The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Nemo’s body was dying.

  The tunnel to the Chi billowed down against J.D.’s face. The weight of the heavy sides counteracted the air pressure, collapsing the tube.

  The air escaped, osmosing silently through failing walls. Panting for breath, J.D. fought her way past the folds of the silken shroud, making slow progress toward the explorer. If the tube’s mouth fell away from the airlock...

  Remember those stories where somebody had to cross ten or twenty meters of hard vacuum without a suit...? she thought. Maybe you’ll find out if it’s possible...

  Not an experiment she wanted to try.

  Blinded by the collapsing tunnel, she ran into the side of the Chi and bumped her knee and her nose. She yelped in pain and flung the silk upward, trying to get beneath it to reach the tunnel’s opening.

  Several of Nemo’s creatures hugged the seam between the tunnel and the Chi. They extruded a gluey, fibrous substance that stuck the organic fabric to the inorganic hull. But the creatures had exhausted themselves. Escaping air hissed around a broken seal.

  J.D. held her breath and plunged into the airlock.

  “Seal!” She spoke through her link, conserving her air.

  The Chi obeyed. The hatch slid, but caught on a swath of silk that tangled around J.D.’s foot. She grabbed the fabric, ripped it, freed the opening. The webbing parted in her hands like old cobwebs.

  The hatch closed in silence, its motion barely vibrating the deck. The air was too thin to carry sound. As the hatch sealed, J.D. thought she saw a patch of black space and bright stars, unshielded by silk or air or glass.

  A heavy warm draft from the Chi poured in around her. Tired in every way a person could be tired, J.D. lay on the floor. She breathed long and slow and deep. Once more she thanked good fortune and habit that she had not allowed her metabolic enhancer to atrophy.

  The inner hatch slid open. J.D. stayed where she was, resting, gathering her energy.

  She had no vital tasks. Nemo’s shell was headed for Europa’s transition point. J.D. could control the shell, but she feared interfering with Nemo’s navigation till she had caught up to Starfarer. She wondered how long that would take.

  Claws scuttled on metal.

  J.D. bolted upright.

  Several of Nemo’s symbionts scuttled across the floor, scrabbling at the hatch with clawed, feathery legs.

  J.D. gazed at them fondly.

  Rising to her knees, she gathered up the creatures in the scrap of soft frail webbing.

  Flecks of iridescence covered J.D.’s hands. The tiny scales from Nemo’s wings gilded her, and when she rose, a scatter of the glitter shimmered to the floor.

  o0o

  Transition surrounded Starfarer.

  Arachne continued, strong and steady, indifferent to the border Starfarer had crossed, leaving normal space behind. Victoria let out her breath and unclenched her teeth.

  “The web’s intact,” she said.

  Jenny stared out into transition. Tears pooled in her eyes, collected at her upper and lower eyelids, and drifted into the air in droplets when she blinked.

  “It’s over,” she said softly. “It’s finally done. We’re safe.”

  “I hope so,” Victoria said.

  And then they smiled at each other, and Jenny laughed, her laughter warring with her tears. She sniffled and coughed and pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and waved it over the floating teardrops to catch them, and blew her nose.

  “Safe!” Jenny said. “Halfway through transition and going where we’ve been told not to. For all we know they’ll blast us out of the sky when we get there.”

  “That’s not allowed,” Victoria said. “Their only weapon is coercion.”

  “Unless they get desperate enough to break the rules to stop us. I think civilization works by peer pressure.”

  “You don’t mean that as a compliment, do you?”

  “I do not. There’s nothing more brutal. People will do anything to get other people to do what they think is allowed. Or right. Or holy. Especially holy. The end always justifies the means.”

  Victoria said nothing. She did not want to think about ends justifying the means; the charge hit too close to her own doubts and fears.

  This was the third time Starfarer had crossed into transition, the first time Arachne had been able to record, and the first time Victoria had been able to watch. On the journey from Earth to Tau Ceti, she had been helping Satoshi drag Stephen Thomas out of the genetics building. On the journey from Tau Ceti to Sirius, she had been trying, and failing, to save Feral’s life.

