The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “You and Satoshi didn’t think it was so disgusting.”

  “Disgusting!” Victoria flung her arms around him. Startled, he fell back onto the bed. She kissed him fiercely, hungrily. He opened his mouth for her tongue, and held her hips when she straddled his thighs. She slid her hand under his shirt, tracing his familiar long hard muscles beneath the soft new pelt. She felt him respond. A powerful current of curiosity increased her excitement. She pulled at the waistband of his shorts, expecting him to move, to raise his hips and help her free him of his clothing.

  Instead, he shuddered violently and turned away.

  Shocked, Victoria sat back.

  “What’s — Did I hurt you?”

  They parted; she knelt beside him, confused.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just that I’m afraid...”

  He hesitated.

  “We can go slow,” Victoria said. “You’re — It’s your first time in your new body.”

  She had almost said he was a virgin again, but the idea of Stephen Thomas as a virgin was funny and she did not want him to think she was laughing at him.

  “Do you want me to —”

  She put her hand on his leg, slid her palm hard up his inner thigh, slipped her fingertips beneath the leg of his shorts.

  “This hasn’t got anything to do with sex!” Drawing away from her, he sat up and pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs.

  “Oh,” Victoria said. “What, then?”

  The silver mutualist held his hair back from his face, but one lock had fallen free. Victoria stroked it and smoothed it into place. The silver worm loosened, coiled around the vagrant lock, and tightened.

  Victoria let her hand rest on Stephen Thomas’s cheek. He shivered. She took her hand away.

  “I think we should separate for a while. So you guys will be safe.”

  “Safe? From what? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s something in Arachne, and it’s hunting me.”

  “What? Nonsense. We’ve checked the system —”

  “It can only come out during transition,” Stephen Thomas said. “When Arachne doesn’t have any attention to spare.”

  “That doesn’t make sense! Come home, we can work —”

  “I can’t come home,” he said stubbornly. “I’m afraid for you.”

  “That is the stupidest, most transparent, idiotic excuse —” Victoria was furious, hurt, and confused. “If you want to leave us —”

  “I don’t, dammit, there’s nothing I want less!”

  “— why can’t you just say so?”

  “If I come home, you and Satoshi will be in danger.”

  “But the last transition was perfect,” Victoria said. During Starfarer’s first two transitions, Arachne had crashed. Only during the third had everything gone smoothly.

  “I felt it. It tried to beat my brain to shit.”

  Her eyelids flickered as she touched Arachne.

  “All our connections are intact!” she said. She could not see how any damage could occur to Stephen Thomas’s neural node without some damage to Arachne’s intricate linkages between the partners.

  “I was using Feral’s account.”

  “What in the world could you do with Feral’s account?” Feral had been a guest; his access had been hemmed in, limited.

  “Pretend to be Feral.”

  He smiled a plaintively charming smile.

  His charm annoyed her sometimes, especially when it made her feel as if she were his older sister instead of his lover. Trying to keep the annoyance from her voice, she made its edge razor-fine.

  “Feral! Why?”

  “To find out what happened to him. Why he died.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Like hell it was. He was murdered, and the murder was premeditated. It just hit the wrong target.”

  Victoria regretted Feral’s death and she felt some responsibility for it. If Feral had done as she had asked, he would never have been in the web when it crashed.

  “It would be so much easier if there was a reason,” she said. “But there wasn’t. We have to accept that.”

  “I got Feral his account. It was linked to mine. When I went in to find out why the system was crashing, I became a threat. If Blades had stopped me —”

  “And J.D.”

  “And J.D. If he’d stopped us, we wouldn’t have been able to prove he caused the crashes.”

  “But it was Feral who got killed.”

  “He was in the way.”

  “What about J.D.?”

  “Her node wasn’t finished yet. Maybe he couldn’t get to her deep enough. Maybe he made a mistake, like he did with me and Feral. Maybe he underestimated her.” His laugh was quick and sharp. “She caught up to Blades before I did.”

