Starfarers

Her equipment—her books—had not yet arrived from the transport. She could ask Arachne for something to read. Instead, she curied up on her futon and dug her notebook out of the net bag.

She worked for a while on her new novel. She tried to write a little every day, even when she was busy with other projects. Writing helped her to imagine what it could be like if . . . when, she told herself ... the expedition met other in-

telligent beings.

Her first novel had enjoyed less than magnificent success. Critics complained that it made them feel off balance and confused. Only a few had realized that it was supposed to make them feel off balance and confused; of those, all but one had objected to the experience. That one reviewer had done her the courtesy of assuming she had achieved exactly what she intended, and she valued the comments.

She knew that nothing she could imagine could approach the strangeness of the expedition's first contact with nonTerrestrial beings. She could not predict what would happen.

It was the sense of immersing herself in strangeness that she sought, knowing she would have to meet the reality with equanimity, and wing it from there.

Her library contained a number of novels and stories about first meetings of humanity and alien beings. Those she reread most, her favorites, embodied that sense of strangeness. But it troubled her considerably to find so many fictions ending in misjudgment, incomprehension, intolerance; in violence and disaster.

J.D.'s stories never ended like that.

She put the novel away, got up, and opened the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside lay a long, narrow terrace, bright green with a mixture of new grass and wildflowers-

Victoria had said she could do whatever she liked with the terrace—whatever she could find the time to do. J.D. recognized some of the meadow flowers from the wilderness, but she had never done any gardening. She had no idea where to start. She liked the big rock over at one edge. Barefoot, she walked across the delicate new grass and sat on the heat-polished stone. It had been blasted to slag sometime during

96 Vonda N. Mclntyre

the creation of Starfarer. The melted curves sank gently into the earth. The rock was warm from the heat of the day, but J.D. imagined it remained hot from the blast that had shattered it from its lunar matrix. She imagined heat continuing to radiate from it for eons.

The starship had no sunsets, only a long twilight. Darkness fell, softened by starlight shining on the overhead mirrors. Rectangles of light, other people's uncurtained windows and open doorways, lay scattered across the hillsides. The air quickly cooled, but J.D. remained in her garden, thinking about so suddenly finding herself a member of the alien contact department.

J.D. liked Victoria. She fell grateful that the expedition's original rejection of her application, and her brief rejection of their subsequent invitation, had not destroyed the possibility of friendship. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas she did not know well enough to assess.

J.D. shivered. She thought about kicking in the metabolic enhancer, but decided against it. The rush would remind her

of the sea and the whales, and the divers, and Zev.

She might as weil let the artificial gland atrophy. She would probably never need it again.

She rose and went inside.

The interior of her house was as cool as the terrace. She had not yet told Arachne her preferences for temperature and humidity and light level and background sounds. If she took off the outer doors and the curtains, as Victoria suggested, to open her house to the artificial outdoors, most of that programming would be superfluous. J.D. thought she would leave the doors and the curtains as they were. After the damp, cold mornings of the cabin, the idea of stepping out of bed onto a warm floor appealed to her.

Flicking her eyelids closed, she scanned the web for mail. Nothing important, nothing personal.

Nothing from Zev.

She could send him a message. But it would be easier for both of them if she left him alone. Best for all concerned if she and Zev never talked again. Her eyes bumed. She blinked hard.

She took off her clothes, crawled into bed, ordered the STARFARERS 97

lights off, ordered the curtains open, and lay on her futon gazing into the darkness.

A quick blink of light startled her. She thought it was a flaw in her vision until it happened again, and again. Short, cool, yellow flashes the size of a match head decorated her terrace.

They were fireflies. She had not seen one for a long time.

They did not exist on the West Coast. They were even becoming rare in the East, in their home territories, because of the size and effects of the enormous coastal cities. Here they must be part of the ecosystem.

The ecosystem fascinated her. If it contained fireflies, lightning bugs, did it contain other insects? She would like bees—bees must be essential. But what about ladybugs?

Surely one could not import ladybugs without importing aphids as well. No one in their right mind would introduce aphids into a closed environment intended to be agriculturally self-sufficient. If no noxious insects existed, but the ecologists were trying to establish songbirds, what did the songbirds eat? Did anything eat the songbirds?

J.D. drifted off into complexity, and sleep.

Victoria tapped lightly on Stephen Thomas's door.

"Come in."

The scent of sandalwood surrounded her. Stephen Thomas often brought incense to campus in his allowance. The in-

cense stick glowed, a speck of pink light moving downward through the darkness. The sliding doors stood open to the courtyard, letting in the breeze and mixing the sandalwood with the spice of carnation. The pale white wash of reflected starlight silvered Stephen Thomas's gold hair and his face in quarter profile. He turned toward her.

"Your hair sparkles," he said.

"And yours glows." She let her kimono fall from her shoulders and slid into bed beside him. He wore nothing but the crystal at his throat, as black as obsidian. He rolled onto his side. The crystal slipped along the line of his collarbone, glinting in scarlet and azure.

"Where's Satoshi?" Stephen Thomas asked. "You guys aren't mad at me, are you? Feral looked so downcast when he saw he'd be practically alone in the guesthouse ... "

98 vonda N. Mclntyre

Victoria felt Stephen Thomas shrug in the darkness, beneath her hands.

"Satoshi's in the shower," she said. "He'll be here in a minute. I'm not mad at you, exactly, but, god, Stephen Thomas, your timing is lousy."

She brushed her fingertips down his side and stroked the hard muscles of his thigh and wished Satoshi would hurry up.

Stephen Thomas drew her closer. His soft breath tickled her shoulder.

"I think it's damned nice of us," Victoria said, "to use your room tonight so we don't keep Feral Korzybski awake till morning!"

"What's the matter with my room?" Stephen Thomas said plaintively. His room was a joke among the partnership. He collected stuff the way a magnet collects steel shavings- Victoria's room was almost as Spartan as the fourth bedroom, and Satoshi's works in progress were always organized. Stephen Thomas kept a desk full of bits of equipment and printouts, a comer full of potted plants, and he never picked up his clothes until just before he did his laundry.

"Nothing," Victoria said. "I enjoy sleeping in a midden heap. But my room is right next to our guest, and we've never tested the soundproofing."

Satoshi came in, toweling his hair. He launched himself across the room and came down flat on the bed beside Victoria. He smelled of fresh water and mint soap. A few droplets nicked off the ends of his hair and fell across Victoria's face. His skin was cool and just barely damp from the shower.

He leaned over her and kissed her. The cool droplets of water disappeared in the warmth of his lips and his tongue. Satoshi reached past her and took Stephen Thomas's hand. Their fingers intertwined, gold and silver in the dim light. Victoria reached up and joined her hand to theirs, adding ebony to the pattern. She hooked her leg over Satoshi's thighs, and as she turned toward him drew Stephen Thomas with her, closer against her back and side. His breath quickened and his long silky hair slipped across her shoulder. Mint and carnation and sandalwood and arousal surrounded them with a dizzying mix. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas surrendered themselves to it, and to each other.

Victoria woke when the sun tube spilled light through the open wall of Stephen Thomas's bedroom. Stephen Thomas lay on the far side of the bed, stretched on his side, his hair curling down across his neck and shoulder, one hand draped across Satoshi's back. Satoshi sprawled in the middle of the bed, facedown, arms and legs flung every which way, his hair kinked in a wing from being slept on wet. Victoria watched her partners sleeping, wishing they could stay in bed all morning, in the midst of the comfortable clutter. The scent of sandalwood lingered.

Stephen Thomas yawned and turned over, stretching. He rubbed his eyes and blinked and yawned again, propped himself on his elbow, and looked at her across Satoshi. 'Satoshi snored softly.

"Good morning," Stephen Thomas whispered.

"Good morning." Victoria, too. kept her voice soft. "Is that how weasels screw?"

He laughed.

"Shh, you'll wake Satoshi."

They got up, creeping quietly away so Satoshi could wake up at his own pace. Stephen Thomas grabbed some clean clothes from the pile in the corner. Victoria had no idea how he always managed to look so good. When she referred to his room as a midden heap, she was only half joking.

After a shower, Victoria smoothed the new clothes in her closet but resisted the urge to wear them. They were party

99

100 Vonda N. Mclntyre

clothes, inappropriate for work. She put on her usual jeans and shirt and sandals, reflecting that back on earth, on almost any other campus, what she had on would be considered inappropriate for a professor.

Victoria smelled something burning. Something burning?

Stephen Thomas's incense—? She hurried into the hallway.

She stopped short. The smell of food, cooking, filled the apartment.

