The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Stephen Thomas took a deep breath, let it out, and sank. Underwater, in the kelp forest, the light blued. Small fish darted away, arrowing between the stems. Tiny snail shells clustered on the fronds.

  Zev kick-dove and followed him underwater. He spoke: a long trill of clicks and squeals. Stephen Thomas understood the tone of concern, but the words were too fast for him to understand.

  “Go away,” Stephen Thomas tried to say in true speech, but his mouth filled with water and the water distorted his words.

  Zev hovered before him, watching and waiting patiently till Stephen Thomas needed air.

  They rose together. Stephen Thomas drew a long, deep breath. Salt and iodine, the smell of sea and kelp, tinged the cool air.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I can taste your sadness.” Zev hesitated. “You were crying. I can taste your tears.”

  Stephen Thomas felt himself blushing. The blush would not be obvious against his darkened skin.

  “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Zev said.

  “Don’t divers have any sense of privacy?” Stephen Thomas snarled the words, infuriated by his own transparency.

  “Not much,” Zev said. “We don’t have much to be private about... If I felt sad, I’d want someone to notice.”

  There was no point in challenging Zev’s perceptions. Zev could see the heat of the flush of blood to his face. Stephen Thomas knew it, because Stephen Thomas could do the same thing.

  “Why did you come here in the first place?” Stephen Thomas asked.

  “To find out what’s wrong.”

  “Not here. Not now. Why did you come on board Starfarer? Because of J.D.?”

  “Partly,” Zev said. “Mostly. But...”

  “What?”

  “I was bored.”

  “Bored!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How could you be bored? J.D. talks about the wilderness like it’s idyllic.”

  “It is.”

  Stephen Thomas waited. Zev remained silent.

  He’s already answered my question, Stephen Thomas thought. Idyllic... and boring.

  “What do divers do all day?”

  “We swim, we play, we take care of the kids, we catch fish.”

  “And at night you sleep the sound sleep of the righteous,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Zev ignored, or did not understand, the sarcasm. “No, divers don’t sleep soundly at all. Not when we’re in the water. You have to wake up and breathe every few minutes. So we drowse, and tell stories.”

  “When do you dream?”

  “We don’t.”

  “People have to dream, Zev. Otherwise they go crazy.”

  “We aren’t crazy! There are a lot more crazy people here than back home!”

  “Hey, take it easy. I just meant you must’ve dreamed so quickly you never noticed it. Something like that.”

  Zev’s anger vanished as suddenly as it had come. He closed his copper-brown eyes, his long fair lashes brushing his smooth mahogany skin.

  “I never dreamed, before I came on board Starfarer.”

  “But you drowsed... and told stories.” Stephen Thomas wondered if the stories took the place of dreams. “Just the divers? Or the divers and the orcas?”

  “Both. Our cousins tell more, they’ve been there longer. Millions of years longer.”

  “Telling million-year-old stories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.” Stephen Thomas restrained his skepticism. “Can’t you tell stories from when you were still...” He did not want to say, “still human.” The divers were human, but changed. He used Zev’s way of describing the difference. “From when you were still ordinary?”

  “I guess we could, but we never do.” He considered. “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe the stories are too painful. Estranged families —”

  “But most of us know our land families. I know my grandparents, my mother’s parents, they visit all the time. They’re nice. I have an uncle and aunt and cousins. Who live on land, I mean.” He sighed. “I hope they’re all right, I hope they didn’t get into trouble when the family went to Canada.”

  “They probably got a visit from the Feds,” Stephen Thomas said. The divers had fled their wilderness home for asylum in Canada, rather than act as spies.

  “I wish I knew if everybody got away all right.” He hesitated. “I’m sure they did.”

  “You don’t need to reassure me.”

  “I bet things weren’t boring on the way to Canada. I wish I’d been there... but I’m glad I’m here.”

  “So’s J.D.,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Why are we talking about me?” Zev asked. “Everybody’s worried about you.”

  Stephen Thomas eased back in the water, ducked his head beneath the surface, and straightened again. His hair slicked back from his face. He slipped the silver worm from his wrist and onto his hair.

  Zev waited patiently.

  “I have some things to think about,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “All by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still a lot like an ordinary human,” Zev said. He did not mean it as a compliment.

  “What would a diver do?”

  “Talk about it. With your mother —”

  “That isn’t a choice I’ve got.”

  “I know,” Zev said, “Nobody came to Starfarer with their parents. Nobody brought their children. It’s weird.”

  That was not what Stephen Thomas had meant. He did not know his mother. He did not say so to Zev; that would have struck the young diver as the strangest thing Stephen Thomas had ever said.

  “You should talk to your family, Stephen Thomas.”

  “I tried! You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I thought I spoke English pretty well,” Zev said. “You’ll have to practice true speech more, so we can talk. Do you want to try French in the meantime?”

  “I don’t speak French. You speak English fine.”

  “We’re talking about me again!” Zev said, exasperated. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong? Are you mad? Because I didn’t know everything that would happen when you changed?”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Are you mad at J.D.?”

