The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  If the baby squidmoth acquired the algorithm, Starfarer would lose Earth’s one advantage over Civilization.

  J.D. withdrew her link to Nautilus. The knowledge surface collapsed.

  Nemo’s offspring convulsed in protest and confusion. J.D. sent soothing words, words of apology —

  “No! No! No!” the squidmoth baby shrieked.

  The cry reverberated in J.D.’s brain. Her link dissolved. Her vision returned. Above her, the squidmoth egg case shuddered. Rainbow patterns pinwheeled beneath its skin.

  J.D. staggered mentally, jumped to her feet, and stumbled physically. Her legs had fallen asleep.

  She slipped. She tumbled off the inspection web, flailing wildly. She missed catching the wire. Her body plunged into space. The stars streaked past her. They whirled. Her safety line caught her with a sharp snap and jerked her to a stop. It pulled her head and body up, and tore the stars out of her sight. Starfarer spun, dragging J.D. along with it.

  “It’s okay,” Infinity said. “Just relax, it’s okay, you’re safe.”

  J.D. felt like she had been thrown off a moving mountain. She hung beneath the inspection web, her taut lifeline crooked against one of the longitudinal strands. The spin of the cylinder pulled her along. Blood rushed into her feet. Her legs prickled painfully.

  At least I’m not head down, J.D. thought.

  The line’s attachment oriented her so she could climb back to the web. Infinity knelt above her and gave her a hand.

  She grabbed his wrist. With his help, she swung one leg over the web and clambered to safety. Her suit pulled her sweat away and cleared her faceplate. Her metabolic enhancer pounded; her body emitted the scent of effort and alarm.

  “You’re okay?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “Everybody falls off at least once, their first few times out.” She could hear the humor behind the gold shadow of his faceplate. “Your very first time — you did better than most.”

  She smiled back at him. “Thanks.” Her first time out, she and Kolya had freed the nuclear missile from its crater in the side of Starfarer.

  “What happened?”

  “It was heading toward Victoria’s algorithm.” J.D. sighed sadly. “I was afraid to let it have the work. I scared it, I think.”

  She cautiously opened her link and offered the squidmoth a thought of comfort.

  “No! No! No!” the squidmoth baby cried. “Give me, give me, give me!”

  J.D. pulled back, her mind echoing.

  “Want! Want! Want!”

  “The terrible twos,” Infinity said wryly.

  “Huh?”

  “Kids. You know.”

  “I’ve never spent much time around kids,” J.D. said.

  “They go through a ‘no’ phase. If you think this is bad, wait till it hits adolescence.”

  The egg case writhed, flexing and twisting, bulging downward.

  “Let’s get out from under it,” Infinity said.

  They backed off apprehensively.

  “Nemo was so gentle,” J.D. said.

  “Yeah...” Infinity said. “Except the time the LTMs bothered the attendants...”

  “That’s true,” J.D. admitted.

  “And the pool Stephen Thomas saw, with the critters fighting in it. And everything that happened after Nemo died.”

  “Okay,” J.D. said. “I mean, you’re right. But, to me... I just wish I hadn’t scared its offspring.” She gestured upward. “I wish squidmoths had names. It’s hard to think of it as ‘it.’”

  Nemo had taken a name, suggested by Zev, for J.D.’s convenience or for its own amusement.

  “Too bad Captain Nemo didn’t have any kids,” Infinity said.

  J.D. grinned. “That would be a natural, wouldn’t it?”

  The pulsing of the egg case continued. It set up a rhythmic wave from one edge to the other. A moment later, a second pulse began, at right angles to the first. The surface of the egg case resonated violently like a wind-whipped sail.

  In the back of her mind, J.D. still heard the squidmoth baby’s desperate demands.

  “We’d better go,” J.D. said. “It would be alone under normal circumstances. Out in the wild. Maybe I gave it too much stimulation.”

  “It’s growing again,” Infinity said.