None of the three surviving members of the partnership was much of a cook. Merit had known how to cook. These days Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas ordered meals from the central kitchen when they had time to eat together.

Victoria drew a deep breath. Getting upset because someone had decided to make breakfast was silly. It was just that

the homey smell brought back memories.

Satoshi was the best cook among them, but Victoria knew from long acquaintance that Satoshi was not cooking breakfast. If he was even out of bed she would be surprised. That left Stephen Thomas.

"He can bum water" had always been a metaphorical phrase to Victoria, until Stephen Thomas once put water on for coffee, forgot about it, and melted a kettle all over the heating element.

The breakfast smelled much better than burning water or melting kettles. Stephen Thomas was always trying new things; maybe cooking lessons were his newest enthusiasm.

Victoria headed to the main room. At the stove. Feral Korzybski glanced over his shoulder.

"Morning," he said. "I wanted to make myself useful."

He gestured to the set table, the skillet. "You folks sure don't have much equipment."

"We don't cook here very much," she said. "No time."

"It's a hobby of mine," he said. "I think this wilt be edible." He poked the edges of the big omelet, letting the uncooked egg run underneath to sizzle against the hot pan.

"Are you ready for tea?"

"Sure."

He poured boiling water into her teapot.

"I talked to the database—"

"Arachne," Victoria said.

STARFARERS 101

"Right, thanks. I talked to Arachne about what was available for people to cook. Strange selection."

"Not if you consider how and where it's produced. We're beginning to grow things ourselves. But a lot of fresh stuff, and most everything that's processed, is from one of the colonies."

Stephen Thomas sauntered barefoot into the main room.

He wore orange satin running shorts and a yellow silk lank top. Victoria tried to imagine the combination on anyone else, and failed.

"What's for breakfast?" he said.

Feral dumped the filling into the omelet and folded it expertly. "Let me see if I can remember everything I put in it.

The eggs were fresh—that surprised me."

"We grow those here."

"With or without chickens?"

"With." Victoria laughed. "We aren't that high-tech."

"The mushrooms are reconstituted but the green onions and the tomatoes were fresh. I was hoping I could get micro-grav vegetables, but Arachne didn't offer them. I've seen them in magazines—perfectly round tomatoes, and spherical carrots, and beans in corkscrews—but I don't know anyone who can afford to cook with them."

"We don't get any of those out here. The colonies export them all to earth. There are problems with growing plants in quantity in micrograv, so whatever you get is labor-intensive. Especially those corkscrew beans."

"I can see where they would be. That's it—except for the cheese. The package said, 'Tillamook Heights.' "

"That's from a colony. The people who run one of the dairies there emigrated from someplace called Tillamook—"

"It's on the West Coast of the United States," Stephen Thomas said to Victoria. "A few hundred kilometers south of Vancouver." He liked to tease her about her Canadian chauvinism, about the way she sometimes pretended to know less about the United States than she really did. He could get away with it.

"—and they wanted to name the dairy after their original place. But 'Tillamook East' or 'Tillamook South' didn't sound right, so: Tillamook Heights."

"I like it." Feral rubbed his upper lip and gazed blankly 102 vonda N. Mcintyre

at the omelet, filing the information away, thinking of how to use it in a story.

"Your omelet's about to bum," Victoria said.

He snatched the pan off the single-burner stove.

"Damn!" He lifted the edge of the omelet. "Just in time. Where's Satoshi?"

"Still asleep, probably."

"Damn," he said again. "I thought you were all up. This is no good cold. I'll go get him."

"Don't, if you value your life," Stephen Thomas said.

"Trust me, he'd much rather eat your omelet cold than have you wake him up. You would, too."

"All right," Feral said, doubtful and disappointed.

The omelet tasted wonderful.

"The coffee's great," Stephen Thomas said. "What did you do to it?"

Victoria took his cup and tried a sip. It was much stronger than she was used to, but tasted less bitter, almost the way coffee smelled.

"I'll show you. It's not hard, but if you boil it you might as well throw it out and start over. That's what I did with what you had in the pot."

Feral ate part of his omelet, occasionally glancing with some irritation at the warmer where he had left Satoshi's share.

"It isn't the same warmed over," he said. He got up, poured coffee from the thermos into a mug, and disappeared down the corridor.

Victoria and Stephen Thomas looked at each other. Stephen Thomas shrugged.

"It's his hide," he said.

Feral returned unscathed. He got the last quarter of the omelet out of the warmer and put it at Satoshi's place. A minute later Satoshi himself appeared, wearing Victoria's hapi coat, carrying the coffee cup, and apparently wide awake. He joined them at the table.

"Nice morning, isn't it?" He sipped his coffee. "That's very good," he said. He put it down and started eating his omelet.

Victoria watched him, amazed.

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"Do you want a job?" Stephen Thomas said to Feral.

"No, thanks. I'm self-employed."

J.D. woke very early in the morning, too early, she thought, to call the other members of the alien contact team. Feeling restless, she went for a walk. She suspected that on board Starfarer she would have trouble getting enough exercise, here where she would have neither opportunity nor time to swim several hours each day.

A stream trickled past her house. She followed it. Soon a second stream joined it, and the combined watercourse cut down through the hill. J.D. found herself walking between sheer cliffs.

The cliff must be designed, J.D. thought. There had been no time for the stream to cut it. Starfarer's interior topography was carefully sculpted. Striped with stone colors, this sculpture looked like a water-eroded cliffside of sedimentary rock.

J.D. rounded a bend and stopped in surprise.

Beside the stream, someone scraped at the bank, probing with a slender trowel. A blanket lay on the ground, covered with bones.

"Hi, good morning," J.D. said. "What are you doing?"

The young digger glanced at her and stood up, stretching her back and her arms. She was small and slight, with a sweatband tied around her forehead. It rumpled her short straight black hair.

"Digging for fossils," she said.

J.D. looked at her askance. "It seems to me." she said,

"that if you'd found fossils in lunar rock, the news would be all over the web by now.''

"Not digging to take them out," she said. "Digging to put them in."

"You're making a fossil bed?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"Don't you think we deserve some prehistory, too?"

J.D. leaned over the blanket. The relics resembled the exoskeletons of huge insects more than any mammalian bones.

"Whose prehistory is this?" she asked.

"Whoever came before."

"Whoever came before didn't look much like us."

104 vonda N. Mdntyre "Of course not."

"What department are you in?"

"Archaeology."

"But—" J.D. stopped. "1 think I'm being had."

"I'm Crimson Ng. Art department."

"J.D. Sauvage. Alien contact—"

"You're the new AC specialist! Welcome on board." She stuck out her grubby hand. J.D. shook it.

"But why are you burying fossils of a different species?"

"I'm just one of those crazy artists," Crimson said.

"Come on," J.D. said.

Crimson opened up to J.D.'s interest.

"Every time the argument about evolution comes along again, I start wondering what would happen if it were true that god invented fossils to fool us with. What if god's got a sense of humor? If I were god, I'd plant a few fossils that wouldn't fit into the scheme, just for fun."

"And that's what these are? Does that mean you're playing god?"

"Artists always play god," Crimson said.

"Don't you believe in evolution?"

"That's a tough word, 'believe.' Believing, and knowing what the truth is—you're talking about two different things.

Human beings are perfectly capable of believing one thing metaphorically, and accepting evidence for a completely different hypothesis. That's the simplest definition of faith that I know. It's the people who don't have any faith, who can't tell the difference between metaphor and reality, who want to force you to believe one thing only."

"I can't figure out who you're making fun of," J.D. said.

"That's the point," the artist said with perfect seriousness. "Everybody needs to be made fun of once in a while."

"Oh, I don't know," J.D. said. "I can get along without being made fun of for two or three days at a time without permanent damage."

Crimson glanced at her quizzically, then picked up one of the artifacts. The long and delicate claw nestled in her hand.

J.D. could imagine an intelligent being with those claws instead of hands, a being as dexterous and precise as any human.

"What happens if everybody forgets you've put these things STARFARERS 105

here," J.D. said, "and then somebody comes along and digs them up?"

"My god, that would be wonderful."

"What will people think?"

"Depends on who they are. And how smart they are. I'm trying to create a consistent prehistory, one that doesn't lead to us. Maybe future archaeologists will figure it out. Maybe they'll realize it's fiction. Maybe they won't. And maybe they'll think it was god playing a joke, and they'll laugh."

"And then they'll figure out that you made the bones."

"Oh, I don't think so," Crimson said. "I grew them very carefully. You shouldn't be able to tell them from real. And I cooked the isotopes, so the dating will be consistent." She grinned. "Got to get back to work."

