The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

“Gerald? Dangerous?” She laughed. “He’s a pussycat.”

  “But there’s a big power differential —”

  “You sound like the illustrious Dr. Gregory,” Fox said, disgusted.

  “But he’s right. It’s awkward. When one person has a lot of power and the other doesn’t.”

  “So who am I supposed to be friends with?” she snapped. “Who am I supposed to talk to? Who am I supposed to sleep with?”

  Mitch tried to say, Me, I want you to sleep with me, I want you to love me the way I love you.

  “God, I can’t believe the bullshit,” Fox said. “There’s not supposed to be a hierarchy, so nobody admits one exists.”

  Confused, Mitch shook his head — a mistake; the interaction of the ship’s rotation with his inner ears dizzied him.

  And Fox was not finished yet.

  “Maybe I get to talk to Professor Thanthavong? Will a Nobel laureate do? Or maybe I can make friends with Androgeos. Is a four-thousand-year-old grandson of the Pharaohs appropriate? Hey, I have it — you think I ought to sneak past the silver slugs and screw the chancellor!”

  “What — ? What are you talking about?” He felt as dizzy and confused as if he had shaken his head again.

  “Mitch.” She glared at him. “Stephen Thomas turned me down because he’s a professor and I’m a student. Big hairy deal. Maybe he’s right — for ordinary students. But my fucking uncle is the fucking president. Everybody pretends it doesn’t count, but it does, and it’ll count for a hell of a lot more when we get home.”

  Mitch spread his hands, speechless.

  She stared at him with incredulous realization.

  “You honest to god didn’t think of that, did you?”

  “No — I mean, I didn’t want you to —”

  “It never occurred to you that I’m the one who could be dangerous.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re unbelievable.” She laughed. Then she was gone, except for a drift of her voice, “Unbelievable!”

  The last time she had disappeared into the darkness, he had followed her; he had comforted her. This time, he slunk away in the other direction.

  J.D. saw Stephen Thomas at the far side of the dance floor, talking to one of his graduate students, talking to Gerald.

  He’ll have to come over here soon, she thought, he’ll have to come give his regards to the Farthings. It would be rude if he didn’t.

  But then Fox walked over to him, and walked away with Gerald, and a moment later Stephen Thomas disappeared into the shadows.

  J.D. sighed. She did not blame him for wanting to avoid Fox, but she had hoped that somehow, in the magic of the evening, he and his partners might find some common ground.

  Nearby, the quartet clustered together at the edge of the dance floor, chatting with Professor Thanthavong and Lehua Aki. Longestlooker, at the center of the conversation, absently arranged beads in the crack between two flagstones.

  Late rested flat on a rock-foam table. For most of the evening he had been surrounded by faculty members, talking to him by communications fugue, their eyes half closed. But the ebb and flow of the party had left him briefly alone. J.D. strolled over and opened her link.

  “Are you enjoying the party?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you have parties, in the Four Worlds?”

  “Parties, and feasts, and ceremonies, great ceremonies.”

  “Do you have dances?”

  “The Largerfarthings dance. I do not dance.”

  “You... are very conservative with your energy,” J.D. said to Late.

  “Yes,” Late said. “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my physiology.”

  “Are you sick? Does moving hurt you?

  “Not hurt, exactly... injure.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Moving is injurious.”

  “Just moving?” J.D. was taken aback.

  “Yes.”

  “How long does it take you to heal?” she asked with sympathy.

  “Forever. Never. I don’t heal,” Late said simply. “The damage builds up. When it builds up too much, I’ll die.”

  “That’s terrible!” J.D. exclaimed. “It’s so strange!”

  “How, terrible? How, strange?” Late quivered against the table, rippling from side to side and back and forth. “Oh, no, you made me laugh... Your world must have changed a great deal since Europa and Androgeos left it.”

  “It has changed,” J.D. said, wondering if the subject of the conversation had changed as well. “In what particular way must it have changed?”

