The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  She found the remains of the slab, tumbled up against the cliff, out of context, its provenance damaged, but the fossils nearly complete.

  She wondered what Quickercatcher would say when he saw this dig.

  o0o

  A tangle glowed in J.D.’s mind, traced out by the knowledge surface and Victoria’s algorithm.

  The algorithm filled a chasm in the knowledge surface with its bright sharp peaks and spirals, blending its edges in multiple dimensions. It pointed the way home.

  Starfarer dragged behind her, tethered to Nautilus by the tenuous bonds of gravity. The young squidmoth had fallen quiet, gathering itself for another tantrum. The lithoblasts struggled to repair the damage it had done; the lithoclasts ate away beneath its nest, preparing to cut it free.

  But if Nemo’s offspring were cast loose in transition, it would die.

  If it was not cast loose, Starfarer might be lost.

  Europa’s planetoid fell behind, spinning slowly.

  “Stay, J.D.,” Europa said through her link. “You can —”

  The transition point blossomed before J.D. She opened her eyes. She pulled away from the knowledge surface just long enough to feel the stiffness of her body, long enough to see Zev, gazing at her, wondering, waiting.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Nautilus surrounded her again, and together they plunged through space.

  She still had time to change her course, to pass around the eye of transition.

  o0o

  Victoria and Stephen Thomas floated through the transparent tunnel leading to the sailhouse.

  Victoria had been anxious to view transition as intimately as she could. But she was distracted, worried. Gerald Hemminge’s words weighed on her mind. She hated to think that their farewell to Civilization was a threat.

  Stephen Thomas squeezed her hand. Her fingertips rested against the warm silk of his swimming webs. They entered the sailhouse, where Satoshi and Jenny drifted among the stars.

  “There’s nothing more to do,” Satoshi said. “Only wait, and hope.”

  “There’s one thing...” Victoria said.

  o0o

  “Goodbye, Europa,” J.D. said. “Goodbye, Androgeos. Take care of Alzena. I’m...”

  She let her message trail off. Her eyes stung and she was tired of apologizing.

  Nautilus brushed through the knot of cosmic string and plunged out of existence.

  All J.D.’s perceptions of the Four Worlds vanished, cut off by the boundary between normal space and transition.

  The knowledge surface resonated. J.D. was all alone, more alone than she had ever been before. She listened, she watched.

  The buzz and hum of energy echoed in her ears. Energy and gravity sparked and cried and spun.

  Other starships pass, she said to herself. Other ships from Civilization, coming from other destinations. Will I see them?

  o0o

  Victoria finished explaining.

  Stephen Thomas laughed. “Gerald will have a heart attack.”

  Victoria protested. “This is serious!”

  “Sure it is. Gerald will still have a heart attack.”

  “That shouldn’t affect my decision.” Then she giggled. “And it won’t. Not much, anyway.”

  “It’s right,” Satoshi said.

  “It is,” Stephen Thomas said.

  Victoria let her eyelids flutter, sending a message through Arachne toward J.D.

  J.D. did not respond.

  “Look,” Satoshi said.

  A great gentle glow of rainbow light washed over them: the transition spectrum.

  Nautilus had vanished.

  Victoria caught her breath. It scared her to think of J.D. all alone in a place that Victoria could not fully explain or describe.

  “That’s us, in a few more minutes,” Jenny said. “If you’re going to make a decision, you’re going to have to make it soon.”

  “What do you think?” Victoria asked. She wanted the opinion of someone outside her family.

  “I agree,” Jenny said. “I agree with Satoshi and Stephen Thomas. Otherwise your work will end up with people like Blades, like the people who tried to kill us, who killed Feral.”

  Victoria made her decision. She had already made it, but she was glad to have support and confirmation.

  She touched Arachne. Opening Arachne to the Four Worlds, Victoria released her transition algorithm to Europa and Androgeos, to the Farther worlds and the Nearer ones, to Civilization.

  “No!” Gerald shouted, his disembodied voice echoing through Arachne’s transmissions.