She returned to her fossil bed.

J.D. watched her for a few minutes, then continued on beside the stream. She smiled to herself. She wished she could tell Zev and the whales about this. They would, she thought, find it very funny.

Though she was curious how J.D. had liked her first night on the starship, though she was eager to get out to the sailhouse for the first full test of Slarfarer's solar sail, and though she was anxious to get over to the physics department and get back to work, Victoria also wanted to give Satoshi and Stephen Thomas the presents she had brought from earth. But she wanted to do it when they were alone. As she was thinking up a polite way to ask Feral to leave for a while, Stephen

Thomas put one hand on the reporter's shoulder.

"Feral," he said, smiling, "thank you for breakfast. Why don't you go look around, and we'll see you in the sailhouse later."

"Huh? Oh. Okay." He drained his coffee cup. "I'd like to visit the alien contact department," he said to Victoria. "Would that be all right?"

"Sure. This afternoon."

"Thanks." He sauntered cheerfully out of the house.

"How do you get away with that?" Victoria asked.

Stephen Thomas looked at her quizzically. "Get away with what?"

106 vonda N. Mclntyre

"Never mind." She picked up the carrying net and opened it flat on the table.

"This is for the household," she said. She pulled out a package of smoked salmon.

"We should save this for sometime special," Satoshi said. "Maybe even after we leave."

One thing habitat designers had not figured out was a way to grow anadromous fish in a space colony. The salt marshes, so important to the ecosystem, could not support deep-water fish.

Victoria handed Stephen Thomas a rectangular gold box.

He took it carefully and hefted it gently.

"I know what this is," he said.

"I had my fingers crossed at lift-off," Victoria said. "It survived."

Stephen Thomas grinned, opened the box, and drew out a bottle of French champagne.

"Victoria, this is great, thank you."

She had known he would like it. And she knew why he liked it. Before Stephen Thomas joined the partnership, she had never drunk good champagne. By now she had tasted it several times. Saying that she had drunk it hardly seemed accurate, for each sip flowed over the tongue and vanished in a tickly barrage of minuscule bubbles.

"Something else for a special occasion," Stephen Thomas said. He was never stingy with his things. Whenever he managed to get good champagne to Starfarer, he shared it with his partners.

"I bought it in a fit of enlightened self-interest," Victoria said.

She handed Satoshi one of his presents. "Not quite on the same scale, but ... "

He smiled, carefully unfolding the tissue paper from the package of chili paste. Victoria and Stephen Thomas always brought back chili paste for him. Victoria could not stand the stuff herself. Sometimes she wondered if, in fifty years, Sa-toshi would confess that forty years before, he had developed a loathing for chili paste, but wanted to spare the feelings of his partners.

"We'll have to get something good to drink with it," he said.

STARFARERS 107

"Oh, no, not my champagne," their younger partner said.

"If you're going to blast your taste buds, you can do it with local beer."

Victoria gave Stephen Thomas his second package. This one was as light as the first had been heavy. He untied the scarf that wrapped it. Victoria never wrapped his presents in paper, because wrapping paper was hard to come by in the starship and he always tore it.

She had brought him two of the loose silk shirts he liked.

The ones he had now he had worn almost to rags. He still wore them. He lifted the new turquoise one, and saw the bright red one beneath it.

"Victoria, these are incredible!" He put on the turquoise shirt. It intensified the clear blue of his eyes. He stroked the smooth fabric. "How does it look?"

"How do you think?" She put one hand on his shoulder and let her fingers slide down his back. The silk felt soft; his muscles, hard. He met her gaze and reached out, letting his arm match the curve of hers.

"It looks terrific, kid," Satoshi said. "Don't wear it into any dark bars—we'll have to wade in and rescue you."

They all laughed. Victoria wished it were evening; she wished they were sitting around the dinner table getting silly on champagne. She handed Satoshi his second present.

He unfolded the wrapping, smoothed it, set it aside, and opened the plain white box.

He pushed aside the cushioning and lifted out the white bowl. The sunlight touched it and turned the graceful round shape translucent. Satoshi caught his breath.

"It's absolutely beautiful."

"It rings," she said.

He tapped it with his fingernail. The porcelain gave off a soft, clear tone. Satoshi looked at her. The smile-lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled.

"Thank you."

"When I saw it . . ." Victoria said, "you know. if anyone had told me I'd be moved nearly to tears by a porcelain dish, I'd've told them they were nuts."

Last she gave him the stones she had picked up on the beach after her first meeting with J.D.

108 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"These . . . they aren't really anything, just something I found. I thought you might like them."

They were gnarled and smooth, like wind-blasted trees;

some had holes bored straight through them. A few carried holes bored partway through, with the shell of the creature that had made the hole left behind, stuck inside after it bored its way in, and grew. One stone was a mass of holes, till nothing was left but a lacework of edges.

"I kept hoping nobody would pick up my allowance and say, 'What have you got in here, rocks?' If I admitted I was carrying plain rocks out of the gravity well, no telling what Distler would do with that."

Satoshi chuckled. "These aren't just plain rocks." He held one in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. Victoria recognized it as the one she had kept in her pocket all the way back home; rubbing it had given it a slightly darker color.

Victoria found herself in a mood more suitable for the end of Christmas morning: glad her partners liked what she had brought for them, but sorry that the occasion had ended.

They spent a few minutes tidying up, giving the dirty dishes to the house AS, then left to meet J.D. and go out to the sailhouse to watch the solar sail's first full deployment.

As Victoria left the house, she saw Satoshi's porcelain bowl in the center of the table. The gnarled sea-worn stones lay artlessly, precisely placed within its smooth white concavity. Victoria gazed at the stones, at the bowl. The arrangement's effect was calming, yet it was also arousing, and in a definitely sexual way. Victoria wondered how Satoshi had managed that.

Griffith woke at the silent arrival of an AS with his breakfast from the communal kitchen. He had slept as he always slept, soundly but responsive to his surroundings, waking once just before dawn when a bird startled him by singing outside his window.

Only one of the other guests had slept in the guesthouse.

The other had yet to make an appearance; Griffith would have heard if anyone had come in during the night. No one had taken any notice of Griffith, and his things remained undisturbed.

He wolfed his breakfast, hungry after two days in zero-STARFARERS 109

gravity. Leaving by way of the emergency exit rather than the front door, he set off to continue his exploration.

Griffith had read all the plans, all the speculations, all the reports. He knew why Starfarer resembled a habitat instead of a vehicle. He understood the reasons for its size. He even understood the benefits of designing it to be aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, both his irritation and his envy increased as he strode along paths that led through what for him was, even in its raw and unfinished form, a paradise. He had no chance at all of living in a similar environment back on earth. He did occasionally work with—more accurately, for—people who were extremely wealthy or extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. They owned places like this. But regular scientists, regular administrators, regular government employees, lived in the city and liked it. They figured out ways to like it, because they had no choice.

People who had lived here would never consider going back to the crowds and noise and pollution of earth. Not willingly. Back on earth, Griffith had been skeptical of the suggestion that the personnel of the starship intended to take it away and never bring it back, either turning it into a generation ship and living on it permanently, or seeking a new, unspoiled planet to take over. That suggestion smacked too baldly of conspiracy theories for Griffith. Now, though, he found the idea more reasonable to contemplate.

The contemplation made his analysis easier.

He looked up.

The sun tubes dazzled him. He blinked and held out his hand to block off the most intense part of the light. To either side of the mirrors, the cylinder arched overhead, curving all the way around him to meet itself at his feet.

He had seen such views looking down from a mountain, during brief training exercises outside the city. Looking up for a view was disorienting. A multiple helix of streams flowed from one end of the campus to the other. Here and there the streams flowed beneath the green-tipped branches of a newly planted strip of trees, or widened and vanished into a bog of lilies and other water-cleansing plants; cr widened into silver-blue lakes or marshlands. A wind-surfer skimmed across one of the lakes. The brightly colored sail caught the morning breeze. Small gardens formed square or

110 vonda N. Mclntyre

irregular patches of more intense green in the midst of intermittent blobs of ground cover.

It would all be very pretty when the plants finished growing together over the naked soil. But it was unnecessary. Machines could clean the water and the air nearly as well as the plants could. Well enough for human use. A ship a fraction this size could store years and years' worth of supplies. Griffith found the claim of the necessity of agriculture to be questionable at best. Wind-surfing was a quaint way of getting exercise, but treadmills and exercise bikes were far more efficient in terms of the space required, not to mention the time. If the scientists had intended to set out on a proper

expedition they would have designed a proper ship.

