The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “What’s cotton candy?” Zev asked.

  “Sugar, spun to a fluff. It’s usually pink. Do you want to try some?”

  “Sure.”

  As they strolled toward the cafeteria, Europa gave Ruth Orazio a brief embrace, then joined J.D. and Zev. She was carrying a cone of cotton candy.

  “Are you enjoying the party?” J.D. asked Europa.

  “It’s very pleasant.” The Minoan nibbled at her cotton candy, and a large batt tore away. She pushed the bright white spun sugar into her mouth, then licked her lips and her fingers. “This is very strange food.”

  “Cotton candy is more entertainment than food,” J.D. said.

  “Sticky,” Europa said. “Awkward. It is amusing.”

  “Can I try some?” Zev asked.

  Europa offered the cone to Zev. He pulled off a shred, and handed half to J.D. She let it dissolve on her tongue. It reminded her of Nemo’s decorative food, without the kick.

  “You could try something more everyday,” J.D. said.

  “Is any of it chocolate?” Europa said.

  “Let’s go look.” They crossed the threshold into the main cafeteria, a large diamond-shaped room with two back walls of grown wood, two front walls of diamond-paned glass doors.

  “There’s Sharphearer,” Zev said.

  The Largerfarthing was pulling a wad of cotton candy apart into small pieces, rolling them into balls, and popping them into her mouth. She fed one to Late, who lay on a table with his front third arched up. His radula moved back and forth, pulling the candy into his mouth. An organ like a set of combs appeared from either side of the radular opening, and pushed the sticky strands off his teeth.

  “I’ll go see what she wants to do about camping,” Zev said. He grinned. “And chess.” He headed across the room toward Sharphearer, while J.D. and Europa continued toward the buffet.

  “I tried the coffee,” Europa said. “But it didn’t taste like the coffee you gave me.” She hesitated. “Perhaps I prepared yours wrong, but I liked it better.”

  “If you made it the way I told you to, mine is better.”

  The bitter scent of burned coffee hung in the air of the cafeteria.

  “It’s hard to make good coffee for a lot of people,” J.D. said. “You have to keep it hot, and that makes it deteriorate.”

  Florrie and her crew of volunteers had put on an impressive party feast. A long table held main dishes, casseroles, salads, spaghetti, baked eggs. Food on board Starfarer tended toward the vegetarian because the starship carried so few large animals.

  “The chocolate would be with the desserts,” J.D. said. “We usually eat dessert at the end of a meal, but some people say ‘Life is uncertain, eat dessert first.’”

  Europa smiled, getting the joke.

  “Or,” J.D. said, “did you mean you wanted to avoid chocolate?”

  “No, I liked it very much. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I don’t believe you mentioned it.”

  “Too many things have happened, I was distracted. But I’ve wanted to taste chocolate for many years.” She added, thoughtfully, “You know, J.D., several members of Civilization have evolved a biochemistry compatible with human food. They might be customers for delicacies. Food expensive enough to be worth importing.”

  “Like chocolate, you mean?”

  “And coffee. We shall have to investigate.”

  J.D. put a spoonful of each of several salads, and some lasagna, and a spinach crepe on her plate, and steered Europa toward the dessert table.

  “You’d better be quick, that chocolate cake isn’t going to last much longer.”

  Europa surreptitiously abandoned her cotton candy. She sliced a substantial wedge of cake and rejoined J.D. They had completely different techniques for approaching a buffet. J.D. liked to sample everything. Europa chose what she wanted most, and concentrated on it.

  She ate a bite of cake, savoring it.

  “Chocolate is mildly psychoactive,” J.D. said.

  “That’s obvious.”

  “It’s full of an alkaloid related to caffeine. Theobromine.”

  “Food of the gods?” Europa said.

  “What? Is that what it means? How did you learn Greek?”

  “Earth’s electronic transmissions don’t contain a great deal of ancient Greek, it’s true,” Europa said. “Most of what I know is medical jargon. Enough to decipher ‘theobromine.’” She took another bite of cake.