  “Many of the creatures we took away — for their starship — have a structure, a life path, similar to that of my people. Changing the structure — it’s very difficult.”

  J.D. touched Arachne with a question; the computer replied with an answer. To J.D.’s surprise, Late was right. An enormous number of creatures from Earth, mostly insects, lived and died in the same way.

  “Things haven’t changed that much.” Now she understood more clearly why Quickercatcher had said Late’s style of living was ubiquitous. “I never knew before now, about your particular kind of metabolism. I... I’m sorry if I teased you.”

  “You didn’t. Not very much. I’m used to it, the quartet is impossible.”

  “But it’s cruel. To joke about life and death.”

  “No, J.D., what better things to joke about?”

  “Can’t you — change your metabolism?”

  “If my people can, that isn’t for someone of my class to know.”

  “I thought there weren’t any secrets in Civilization.”

  “How in this phase,” Late said, in a tone of astonishment and amusement, “did you ever get that idea?”

  “I know you keep secrets from us,” J.D. said in a level tone. “I thought you didn’t keep them from each other.”

  “We all keep all sorts of secrets. Less between the Four Worlds, I suppose, but secrets nonetheless.”

  “How can ordinary medical knowledge be secret?”

  “We have no medical tradition,” Late said.

  “Because you don’t heal,” J.D. said.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you allowed to know anything about your own metabolism?”

  “I know some things, surely, but mine is not necessarily the same as that of my superiors.” Late hesitated. “You disapprove.”

  “I’m... disappointed. That you have to balance so much against the length of your life.”

  “Our society functions well this way. Our elders are great diplomats and scholars and artists of... hmmmm, it’s like painting, like the frescoes Europa likes so much. Except the pigments reflect frequencies in the infra-red.”

  “Heat painting,” J.D. suggested.

  “Close enough. Heat painting. Thinking does not damage us.”

  “That means, I suppose,” J.D. said, “that the Representative is either a scholar or an artist.”

  Late hesitated.

  “Not a good joke?” J.D. asked.

  “He is a great diplomat,” Late said. “I am not transmitting, not flattering him. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I believe you,” she said. She did believe him, within his own frame of reference. “But after the way he treated me, it’s hard for me to understand.”

  “Someday he will prove it,” Late said, “and that will be a wonderful day for our line. Then we’ll have a ceremony, a festival, the like of which no one has ever seen. You must come to it, and celebrate with us.”

  J.D. touched her fingertips to Late’s dappled fur.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “I’ll look forward to it very much.”

  Professor Thanthavong strolled over to them, her pure expression transcendently happy. She smiled at J.D.

  “Representative Late,” she said, “I wonder if you can tell me...”

  J.D. tried to focus on the conversation. The professor asked Late questions abou
t alien genetic systems. Late protested that he was a diplomat’s assistant, not a scientist.

  J.D.’s attention wandered to the quartet.

  Fasterdigger fed bits of cotton candy to Longestlooker. Quickercatcher’s long-furred tail twitched and spiraled with the music and he watched the dancing curiously. He had bits of white sugar on his whiskers. A silver mustache of mutualists formed on his muzzle; the sugar soon disappeared. Sharphearer rose on her hind legs to see across the crowd. Standing like that, she was well over two meters tall, taller than any of the humans. For all her frail grace, she was an imposing being.

  She dropped to all fours and nudged Longestlooker beneath the jaw, bending her neck sinuously to reach her sister’s soft throat. Longestlooker closed her eyes from outer corners to inner corners, and trilled a few words of the Largerfarthings’ language. All together, the quartet paced out onto the dance floor. Surprised, pleased, even apprehensive, the other people made room for them.

  Longestlooker started the dance, swaying gently forward and back, raising her arms and moving her hands. Quickercatcher twined his fingers in hers and joined the swaying. Sharphearer grasped Quickercatcher’s other hand; Fasterdigger completed the circle between Quickercatcher and Sharphearer. All four swayed, eyes half closed, blinking languorously.