  Victoria looked away. She sympathized with Stephen Thomas. The complicated rationale might ease his grief at his friend’s useless death. But she could not accept it if it meant he would leave.

  “Victoria, I don’t know all the answers. But when I was in Arachne pretending to be Feral... something tried to kill me.”

  “Not you — Feral. It must have been an echo — a memory of what happened to Feral. If we wipe his records —”

  “No!” Stephen Thomas said angrily. “We can’t wipe out his work.”

  “We can make a back-up.”

  “If we wipe out his node, we’ll never know what’s wrong with Arachne.”

  Victoria blew out her breath in frustration. Stephen Thomas was obsessed by Feral, by Feral’s senseless death.

  “Love, I liked him, too. But we’ve got to get on with our lives. Besides, I don’t see how this connects with your being afraid to make love with me, eh?”

  He looked out the French window, into brilliant daylight. Alzena’s songbirds shrilled and cried, confused by the direction of the light.

  “I’m afraid if I love you,” Stephen Thomas said, “the same thing will happen to you that happened to Feral. I think anybody connected with me is in danger.”

  “But that’s crazy!”

  She blurted out her reaction without thinking.

  “Crazy?” he shouted. “I’m trying to protect you, and you think I’m crazy?”

  “Listen to me,” Victoria said. “Good god, Stephen Thomas, listen to yourself! No one’s going to die from fucking you! You didn’t even sleep with Feral!”

  “But he was connected to me. You and me and Satoshi, we’re so connected our nodes look like a pile of spaghetti!”

  “Nobody’s going to die because they love you!” she said.

  “What about Merry?”

  “What has Merry got to do with any of this?” Victoria cried. Merry had nothing to do with Arachne. Merry had never made it into space.

  Her vision blurred. After a year, she still could not think of her elder partner without grief. Her heart skipped, as if it had emptied and clenched on nothingness.

  “Merry loved me,” Stephen Thomas said. His expression went bleak. Hurt and confusion filled his startling sapphire eyes. “And Merry’s dead.”

  “Merry didn’t die from loving you, Merry died because of the damned stupid motorcycle!” Victoria’s voice broke and the hot tears spilled down her cheeks. She fumbled toward Stephen Thomas, desperate for the comfort of his touch.

  “I can’t do this anymore!” Stephen Thomas lunged to his feet and stood there trembling, out of her reach, looking down at her, his face set. “Fuck it, I can’t!”

  He ran through the open window, across the yard, and vanished beyond the gateway.

  Victoria cried uncontrollably. Fighting to stop only made it worse.

  Satoshi enfolded her in his arms.

  “It’s okay,” he said, his voice gruff with sleep. “It’s okay.”

  “I didn’t —”

  She hiccupped, and swallowed; she wrapped her arms around him and held him. Her tears pooled up on her cheek where she pressed her face against Satoshi’s shoulder; they dribbled
down his chest. He leaned his head against her hair and rocked her.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  He was right; it was nonsense, like everything that had just happened, like her whole conversation with Stephen Thomas —

  “I was already awake,” he said.

  “Then why —”

  “Because he said he wanted to talk to you alone... Because you needed to talk... Because...”

  He stopped.

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably.

  o0o

  The trail from the partnership’s garden ended at a main footpath, one of the walkways that spiraled around Starfarer’s interior.

  Stephen Thomas stopped running.

  He was baffled. Baffled by Victoria’s reaction and baffled by his own. He would be lucky if Victoria ever spoke to him again, or Satoshi either once he found out what had happened.

  He was not entirely sure Satoshi had been speaking to him anyway.

  Stephen Thomas could not believe what he had just done. He had pushed Victoria away. He had fled instead of comforting her, as he had comforted Victoria and Satoshi since Merry’s death.

  “All you had to do was hold her, you stupid son of a bitch,” Stephen Thomas muttered. “And you couldn’t even do that. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  He felt flayed, slashed.

