On a whim, she sent a copy of the novel’s text through her link toward Europa’s planetoid.
J.D. widened her perceptions to include Starfarer, in orbit around Nautilus. She could sense their tenuous bonds of gravity. She expanded her perceptions again to encompass the tiny local constellation of Starfarer, Nautilus, Europa’s starship, the Four Worlds ship. She extended again, taking in the Nearer worlds, once more to include the Farther worlds.
The ship carrying the archaeological party proceeded at a stately pace from Largerfarther toward Starfarer.
J.D. opened her perception as far as she could.
A yellow point marked the position of Earth’s sun. An ordinary star, it was bright because it was so close.
J.D. could see — could perceive — its planets. Pluto was a dark shadow. The Jovian planets looked like gaudy Christmas tree ornaments, decorated with colored stripes and bright rings and baubles. Mars was cold, silent, Earth a riot of green and blue and swirling weather patterns, circled grandly by the Moon. Venus twirled, mysterious beneath its veil of clouds, and Mercury hid at the edge of the brightness of the Sun.
J.D. wondered if she was seeing the solar system, or seeing Nemo’s memories of it.
If only I’d had more time with Nemo, she thought. If only I’d met 61 Cygni’s squidmoth...
But Nemo’s offspring possessed all Nemo’s memories.
Has it calmed down from its tantrum? J.D. thought. If Infinity is right, if it’s an adolescent, it’s probably got its temper back. Maybe it’s even outgrown the rebellion phase.
J.D. tapped into the LTM transmission from the surface of the wild side. The blue-white egg nest lay quiet and still, like a splash of spilled milk. Iridescent veins quivered just beneath the skin of the central bulge.
J.D. extended a tentative greeting.
Instead of backing off or erecting a barrier, the squidmoth larva responded with quiet curiosity.
This is more like it, J.D. thought. More like Nemo...
“I’m sorry I upset you before,” J.D. said.
“That was my previous instar,” the squidmoth said.
“Have you metamorphosed into a juvenile?”
“I have metamorphosed not into a juvenile.”
“Will you talk to me?”
“Tell me what you want to talk about.”
“I was looking at the solar system.” She pointed it out. “I can see the planets — or I can see Nemo’s memories of them. I don’t know which. Can I see so far? Can you see them?”
“I see them as you see them.”
“But do you see them as they are now, or do you see your memories of them? Did Nemo ever visit Earth’s system?”
“I understand the motion of the spheres, so there is no difference between seeing them and remembering them.”
“Sure there is,” J.D. said. “A human being would need a powerful telescope to see the Sun’s planets. Do you?”
“If I wished to see the planets as they are, not as they were, I would travel to the system.”
“I know I’d be seeing them as they were when their light left the system,” she said. “But am I seeing them or seeing your adult parent’s memories?”
“Yes.”
J.D. sighed, frustrated. As an experiment, she turned her attention to another star, one distant and dim. There, too, she detected the reflected light of planets. Her question remained, for Nemo or one of the ancestors whose memories Nemo possessed might have visited that star system as well.
But it was wonderful to look at distant stars, and see the signs of other worlds.
“You will go to your home system to see your planets,” the young squidmoth said.
“No,” she said. “I wish we could, but our solar system’s still empty of cosmic string. Once we go home, we have to stay. We don’t want to leave Civilization.” She wished she knew what had happened after Starfarer fled. Once Starfarer no longer loomed over the Mideast Sweep, had political tensions eased? Or had they tightened, had they broken?
“I’m so worried,” she admitted. “About Earth. About my home.”
The young squidmoth quaked suddenly in J.D.’s mind.
“Home!” it wailed. “Home!”
It flung her away, wrenching loose their connection. The LTM transmission shuddered. The milk-blue splash of the squidmoth nest darkened against the wild side’s skin as its protoplasm rushed to the central bulge. The membrane dried and cracked.
Iridescent veins solidified into cables. The surface thickened and contracted, forcing the protoplasm into the crater, toward the wild side’s interior. Hydrostatic pressure surged smashing stone.