Griffith tried to imagine what the cylinder would look like when all the plants reached their full growth. As yet the intensely green new grass remained thin and tender, brown earth showing between the blades. Other ground cover lay in patches, not yet grown together, and most of the trees were saplings, branchy and brown. Some of the vegetation in the wild cylinder, according to the reports, had been transported from the O'Neills, but most came from single-celt clones engendered on board Starfarer. It was far too expensive to import bedding plants or trees all the way from earth. The cell banks of Starfarer boasted something like a million different kinds of plants and animals. Griffith thought it extravagance and waste.

He kept walking, following a faint, muddy path worn through new grass. They should at least pave their paths. He saw practically no one. Half the people working on Starfarer had been called back by their governments in protest over the changes the United States was proposing in Starfarer's mission.

Griffith had drafted most of the changes.

Now that he was here, he could see even more possibilities.

If he had to, he would accede gracefully to the objection that the cylinder was too large to use as a military base. He would turn the objection to his advantage. The body of the cylinder was a treasury of raw materials, minerals, metal ore, even ice from deposits of water that had never thawed since the moon's formation. Starfarer could be mined and re-created.

He would rather see it used as an observation platform and

STARFARERS 111

staging area. That way its size would be useful. It could be as radical a training ground as Santa Fe, the radiation-ruined city. Griffith had spent a lot of time there, wearing radiation protection, inventing and testing strategies against urban terrorism and tactical weaponry. He imagined working up here under similar conditions. It would be easy to evacuate the air from the cylinders. A spacesuit could hardly be more cumbersome than radiation garb.

He did not see any problem in taking over the starship.

Now that Distler had won the election, Griffith's political backing was secure. MacKenzie's ill-considered comments could only speed things along.

When he first started studying the starship, he could not believe it was unarmed, that its naive philosophy allowed it-required it'—to vanish into the unknown without weapons.

Getting weapons on board was Griffith's next priority.

Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas walked over to J.D.'s house. Victoria wished she had invited her to breakfast. She would have, if she had known that Feral would be around.

None of the paths on board Starfarer, even the paved ones,

had been designed for three people walking abreast. In this the starship was much like Terrestrial towns. Saioshi was in the middle, so Victoria and Stephen Thomas alternated walking on the verge. Knee-high bushes sprinkled dew against Victoria's legs.

"Hello!"

They paused at the edge of J.D.'s yard. She appeared in the open doorway and beckoned them inside.

"Good morning."

"How did you sleep?"

"Just fine. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get used to a new place, but this feels like home."

They followed her into the main room. Her boxes of books stood in stacks; books from opened boxes stood in stacks. J.D. had set several of the packing boxes together to form makeshift shelves. Starfarer's houses contained few bookshelves, since everyone used the web or temporary hard copy.

"This will have to do till I can get something more substantial. What do I do to requisition some boards?"

112 vonda N. Mclntyre

"Plant a tree," Stephen Thomas said.

J.D. looked at him curiously.

"Wood is scarce," Victoria explained. "The trees are still growing. What you want is some slabs of rock foam."

Stephen Thomas picked up one of the old books, handling it gingerly, as if it would disintegrate in his hands. As it probably would.

"Why do you have all these?"

"For research. They give me ideas that I try to build on."

"Nothing a human being is going to think of is going to match a real first contact," Stephen Thomas said.

"No," J.D. said. "It's not. But the ideas are for mind-stretching, not script-writing."

She picked a book out of an open box. The cover painting looked like a peeled eyeball.

"Here's one," she said. "It's got a story in it called 'The Big Pat Boom,' by Damon Knight. Aliens visit earth and decide that cowpats are great art. They want to buy them and take them back home—to alien planets. So everybody on earth tries to comer the market in cowpats. What would you do?"

Victoria laughed. "What would I do with a cowpat? Yuck."

"What," Stephen Thomas asked plaintively, "is a cow-pat?"

Satoshi explained. Stephen Thomas snorted in disbelief.

"I can't even think how I'd move a cowpat," Victoria said.

"I haven't read the story in a long time," J.D. admitted.

"I forget the exact details. I think they let the cowpats dry before they try to move them."

"What did they do about the dung beetles and the maggots?" Satoshi asked.

"I don't know," J.D. said. "I didn't know about the dung beetles and the maggots."

"Your science fiction writer must have used some poetic license," Satoshi said.

"How did you get to be such an expert on cowpats?" Victoria asked.

"I'm a font of wisdom," Satoshi said, doing a subtle imitation of Stephen Thomas in his occasional pompous mode.

He grinned. "And I used to spend summers on Kauai herding cattle. I saw a lot of cowpats. Or steerpats, as it happens."

"Come on," J.D. said, "what would you do?"

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"I'd go looking for some different aliens," Stephen Thomas said.

"I guess I'd let them buy the cowpats," Satoshi said.

"I think we should try to get the cow farmers—"

"Ranchers," Satoshi said.

"Okay, ranchers—to give the aliens the cowpats as a gesture of friendship." Victoria chuckled. "Though I don't know how that would go over with the proponents of free trade."

"That's a good idea," J.D. said. "I hadn't thought of that alternative."

"The government would buy them and form a whole new bureaucracy to decide which aliens to give the shit to," Stephen Thomas said.

Everybody laughed.

"I'd nominate our new chancellor to be the minister of that department," Satoshi said.

J.D. glanced at him quickly, startled. Victoria found it interesting that the chancellor had earned Satoshi's dislike so quickly. Satoshi was notoriously slow to take offense.

"Here's one," J.D. said. "About some kids who smuggle a cat onto a space station."

"Don't show that one to Alzena," Victoria said. "She swore she'd draw and quarter anyone who smuggled a predator on board."

One of the makeshift shelves collapsed. J.D. tried to catch the books as they spilled out in a heap on the floor.

"Oh, this is hopeless," J.D. said. "But it's been so long since I had my books out. I was afraid they'd mildew at the cabin."

Satoshi picked up some of the fallen books and put them back in the box, setting it on its base rather than trying to use it as a shelf.

"I'll walk you through requisition," Victoria said. "The supply department can't be busy these days. . . . You can probably get some real shelves in a day or two."

"AH right. Thanks."

"No problem," Victoria said. "Come on, let's go watch the sail test!"

Infinity led Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov toward the guesthouse, trying to explain the problem about Floris Brown. The

114 Vonda N. Mdntyre

trouble was, he felt so intimidated about talking to the cosmonaut that he kept getting tangled in his words.

' 'I took her to the guesthouse last night. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't just leave her in the garden. I sleep there sometimes, but you can't let an old person sit out all night in the dew. Do you know what I mean?"

"I do have some experience speaking English."

"I know that, I mean, I didn't mean—"

"I suppose you could not leave her to sit in the garden, but she might have come to her senses and moved back into her house if you had."

"She's pretty stubborn."

Infinity glanced sidelong at Nikolai Petrovich. This was the first time he had talked to the cosmonaut. Physically, Cherenkov was still vigorous. He had been tall for a cosmonaut, nearly two meters. The bone loss of years in space, in zero-g, had given him a pronounced stoop. His posture caused him to peer out at the world from beneath his brows. Exposure to sun and radiation had weathered his skin as severely as if he had spent his life in the desert. His dark brown hair was turning gray in discrete streaks. Gray striped his bushy eyebrows.

He turned his head and caught Infinity looking at him. His gaze locked with Infinity's.

His age was in his eyes. Infinity felt a chill, a prickle of awe.

Nikolai Petrovich smiled.

"Why do you think an old stranger like me would change

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt her mind, when you could not?"

"You can tell her it isn't a nursing home."

"That is what she fears?"

"That's what she said."

"She thinks Thanthavong and I are geriatric cases."

Embarrassed, Infinity tried to think of something to say. "She doesn't understand . . -"

Cherenkov chuckled.

"Where does she wish to live?" the cosmonaut asked.

"She wasn't quite clear on that. It sounded like she wanted to live in her own house by herself, but she also wanted her family around. I guess she couldn't have either one back on earth."

STARFARERS 115

"So she came here. Alone."

"Right. She said they'd put her in a nursing home, and she'd die."

"I see. I remain here ... for similar reasons."

"I know," Infinity said.

It was not a nursing home that would kill Nikolai Pelrovich if he went back to earth. The executioners of the Mideast Sweep did not wait for their victims to turn themselves in.

"Why did you come to me, instead of going to the housing committee?"

That was a good question. Infinity realized that the answer was, he wanted an excuse to meet the cosmonaut face-to-face. He was embarrassed to say so.