  Victoria winced. At the same time, joy rushed toward her from Quickercatcher and his siblings. They dove, entranced, into the complexity of Arachne.

  “How could you?” Gerald cried. “All your work, gone! You’re a traitor to Earth, a traitor to your own kind!”

  Europa’s voice whispered beneath Gerald’s anger.

  “Thank you, Victoria,” she said softly. “Oh, my dear, thank you.”

  Victoria had no time to answer.

  Starfarer plunged into transition.

  At the moment of change, the young squidmoth erupted into a frenzy.

  o0o

  Rock pelted Chandra. A chunk ripped away, carrying her lifeline attachment. The lifeline dropped past her feet and hung beneath her, useless. Chandra clung tight to the web supports. If she fell, she would be flung out into transition forever and no one would ever find her.

  Her enhanced nerves throbbed and pulsed; blood engorged the veins that nourished them. She wished she could take off her spacesuit and expose herself to transition raw, naked.

  More stones pelted her, clanking and bouncing from her helmet and her suit.

  Above her, the young squidmoth thrashed and groaned, transmitting exultation and pain. The milk-white cover of its nest, dried in a pattern like frost on a window, cracked and flaked and fell away. Chips of glass and shards of stone showered down. The broken crust revealed a ropy, leathery brown hide, twisting, pulsing, nothing at all like Nemo’s delicate iridescent scales.

  Beyond the edge of the egg nest, a silver slug pressed itself down from a deep crack in the skin. Chandra expected it to spew rock foam into the crack to fill and stabilize it. Instead, it pressed its snout into the end of the crack, spewed thick solvent onto the broken rock, and slurped up the remains before they boiled away into the vacuum. The crack widened.

  The slug was not a smooth-coated silver lithoblast, but a silver-moiré lithoclast.

  Chandra watched, enchanted by terror.

  The lithoclast was cutting the squidmoth loose.

  And Chandra along with it.

  o0o

  “J.D. is going to kill me,” Infinity said, “if I send Nemo’s kid off into transition.

  “If you don’t,” Esther said grimly, “Starfarer will come out of transition in pieces.”

  “Yeah.” He tried to see better what was going on, but several of the LTMs had been knocked loose and lost. He had only an incomplete picture of the squidmoth nest.

  Overcoming the lithoclasts’s resistance, Infinity urged the silver slugs to cut Starfarer’s skin faster than the lithoblasts could repair it.

  o0o

  Starfarer appeared in transition, chasing Nautilus through the strange multi-dimensional space. J.D. observed it through the knowledge surface, but could not reach Starfarer directly through her link to Arachne.

  She brought herself closer, anxious about her friends. The starship was whole, its cylinders spinning evenly.

  The squidmoth nest rotated into view.

  It had created a crater worse, more damaging, than the crash of the nuclear missile. Silver slugs ringed it, eating at the stone, undercutting the nest, struggling to eject the squidmoth youth from the wild side.

  “Oh, no,” J.D. whispered. “Oh, no, please...”

  But Starfarer had no choice.

  The young squidmoth struggled in its nest, flinging itself back and forth in a panic. The egg nest had peeled away, rev
ealing the being itself. Its ropy skin clenched and spasmed. A long and multiply-articulated appendage stretched down from its center,

  All Nemo’s incarnations, from juvenile through chrysalis to winged adult, had been beautiful. The offspring, to J.D.’s eyes, was ugly. As it spun out of sight, she tried to make herself see it as beautiful, but she could not.

  As it spun out of view, she noticed the spacesuited figure standing beneath it.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas floated in the sailhouse, his body as relaxed as if he had been in the sea. Victoria and Satoshi and Jenny Dupre drifted nearby.

  While they were distracted by transition, he let himself settle into Arachne. He had tried to persuade himself that his partners were safe, that the computer could not be hunting them.

  But he was frightened by their vulnerability, terrified by the danger.