J.D. cried out.
In pure silence, huge cracks opened. Chunks of moon rock shattered. Rock-foam matrix twisted and deformed. The spin flung shards against the inspection web. The bounced from the cables and vanished into space.
“Don’t!” J.D. shouted. “Don’t, you’ll destroy Starfarer, you’ll destroy yourself!”
“Home!” the squidmoth wailed. “I want to go home!”
Nemo had reproduced in the Sirius system, now empty of cosmic string. Starfarer could enter transition and return the squidmoth to Sirius.
But it could never leave, and its ecosystem would not survive.
“I’m sorry!” J.D. said. “We didn’t mean to isolate your siblings! We can’t take you home, Starfarer would die. Please, don’t —”
The larval squidmoth wrenched itself in its crater. Broken stone cascaded toward the campus cylinder.
J.D. made a precipitous decision.
“Will you trade your place for a home on Nautilus?”
“No!” Europa flared into sudden, intense presence. “If you don’t want the ship, give it to me — to us — to the Four Worlds!”
“You want me to live — in my parent’s shell!” A wave of agitation and disgust poured from the squidmoth to J.D.’s link. “You want me to live in a grave!”
“You’ll live in a grave anyway, if you breach the cylinder!”
“I don’t care about your grave.”
The squidmoth nest passed into darkness. Cut off from the light, the immature being clenched violently, then fell quiet.
Messages poured through Arachne and out to J.D., from J.D. to Arachne and Starfarer.
“Victoria! Are you all right? Infinity! Where are you?” She was afraid he might be in the wild side, directly in danger.
“I’m here,” Victoria said, “I’m right in my office, I’m all right — but what about you? What happened?”
“I’m with Esther,” Infinity said from his house. “The barrier’s holding so far. Can you get that guy to hold still?”
“I’m afraid — I’m afraid it’s reacting to something I said.”
Gerald projected his image into her tent. “Perhaps you’d best stop provoking it!” he said. “This happens each time you approach the creature!”
“You’re right,” J.D. said, chagrined. “I thought I’d made peace —”
Avvaiyar Prakesh projected her image from the astronomy department.
“Something else has happened,” she said, her expression grim. “Something as bad. Worse.”
“What?”
J.D. extended herself through the knowledge surface. Before Avvaiyar spoke again, she knew what had happened.
“Oh, no,” J.D. whispered.
“The string,” Avvaiyar said. “The cosmic string is receding from 61 Cygni.”
J.D.’s link fell silent. Gerald remained, his image reflecting his shock.
J.D. struggled with numb disbelief.
Quickercatcher projected his image into her tent. He cuddled with the rest of the quartet in the VIP suite of the U.S. Embassy, startled awake from his midday sleep.
“Why is this happening?” J.D. cried.
“I don’t know,” Quickercatcher said. Longestlooker’s sleek head emerged from the tangle of blankets and pillows.
The Largerfarthing scrambled out of the resting nest. Fasterdigger and Sha
rphearer stretched languorously. Fasterdigger arched his neck and whispered to Ruth Orazio, who snuggled against his side. As she woke, she pushed her hair back from her face. The bit of red fluff in her hair brushed her cheek.
“The question may be,” Longestlooker said, “why it didn’t happen before.”
Maybe she’s right, J.D. thought. Maybe we just outpaced the reaction of the string. And now... it’s caught up with us.
Longestlooker reared on her hind legs and scanned the room.
“What will you do?” she asked, moving her gaze from J.D., to Gerald, to Ruth. She dropped to all fours again.
“I don’t know.” J.D.’s voice was uneven with confusion and despair. Zev projected a tendril of his presence to her, sharing her distress, offering comfort.
“J.D.,” Gerald said gently. “Victoria. Please believe I feel no satisfaction in saying this...”