  Longestlooker surged forward. The circle broke. Her siblings followed her. She curvetted and leaped, turned and twisted. Her body was remarkably limber. She bounded over Quickercatcher, slipped beneath Fasterdigger, slid past Sharphearer. As she passed them they followed her again, their beads and decorations clicking and chiming, their claws tapping on the dance floor. They braided themselves together, improvising to the unfamiliar music. Their sweet scent, intensified by their exertion, wafted through the air. They trilled in harmony.

  The music ended. They fell to the floor in a delighted heap of color, trilling, softly howling, panting for breath.

  J.D. burst out with spontaneous applause. Zev joined her, and in a moment nearly everyone clapped and cheered. Longestlooker raised her head, looking around with her sharp, intense gaze.

  J.D. hurried toward her. “Longestlooker, that was wonderful, I never saw anyone dance like the quartet.”

  The Largerfarthings rose together, stretched, gathered around her.

  “We’ll have to invent dances for Farthings and human people together,” Quickercatcher said.

  Chapter 7

  The path led along the bank of the river, then across a bridge. Stephen Thomas sat on the bridge’s edge, staring down into the gentle ripples. At dawn, fog rose from the water, swirling above the current. As the sun tube brightened, the air warmed and the fog dissipated

  Maybe I’ll go for a swim, Stephen Thomas thought. Zev was right, it does make me feel better.

  He wished all his problems could be solved by going for a swim.

  After leaving the party, he had spent all night in his lab. He was unwilling to go home till he felt he could face his partners with equanimity. He could have gone back to the guest house, and slept in the room Feral had used as an office. But the room had lost any feeling of Feral’s presence.

  His vision sparkled at the edges with exhaustion. He doubted he would be able to go to sleep till he could take a look at the results of the experiment he had begun last night. It should give him some clues about squidmoth genetics; it should at least give him evidence that the dendritic molecules were the chemicals of squidmoth inheritance.

  He yawned and stretched, glad of the fresh air and bright light. They would refresh him before he went back to the lab.

  Last time he had crossed this bridge, it had been covered with rushing water. He had run through the current, splashing, exhilarated by the newness of his body, elated by his mastery of it, driven by his anger at Europa and Androgeos and their secret supercharged bacteria, appalled at what he had discovered lurking through Arachne.

  He still did not know exactly what it was. Chancellor Blades was cut off from Arachne, his neural node withered and resorbed. But something, something dangerous, remained.

  He touched the web tentatively. All his recent interactions with it had been superficial and wary, and he had found nothing. Nothing dangerous, nothing to confirm his experience. No proof. If his suspicions were true, his surveillance had warned off the anomalous presence.

  The river flowed peacefully under the bridge. It had receded to its normal level.

  Stephen Thomas stared upstream, letting himself dissolve in the transparent ripples, opening himself to Arachne’s web. He offered the web his trust and his innocence.

  He waited. He wandered, but there was a direction to his wandering. He found himself in sight of Feral’s guest node. No longer sustained by Feral’s attention, it had begun to dim and contract from disuse. The files of Feral’s work would remain, unchanged, mummified in the archives.

  Stephen Thomas could find no echo of the presence that had stalked him during transition. Arachne denied that such a presence could exist, or, if it existed, that it could pass unnoticed through the web.

  Maybe not now, Stephen Thomas thought, keeping the idea to himself. But when Arachne’s resources are all focused in one direction, getting Starfarer into transition... that would make an opening for anything to get through.

  “Stephen Thomas!”

  He drew himself from the web and made his eyes focus on distant spots of riotous color. He had stared unseeing into the river gorge for several minutes, forgetting to close his eyes while he linked himself with Arachne. His eyes felt dry and scratchy. He blinked rapidly.

  At the fossil site, upstream around the next bend, Crimson directed the first interspecies archaeological dig. Stephen Thomas corrected himself: The first interstellar interspecies performance art, complete with sculpted fossils and an intricately designed provenance.