  The recordings did not do transition justice. They showed nothing but a formless gray fog. Transition was much more than that.

  Victoria wondered if she would be able to describe it afterward. She wondered if Arachne would be able to reproduce a view of it.

  The sailhouse hung suspended and isolated in a silver flurry of sparks. Now and then a streak of color or a shape coalesced from the storm, then disappeared. Victoria could not tell whether she was seeing something real, or if her mind was creating pictures from random intersections of the matrix around her.

  “It’s like the maze,” she said. “We kept thinking we saw a pattern in it, but there wasn’t any. Just a maze.”

  She felt isolated, alone out here with Jenny. They could not even see Starfarer’s main cylinder through the silver storm.

  The isolation J.D. must be feeling struck Victoria hard.

  “Goodbye,” J.D. had said, and nothing else, in that last second before Starfarer disappeared.

  It sounded so final.

  o0o

  In the Chi’s small bio lab, J.D. placed the creatures in sample cases, one to an aquarium so they would not eat each other. She divided the shred of webbing among them.

  They probably would not survive. They had not evolved to survive Nemo’s death for long; they were part of the body that was dying. Maybe Stephen Thomas or Professor Thanthavong could figure out how to keep them alive. If she could save the symbionts until she caught up to Starfarer.

  I wonder how long that will be? J.D. wondered. How long will I be here alone?

  Nemo must have been able to calculate transition duration — or would the time even matter to someone who lived for millennia, who lived a life almost entirely of the mind?

  J.D. reached for the knowledge surface of Nemo’s shell. She found it — and again her expanded link took over all her senses, disorienting her, leaving her suspended in nothingness — and cast around for the answer she needed.

  It overwhelmed her. She skittered along the surface, unable to penetrate its depths, distracted on every side by hints and shadows of Nemo’s experience.

  She came back to herself, still with no idea how long it would take her to reach the 61 Cygni system. Worse, she had no idea how to find the information in the maze of the knowledge surface.

  Maybe Nemo didn’t care how long it took, she thought. Besides... is it an answer I want to know?

  The Chi was well-stocked, but its stores were finite. If transition duration lasted weeks, or months, she could find herself in a lot of trouble. The Chi possessed a few organic systems, but it had never been designed to support a human being during a long separation from Starfarer.

  She chuckled ruefully. If she had let Victoria give Androgeos the new transition algorithm, no doubt Nemo would have snagged the information, too.

  “Outsmarted yourself this time, didn’t you?” she said softly, trying not to feel how scared she was.

  She wished she had sent a better, more comforting farewell to her friends. “Goodbye”? That told them nothing; it might even frighten them. They had no idea how long it would take her to traverse the space between Sirius and 61 Cygni, either. Only that it would take her longer than it took Starfarer.

  Leaving Nemo’s symbionts to explore the hard edges of their new homes, J.D. headed for the observers’ circle.

  She caught her breath in surprise and apprehension.

  The
sinuous, beautiful shape of Victoria’s algorithm twisted itself into being in the center of the circle.

  J.D. took her place in the circle. The transition algorithm hovered at the focus, Victoria’s final message, her final gift.

  Nemo’s shell plunged toward transition point. J.D. had only a few minutes to decide what to do.

  With apprehension, she closed her eyes and opened her link completely, sliding onto the knowledge surface, stretching to connect it with the Chi’s onboard computer. The real world vanished as J.D. approached the chasm in the knowledge surface and compared it to the algorithm.

  They do match, she thought. Not a perfect fit...

  She asked herself a question: What happens if the fit isn’t good enough? Do I end up on the other side of the galaxy?

  Gently she moved the algorithm, rotated it, and translated it into the chasm.

  The algorithm joined the knowledge surface, rough, raw beauty touching elegance refined and polished by time. The algorithm was a crystalline chunk of ice on the cracked surface of an ancient, flowing glacier. The crystal’s edges melted; it sank in; the points of attachment melded. The surface and the algorithm remained distinct.