  J.D.’s helmet showed her what Infinity had found. Beneath Starfarer’s skin, the egg-case tendrils probed deeper, dissolving moon rock and rock foam, enlarging into the water conduit. Water drained into it, pushed by the spin to the squidmoth baby. Above J.D. on the surface of the wild cylinder, the edges of the egg case spread.

  Silver slugs retreated nervously from the perimeter, obeying their orders not to touch the egg case, fighting the instinct that drove them to repair faults in the cylinder’s surface.

  “I don’t know if they’ll hold off indefinitely,” Infinity said. “They —”

  “They’ve got to!” J.D. said.

  “But if the squidmoth breaches the cylinder —”

  “It won’t!” she said.

  Infinity hesitated.

  He won’t question me anymore, J.D. thought desperately. He doesn’t like arguing, he doesn’t like conflict...

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “No,” J.D. whispered.

  Chapter 5

  The newest results of Victoria’s transition algorithm created themselves. Victoria spun the glimmering representation.

  Victoria was upset at Stephen Thomas for disappearing without a word. She had hoped work would take the edge off her anger. But her thoughts kept returning to her youngest partner.

  He always says what he thinks, she told herself. Why can’t he tell me, straight out, that he wants to leave us? Then maybe we’d have a chance. Maybe it isn’t too late.

  She sighed.

  The algorithm evolved and solidified. It mapped a path through transition from 61 Cygni back to Earth. And it confirmed what she had hoped not to see. The solar system, Earth’s system, remained “empty”: empty of the cosmic string that had visited it and given human beings such a brief access to Civilization.

  Starfarer could return home. It could use the cosmic string accessible from 61 Cygni to enter transition; from transition it could travel to an empty system.

  What Starfarer could never do was leave an empty system. It could not enter transition without access to the cosmic string.

  Once back home, the starship would be stranded until — unless — the cosmic string returned.

  “May I come in?”

  Europa stood at the threshold of Victoria’s office. Victoria collapsed the algorithm to a point of light.

  “What was that?” Europa said. “It was beautiful.”

  Victoria gave her a quizzical glance.

  “It’s the algorithm.”

  “Ah,” Europa said. “You needn’t hide it from me. I couldn’t steal it, not just by looking at it.”

  “I can’t be sure of that,” Victoria said in a friendly tone.

  “No... I regret you don’t trust me.”

  Victoria gestured, inviting Europa in. The alien human entered and sank down on a rattan chair.

  “I’m not a student of the physical sciences,” Europa said.

  Victoria imagined having a life span of four thousand years. With that much time to study and learn, she would no longer have to be such a specialist. She tried to imagine living four millennia and not studying physics, and more math, and —

  The idea made an extended life look, to her, like a desert.

  “What do you study? What do you and Androgeos do, out here all alone? Or are there other humans in Civilization?”

  “I’m a student of our sponsors,” Europa said, her voice edgily defensive. “Ah, Victoria, we started out so badly. Is there any way for us to begin again?”

  “I wish we could,” Victoria said. “But...”

  “Somehow I must persuade you to trust me,” Europa said. “How am I to do
that?”

  “Tell me the truth!” Victoria said. “Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts us. Even if it hurts you.”

  Europa shifted in the chair. She glanced away from Victoria, her pure black gaze sliding toward the window, her long eyes seductive beneath dark lashes, kohl-lined eyelids. Like Androgeos, she was remarkably beautiful. The silver strands in her hair gleamed. Now that Victoria knew they were alive, their motion no longer looked liquid, molten, to her. It looked squirmy.

  “You look like the goddess,” Victoria said softly. “The Minoan goddess, the one with the snakes.”

  Europa smiled. “We all cultivated that resemblance.”

  “All Minoan women?”

  “All the Lady’s interpreters.”

  In her mind’s eye, Victoria could see Europa standing in a temple on a hill above the sea, her breasts bare, a serpent in each hand. She spoke a blessing to the people gathered around her.

  “Were you a priestess?”

  “That’s the nearest idea you have to who I was to the Lady. I spoke for her, I befriended her.”