Maybe he truly did not, but this vindicated him. He had been right all along. If they had turned back as soon as they reached Tau Ceti, as soon as the alien museum self-destructed, no one would have died and the cosmic string would not have cut itself off from any system. J.D. would never have met Nemo, but Nemo’s offspring would all be free, instead of trapped in the Sirius system, lost in transition, or ensnared in a psychotic episode on an alien starship.
“We have no choice, now,” Gerald said. “For our own good, for the Four Worlds, for Civilization... we must go home.”
“There must be something else we can do — some other choice — !” J.D. appealed to Quickercatcher. “Tell us the truth, tell us the truth, Civilization must know how to control the string, tell us what we have to do!”
“I can’t,” Quickercatcher said, raising his chin, exposing his throat with regret. “I tell you as I would tell my siblings, no one knows how to change what’s happening.”
Infinity appeared again, looking grim.
“J.D., we’re in bad trouble on the wild side.”
J.D. opened her link completely — the physical world vanished — and gathered all the information she could grasp straight into her mind. Arachne’s neural traffic. The young squidmoth’s angry mutterings. Avvaiyar’s report on the string. The cracks in the wild side’s skin hurt like wounds in her own body.
Transmissions — perceptible but not comprehensible — flashed among the Four Worlds spaceships, the Four Worlds themselves.
J.D. called to Orchestra, to the Smallernearer, but neither had any comfort. Orchestra offered sympathy, and a calm disinterest in the workings of the string. The Smallernearer feared the loss of interstellar communication, the loss of contact with the distant sibling it had created.
The Smallerfarthings and the Largerfarthings were part of Civilization. When they imagined being cut off from it, they fell toward panic. Even Late, metamorphosing, climbed blearily above his fugue to react to the crisis.
“Can you help?” J.D. asked. “Don’t your people know these secrets?”
“We know what the Largerfarthings know,” he replied.
“That’s an ambiguous reply, at best,” J.D. said. “I’d like to talk to the eldest.”
“That’s impossible!”
Even Longestlooker reacted with shock to that proposal.
“We aren’t lying to you, J.D.,” she said. “I wish you’d believe that.”
“You won’t believe me when I tell you the truth!” J.D. said. “Maybe your superiors know something you don’t. Maybe Late’s superior knows. I want to talk to him — direct!”
“That’s impossible,” Late said again.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“We do not know our achievements,” Late said. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? Dead?”
“Gone into rapture, with the eldest.”
J.D. opened her eyes. Instead of clearing, her vision blurred. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face. She wiped them away on her sleeve.
“Victoria,” J.D. whispered.
Victoria touched J.D.’s link. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas joined the conversation.
“If we stay, we’ll be stranded, and the Four Worlds with us,” Victoria said. “We can risk another system. We’d be putting off the inevitable, but at least we’d be putting it off.”
“And maybe destroying our ecosystem,” Infinity said.
Satoshi spoke grimly. “Starfarer depends on both cylinders. If the wild side disintegrates, it’ll tear up the sail. The spin on this side will go wonky. We’ll have to evacuate. Unless we’re back home, we haven’t got anyplace to evacuate to.”
“How can you do this to us?” J.D. said to the immature squidmoth. “Your parent was my friend.”
The being responded with an incoherent shriek and another shudder that quaked the wild side.
“J.D. — !” Infinity protested.
She drew back, rejected and hurt.
Nemo’s gone, she said to herself. If you keep denying that, you’re going to destroy your other friends.
“We have to go home,” Victoria said.
“I know,” J.D. replied softly.
It was simple; it was obvious. Gerald was right. They had no choice.
“You could stay,” Stephen Thomas said.
“What?”
“On Nautilus. You could stay. You could be part of Civilization. Like Europa and Andro.”
“No!” Zev said, distressed. “Stay here all by herself?”
J.D. hesitated. Nautilus gave her freedom. If the string was reacting to Starfarer itself, she could safely stay behind.
If she wanted this freedom, she could go anywhere she wanted, except back to Earth. Except home.
“I...” She was tired of saying, I don’t know.