  If Nemo were still alive, the fit would have been precise. So much detail was lost when Nemo’s personality slipped away. J.D. withdrew from the surface. Now all she could do was wait.

  When her senses returned to her, she gazed through the wall of the observers’ circle, toward Nemo’s crater. The flattened access tunnel lay between the Chi and the nest, like a shed and discarded snakeskin.

  The wings and sails of Nemo’s nest shuddered.

  Nemo’s convoluted tapestry collapsed, like ice cliffs avalanching. One side tore free of the rock. Limp and silent, it flopped inward. It dragged the access tunnel from the Chi’s hatch, to the crater, and over the edge.

  The nest vanished into the crater’s depths.

  o0o

  Nemo’s shell slipped from space into transition. J.D. perceived the change, a change in angle down the knowledge surface, from an oblique traverse to a headlong plunge.

  She had to choose now: To travel with the ancient glacier along the smooth, long ice slope, or to plunge into the choppy, dangerous terrain of the new algorithm.

  She guided Nemo’s shell into new territory.

  J.D. felt like a chambered nautilus, shelled and tentacled, extending herself far beyond her own body, exquisitely sensitive. The shell found the pathway she sought and fitted itself to the jagged curve.

  J.D. felt exhilarated, yet frightened. She believed she was following Starfarer’s path... but she could not be absolutely certain.

  As she thought of the starship, she thought she saw it — or heard it, or felt it, with a sense Nemo had possessed but humans lacked. An anomaly appeared in the part of the knowledge surface that represented transition. The anomaly vanished, then appeared again, like a train chugging down the track into a valley and out of it again.

  The anomaly distracted her. She wanted to catch up to it, to be sure it was Starfarer and to be sure she kept following it. She knew she could make Nemo’s shell catch up to the anomaly. That surprised her. Starfarer had never tried to change its vectors from the time it achieved transition energy to the time it re-entered normal space.

  J.D. restrained herself. One experiment was enough for any trip.

  She drew her attention back toward herself, back within Nemo’s shell. She was trembling with excitement. She breathed deeply of air tinged with the hydrocarbon-drenched odor of Nemo’s ship. She sneezed.

  I’ll have to do something about the atmosphere, she thought. Nemo isn’t creating it anymore. Will I be able to terraform the shell, like Europa’s ship? Again she wondered how Europa had acquired her starship, and how she had configured it to her liking. Surely starships were a booming business within Civilization.

  Sally’s Used Starships, J.D. said to herself. Gort’s Starship Redecoration.

  J.D. laughed. She laughed, and then she cried for a while.

  She extended her attention to the edge of Nemo’s shell, and stretched beyond —

  She discovered that Nemo’s last two egg cases had detached and vanished, leaping off into transition while her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Frantically J.D. cast her new senses around her, but caught no glimpse of the egg cases, no hint of them anywhere in transition’s many dimensions. The anomaly of Starfarer glimmered in the distance, but nothing else marred the knowledge surface.

  “Nemo, I’m so sorry...”

  She had failed. She should somehow have held onto the two cases until she reached the new star system and normal space.

  But now they were gone.

  o0o

  Despite being able to look straight into transition, Victoria felt blind. The environment flung Starfarer’s radar back only a few meters from the surface of the cylinder. They might as well have been traveling through murky water without sonar. Starfarer had no sonar capabilities, of course, though Victoria would have tried it if it were available.

  I can just imagine what Senator Derjaguin would have said if we’d outfitted a spaceship with sonar, she said to herself.

  Starfarer was taking samples of the transitional medium, but Victoria did not think the samples would reveal a material medium, an ether, that would respond to sonar.

  The source of the light storm was another mystery entirely.