  J.D. ate some lasagna. It was rich with ripe tomatoes — someone must be growing them in a greenhouse — and spicy. J.D. wondered if Earth’s future economy, like the economy of Europe during the early days of world exploration, would be based on the transport of chocolate, and coffee, and spices.

  A long way to go, she thought, for no change at all...

  Over in one corner, Avvaiyar Prakesh, the head of the astronomy department, twirled twisted paper in spun sugar and handed it out. She gave some to Zev. Sharphearer accepted seconds.

  “Don’t you want your own cotton candy?” Europa asked.

  “No,” J.D. said, “sugar doesn’t go well with lasagna.”

  Florrie Brown had adapted a large vat, J.D. supposed it must be a bread-kneader or a vegetable-chopper or some food processor with rotating blades or vanes, to make the cotton candy. J.D. had no idea how to go about spinning sugar; she had only a vague recollection of what the cotton candy machine at the carnival had looked like. She was sure the cotton-candy seller had looked nothing like the tall, exotic, elegant Avvaiyar.

  She chuckled.

  “What amuses you?” Europa asked.

  “I have some books,” J.D. said. “Fiction, speculation, stories of the future. In some of them the plot hinges on developing a great scientific breakthrough.”

  “Convenient,” Europa said drily.

  “Yes... maybe it’s different in Civilization, but back on Earth that kind of high tech development always takes longer and costs more than you think it will. You could never resolve a crisis that way. Not in a few hours or a few days.”

  “It’s the same in Civilization,” Europa said. “We make mistakes, too. We take risks, we experiment. If not for the likelihood of failure, it wouldn’t be a risk.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why were you laughing?”

  J.D. gestured toward the makeshift cotton candy machine. “That’s our high-tech development.”

  Europa laughed, a genuine, open laugh.

  o0o

  On the path to the main cafeteria, Stephen Thomas caught up to Mitch, dawdling toward the party.

  “Hi, Mitch.”

  “Hi.” Mitch stopped. “You look amazing — where did you get a tux?”

  “Brought it with me, I’ve had it for a long time.”

  Instead of keeping up, Mitch hung back. Stephen Thomas waited for him.

  “Come on, we’ll be late.”

  “We’re already late.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Mitch said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Did Fox forget your name again?” Stephen Thomas said with sympathy.

  “Who cares?” Mitch said angrily.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Between her and me? Nothing,” Mitch said bitterly. “It’s you she —”

  “Shit, I swear I never —”

  “I know it! Everybody knows you don’t sleep with students. I know you never led her on. She knows it. No matter what Florrie Brown’s telling everybody.”

  “I never even talked to her till Satoshi and I tried to get her to get on the fucking transport and go home.”

  “She thinks none of the rules apply to Ms. Niece of the President.”

  “Led her on, Jesus Christ.”

  “Just because she knows you aren’t interested,” Mitch said miserably, “doesn’t mean she cares that I am.”

  Stephen Thomas wondered if he was going to have to fend her off again. In his life he had met all too many people who got aroused by an unbalan
ced power dynamic. Maybe Fox was one of them.

  “Hey, give her some time,” Stephen Thomas said. “Give yourself a chance.”

  Mitch shrugged.

  “Come on, life always looks better at a party.”

  “Maybe...”

  They crossed campus through the twilight. Stephen Thomas looked upward. The sun tubes glimmered faintly with reflected starlight. On the other side of the cylinder, far-overhead, lights shining from recessed porches produced gold fans of illumination.

  Mitch suddenly chuckled. “Fox sure was mad at Florrie.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t blame her.” I’m not too happy with Florrie myself, Stephen Thomas thought. I thought we were friends... but she took the first excuse she had to light into me.

  Party music drifted around Stephen Thomas. He wished he had not come. He felt reluctant to see Victoria and Satoshi and, at the same time, lonely for them. He had not talked to them since they returned from the Four Worlds ship. In better times, they would have met at home and come to the party together. Maybe they would have had dinner together. Recently, he had not been coming home for dinner, or for anything else. He had not even been keeping up the pretense that he might come home, by telling them he would be absent once again.