  Stephen Thomas created a mental glass wall to protect his consciousness from his emotions. It was all that had kept him from collapsing when Merry died, and again after Feral’s murder.

  When Victoria started to cry, the glass wall had exploded. Instead of protecting him from his grief and anger, instead of walling him off and allowing him to function, it had shattered around him, causing more damage than it had ever blocked out. Its destruction had opened him to a visceral surge of terrifying anger and resentment. All he could think of — No, he had not thought at all. He had simply fled.

  The glass wall lay in bright bloody shards at his feet.

  He had failed Victoria several times over. Besides being unable to console her about Merry, he had disappointed her — and himself; he ached with need for her touch and Satoshi’s. And he had failed to explain what had happened in Arachne. He had been so inarticulate about his fear that Victoria did not believe she was in danger.

  Maybe she’s right, he thought. Oh, god, it would be so much easier if she were right.

  But the consequences, if he was right and Victoria was wrong, meant Victoria and Satoshi were in peril.

  If he could not persuade his partners of the danger, he would have to protect them another way. But the only way he could think of to safeguard them would take time.

  If a psychotic pattern in the computer web was hunting him, and the people most closely connected to him, then he had to break the connections. He had to do it before Starfarer entered transition again.

  No one knew when that might be. Starfarer might remain in the Four Worlds for months. But Stephen Thomas could not risk a delay.

  He turned his attention to his neural node. Dendrites, tendrils, spread out from it in all directions, touching other nodes, other neural connections. A tangle of interlaced fibers filled the space between his and Victoria’s and Satoshi’s nodes. In some places several filaments had lost their identity and merged into one.

  Stephen Thomas urged his node to disengage. The pattern resisted him. He persuaded it.

  The change began.

  Each time a connection separated, it left behind a ghost of itself, like a phantom limb. His node drew away from the reflected presences of his partners.

  The distance ached.

  o0o

  The glass wall was full of cracks and missing pieces. One good blow would shatter it again. But for the moment it would hold.

  As long as I don’t try to talk to anyone I love, Stephen Thomas said to himself, it will hold.

  He set off across campus toward his lab. If he submerged himself in work, he could wipe away the emotional tangle his thoughts kept falling into.

  Stephen Thomas had succeeded in growing alien cells retrieved from Nautilus. While he was visiting the Four Worlds’ ship, his students had made a lot of progress. Mitch and Lehua and Bay had perpetuated the cells, harvested them, and done a rough separation of their components. Last night, after the party, Stephen Thomas had begun an analysis of what he believed to be squidmoth genetic material.

  He had some ideas about how the molecules coded for biological chemicals. He had been worrying the problem around in his mind. The molecules were roughly spherical, but rough was the operative word. They looked less like beach balls and more like dust mice: rough and fuzzy, loose ends of molecules sticking out all over. The roughness would be the key, the variation that produced thousands of different results from a single type of substrate.

  Professor Thanthavong had some other ideas about how squidmoth genetics worked.

  And she could be right, Stephen Thomas thought, I could be off on the wrong track entirely. But I don’t think so. I think those big molecules are what served Nemo and Nemo’s attendants the way DNA serves us.

  The dendritic molecule was complicated in appearance but relatively simple in structure. The same could be said for DNA. But DNA was like a string of alphabet beads with only four letters, arranged one by one in three-letter words. The dendritic molecules in the Nautilus samples resembled a clump of beads strung together with a web of connections, tangles, and loose ends. The ends, he believed, would form the blueprints for biological polymers, the way DNA’s sequence created a code.

  What baffled him was how to limit the degrees of freedom. DNA was a string, one-dimensional, readable in only one direction. Dendritic molecules presented a surface that was at least two-dimensional, possibly three-dimensional, probably a fractional, fractal dimension.

  I’d know more, he thought, if my time hadn’t been so damned busted up since we hightailed it out of the solar system...

