely curious.”

  “You aren’t afraid of the nature of my gift.”

  “No. I’m not afraid. I trust you.”

  “You’re not concerned that my gift will change you.”

  She hesitated. She wanted to say that if she were afraid of change, she would never have come to space. But... if she were not afraid, she would have accepted the divers’ offer regardless of the other consequences. She still wished she had accepted.

  I won’t make the same mistake twice, she said to herself.

  “I’m not so frightened that I’ll turn it down.”

  “I give you myself,” Nemo said.

  “I... I don’t understand.” Then, with joy, she said, “Do you mean you’re going to live — ? Nemo, that’s wonderful!”

  “No, I’ll die.”

  “Then... I really don’t understand.”

  “I give you the inorganic parts of myself that I leave behind.”

  What Nemo was trying to tell her came clear.

  “The part of you that I called your ship,” she said softly.

  “I give you my ship,” Nemo replied.

  She tried to speak, but she was too stunned. She could hardly breathe. Nemo’s ship — !

  The tentacle writhed weakly from her limp hands, touched its way up her body, and brushed her face, her hand, with its furred tip. It left a trace of iridescent dust.

  “You say nothing.”

  “Because I’m speechless,” J.D. said. “It’s a response humans have to being this surprised.”

  “You accept my gift?”

  “Yes, Nemo. Oh, yes, I accept. Thank you.” Her hands were trembling. “But — how will I fly it? Do I have time to learn before... before...”

  “Before I die.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “My life has been long and full, and I don’t regret its passing,” Nemo said.

  “But I’ll grieve for you,” J.D. said. “I’ll wish I’d had more time to know you.”

  “My offspring will know all that I know.”

  “They’ll be just like you?”

  “Each will develop separately, and each will possess my knowledge and the juvenile parent’s knowledge.”

  “But they won’t be you.”

  “Each will be unique,” Nemo said.

  “I’ll look forward to meeting your children,” J.D. said. “But I’ll still miss you.” She hardly had time to consider the idea that Nemo’s children would be born with all the knowledge a squidmoth could collect in a long, dedicated life. Nemo would have been born already steeped in ancestral knowledge... for how many millennia, how many generations?

  “Is there anything you don’t know?” J.D. asked softly, in awe.

  “The shape of my knowledge is so incomplete,” Nemo said, “that my children and their children will never finish it.”

  She let Nemo’s communication shape appear in her mind. The squidmoth was right. Now that she looked, now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see where it ought to extend a great distance in many dimensions. She could see where it fell short. How strange: the first time she looked at it, entered it, she had perceived it as infinite.

  “If I only knew the details of the surface...”

  “You will extend my knowledge, as my offspring will.”

  J.D. managed to smile. “Does that make me your daughter?”

  “I like that idea,” Nemo said.

  Nemo’s tentacle caressed her again: her cheek, her hair. It quivered and collapsed, sliding down her arm to coil unevenly on the floor.

  The wings shed more of their iridescent scales. Small creatures like ants crossed with periwinkles, like minuscule hermit crabs, carried the scales away. Their paths formed lines of iridescent, unreadable hieroglyphics.

  J.D. shivered suddenly. If the new generation of attendants was doing to dismember Nemo... she could not watch it. Yet she could not leave Nemo to die alone, either.

  “Nemo, what’s going to happen?” she asked again. “How will I learn to fly your ship? What about your real children? Shouldn’t you leave it to one of them?”

  “My children can’t make use of what I’ll leave behind.”

  “How will I make use of it? I should have asked Esther to come over and help, but there’s no time now.”

  The tentacle crept up, slowly, painfully, and grasped her wrist. She fell silent.

  “You have the means to learn.”

  Nemo led her into the internal reality.

  J.D. cried out.

  She was the ship. She was Nemo. She felt the weakness in Nemo’s organic body, and the unlimited strength and power of the inorganic body that would remain. Nemo led her to the proper set of intersecting surfaces. To move from place to place was as easy as walking, as easy as thought. She could see the path into transition, the long, looping route through it.