  “Was Androgeos a priest?”

  “A priest?” Europa said. “You’d look long and far for a priest in Knossos.”

  “What about the minotaur?”

  “The minotaur wasn’t a priest,” Europa said offhand. “Andro was just...”

  Europa fell silent for so long that Victoria expected some terrible secret. Or another lie.

  “‘Just’?” Victoria asked.

  “I’ve promised to tell the truth,” Europa said, “so I will tell you the truth. Andro was... a boy. A common boy. He was a servant in my household. He wouldn’t like you to know this. He’s become very sophisticated and ambitious over the years.”

  “Not descended from the Pharaohs, after all, eh?” Victoria said gently.

  “Oh, yes,” Europa said. “We all were. But everyone can’t rule. His family had fallen to a lower class. Sometimes, now, his ambition overcomes his sophistication. So does mine, I fear, and I have much less excuse. Then we behave... as we did over your algorithm. Over J.D.’s starship. Will you forgive me?”

  “I’d like to.”

  Victoria appreciated Europa’s accepting some of the responsibility. She had never quite persuaded herself that Andro, for all his arrogance, decided by himself to try to get the algorithm. Europa must be thirty years older than Androgeos. Thirty years out of nearly four thousand. Yet she was still the eldest, with the responsibilities of the eldest.

  “But it’s hard,” Victoria said. “Earth is your home — how could you try to take something that’s so valuable to us?”

  “We thought we had no time to explain. We thought Starfarer — Earth — would be banished. We panicked.”

  “You were greedy,” Victoria said sadly.

  “No!” Europa said. Then, more calmly, “Not for ourselves. The algorithm has enormous potential for Civilization. Faster travel. More systems in reach. Better communication and trade.”

  The quartet said Civilization had no empire. Victoria wondered if her algorithm would be of benefit, or if it would bring an era of conquest and imperialism.

  Maybe the rules of the cosmic string would protect the peace. She hoped so.

  “We wanted to take the algorithm for Earth, not from it,” Europa said. “You would have gotten credit for it, Earth would have gotten credit. Credit you could have used —”

  “‘You’ in the general sense,” Victoria said. “I wouldn’t have lived long enough to see the banishment lifted.”

  “Perhaps not. But our home world, yours and mine, would have returned from exile with admiration and sympathy. And wealth.”

  “Wealth. Financial wealth?”

  “Yes. Of course.” Europa smiled.

  “I suppose everyone must pay their way,” Victoria said. “Have we run up debts already?” She imagined entry taxes, toll charges, fees for services she had not conceived.

  “Certainly not,” Europa said, offended. “On the contrary. Our world’s balance —” She smiled. “Stands on all four legs, as the Largerfarthings would say.”

  “How?”

  “Because Andro and I work toward that end! All the time we observed Earth, we collected its art.”

  “Its art?” The comment put Victoria off balance.

  “Earth’s songs and stories. Some two-dimensional pictures.” She shrugged. “The quality there was less than one could wish. We gathered what you transmitted. What we could receive from space. We translated it.” She chuckled. “You do transmit an appalling amount of junk.”

  “Maybe,” Victoria said, her own defenses rising. “But who’s to say what’s junk?”

  “An excellent point. We made available the work that caught the fancy of Civilization. In some places, Earth’s artworks are highly regarded.”

  “Primitives, eh?” Victoria said,

  Europa frowned. “How is the artwork of Minoan culture regarded, in your modern world?”

  “I’m not an expert —”

  “Few of us are,” Europa said dryly.

  “— but I think it’s admired. I looked it up, after we met you, and I admire it.”

  “Civilization is no less perceptive,” Europa said, her tone severe.

  “Are you saying art is the currency of Civilization?”

  “What else is worth transporting over interstellar distances?” Europa said, completely serious. “Cleaning robots? Furniture? No. People. Information. Unique organic patterns. And the gifts of creativity.”

  “People?”

  “People who wish to see other worlds. Like you. Like me.”