  “That’s... a complicated question.” Stephen Thomas did not want to lie, flat out, to Zev — for one thing, Zev probably could tell he was lying, if he lied hard enough to make himself uncomfortable.

  The trouble was, Stephen Thomas himself was not certain of the truth.

  “No, it isn’t,” Zev said. “You’re mad, or you’re not. She thinks you are.”

  “It isn’t that I’m mad,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “Then what?”

  “I’m jealous of her!” Stephen Thomas shouted. He passed beyond embarrassment to humiliation. “Of her and Feral,” he said. “I’ve never been jealous of anyone in my life, but I’m jealous of J.D. and Feral.”

  Zev frowned, startled and shocked.

  “I told you you wouldn’t understand,” Stephen Thomas said. “Shit, I don’t understand. I should be glad for them... For what they had.”

  “How can you be jealous of someone’s friend?” Zev asked, baffled. “Besides, you were friends with Feral, too.”

  “I’m jealous because they were lovers!”

  “No they weren’t,” Zev said.

  Stephen Thomas made an inarticulate sound of frustration.

  “She would have told me, if they were.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? Because she would. We talk about everything. She told you, didn’t she?”

  “She might as well have.” It was the only explanation for the way she had reacted to his plan to read and edit and publish Feral’s Starfarer journals.

  “What if they were lovers?” Zev’s voice was uncharacteristically sharp. “Why should you be jealous?”

  Stephen Thomas regarded J.D.’s lover. Like every young man, Zev possessed his own u
nique combination of sophistication and naïveté.

  “For the same reason you are, Zev,” Stephen Thomas said. “Only Feral’s gone. You still have J.D.”

  Shocked, Zev kicked hard, arched his body, and dove backwards out of sight.

  Stephen Thomas did not see him again, and when he stopped treading water and let himself sink into the sea, Zev’s sound signature vanished in the distance.

  “Shit,” Stephen Thomas muttered. He had hurt Zev. He had done it deliberately, out of his own pain. But all he could feel was relief that Zev was gone, that he was alone again.

  He floated on his back. He let all the air out of his lungs and sank just beneath the surface. The light of 61 Cygni glittered on the low waves, dazzling him.

  o0o

  J.D. sprawled in the squishy fabric chair in her office. She had so much work to do, but she was too drained to begin.

  She should find Quickercatcher and have another long talk. She should try again to persuade the Largerfarthing that the fossils were props for a performance, pieces of art in their own right. The Four Worlds were going to be massively disappointed when they finally learned — finally accepted — the truth. J.D. wondered what members of the interstellar civilization did when they were massively disappointed... or massively angry.

  And she should clear everything up so she could go to Nautilus.

  A flicker of motion caught her eye.

  Zev stood uncertainly in the doorway.

  J.D.’s mood lightened.

  That’s what it felt like the first time I saw the quartet, she said to herself, with surprise. It felt like seeing Zev. Like seeing someone I love.

  “I thought we talked about everything,” Zev said.

  His voice held an unnatural note. She had never before heard suspicion in the voice of any diver. Everything was so open, between people in the sea. They had given up privacy in exchange for trust.

  “I thought we did, too,” she said mildly.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about Feral?”

  “Tell you what?” she asked, confused. They had talked about Feral several times.

  “That you were lovers.”

  “Why told you that?”

  “What difference does it make?” Zev exclaimed.

  “Who on Starfarer makes up silly rumors and spreads them around?”

  His stiff stance eased. He looked sleeker, calmer: the hair on his arms and shoulders smoothed from its bristly tension.

  “Makes up rumors?” he said. “Makes them up!”

  “I liked Feral,” J.D. said. “And he was very attractive. I probably would have slept with him — made love with him — if the subject had come up. It didn’t. If it had, I probably would have told you about it — if the subject had come up. Would it have made a difference to you?”

  She pushed herself from the chair, wishing again for time to replace it with something less engulfing, less awkward. She wished, too, for the grace and ease of being in the water. In the sea, the subject never would come up, because there would never be any mystery to begin with. Everyone would know if she and Feral had made love, and no one would think another thing about it, except to be happy for them.

  “Would it have made a difference to you?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He put his arms around her and hugged her very tightly.

  “I don’t know!”

  He kissed her fiercely. She could feel his arousal against her, through his shorts and the genital pouch.

  She kissed him back, but she felt uneasy.

  She was used to gentleness from Zev, not frantic intensity. He fumbled at the hem of her shirt, pulling it free and reaching beneath it, straining to reach her breast, awkward, ripping the material at the base of one of the buttons.

  “Hey, stop it.”

  “I want —”

  “I don’t.”

  She pushed his hand down.

  He was strong, but it was not in Zev to use his strength against her. He stepped away from her, hurt and confused.

  “I can’t just run down to the corner and get a new shirt,” she said, annoyed. She straightened her clothes, fingering the torn fabric as if the damage might heal.

  “Sure you can. There’s lots, some anyway, I saw them when I went looking for something that didn’t rub my fur off.”

  “Not a new old shirt,” J.D. said, ignoring inconsistency. “Who told you Feral and I slept together?”

  “Stephen Thomas,” he said.