“J.D.?” Zev said, quiet and intense.
“I have to think for a while, Zev,” she said. “I love you.”
J.D. drew away from Zev, as gently but as quickly as she could, a whirlpool of grief annihilating her elation. Rudely, desperately, she cut off everyone who was trying to talk to her. Gerald’s image disappeared, and Infinity’s, and the colorful group of Largerfarthings.
What difference does it make what I think, or what I want? J.D. thought. It doesn’t matter anymore, we have no choice.
She could not understand how everything that had been going so well had reversed so suddenly and so completely,
She burst into tears. All alone, she cried.
o0o
Chandra was a little drunk. She sipped at a crystal snifter, then took a deep swallow, drinking far too quickly for good brandy. She would have a hell of a hangover in the morning. At least being drunk helped her forget the surge of pleasure and joy she had felt when Sharphearer touched her. She had nearly drowned in it, nearly surrendered to it.
She never surrendered to pleasure. The price was too high. There was always a price, always hidden, always too high.
“I’ll drink me a drunk worth recording,” she said to her empty living room. “There’s nothing else worth my time on this damned rock.” Starfarer was boring. They would not let her join the alien contact department. They let Zev, and he was not even a member of the expedition. “Maybe I should sleep with somebody in alien contact,” she muttered. “Maybe that would work.”
Arachne signaled her and displayed an image a handsbreadth above the thick wool carpet. The image whirled around her without moving, she was that drunk. Chandra almost sent it away. Arachne was supposed to signal to her if anything anomalous happened, but so far the computer had sent her nothing but weird tangled twists of its mind. Nothing she could record or use.
“Stupid damned computer.” She looked at the image to prove it was useless.
The wild side spun from shadow into the bright light of 61 Cygni. The immature squidmoth soaked in the brightness, moved in response to it, clenched and shuddered. The wild side quaked under the being’s convulsions.
Chandra brought the violent image closer, enlarged it, wrapped it around herself. Sober — feeling sober — she pushed through the wove
n light and out the carved wooden door, leaving it open behind her.
o0o
A bright spot burned in the back of J.D.’s mind with the pressure of her waiting messages. She let them form, voices and moving images floating around her: her colleagues in alien contact, Zev more and more agitated as her silence lengthened, the quartet bidding Crimson farewell, accepting her gift of a block of stone full of alien sculptures.
A new message arrived: Jenny Dupre, floating in the transparent zero-g chamber of the sailhouse. J.D. accepted it in real-time.
Easier to talk to an acquaintance, just now, she thought. Easier than talking to a friend. Or a lover.
She thought better of her decision as soon as Jenny spoke.
“We have a bad problem,” Jenny said.
“Just one?” J.D.’s voice was high and tense.
The schematic told the story. The string receded fast. Too fast for Starfarer’s sail to take the starship to it.
“They want us gone very badly,” Jenny said.
Or, J.D. thought, someone wants us stuck here.
“You’re going to have to be careful,” Jenny said. She traced a line across the schematic, showing J.D. where the stresses on the starship would be least.
She assumed J.D. would use Nautilus, and its gravity, to tow Starfarer into transition.
It’s a fair assumption, J.D. thought. What else would I do, what else could I do? Another decision taken out of my hands.
She urged Nautilus toward the transition point, changing the starship’s path gradually so gravity would pull Starfarer with it. So Nautilus would not rip itself away to freedom.
o0o
The Nearer worlds fell behind.
Europa took Victoria’s hand. “Goodbye,” she said. “I am so sorry.” She pressed her smooth cheek to Victoria’s, held her for a moment, then drew away. Her motion, in the zero-g docking room, made them drift apart. “Perhaps —”
“Don’t — !”
“Don’t say we’ll see you again,” Stephen Thomas said. “We all know that isn’t going to happen.” He stretched out his hand to Victoria; she grasped it and brought herself to a stop.
“Very well,” Europa said.
“Come home with us,” Victoria said suddenly. “Come back to Earth.”
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 135