  If I hadn’t felt so crappy during the changes...

  If Arachne hadn’t crashed... Even if the artificial stupids hadn’t crashed!

  If it hadn’t been for all the meetings — god, if I never go to another meeting — !

  If Feral hadn’t died...

  Stephen Thomas smiled sadly to himself. The truth was that if Feral were alive, Stephen Thomas would happily fragment his time to hell and gone.

  o0o

  The rubble of the genetics department had been cleared, dissolved away and recycled by the lithoclasts, the silver slugs that were so important to the operation of Starfarer. The nuclear missile had struck the outside of the cylinder directly below the genetics department, creating an earthquake inside.

  Stephen Thomas brushed his fingertips across the new scar on his forehead. He and Satoshi had been inside the genetics department when the missile hit. They were lucky they had not been crushed.

  The new genetics building had begun to grow, but no slugs were crawling on the foundation. The small ones might be out of sight, and even the medium-sized ones could be working behind the bits of wall and the fibrous complex of framework. But the big slugs were the size of rhinoceroses, and they were nowhere to be seen. The rebuilding of the genetics department was on hold.

  Maybe Infinity Mendez needs all the slugs on the outside of the cylinders, Stephen Thomas thought. Or maybe they’re all off fixing snow damage.

  Or guarding Chancellor Blades.

  He continued along the trail to the biochemistry department, where Starfarer’s geneticists were camping out. Stephen Thomas missed his old office, with its sagging rattan chairs, all his intramural athletic trophies, and enough floor space for a sleeping mat. His temporary cubbyhole was too small to let him stretch out for a nap during all-night lab sessions.

  Like the genetics department, the biochem building lay inside one of Starfarer’s rolling hills. Stephen Thomas strode into the cool shadow of the main corridor. He added tracks to the other footprints before he
realized the old towel at the entrance was for wiping the mud off shoes.

  Too late now, he thought. Good god, the place is a mess.

  Everybody on board Starfarer took the artificial stupids for granted. They kept things clean, they kept things in order. They were practically invisible. He noticed their absence more than their presence. The chancellor had disabled them. Stephen Thomas wondered when they would be back in service.

  We worked on them hard enough, he thought, grimacing at the memory of the artificials’ rotting brains.

  A touch to Arachne assured him that the ASes were regrowing their brains as quickly as possible.

  Stephen Thomas reached the doorway of his temporary lab. All three of his graduate students, Lehua, Mitch, and Bay, sat around a lab table, staring at a holographic projection.

  “Think it’s a mistake?” Lehua asked morosely. She wrapped her fingers in her red-gold hair and twisted and tugged at one long lock. The nervous gesture clashed with her usual composure and youthful elegance.

  “Maybe it’s...” Bay’s voice fell apprehensively. “Maybe it’s contaminated.”

  “Bullshit,” Stephen Thomas said.

  All three students started at his voice and looked at him without speaking.

  Unsettled, Stephen Thomas joined them.

  Lehua gestured toward the display with her free hand.

  On the graph, straight, perfect vertical lines marked several high molecular weights.

  Biological molecules never gave precise results. The natural variation of goopy, sloppy organic systems smeared the peaks out.

  “There’s no variation,” Bay said.

  “It’s perfect.” Mitch wrapped his gangly long legs around each other and wrapped his arms around his knees.

  “But they can’t be,” Lehua said. Her hair snarled in her fingers.

  “The peaks for the squidmoth molecules are as sharp as the calibration beads,” Bay said. He pointed out the calibration lines.

  “Did Arachne run the data through clean-up for you to look at?” Stephen Thomas felt more apprehensive than he allowed himself to sound.

  “Of course not,” Lehua said. “That’s the first thing we checked.”

  Jesus, Stephen Thomas thought, maybe I screwed up. Maybe I ran the tests on a handful of calibration beads. It was late. I was tired. I was distracted — everyone was distracted. And none of that’s any excuse.