"There are lots of empty houses, but they either belong to people or they're just shells. Nothing's been finished in a couple months. There's hardly anybody left on the housing committee to do the finishing. Just a few Americans and a Canadian and a Cuban."

"You are still here. You are Cuban, perhaps?"

"No. I use the U.S. passport mostly, but my father was Japanese and Brazilian and my mother was United Tribes, so depending on what rules I pay attention to, I can claim four citizenships."

"And four political entities can claim your allegiance. Complicated."

"It could be, but political entities don't spend much time claiming allegiance from metalworkers turned gardener."

"More fools they," Nikolai Petrovich said.

"Anyway," Infinity said, "I can't ask the committee to put her in somebody's house, because we're all pretending everything is going to be all right and they're coming back and the expedition will go on the way it's planned."

"Pretending?"

"Yeah," Infinity said. "What else? If the Defense Department decides they want us, they'll have us, just like they get everything else they want."

"You are cynical."

"I know how it works!" Infinity said. He fell silent, wishing he had not spoken with such bluntness.

Nikolai Petrovich walked along beside him in silence for a

116 vonda N. Mclntyre

she was from the United States?

while. "Your mother The Southwest?"

Infinity shrugged. It did not mean much to be from one of the Southwest tribes anymore. He wished he had not given Cherenkov the key to his background by bringing up the Department of Defense. They had ripped the Southwe&t land away from the people who inhabited it, and in doing so they had ripped the heart and soul out of most of the people Infinity had been closest to.

"We will not speak of it further,*' Nikolai Petrovich said,

"and we will continue to pretend. So Ms. Brown has the choice of the guesthouse, or the first level of our hill. You wish me to help you persuade her to live in the hill."

"I thought she'd like it. Especially the garden ... I think the best I could get for her, for a while, would be a place with no windows yet, and mud puddles outside."

"The garden you made for her is beautiful," Nikolai Petrovich said. "I notice the changes."

"I saw your footprints sometimes, where you stood to look at things. I wondered what you thought about it," Infinity said, feeling unreasonably pleased. "It'll look better when it's finished. When it has time to settle in and grow for a while. The other thing is, there's a welcome party tonight and if it isn't going to be at her hill I need to tell people where to go. Or whether to go at all. Urn, are you coming?"

The invitation was general, but he had done a special one for Cosmonaut Cherenkov, and left it not only in electronic form on the web but in written form on his doorstep.

"I seldom accept invitations these days,** Nikolai Petrovich said in a neutral tone. Infinity did not know if that meant he was going to make an exception, or if he was put out to have been invited. "A party, you say. Is this sort of thing to become a common occurrence?"

"I don't know. Depends on her, I guess."

"Perhaps I should encourage her to stay in the guesthouse," the cosmonaut said drily. "I value my privacy."

"Oh," Infinity said. "I didn't ... 1 mean—Pm sure it won't get too noisy. I'll tell people to keep it down." He stopped. "I'm sorry."

"Nichivo, " Nikolai Petrovich said. "The truth is I am sel-STARFARERS 117

dom at home and I probably would not notice. I had planned to go away later.''

"Then you will talk to her?**

"I am here with you, after all," the cosmonaut said.

Griffith relumed to the guesthouse. He had ten kilobytes of notes filed away in the web, scrambled and guarded, and plans for a tour of the infrastructure tomorrow. An inspector for the General Accounting Office had complete freedom, and no one on board to answer to.

In the hall, he hesitated. Beyond the central stairway, one of the occupied rooms stood open. Several people laughed, and someone spoke. Griffith frowned, trying to place the familiar voice.

He strode quietly down the hall.

"You see that I would not be such a disaster as a neighbor."

"No one will come to visit," a second voice said, a voice that was quivery, feathery.

"Give it a chance, ma'am." The third voice belonged to someone who had grown up speaking Spanish and English both, and at least one other language that Griffith, to his annoyance, could not pin down. He walked past the open doorway and glanced inside.

"They will visit if you wish. Believe me. I had to train them very hard before they gave up and accepted me as a hermit."

Griffith stopped, staring at the man who sat hunched on the window seat. Griffith was more familiar with him as he had looked when he was younger, but age could not distort the wide, high cheekbones, the square line of the jaw. It only intensified the unusual gray streaks in the man's dark hair.

"My god!" Griffith said. "You are Cherenkov!"

The younger man jumped to his feet, startled; the elderly woman flinched. The old man turned toward Griffith.

"Yes." His voice was as calm as before. "But I prefer my acquaintances to address me as Kolya. Who are you?"

"Griffith, GAO. I heard your voice, I recognized it. Sir, I

just want to express my admiration for your exploits, your bravery—"

"I was very young," Cherenkov said. Suddenly he sounded 118 Vonda N. Mcfntyre

tired. "Only young people are foolish enough for that kind of bravery. Will you join us? This is Mr. Mendez, who is an artist of the earth. This is Ms. Brown, who has just moved here."

"You frightened me," the old lady said with frail dignity.

"I didn't mean to," Griffith said. He looked her up and down. Grandparents in Space was a program he intended to use against the expedition. With Ms. Brown as the program's first member, he thought his attack would be even more effective.

"Will you have some tea?" Ms. Brown said.

The chance to talk to Cherenkov lured him in.

"Sure."

As Griffith entered the room, Mendez sank down on the edge of the bed. Griffith could feel his attention, his suspicion, his fear. He was a strange-looking character, with long thick black hair tied up on the top of his head. He wore a couple of earrings and a grubby, fringed leather vest. Dirt was ground permanently into the knees of his pants. Pretending to be oblivious to the younger man's discomfort, Griffith sat next to him. Cherenkov had the window seat, and Ms.

Brown the only chair. The old woman leaned forward and tremulously poured another cup of tea.

"What is GAO?" Cherenkov asked. "I'm not familiar with that branch of the military.''

"GAO's the General Accounting Office, sir," he said. "It isn't military at all. I'm just here to do a few surveys. Check the outlays and so forth."

"Ah. By your carriage, I took you for a military man."

Griffith made himself chuckle. "Well, sir, the drill sergeant would accept that as a compliment. She said I was hopeless.

I did my time. General, like everybody else."

"Your sergeant drilled into you too much military courtesy.

You must not call me 'general* or 'sir.' If you must use a title, 'tovarishch' will do. I still prefer 'Kolya.* "

"I'll try to remember, sir, er . . . Kolya. It wasn't the sergeant who drilled that into me so much as ten years in government." Cherenkov put him off balance. He sipped his tea to cover his discomfort, to conceal the intensity of his interest. He wondered if he could get Cherenkov to talk about the past without putting his own cover at risk. Griffith glanced

STARFARERS 119

at Mendez, sitting beside him and holding a teacup with surprising delicacy. "So you're part of one percent for art," he said.

"I'm a gardener," Mendez said.

"But the general said—"

"It was a joke," Mendez said, looking down, embarrassed.

"A joke'" Cherenkov said. "Hardly. You are an artist, and my admiration is sincere. Floris, did you admire Infinity's work when you walked through the garden?"

'*! used to have roses," she said. "But when I moved, there wasn't any room for roses."

"We don't have too many roses up here yet," Infinity said.

"We needed ground cover first. Annuals are fastest. Roses take a while to get established, and they need a lot of hand labor."

"Oh." Ms. Brown's voice was small and sad and disappointed.

"I could try to get some, though," Infinity said.

Griffith decided the old woman was self-centered at best and getting on toward senile at worst, and he did not understand what she was doing here. The one percent program was bad enough; who ever heard of an art department on a scientific expedition? But grandparents^ Next thing, they would be shipping kids up, or having their own. He supposed that if he were planning to create a generation ship he might want to begin with a complete age-mix. He filed the information away for further use.

"Floris," Cherenkov said, "will you consent to be my neighbor for a week? If at the end of that time you prefer to move, I will speak to the housing committee on your behalf.

I have some credibility here."

She hesitated, watching him and blinking, like some elderly cold-blooded reptile waiting for the sun to warm her enough that she could move and think.

"They said I had to stay even if I didn't like it," she said. "I had to sign a paper." She waited expectantly.

"Transportation is expensive," Cherenkov said. "But papers can sometimes be changed. This I cannot promise, but if in a week you ask for my help in the respect of returning to earth, I will do what I can."

Though it would be better for Griffith's purposes if Ms.

12 0 Vonda N. Mdntyre

Brown stayed, he thought Cherenkov would be doing the expedition a favor to have the old woman sent home whether she wanted to go or not. He could not imagine anyone refusing a request that Cherenkov made.

"I'd like to go to my house now."