  Jenny hovered nearby. She had returned to the sailhouse a few minutes ago, looking refreshed, looking better than she had since Starfarer left the solar system. A few other people had come out to the sailhouse to watch what was happening. Victoria wished Satoshi and Stephen Thomas were with her. But Satoshi was in the observatory waiting for a first glimpse of the new system, and Stephen Thomas... Victoria had no idea where Stephen Thomas was. That was true more often than not these days.

  As abruptly as a blink, Starfarer fell out of transition.

  Victoria whooped with triumph and relief. She dove into Arachne’s perceptions. Starfarer remained in danger: Europa’s ship might be anywhere. Last time through transition, it had come out immediately on Starfarer’s tail. The sail gave the starship some mobility, but no description of Starfarer would call it agile. It was Europa’s ship that had dodged, turning aside from Starfarer just as the two spacecraft were about to collide.

  Arachne pinpointed a nearby anomaly: a sphere, blue and green and hazed with atmosphere, far too massive for its size, an asteroid biologically and geologically sculpted to house humans comfortably.

  Arachne expanded the anomaly: Europa’s starship, only a short distance ahead.

  We made up a lot of time, Victoria thought. A lot.

  Starfarer’s sail deployed. The metallic film untwisted, then unfolded, then opened into a great sheet of silver.

  Jenny was nowhere near the hard link. Her eyelids fluttered open and she glanced at Victoria, and grinned, and shrugged self-deprecatingly, as if to say, “I couldn’t resist Arachne anymore,” and withdrew again into a communications fugue.

  Satoshi’s image appeared.

  “Can you look at the astronomy report?” His voice radiated excitement.

  “Sure.” She let Arachne send her the first information from 61 Cygni A and its planets.

  The system crackled with electronic communication. When Victoria glanced at the planetary information, she gasped.

  61 Cygni A possessed no fewer than four planets within the limits for carbon-based life: two sets of twin worlds, one set at the sunward side of the region, the other just within the farthest, coldest limits.

  All four worlds possessed the unmistakable signs of living systems. More than that, all four worlds cradled civilizations.

  Victoria’s elation and her apprehension fought each other to a draw.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Don’t get carried away with excitement,” Avvaiyar said dryly.

  Satoshi laughed. “That’s pretty excited, for a Canadian.”

  They grinned at each
other. Then Satoshi sobered.

  “We can’t stay here, you know.”

  Victoria stared at the system map, wishing she could argue with him, but knowing he was right. If they stayed, the cosmic string would withdraw. Starfarer would cause 61 Cygni — and all its inhabitants — to be cut off from the interstellar community. How could they sentence other civilizations to the punishment they were trying to avoid?

  “But Starfarer’s ecosystem...” She stopped. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

  She reluctantly set Arachne to work on a new solution to her transition algorithm.

  “We’re going to have to change the name of the ship,” Satoshi said.

  “To Murphy’s Law,” Victoria said, repeating a wisecrack Stephen Thomas had made.

  “I was thinking, Flying Dutchman.”

  “Oh, god. Goddamn! Europa must have known the risk! Why did she lead us here?”

  “To take advantage of our good natures, so we’d give up and leave?”

  “That makes... a certain amount of perverted sense.” She laughed bitterly. “Does Europa believe we have good natures?”

  “Maybe she wanted some help driving us away,” Jenny said, floating beside her.

  That, too, was a possibility, one that sounded rather more like the alien humans’ style.

  o0o

  Infinity stood on the inspection net below a fissure in the rocky outer surface of Starfarer’s wild side. Nearby, clinging to the cylinder — hanging upside down, from Infinity’s point of view — a silver slug probed the fissure, touched the strange iridescent mass, and withdrew again. The slug moved back and forth, confused, uncertain.

  The stars spun past behind and below Infinity; the surface of the cylinder loomed overhead, marred by the weird growth.

  “What do you think?” he asked Esther.

  Still bewildered and awestruck by the voyage through transition, Esther stared up at it in silence.

  Infinity sent his image, and an image of the growth, to Victoria in the sailhouse.

  “We picked up something kind of strange, in transition,” he said.

  There was a long silence.