  “Tourists,” Victoria said. “And great art. I’m afraid there’d be some objection to exporting the Mona Lisa — or the Taj Mahal — to 61 Cygni, eh?”

  “That’s up to you. To the people of Earth. No one will prevent human beings from dispersing our cultural heritage. But you have some protection from outright thievery or counterfeiting, and many other possibilities exist. I increased the worth of what I gathered for Civilization. I never diminished its value back on Earth.”

  Victoria mulled over what Europa had told her.

  “Civilization chose well, when it chose Minoans to represent human beings,” Europa said. “We fit in. We ruled the sea and the islands with trade, not with weapons. Our cities needed no fortifications.”

  She stared at the empty spot where Victoria’s algorithm had pirouetted.

  “Do you miss Crete?” Victoria asked. “After all this time? Are you lonely? Are you and Androgeos the only humans in Civilization?”

  Europa raised her head, ignored Victoria’s question, and returned the subject to interstellar trade.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” she said. “Earth can bankrupt itself. Our world could turn itself into a mockery. This has happened. Civilization will change Earth. We must choose the changes — or they’ll overwhelm us.”

  “The algorithm can... help Earth’s position within Civilization,” Victoria said.

  “Yes. Between your algorithm and J.D.’s starship, human people can join Civilization in a favorable position.”

  “J.D. will never give up her starship.”

  “Under no circumstances should she!”

  “But Andro tried to claim it —”

  “He thought the ship was abandoned. He had no way of knowing J.D. controlled it. Owned it.” She sighed. “J.D. is an extraordinary person.”

  “I agree with you — J.D. is extraordinary. But she’d probably say all she did was offer Nemo courtesy and friendship.”

  Europa interpreted Victoria’s comment, rightly, as criticism of herself and of Civilization.

  “The squidmoths have been reclusive as long as anyone can remember,” she said. “They never showed any interest in joining Civilization. J.D.’s the first person to succeed in making friends with one.” She raised one hand to forestall Victoria’s objection. “The first in a long time to try, I admit it.” She chuckled. “Perhaps she might be persuaded to do it agai
n.”

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, Europa!”

  “Cruel! Why?”

  “To get another ship, she’d have to pick another squidmoth who was near metamorphosis.”

  Europa looked away. Color glowed hot in her dark face.

  “You are right, I —”

  “Then she’d have to make friends with it... and then she’d have to watch it die.”

  “I am sorry, Victoria, I was thoughtless, I overlooked — I apologize.”

  “It’s bad enough that we’ve all lost one friend recently. J.D. has lost two.”

  “Please forgive me. It’s only that the starships are so very valuable. They obscure one’s critical facilities.”

  “But you already have one. All your own, only two people —”

  “And several thousand other Earth species, some of them extinct.”

  “All the more reason not to covet Nautilus. It doesn’t even have air anymore.”

  Europa shrugged off the barrenness of Nautilus. “A triviality. Each member of Civilization takes on the obligation of supplying a starship — temporarily — to its clients. In order to invite other people into the community.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “My ship, my small world, is on loan from the Four Worlds.”

  Victoria wished she still was not following Europa.

  “On loan. You have to give it back. When? Why didn’t you say so before?”

  Europa hesitated so long that Victoria feared she was about to go back to equivocating.

  “Europa?”

  “So many answers, to such a simple question. I didn’t tell you because it shouldn’t have made a difference. If you were banished, the Four Worlds would allow me to keep the ship.” She smiled faintly. “With, perhaps, some grumbling. We have been waiting for you for a long time.”

  “And if we’d been accepted?”

  “I would have given my ship back to my benefactors. Returned to Earth to act as liaison. Eventually I suppose I would have retired, to Earth or to Tau Ceti II. I had not anticipated... how difficult I would find returning the starship to the Four Worlds. It’s been my home for a long time.”

  “But they can’t do anything with it — the Farther worlds both have different atmospheres and the Nearer worlds wouldn’t have any use for it!”