Ms. Brown made Griffith fee! creepy, the way she responded to comments without really acknowledging them.

"Excellent," Cherenkov said. "Infinity, 1 will entrust FIoris's comfort to you. I must hurry—I have another obligation."

He left the room. Griffith put his cup down with a clatter and hurried after him.

"Sir! I mean, Kolya—"

He caught up to Cherenkov, who continued without pause.

The cosmonaut had a strange, careful way of walking, as if he feared that gravity would trap him forever on the ground.

"You said your name was Griffith," Cherenkov said. "Is that your surname or your given name?''

"Surname."

"And your given name?"

Griffith felt a blush rising. He had not blushed for years.

He hoped his tan concealed it; he hoped Cherenkov did not notice. Then Cherenkov glanced at him, and Griffith knew that even if his tan did conceal the blush, Cherenkov noticed

it.

"It's Marion, sir."

"It's Kolya, sir," Cherenkov said, mocking him a little.

"I don't use my given name." Griffith tried to keep his reaction cool, his tone cold.

"Everyone uses given names here. The informality is refreshing."

Griffith kept his silence.

"You do not agree."

"I think informality leads to sloppiness. There's no clear chain of-command here. I think that's dangerous, especially in an environment as severe as space."

"Spoken like a military man," Cherenkov said, "ora government worker," he added before Griffith could object. "But you are wrong. In such a self-contained environment, a certain democratic sloppiness can be turned to advantage. Why did you follow me?"

STARFARERS 121

"You said you were going outside. Would you iet me tag along?"

"Outside? I think not. That is dangerous without training."

"Just to the staging area, I mean."

"You may do that without my permission. The ship is open to inhabitants and visitors alike. You may be required to pass training to engage in certain activities, but no one is denied the opportunity to attempt the training."

Griffith frowned. "That seems awfully loose to me."

"Spoken like a true—government man."

Griffith wondered again if Cherenkov were laughing at him, deep down under the intensity of his gaze. And yet even if the cosmonaut had pegged him as a military observer, what could he do? Exposed, Griffith might expect some uncomfortable moments. The more recalcitrant expedition members might denounce him. It would be verbal, not physical, abuse;

of that he was certain. If Cherenkov blew his cover, Griffith would have to return to earth. Having to send another observer could delay Griffith in implementing his plans. On the other hand, he already had most of the information he needed.

A few more days . . .

He found it difficult to understand the core of resistance against the changes that had to occur. The deep space expedition was all very well when it was planned, two decades ago in a time of prosperity, civil international relations, and silence from the Mideast Sweep. All of that had changed. Starfarer had to change, too.

Griffith's job would have been much easier if he had not had to deal with thz researchers, the stubborn, self-centered idealists. As the starship had to change, the people had to change, too.

If Griffith coufd arrange to antagonize a few more countries into withdrawing from the expedition, the remaining personnel would not be able to continue alone.

He was doing a good job. No one would fault him for giving himself a few minutes. He wanted to get Cherenkov to talk about his experiences, and he knew it would not be easy. The general obviously felt no nostalgia for the past. Griffith held no power over this man; he could not demand a reply. He would have to be patient.

122 Vonda N. Mclntyre

Kolya wished the young officer would follow someone else.

It mattered little to him if Griffith were here under false pretenses. Kolya ignored politics with the strength of visceral aversion. He hated politics almost as much as he hated violence.

He also did not like to be followed. Nikolai Petrovich Che-renkov had been followed by people who wanted to kill him and by people who wanted to worship him. The two experiences were not all that different.

He had become more and more private over the past two decades. One morning in the company of Infinity Mendez and Floris Brown tired him to a startling degree. The effort

of remaining civil, pleasant, even cheerful, had drained him of the anticipatory energy he experienced before his spacewalks. Human contact affected him with a kind of sensory overload that only the emptiness and completeness of space could overcome.

Kotya entered the elevator to the outside, hoping Griffith would remain at the inner surface.

"It is boring and dark down there," Kolya said. "Unpleasant. Stay in the sunshine."

"It's all right," Marion Griffith said. "I want to see." The officer stayed with him.

Griffith made Kolya uncomfortable. He showed too much interest in Cherenkov's past. But Cherenkov did not exist anymore. Only Kolya existed. Kolya was not a pioneering cosmonaut or a heroic antiterrorist or a terrorist traitor. Kolya was an old man who loved space.

The elevator fell through the inner skin of fertile dirt, through the underground water level, through the massive radiation-slopping shell of lunar rock.

Paying Griffith no more attention, Kolya analyzed his reasons for letting Infinity persuade him to talk to Floris Brown. What did it matter to Kolya if she lived on the bottom level of his hill, or in the guesthouse, or back on earth, or out in the garden in the dew? Thanthavong never bothered him— she was no recluse, but she did spend all her time in the genetics lab. That was what she had come up here for, after all, to escape the demands of achievement and publicity and

STARFARERS 12 3

public adoration, to get on with her work. Like Kolya, but with more meaning to her life.

A lonely old woman living downstairs would demand attention, whether from Kolya or from others who would visit. Kolya could see nothing coming from the change but an invasion of his privacy.

He felt no obligation to offer anything to Floris, but Infinity was different. Kolya thought Infinity was far more admirable than any of the scientists, who worked in their minds, or he himself, who did not work at all anymore, except at tasks he chose, tasks that took him into space. It would have been possible to program an AS to do most of what Kolya chose to do, and an AI to do the rest. But no one had ever succeeded in programming an expert system to replicate a master gardener. To approximate, yes. Not to replicate. There was something about technological complexity, mechanical complexity, that machines could handle, and something about organic and aesthetic complexity that befuddled them. Kolya thought the gardeners, like Infinity, to be the most important people on board the starship.

The elevator stopped. Assuming a strong young military officer would be embarrassed to have his discomfort noticed, Kolya said nothing to explain the strange sensation produced

by riding an elevator through a rotating environment. If Griffith had neglected to read his introduction manual on the way to Starfarer, that was his problem.

The artificial gravity was perceptibly stronger here, nearly one g. The radius of the cylinder's outer skin was significantly longer than the distance from the axis to the inner surface.

The increased radial acceleration increased the sensation of weight.

At the outer surface of the cylinder, the corridors were solid, rough, and ugly. Few people came this far down. If they wanted to spacewalk, they went out at the axis and avoided the rotation. Kolya liked the rotation. He climbed into his pressure suit as Griffith watched.

"That doesn't look too hard," Griffith said, breaking the silence for the first time since they left the inner surface. "How long does the training take?"

Kolya had already drifted into the strange and vulnerable state to which he surrendered in space. Without a word, he

124 vonda N. Mclntyre

stepped into the airiock and sealed it, leaving Griffith behind as abruptly as he had left Floris and Infinity.

The pump drew the air from the lock and back into the ship- Surrounded by vacuum, Kolya opened the outer hatch.

He let the radial acceleration press him past the skin of the cylinder and into the harder vacuum of space. With the ease of long practice, he lowered himself onto the narrow framework that crept over the cylinder's surface. He stood in the same orientation as he had inside the cylinder, with his head toward the axis of rotation. The outer skin of the cylinder lay a couple of meters above him. Nothing separated him from space except the cables of the inspection net.

Beneath him, the wild cylinder and the furled sail slipped past. Kolya sank to his knees, then inched fiat. He let his arms dangle toward the stars. Someday, he thought, he would let himself slip from the framework and be flung away into space. But not quite yet. He was not quite ready yet.

Rotation took him out from between the cylinders. Before him, the stars made a fine, spangled sheet.

He lay there, still and silent, staring at the galaxy.

The transparent skin of the sailhouse placed no barrier between the room, and space and stars and the sail outside.

People floated in zero-gravity along one side of the curved glass wall: fewer people than should have gathered to watch the first full test of Starfwer's solar sail.

Satoshi floated farther into the transparent chamber. The sensors surrounded him with melodic chords. Iphigenie DuPre, the sailmaster, drifted with eyes closed, listening to the musical reports, invisibly connected to the computers and control strands of the sail. Her long, lithe, dark limbs reacted with reflexive, minuscule motions as she ordered a strand tightened here, balanced there.

The sail, untwisting from its cable configuration, now appeared as a great sheet of silver, closely pleated.

Victoria and J.D. and Feral joined Satoshi. Still inside the access tunnel, Stephen Thomas hesitated. He pushed off gingerly, awkwardly, with one hand. In the other he carried a sack, which he had avoided explaining.