  “We need to go there,” she said, pointing.

  She could even see a different direction toward transition, toward 61 Cygni, but she was cut off from it by a depthless chasm. She could get no closer. It might be the direction Starfarer would take. Though its shapes and curves echoed Victoria’s transition algorithm, she could not quite fit the shapes together.

  Nemo’s path into transition was intricate, convoluted, beautiful.

  It was a maze, but Nemo showed her the route that allowed her to pass.

  They returned to the real world.

  “It’s a long distance,” Nemo said, “and I fear you will be lonely.”

  “I’ve never minded being lonely,” J.D. said. “Not too much, anyway. But I will mind this time. I’ll miss you.” She opened her eyes, but shut them quickly. In her mind, Nemo was an ethereal presence. The crumpled, spent body that lay before her, its long eyelid completely closed, its battered wings shrouded, only reminded her how little time they had left. She squeezed her burning eyes shut; her throat ached with the effort of holding back her tears.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas tried to ignore the discomfort of the changes. As long as he stayed still, he could imagine nothing was wrong. But every motion reminded him of what was happening to his body.

  Starfarer neared transition point. J.D. had checked in once, then fallen silent again. Victoria and Satoshi had tasks to perform during the next few hours, but Stephen Thomas had no official responsibilities.

  During Starfarer’s first entry into transition, he had been unconscious in the ruined genetics department. As the second transition point approached, he had helped track Arachne’s crashes to the neural node of Chancellor Blades.

  I want to see transition, Stephen Thomas thought. I want to be where I can experience it.

  With the thought, he jumped to his feet.

  The constriction of his genitals froze him. Nauseated, he sank cautiously into his chair.

  “Fucking hell,” he muttered. He had no control over muscles that were, for Zev, completely voluntary; he could not take the last step that would change him from ordinary human to diver.

  He folded his arms on his desk, put his head down, closed his eyes, and opened his link to Arachne.

  The biofeedback routines reacted as if he had ordered a refresher course in an ordinary subject — beard repression, fertility control. He told Arachne to help him learn the use of muscles that an ordinary human man did not possess.

  Having no restrictions against what he asked, Arachne proceeded. The web sought out new neural pathways that Stephen Thomas did now possess, and reinforced their connections.

  As Arachne worked, Stephen Thomas’s perception of his body grew remote. His conscious mind stayed free and alert. Both bored and apprehensive, he sought something to occupy his attention.

  J.D. remained isolated. Stephen Thomas almost sent a message to his partners, then reconsidered. They were busy, and he did not know what to say to them. Nor did he know if they wanted to speak to him.

  He tapped into Arachne’s reports on transition approach, surrounding himself w
ith a holographic representation and using his link to listen in on the telemetry.

  Nemo’s ship followed Starfarer, silent; the cosmic string coiled invisibly before the starship. Arachne felt solid and steady.

  This is what Feral was doing in the last few minutes of his life, Stephen Thomas thought.

  He backed away from Arachne, spoke Feral’s passwords, and re-entered his communications fugue under Feral’s guest account.

  An unusual resonance probed toward him. It snatched itself back. He grabbed for it, but it eluded him so swiftly that it left him doubting its existence

  Suspicious and disturbed, he watched, and listened, and waited for transition.

  o0o

  Victoria linked easily with Arachne. Her view of Starfarer from the transparent sailhouse merged with Arachne’s view of the state of the starship. For once, finally, all the systems hovered within reasonable ranges and the sail aligned the cylinders with transition point. No military vessels chased them, firing orders and nuclear missiles; no saboteur — Victoria believed — hovered in the background waiting to crash Arachne at the worst possible moment; and the cosmic string, though it was withdrawing from Sirius, moved without twisting, and at a constant acceleration. The starship had nearly caught up to it.