  Do they even expect me to tell them anymore? he wondered.

  In better times, Merry would have figured out what was wrong. Merry would have figured out how to make things right.

  Stephen Thomas’s vision suddenly blurred. He stumbled. He caught himself from falling; Mitch grabbed his arm to steady him and nearly knocked him off balance again.

  “You okay?” Mitch asked.

  “Yeah. I was just thinking about...” He seldom talked about Merry to other people, never to his students.

  “What?”

  “My family’s fourth partner.”

  “Oh,” Mitch said. “I heard — I mean, I knew you were a, a widower — is that what it’s called when there’s more than two people?”

  “I don’t know, I guess so.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mitch said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to say something that brought back —”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with you,” Stephen Thomas said. “When you lose somebody... that fast, that unexpectedly... You get flashbacks. You think, If I’d done one thing, maybe it wouldn’t have been a fatal accident. If I’d done something else, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. You want... for it never to have happened at all.”

  “I’m real sorry,” Mitch said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Stephen Thomas wanted to stop and curl up in a protected ball until he stopped shaking. He made himself keep on walking toward the party.

  Stephen Thomas and Mitch rounded the flank of the hill that housed the main cafeteria. The diamond-shaped building nestled half beneath the hill; a glass-roofed extension surrounded by a low porch projected into the flagstone courtyard.

  The last time Stephen Thomas had been here, snow and slush had covered the ground. Now spring had returned.

  Pastel lights hovered like fireflies; conversation provided a background hum to the music. The courtyard was full, dancers in the center, people in conversation around the edges. Holographic images touched the night in bright patches. J.D. and Zev chatted with Iphegenie Dupre, the sailmaster. The Four Worlds people stood with the senators, watching the dance. Crimson Ng drew strata in the air for Androgeos. On the far side of the courtyard, Infinity Mendez waved toward Esther Klein and Kolya Cherenkov, who attended by image. They waved back. Florrie Brown sat nearby in a rattan chair. Her gaze flicked past Stephen Thomas. He swerved and circled the dance floor in the other direction.

  As Infinity Mendez made his way toward Florrie Brown, the elderly woman’s gaze followed Stephen Thomas, then rested on Fox. Neither acknowledged her presence.

  Infinity Mendez approached Florrie Brown. She looked quickly away from Fox and pretended to be watching the other dancers.

  She had layered her eyelids with makeup of iridescent black, stark against the pallor of her feather-soft skin. Her hair, instead of being plaited with shells and beads, was twisted with shiny blue-black ribbons. As always, she wore black. Her tunic was fringed with tassels of leather and slender chain. Chrome studs gathered the cloth of her leggings into star-shaped pleats. On her boots she wore discreet silver spurs.

  Infinity sat on his heels beside her. She took a sip of her beer, and a nibble of her cotton candy — a combination Infinity would not have attempted — then looked at him quizzically.

  “Are you speaking to me?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  “I thought... Oh. You weren’t at the potluck, maybe you didn’t hear about — it doesn’t matter.”

  Infinity had heard, all right. Everybody on campus had heard what happened. The party had ended with Fox spilling beer on Florrie and Stephen Thomas. Or throwing it, depending on who was telling the story.

  It was too bad. Florrie had been getting to be friends with both the others. She was new here; it was important to make friends in a new place.

  Infinity liked Florrie, and he liked Stephen Thomas. He did not know Fox. But he did know better than to get in the middle of fights.

  Goes double, seems like, he thought, when one of the folks fighting is related to the president of the United States.

  “Something you should know about the way people treat each other here,” he said carefully.

  She narrowed her bright gaze, suspicious, waiting.

  “People get in arguments,” Infinity said. “There’s no way around it. But everybody does their best not to pick sides afterwards. Nobody says, ‘It’s them or me.’ If we did, pretty soon nobody would be able to talk to anybody. This is a small town.”

  Florrie twined the pink lock of her hair around one forefinger. Though her knuckles were gnarled with age, her fingernails were carefully shaped, and painted with a shiny dark liquid crystal polish.