  “What!”

  The confusion and embarrassment she had been feeling transmuted in a blaze to anger.

  “J.D., it’s all right,” Zev said quickly. “I believe you.”

  “It isn’t all right!” J.D. said tightly. “He lied about me, he hurt you —”

  It hurt even worse for Zev to affirm his trust in her than for him to be suspicious of her in the first place.

  “Where is he? When did you see him last?”

  “Swimming. In the bay with the pen for the artificial lungs.”

  She dragged a mask and flippers from a box of equipment and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to Stephen Thomas.” Maybe I’ll drown him, too, she thought.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “That isn’t a good idea.”

  “When will you come home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She plunged out of the house, untidily tucking in her shirttail, fingering the rough edge of fabric where the button hung loose.

  o0o

  J.D. pulled an artificial lung out of the enclosure, arranged it on her back, and swam straight out from the beach. She made no effort to approach Stephen Thomas silently, no effort to surprise him. She wanted him to know she was here.

  He lay in a dead-man’s float.

  “Stephen Thomas!” When he did not respond, she ducked her head and said his name in true speech.

  She surfaced beside him.

  He jerked his head up and gasped a long deep breath as he flung himself backwards and around and flailed into motion.

  Did I scare him? J.D. wondered. Good. I hope I did.

  She swam after him, catching up easily, her strong smooth stroke cutting through the water with barely a splash.

  “Stop, dammit!”

  He kept swimming. “Why? Pace too much for you?”

  She stayed beside him, even when he dove deep.

  J.D. swam easily underwater. Eventually, Starfarer’s best natural athlete would realize he could not outdistance a practiced long-distance swimmer.

  He flailed away from her. J.D. was mad enough to let him drive himself to exhaustion. He surfaced; she stayed underwater. She turned over; when he dove again he came face to face with her.

  Bubbles burst from his mouth, obscuring and muffling his exclamation.

  Whatever he said, it was not true speech.

  Stephen Thomas stopped, hovered, then let himself rise.

  J.D. followed.

  They surfaced together, J.D. smoothly, Stephen Thomas with an angry splash. Out of habit he raked his hands back through his hair, but the silver mutualist had held his pony-tail in place. He was breathing hard

  J.D. pushed her mask to the top of her head.

  “Why did you tell Zev I slept with Feral?” J.D. asked. “You upset him terribly. And you’re making Victoria and Satoshi so unhappy. Fox is moping like a lovesick schoolgirl —”

  “A spoiled rich kid is more like it, somebody ought to tell her to grow up —”

  “And so is Florrie.”

  “Why is everybody blaming me?” Stephen Thomas yelled.

  “I’d like an explanation.”

  “I want some fucking privacy,” Stephen Thomas snarled. “First Zev, now you —”

  “Come to shore,” J.D. said. “I want to talk to you.”

  “We can talk out here.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

 
“Because you don’t know enough true speech to understand how angry I am.”

  She pulled down her mask, backstroked into a turn, flipped over, and settled into a strong freestyle stroke.

  She swam ten meters before Stephen Thomas followed. He swam as if he were slapping and punching the water.

  J.D. reached the shore well ahead of him. She threw the lung back into its pen, then crossed the hard wet beach. Above the high water line, rough beach grass grew in clumps in hot dry sand. The grass tangled around the twisted roots one of Crimson’s monumental pieces of artificial driftwood. She let herself dry in the warm sunshine, in no hurry to cover herself. What did it matter what Stephen Thomas thought of her stocky body? She already knew he could not stand the idea that she found him attractive.

  He strode out of the ocean, flinging water from his mahogany body like silver rain. He was unusually tall for a diver, and his sapphire eyes gave him a wild look. He swiped at his pelt with the edge of his hand, currying the water from his chest, his belly, the thicker hair over his genitals.

  Turning away, J.D. sat on the gnarled root of the driftwood stump. The warmth of the splintery wood soaked into the backs of her thighs, and the scent of weathered cedar surrounded her.

  Stephen Thomas let himself slump in the natural chair of another twisted root.

  “So talk,” he said, his tone hard.

  J.D. pretended calm, but when she spoke her voice shook.

  “We’ve got to work out our difficulties directly.”

  He remained silent, not making what she wanted to say any easier, piercing her with the blue knife of his gaze.

  She took a deep breath. “Don’t spread any more stories about me. You hurt Zev, you made him think I didn’t trust him. It isn’t his fault —”

  “Sure it is,” Stephen Thomas said.

  “But he didn’t mean to make you into a diver!” J.D. said, “He’d never hurt anyone deliberately. I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt him but —”

  Stephen Thomas looked away. “I did mean to.”

  “You —” His admission shocked her. “How could you — ?”

  Stephen Thomas shrugged. “I was pissed off.”

  “Why do you hate me so much? I’m sorry I — stop taking it out on Zev! We’ve got to stop making everybody miserable.”

  “Just make each other miserable, huh?” Stephen Thomas laughed harshly, sarcastically. “Jesus Christ, what a bunch of primates. We sneak around behind each others’ backs, lying to each other, pretending we’re so honest and civilized!”