  Jenny glanced up from the hard link, then down again. She typed something, hunt-and-peck. Nobody ever typed anything; the keyboard was an anachronism, a third-backup redundancy.

  Arachne formed a display in the air above the keyboard, mirroring the report in the back of Victoria’s mind.

  Avvaiyar’s image appeared between Victoria and Jenny. She had been participating in Starfarer’s transition approach, but physically she was in her observatory.

  “You know what I wish?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “That we’d find a nexus. A crossroads. The real freeway interchange, the one we thought we’d found at Tau Ceti. An intersection too important to disrupt just because troublesome human beings are using it. They would never blow up a major transportation system because of a couple of infidel joy-riders.”

  Victoria chuckled, but the image was apt.

  “That’s all right with me,” she said. “If I could jump from freeway interchange to freeway interchange, shouting at civilization at the top of my lungs till they listened — that’s what I’d do.”

  She turned her attention to the image of Nemo’s ship. The rock sphere had budded out a dozen silken bubbles.

  “Hadn’t you better try to call J.D.?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t think so. She’s very even-tempered, eh? But if you interfere with her job she can get quite sharp about it.”

  “She’s cutting it too close.”

  “I know it,” Victoria said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  She yearned to call out to J.D. and persuade her, command her, to come back to safety. It took all her strength to keep her silence.

  “She isn’t coming back,” Victoria said. “Jenny, she won’t leave Nemo. If that means going into transition on an alien ship... that’s what J.D. will do.”

  “How far behind us will she be?”

  “I don’t know!” Victoria lowered her voice. “She might be gone... a long time.”

  “You know, Victoria...” Avvaiyar’s image hung rock solid in the air; Jenny and Victoria, in zero gee, hovered and drifted. “You could —”

  “I know!” Victoria exclaimed. “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. But... if I send J.D. the algorithm, it’ll be in Nemo’s memory. In whatever Nemo’s ship uses for a computer web. That would be like turning it over to civilization.”

  “No strings attached,” Avvaiyar said wryly.

  What would J.D. want her to do?

  Victoria had only a few minutes left. She had no time to call a meeting to discuss the question with Starfarer’s faculty and staff. She hardly had time even to confer with any of her colleagues.

  Admit it, she said to herself. You’re afraid to ask for advice; you’re afraid someone will close off your options. Satoshi would say you must send it; Gerald and the senators would say you must not. And Stephen Thomas... it shocked her to realize she had no idea what Stephen Thomas would say.

  Victoria took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. Arachne lay calm around her. Starfarer fell toward its transition point. The stellar sail began to furl.

  “Avvaiyar,” she said. “Jenny...”

  “Yes,” Avvaiyar said gravely.

  “I agree,” Jenny said. “I thought you’d come to that decision.”

  o0o

  J.D. felt the quiet power of Nemo’s body. She could see, and sense, how to move it, how to guide it, as easy and as natural as walking. She had no more idea of how it powered itself than a child would have of the intricate energy cycle within her own body. J.D.’s adult mind wondered about gravity waves or mass exchanges of subatomic particles. But Nemo’s method of propulsion remained speculation, a mystery.

  She could reach out through Nemo’s senses and recreate the shape of the universe around her. The surface of the planetoid formed her skin; the egg-sacs pressed against her, laden with potential.

  In the distance, perilously close to the loop of cosmic string, Starfarer plunged toward transition. The last silver flicker of its sail furled and darkened.

  “Goodbye!” J.D. cried.

  Starfarer disappeared.

  J.D. squeezed her eyes shut, reflexively, as the bright transition spectrum flooded through the system. The starship left nothing else behind.

  She opened her eyes, breaking her connection with the world outside Nemo’s chamber. The silken curtains drooped and shredded like old cobwebs. The whisper and crunch of the symbionts’ mouths and mandibles surrounded her.

  “They’re gone, Nemo,” she whispered.

  “Look,” Nemo said, “my offspring are free.”