  He opened himself to Arachne.

  o0o

  Chandra stretched herself upward, trying to reach the squidmoth. Its leg, its antenna, whatever it was, flailed wildly. She ducked. It knocked against her, scraping the fabric of her suit, leaving a deep scuff.

  She flattened herself against one of the web supports, holding tight. drawing in every sensation, savoring the terror.

  o0o

  “Infinity, look!” Esther said, incredulous.

  A person stood beneath the writhing alien being as it humped its back and struggled in its crater. Another articulated limb unfolded from the convolutions of the body, caught itself into a tense arch, and whipped against the inspection web. The cable snapped. The thick wire sprang apart, coiling and twisting.

  “Get out of there!” Infinity shouted, out loud and into Arachne. “Who the hell is it?”

  “It’s Chandra, of course,” Esther said. “Who else would it be?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Showing up J.D.?” Esther said. “Trying to get the critter to leave, when J.D. couldn’t?”

  “Trying to get herself killed, is more like it.”

  “Or collecting something unique?

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Infinity said. “There’s no time to get out there and drag her off —” His eyelids flickered and he vanished into a communications fugue. Esther joined him. Arachne was slow and sluggish, all its capacity focussed on transition. Esther saw what Infinity was doing. She took control of a second lithoblast and urged it over the crevasse.

  o0o

  The squidmoth crater spun into J.D.’s view. The being had twisted more of its body into sight.

  Its back humped again. One gnarled end slowly pulled free. It reached through the broken cable, probing blindly, purposefully, with the articulated antenna. It stretched and arched, drawn outward, downward, by the force of the cylinder’s spin. Two upside-down silver slugs crawled toward it, toward the person clinging below it.

  J.D. did not know what to hope for. That the squidmoth would free itself before Infinity Mendez had to cut dangerously deep into the cylinder to expel it, or that it would stay where it was, hang on, and come out of transition safely with Starfarer. But she could not see the end of their course yet, the spot that would lead the starships back into the solar system.

  Maybe I could catch it, she thought. Wait for it to come free, and offer it sanctuary on Nautilus. Maybe it would spend some time in a grave... to save its own life.

  o0o

  Arachne focused intently on Starfarer, on keeping it stable through transition, working to compensate for the struggles of the squidmoth.

  Stephen Thomas waited, and watched.

  A malevolent presence rewarded his patience.

  o0o

  The squidmoth wrenched itself a final time, cracking rock and web supports, knocking Chandra against the cables. She held desperately to the wires. Transition blossomed around her. The squidmoth screamed and cried. Chandra could not tell what sensations came to her through vibration, what came through her link, what came through the suit radio; she could not even distinguish those sensations from what she saw. The nerve clusters covering her body took it all in, gulping the experience like water.

  The squidmoth arched its body, whipped its head and antennae back and forth, and exploded free of the wild side.

  o0o

  The squidmoth flung itself free. It tumbled away from Starfarer, twisting and spinning, a cross between a giant leech and a grasshopper, a horrible creature.

  J.D. slowed Nautilus, determined to do her best to save the being no matter how she felt about it.

  The squidmoth stretched itself, engaged itself with the fabric of transition, and slowed its rapid tumble.

  It sailed toward her, immense and terrifying, the most alien presence she had ever experienced.

  It carried Victoria’s transition algorithm like a newborn child.

  J.D. gasped.

  And then the other squidmoths streamed toward her.

  Many were juveniles, like Nemo, riding the starships they had inherited from the other ones. Others were larval, like those J.D. had left behind in the system of their birth — she touched the knowledge surface and found that the cosmic string had returned to Sirius. Perhaps some of the larvae were Nemo’s offspring.

  They collected around the wild side squidmoth like a swarm, one after another freeing itself from its starship and clustering together. J.D. lost count as the hundreds passed to the thousands. The mass grew until it exceeded the length of Starfarer. The wild side squidmoth, and Victoria’s algorithm, vanished into the center of the roiling melee.