  “Hm,” she said, noncommittal, reacting neither to his advice nor to his gentle implied criticism. Then, as she often did, she changed the subject abruptly. “I never learned to dance like this.”

  “It’s not hard.” Infinity had learned how to waltz from Esther, at a welcoming party a few months ago. He would have liked to dance a waltz with her tonight. To be in Kolya’s place, dancing light-footed in the faint gravity of Nautilus. Esther and Kolya were projecting their image from J.D.’s starship. Out in the garden, their figures flowed and spun.

  The dance ended. Couples parted, applauded each other politely, and laughed. The old-fashioned dance, with its old-fashioned manners, was a minor fad on campus.

  “I could show you,” Infinity said, expecting another slow tune. But a fast, hard beat began, a discordant electronic throb. He shrugged apologetically at Florrie. “Maybe some other time?”

  “You’re all so staid!” she exclaimed. She jammed her cotton-candy cone into her empty beer glass, pushed herself to her feet, grabbed his hand, and dragged him into the courtyard. “This is more like it.”

  All the stiffness of her body, all her hesitancy, vanished when she moved into the music. She flung herself back and forth, swinging her head, swaying her arms, bumping Infinity deliberately as she passed. The pink and the green and the natural white braid, with their long black ribbons, slapped against her shoulders and her neck. When she spun, the ribbons fluttered past Infinity’s face. Florrie’s energy cleared the floor around her.

  Infinity danced with her, trying to copy what she did without flinging himself against her. He was amazed by the change in her, but not incredulous. He had seen similar transformations in other elderly people. Florrie combined the freedom of her dance with the compulsive carelessness of a much younger person.

  The discordant music crescendoed, then faded. Florrie danced past the music’s end, stopped abruptly, and sank in upon herself. Her presence and her size diminished. She clutched at Infinity’s arm, leaning on him heavily. He led her to her seat. She was breathing hard...
but so was he. She sat down, stiffly, and caught her breath.

  A slower piece of music began. The dance floor filled quickly.

  “Oh,” Florrie said in a quivery sigh, “I haven’t done that for so long. I used to dance all the time, I used to hit that floor —” She smiled, her eyes half closed, remembering. Infinity got the feeling that she meant the description literally. Florrie glanced at him through her coquettish dark-painted eyelids. “But I haven’t pounded for fifty years. I gave it up for my — never mind which birthday.”

  “The hot tub helps, when you’ve gotten a pounding.” Infinity thought of the elderly martial artists he had known, training hard and smoothly, hobbling off the mat. The older students were not the only ones who headed straight for shower and deep bath.

  “That would be pleasant,” she said. “Will you come too?”

  “Sure,” Infinity said. “Sure. I’d like that.”

  “Maybe when we’re done,” she said, “all those professors will be done monopolizing the guests. Maybe ordinary people can talk to them, then.” She gestured sharply toward the cafeteria, where the Largerfarthings stood in a colorful cluster, surrounded by faculty and administrators.

  Infinity offered his arm; Florrie took it, and they strolled into the darkness.

  Off in the shadows beyond the party, Griffith watched Infinity Mendez and Florrie Brown dance with abandon and leave together.

  “I made the cotton candy,” Florrie said to Infinity as they vanished into the darkness. “I wanted to tint it blue, but the dye wouldn’t be good for them.”

  Florrie and Infinity left while the aliens were still at the party, without even talking to them.

  That’s about what I’d expect, Griffith thought contemptuously.

  He felt suddenly jealous of their friendship, jealous of the fun they were having. He considered them the least important members of the expedition — Mendez was staff, Brown, a recruit to Grandparents in Space. Neither held much status, yet between them they had caused him more trouble than all the rest of the deep space expedition combined.

  Mendez was a chronic thorn in Griffith’s side. He might humiliate Griffith at any moment by telling everyone about rescuing him from the emergency pouch. And Brown — Griffith had been effectively invisible till she started ranting that he was a narc. Griffith had not even known what a narc was. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the attention.