Satoshi looked around. Almost everyone in the sailhouse was faculty or staff". There were a few sponsored reporters, and Feral, and a number of remotes transmitting the event back to earth, but none of the VIP visitors the expedition had prepared for. Chancellor Blades had chosen not to attend the test, and he had not even sent his usual deputy, Gerald Hem-minge, the assistant chancellor.

Feral pushed off and started interviewing people, setting the background for his story. Starfarer navigated from one

125

12 6 vonda N. MdnCyre

star system to the next via cosmic string. But once it reached a destination, it required other methods of propulsion: primarily the sail. Cosmic string provided macronavigation, the sail, micronavigation, though it sounded strange to apply Ihe term "micro" to distances measured in millions of kilometers.

The sail was slow, but near a star it was steady. It had the great benefit of operating without reaction mass or onboard fuel. It would propel the starship from its entrypoint into the star system to a point from which it could reenter the twisted space-time of a cosmic string. The alien contact team had a small, fast explorer to use in traveling between Starfarer and a new system's worlds.

Feral drifted over to the sailmaster.

Iphigenie DuPre's astonishing mathematical ability reached so deep that it appeared instinctual to anyone who overlooked her years of experience and practice. She was one of the first people to build a sail-ship and to sail it in space. She had designed most of the sail systems that racers used down around the O'Neill colonies. Once her sails started winning races, she retired from amateur competition and put her time into developing and marketing. She was probably the wealthiest person on board Starfarer, thanks to the popularity of sail-ship racing.

The challenge of a starship's esoteric combination of propulsions had brought her to EarthSpace, and to Starfarer.

"Ms. DuPre—** Feral said.

"Hush, now," she said quietly. The tempo of the sensor melodies quickened.

Everyone fell silent, and the change began.

Tension eased at the ends of the pieated surface. The folds

turned to close-set ripples.

The sail opened.

Liquid silver spread over blackness, widened, flowed like a flooding lake across the path of the Milky Way, and cut off the stars. One edge quivered. A vibration shimmered through the satin film. The shivering threatened to twist the surface out of shape, but control strands shifted and tightened and eased away the oscillation.

The sail grew.

Its complex harmonies filled the sailhouse. No one spoke. STARFARERS 12 7

The sail shivered with one final ripple, then lay quiet, stretched out across space. Satoshi imagined that he could see a slight curve in the surface, as the sail filled with the invisible solar wind. He imagined he could already feel the acceleration, already detect the most infinitesimal widening of the starship's orbit.

The sensor melody decreased to a whisper.

"Full deployment."

Iphigenie's quiet statement filled the sailhouse like a shout. Her voice held suppressed laughter and excitement. She opened her unusual cinnamon-brown eyes. For a few seconds, no one else made a sound. Satoshi released the breath he had been holding.

"Watch it!"

The shout and an explosive "pop!" broke the silence. It sounded like damage, like decompression, like a breach of the sailhouse wall into the vacuum of space. Satoshi tensed, forcing himself not to jerk toward the noise. Any quick movement in freefall would send him tumbling.

A projectile shot past.

The champagne cork slammed into the transparent wall beyond him. It rebounded nearly as fast, hit the glass on the other side, and bounced again. It narrowly missed Satoshi and several other faculty members.

Somersaulting slowly backward, Stephen Thomas laughed

as the cork flung itself around the glass cylinder until it used

up its momentum. Champagne pressed itself out of the bottle

he held. Without gravity, the bubbles formed on the sides

and bottom of the bottle instead of exploding upward; their

pressure pushed the champagne out. As Stephen Thomas

tumbled he left a liquid rope twisting in his wake. It fizzed

softly.

Stephen Thomas looked like the star of some weird zero-gravity sport, celebrating a championship by trying to spray his teammates with champagne, but being defeated by weightlessness.

He'd have to be the star of something yet to be invented, Satoshi thought. He's wrong for the most popular earth sports:

too slender for football, not tall enough for basketball, and far too beautiful for hockey.

Stephen Thomas spoiled the effect by bumping into the 128 Vonda N. Mclntyre

wall and snatching awkwardly at a glass handhold to stop his tumble. He came to a hall, still laughing, still holding the bottle. The twisting stream of champagne broke itself into spherical globules that drifted among the spectators.

"I was wondering how to split it up," Stephen Thomas said. The pressure of the bubbles slowly pushed the last of the champagne into the air.

The cork tumbled lazily, having lost most of its momentum without hitting anyone in the eye. Everyone was looking at Stephen Thomas rather than at the sail.

He tossed his head. His long blond hair nipped back for a second, then fell forward again to drift in front of his eyes. He tucked it behind one ear.

"Congratulations, Iphigenie," he said.

"Yes," Victoria said. "Iphigenie, the sail's beautiful."

"Thank you." She reached out and waved a rippling sphere of champagne toward her, placed her lips against it, and drank it with a kiss. Unlike most zero-g workers, she kept her hair long, but she wore it in a smooth mass of thin, heavy braids caught up at the back of her neck.

Iphigenie's action broke the tension of waiting for deployment, and the fright of Stephen Thomas's exploding champagne cork. Everyone clustered around Iphigenie, sphering her with their congratulations, surrounding her like the bubbles surrounding the wine; people caught and drank the fizzing globules of champagne that drifted and trembled in the air currents. Satoshi kissed one and let it flow between his lips. It dissolved against his tongue, dry and gentle and ephemeral.

Nearby, J.D. floated alone, watching the sail, occasionally glancing at the celebration with a slight smile on her lips. Satoshi waved a bubble of champagne in her direction.

"J.D., catch!"

Instead of reaching for the rippling bubble, she pushed her hand toward it to create a counterdraft in Satoshi's direction.

"Thank you," she said. "It's very kind of you, but I don't drink. I quit when I started diving."

Stephen Thomas paddled awkwardly toward them.

"Are you guys playing tennis with my good champagne?"

He tried to capture it with the air pressure of a gesture, and

succeeded only in breaking it into several smaller drops. Sa-STARFARERS 12 9

toshi caught one in his mouth and pushed one toward Stephen Thomas.

"Victoria! Feral!"

They joined him. Together, they drank the last bubbles.

"I knew I'd think of something good to drink this with," Stephen Thomas said.

Satoshi chuckled. Victoria smiled and drifted close enough to brush her lips against his cheek.

In one direction, the sail lay taut. In the other, the twin cylinders of the campus rotated, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, toward each other, and away. Beyond campus, at a great distance, the earth hung in space, one limb bright and the rest of its face dark, a new earth.

Most of the spectators had left the sailhouse. Stephen Thomas floated near the transparent wall. For once he felt almost comfortable in freefail.

Maybe, he thought, I ought to combine it with champagne more often.

"Are you coming?" Victoria asked.

"I'll be along in a little while."

Satoshi passed the sailmaster. "Thanks for the show, Iphi-genie."

"My pleasure," she replied, too experienced in zero-g to disturb her equilibrium by turning.

Stephen Thomas watched his partners glide out of the sailhouse. He envied their grace. He knew he would get the hang of navigating in weightlessness soon enough—it had better be soon, because he hated feeling physically incompetent and off balance, baffled and awkward.

Stephen Thomas was the last spectator. Intent on the sail, Iphigenie paid him no attention.

The sail lay almost motionless in space, but every now and again the silver surface shimmied. When it did that it looked alive, like some huge aether-breathing animal, twitching its flank to drive off a fly.

Stephen Thomas wondered if a space-living creature would have an aura. Idly, he narrowed his eyes and focused his vision beyond the center of the sail. He had never thought of seeking the aura of an inanimate object. The idea amused him. He did not expect to find anything.

13 0 vonda N. Mcintyre

He looked.

Gradually, as if the act of searching for i( caused it to appear and grow. a pale violet light glimmered along the edges of the sail. It flowed down the feedback lines and crept across the sail's face.

Stephen Thomas gazed at the lavender light until it swept all the way to the sailhouse, surrounded the transparent cylinder, and wrapped it in a transparent gauze of illumination.

Iphigenie did not react to it, though every now and again she glanced out at the sail as if her eyes and her instincts could tell her more than the feedbacks and computers and musical sensors. Stephen Thomas said nothing of the aura.

She would probably shrug it off or laugh or refuse to look for it, or all three.

It always amazed him when he saw something so direct, so spectacular, and everyone else was oblivious to it. He could never persuade his partners to try to see what he could see. Victoria, in particular, was so open-minded about other things: she had to be, or she would never have won her job.

The effort of seeing began to tire him. He let his concentration wander. The perception vanished as if he had snapped off the current powering the violet light. The sail billowed silently before him, plain silver again.