  Quickercatcher cantered down the beach toward Stephen Thomas. The Largerfarthings were as graceful in gravity as in free-fall. Quickercatcher folded his arms loosely on his back and ran on his front and rear legs, his long body moving sinuously. The decorations braided into his fur bounced against his neck and sides. Small soft sparks glittered around him, like fireworks in fog, but Stephen Thomas refused to see the Largerfarthing’s aura; it faded away.

  Stephen Thomas waved to Quickercatcher. He reacted to the Largerfarthings the same way J.D. did, the same way most of the people on board reacted. He loved them without reason.

  What is it about these folks? Stephen Thomas wondered.

  “I found a tooth, come see!” Quickercatcher looped around, ran back the way he had come, and disappeared around the river bend.

  If the Largerfarthings had changed themselves to be able to breath Earth’s air, to be able to exist in an alien environment, then they might have changed themselves to be appealing to human beings. Stephen Thomas tried to shrug away the idea. He did not want to be manipulated for Civilization’s plan. He wanted to like the Largerfarthings for themselves. He did like them for themselves, no matter what the reason.

  Stephen Thomas left the bridge, climbed down the steep trail, walked along the river beach, and followed Quickercatcher to Crimson’s stage.

  Quickercatcher’s mauve fur stood out against the dark rock of the river channel. Longestlooker and Fasterdigger blended in, but Quickercatcher and Sharphearer, with her piebald fluorescent fur, looked like a party waiting to happen. The sight of the quartet dissolved the sadness and confusion Stephen Thomas had been feeling.

  They stood in a semi-circle around Crimson, who knelt on the beach brushing layers, grain by grain, from a slab of rock of no volcanic origin.

  Amazing how easy it is to accept Crimson’s fossils — and their ridiculous provenance — as real, he thought.

  Even though he knew they were fake, even though he had seen her with her wheelbarrow full of artwork on the river beach, he found himself thinking of the fossils as a billion years old.

  Coincidences aside, it was an aesthetically pleasing story. Granted, some of the provenan
ce of the fossils had been lost by the original mass-driver excavation. The alternative was that the fossils would never have been found, for who in their right mind would look for fossils on Earth’s moon?

  Stephen Thomas wondered what the Four Worlds people would say when fossils from a completely different evolutionary system turned up. Crimson’s second group of creatures, devolved from Nemo, looked even older and much, much stranger than the remains of the Fighters.

  Once the second site turned up — a second site dug from Earth’s moon, which should not have fossils at all! — the Four Worlds people would appreciate the performance. They would have to get the joke.

  All four members of the quartet, and Androgeos, stood around the cramped slab watching Crimson prepare the fossil for extraction. She used a dentist’s pick and a soft brush.

  Stephen Thomas had never been to a dentist who used a steel pick instead of microbial techniques. He had once asked Crimson where she got dentist’s picks, if she bought them from some company that manufactured them specially for paleontologists. She had laughed. When she laughed, when she smiled, Stephen Thomas understood why Satoshi had fallen in love with her. She had told him that even paleontologists do not use dentists’ picks. She had found the tools at an antique store, and decided to try antique excavation methods.

  The techniques worked. The Largerfarthings were fascinated.

  A ruffle of green and gold above the site startled him. He focused on the motion: the Representative’s Representative hugged the volcanic riverbank. He looked like a mat of lichen, until he arched his back and the spines rose up, then settled down. His leading edge draped directly over the sandstone. He, too, concentrated on the site excavation.

  LTMs perched nearby, recording everything.

  One of the Largerfarthings’ tiny dioramas stood in a crevice of the riverbank: several tiny wooden figures danced with a bead, a blade of grass, and a feather.

  “There, see?” Quickercatcher pointed at the new fossil. “It was my turn to dig, and I found it.”

  Crimson glanced up. “Hi,” she said. She gave Stephen Thomas a quick smile, and went back to her work.

  “Hi, Crimson.”

  “I prepared the surface,” Fasterdigger said proudly, without any hint of jealousy that his sibling, rather than he, had found the fossil.