  Nautilus fell abruptly out of transition.

  o0o

  Stephen Thomas watched in awe as a malignant presence reassembled from Arachne’s fabric. It patterned itself on a carcinogenic blueprint that similarly self-assembled from individually banal subsections. It fascinated Stephen Thomas even as it repelled him. It was an extraordinary creation, twisted toward the service of evil, no longer under the control of any intelligence.

  It forayed past the connected nodes of Victoria and Satoshi, blindly seeking the connections Stephen Thomas had severed. Lost, it wandered toward Satoshi’s node.

  Stephen Thomas shouted at it, distracted it with a probe of anger, prepared himself to fight it.

  Without turning, without even moving, it reoriented itself.

  It snatched him by the throat.

  o0o

  Infinity pushed the slug to its limits, crawled it down the shuddering web struts, slid it around and beneath the web itself, and slipped under Chandra where she lay clutching the wires. Esther’s slug approached from the minus-spin side, giving the artist a surface to lean against. Chandra’s breath labored against Infinity’s slug. The lithoblast curled its edges around the cables, securing itself. If it lost its grip, it would fall away into space. It might take Chandra with it.

  “It’s all right,” Infinity said to Chandra. “It’s all right, let’s move back to solid ground.” The squidmoth nest hung suspended from the wild side cylinder by a few arches of rock foam. He freed the other lithoblasts from their inhibitions. They moved toward the crevasse to fill it in.

  o0o

  J.D. gasped at the abrupt change.

  Nautilus moved peacefully into the solar system, a system empty of any connection to Civilization.

  J.D. started to cry.

  She huddled in the soft chair. In her home system, she was more alone than she had ever been before.

  The last thing she wanted to do was send a message to Earth. But she sought the planet out. She had subconsciously feared that Starfarer’s departure might have precipitated war, though Starfarer’s presence in orbit had been a major point of contention.

  She found Earth spinning as peacefully as Nautilus, no clouds of nuclear dust streaking its white swirls of cloud, no patches of biochemical warfare blighting its surface.

  She wiped her eyes. If no one had been watching for her transition spectrum, it would be a while before anyone would notice she had returned. She would wait, wait for Starfarer, and all to
gether they would try to explain what had happened. She was desperately grateful for the quartet’s decision to return with them. Now that the young squidmoth had fled, the quartet was Starfarer’s only physical proof that alien beings existed.

  A wash of rainbow light burst over her.

  Starfarer dropped out of transition and into normal space.

  Zev threw his image instantly into the expedition tent.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you see what happened?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t understand it.”

  Victoria followed Zev, her image forming nearby. “We made it,” she said.

  “Not by much,” Satoshi said. “A close call.”

  “What about Chandra?”

  The artist’s voice expanded around her. “I’m right here,” she said, aggressive and self-confident. “I got stuff no one else could ever get!”

  J.D. laughed with relief, with disbelief.

  o0o

  Simultaneously relieved by their safe transition and depressed by their forced return to Earth, Victoria touched Satoshi’s wrist, and stroked her hand down Stephen Thomas’s arm.

  His skin was cold.

  “Stephen Thomas!”

  She cried out to him, directly through her link.

  Victoria’s distress drew J.D. into Arachne. Zev rushed in behind her. J.D. following her link to the gnarled and poisonous clump that immobilized Stephen Thomas. He struggled vainly, trapped, his strength nearly exhausted. Victoria and Satoshi rushed to help him — they did not look like themselves, but their neural nodes concentrated their personalities; they were unmistakable. Victoria glowed with energy and anger; Satoshi was calmer, a burnished presence of strength.

  Tendrils of the computer tumor stretched toward Victoria’s node, toward Satoshi’s.

  “He’s protecting us,” Satoshi said. “He was right...”

  “Who asked him to protect us — to risk himself — all alone — !”

  J.D. struggled to approach him, but the carcinoma whipped out savagely with sticky, burning tendrils.

  J.D. felt a curious and unfamiliar presence. The quartet appeared, trailing knowledge from their first exploration of Arachne.

  Quickercatcher laid his chin on J.D.’s shoulder and gazed at the malignancy.