  Together, J.D. and Nemo watched the surface of the planetoid.

  The bulge of one of the silken craters had grown spherical. It expanded, huge and taut, like a quivering soap bubble. Its diameter was much larger than the crater, but it clung to the crater’s mouth as if it were being blown up like a balloon.

  It detached.

  It sank: the planetoid had too little atmosphere to buoy it. But then, as it bounced once, the small opening left in its bottom fluttered. A spurt of glowing gas propelled it from the surface of the worldlet.

  J.D. laughed with delight.

  The balloon rocketed, silent and free, into space.

  In quick succession, Nemo’s planetoid released a half a dozen of the translucent powered balloons. Malleable surfaces covered obscure, tantalizing shapes. They shrank to blips of light. She — Nemo — had done everything for them that she could. They were on their own. She wished them well, but she would never —

  J.D. brought herself abruptly back to herself. She might see them someday in the future. She was not Nemo. She was not preparing to die.

  J.D. reached out to Nemo to offer her congratulations.

  She encountered emptiness.

  She reached desperately toward the squidmoth’s mind. She found a small dim spark in blackness. It flared, welcoming her, and Nemo’s soft tentacle twitched feebly in her hand.

  Everything grew still around her.

  The spark moved. It expanded, spreading itself over the surface of the shape of Nemo’s knowledge. But as it expanded, it faded, too. The tenuous light vanished so gradually that J.D. could not be certain of the moment of its disappearance.

  “Oh, Nemo... Goodbye.”

  The knowledge surface changed. It grew cold, and solidified. As Nemo’s personality dissolved, the surface lost an uncountable number of its infinite dimensions. J.D. reached out as if to stop it, and then drew back, knowing she could have no effect.

  Nemo was gone.

  J.D. felt more alone than she had ever felt before, in a largely solitary life. She was alone, more alone than any human being ever had been. Nemo’s children, for all their potentia
l, were no more than a few cells each, zygotes clinging to great yolk sacs of knowledge, not even embryos.

  J.D. was the only sentient creature in the star system.

  She shivered.

  All around her, the tattered silk came alive with scavengers. The sound of destruction filled the chamber with a soft, inescapable vibration of rending threads. A new sound added itself to the tapestry: the viscous slide of dissolving support cables. Beneath her, the floor sagged.

  Nemo’s tentacle twitched. J.D. flinched in surprise, in a brief flash of joy as quickly wiped out by shock. She dropped Nemo’s tentacle.

  Two of the symbionts struggled with each other, vying for possession of Nemo’s tentacle by lashing at each other with the clusters of scorpion-tails that projected from their armored shells.

  The leftover egg case, the one that remained unfertilized, writhed against the floor. Unseen creatures moved within it. The silk tore, with a long, ripping scream: claws on prehensile limbs thrust out, snapping.

  The fate of Nemo’s organic body was the same as what would happen to her own body when she died and was buried in the earth or allowed to sink into the sea.

  But she could not watch it.

  J.D. stroked her hand once across Nemo’s long eyelid, pressing the squidmoth’s eyes closed. She rose to her feet. Shaky and stiff, she fled Nemo’s ruined web.

  Chapter 13

  J.D. climbed fast, no longer careful about damage, for the nest was coming apart around her. Panic chased her. She had to get back to the Chi. How stupid to leave her space suit behind, how complacent —!

  The web tunnels shivered as J.D. ascended. More unfamiliar creatures, symbionts and attendants and scavengers, worked and worried at the silk and at each other. Optical fibers hung loose along the walls, some broken and dimmed, some still glowing, their ends bright as white flame.

  No longer would Nemo convert the light of Sirius to useful energy, process rock and extract nutrients, and create the webbing that nurtured the ecosystem. The symbionts would deplete the webbing, the attendants would feed on the symbionts, and the scavengers would feed on the leftovers, till nothing remained of the squidmoth but inorganic matter, dust, a few desiccated bacteria.