Chandra tried to persuade herself that being on the run. hiding out from—who were those guys?—in a fishing camp would be good stuff to record, but the truth was that she hated this part of it. The cabin smelled stale and fishy. The bed was both lumpy and too soft. The window, which could have looked out on the water, opened onto a grotty gravel driveway sprouting dusty weeds. And the bathroom was really nasty.

The diving sequence would be great. It would reproduce her utter terror at being pulled underwater, her certainty that she was about to drown. But this place would ruin the rest of the experience. It would do nothing for either her reputation or her bank account. It had to go. She had to end the sequence somehow, but she did not see how she would find the time to do any restaging and still make it onto the spaceplane.

"How do the folks who own this place make a living?"

STARFARERS 131

she said. "We're the only ones here. I bet we're the only ones who were ever here."

"It is not fishing season," Zev said. "This is a place where humans fish. I mean where they sleep when they are too tired to fish."

"Oh."

"If it had not been here," the diver said, "you would still be swimming."

"Listen," she said. "that was a great sequence. That was real terror. Nobody has ever gotten anything that intense before. They all think their sex scenes are so great. Hah."

The young diver wandered around the wooden cubicle, touching things at random: the rough, threadbare ticking on the mattress, the frame supporting the upper bunk, the planks of the drafty door, the doorknob.

"1 don't think that's a good idea," Chandra said.

The diver looked at the handle curiously. "Why? Will ii break?"

"I mean I don't think you should go outside. Those guys are probably still looking for you."

"Oh."

"What do they want?"

"All I wanted was to join the deep space expedition."

"Distler hasn't made thai a criminal offense," Chandra said. "Not the last time I heard, anyway. There must be something else."

The diver took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "They want divers to do things for them that we do not wish to do.

I think they would have taken me away and kept me until they made my family come back from Canada."

"They were going to kidnap you?"

The diver shrugged and changed the subject. "What is that room?"

"It's the bathroom. Only there isn't any bath. I guess you don't need to take baths out in the ocean."

"We like to rub ourselves on smooth rocks or scrub ourselves with sand."

"Close enough. Turn on the faucets in the sink if you need water. Do you have to stay wet like the guy in that old tv series?''

"No. Do you like that show? I do, too. But divers are not 132 Vonda N. Mclntyre

from Atlantis. There is no such place. Divers can live on land. I never have, though. I am not used to it."

Suddenly something protruded from the diver's crotch.

Chandra watched, startled, as the male diver, whom she had assumed to be female, extruded his penis and began to pee on the floor.

"Wait! Stop! What are you doing?"

His penis slid back inside. "Peeing," he said, equally startled. He looked down. "I never did it on land before. It is not very aesthetic, is it?"

"No, especially if you do it on the floor!" "What should I do?"

"Wipe it up, to begin with."

"But I need to pee."

Chandra sighed and showed him the toilet, then fled, embarrassed, when he started to use it in front of her. Very few things embarrassed her, but this sequence of events was getting weird.

He came out of the bathroom, carrying their single ragged towel. "Why did you run away?"

"Because—wait!" she said again. "This isn't a hotel."

She snatched the towel, put it back in the bathroom, and threw him a wad of paper tissue. **I don't think we get maid service and clean towels every day with this room."

He wiped the floor, gazed at the sodden paper for a moment, then carried it into the bathroom and got rid of it.

"I didn't run away," Chandra said when he came back. "I

left to give you some privacy. It isn't polite to piss in front

of other people."

Fine gold hair, nearly transparent, almost invisible except when the light struck it just right, covered his whole body.

His pubic hair was slightly thicker, slightly coarser. She stared at the smooth flesh between his legs. She could stare at anyone or anything, anytime she liked, because no one could tell where her eyes were focused.

"It is not considered polite to piss on land, you mean," the diver said. "Divers think nothing of it. I did wonder what that small room in the comer ofJ.D.'s cabin was. She always kept the door closed."

"J.D. ! J.D. Sauvage? Do you know her?"

"Yes."

STARFARERS 13 3

"This is all her fault!"

"I do not believe it," the diver said. "She would not lend herself to this occurrence. Please do not talk of my friend that way."

"She was supposed to be there! Where does she get off, forgetting our appointment?"

"She left for the starship," the diver said. "And if she had not, she would be hiding along with us."

"Yeah. Maybe." Chandra scowled. The nerve ridges on her forehead twisted. "Serve her right."

"She would probably know what to do," he said.

Chandra glared at him, but the silver-gray nerve tissue that hid her eyes and allowed her to stare also prevented her from glowering effectively.

Zev changed the subject. "Are you allowed to eat in front of each other?"

"Of course. What a dumb question."

"Why 'dumb'? You do not pee in front of each other. I do not understand why eating is so different. I know only one land-bound human. J.D. is almost a diver herself. I cannot compare her customs with yours."

"Okay, I see your point. Are you a guy, or are all divers built like you?" Chandra said.

"I am male, if that is what your question means. I am physiologically mature, though I have not yet fathered anyone."

"You mean you're a virgin?" Then she had to explain "virgin." The diver laughed.

"No—how foolish. We don't even have a word for that.

We play all the time—whenever we meet another family. J.D. says regular humans don't do that. And she said regular humans have to learn how not to be fertile. You have to concentrate on it. Divers have to leam how not to be sterile."

"Why?"

"Because that's how we designed ourselves. External genitals would cause hydrodynamic drag."

Chandra waited for him to continue, but he seemed to think that told her all she needed to know.

"Nobody ever put it quite like thai to me before," she said. "Which is probably a good thing, since I haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about."

134 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"Male humans have to leam to raise their temperature in order to become sterile—you know this?"

"Sure,"

"I had to learn to extend my scrotum—do you understand?

And when I father someone, when a diver from another family chooses me, I will have to leave it extended long enough to overcome the sterility my body temperature causes."

"Sounds dangerous, if a hungry shark comes along . . ."

"If a hungry shark came along, I think I would not mind putting off parenthood a few more weeks in order to withdraw myself." Zev grinned.

"What about women?"

"Women who are divers leam to ovulate, and do so only when they choose someone to conceive with."

"How did we get off on this subject?"

Zev looked hurt. "You expressed interest."

"I guess so. But I'm a lot more interested in how we ended up being here."

"That does not interest me anymore. I am interested in how to get out."

"Me, too."

"Excuse me a moment," Zev said. "I must tell my mother where I am." His eyelids flickered.

"Wait!" Chandra grabbed him and shook him roughly before he could hook into the web.

He opened his eyes again. "What is wrong?"

"The web's probably being monitored!"

"Oh. I did not know that was allowed."

"Maybe not, not usually, but I bet they're doing it."

"Lykos will be worried."

"She'll be a lot more worried if they catch you!"

"That is true," Zev said.

Kolya came in from outside, drugged with dizziness and wonder. The path of stars lay before him, a web passing across his image of reality. The vision would remain for a while; then, as it faded, he would be drawn to the stars again.

He opened the fastenings of his spacesuit-

He had watched the sail unfurl. He hated it. It cut off a significant portion of the sky. But he loved it, too, because

STARFARERS 13 5

every increment of time added another increment of velocity to the ship's speed, pulling it toward the stars. Soon—

"General Cherenkov? Is everything all right?"

Kolya started violently and stumbled in the awkward halfremoved suit. Marion Griffith lunged forward, caught him, and held him on his feet.

"Bojemoi, " Kolya said, "don't you know it's dangerous to startle a—someone with a background like mine? Have you been waiting all this time?"

"Yessir. My apologies, sir, I didn't mean to scare you. I thought you saw me ... and then I couldn't tell."

"Several hours outside will affect the vision- Why are you still here?"

"I wanted to talk to you, and since you said I couldn't go outside, I decided to wait."

"If I reward your preposterous devotion, will I encourage its continuation?"

"I don't understand what you mean, sir."

"I mean that I like my privacy. I have not made that sufficiently clear to you. What do you want?"

"Only to hear what it was like in the early days, in space.

When you didn't have all this. When it was tough, and dangerous. About the years when you went back to earth. And about coming back up here, when you knew you'd never be able to leave again."

"I believe that the expedition will be both tough and dangerous. More than we can conceive. As for the rest—all that is in the archives. I sat for the cameras answering questions for ... far too long."

"I know," Griffith said. "I saw you. I watched the tapes.

But it isn't all, there's nothing about the years when you disappeared. And it isn't the same as hearing it straight, being able to ask questions ... "

"The years when I ... disappeared ... are not fit stories for civilized people. Are you civilized, Marion?"

"I ... I think so."

"I'm going to walk back to my house," Kolya said. "If you wish, you may walk with me, and I will answer what questions I choose. In return you must promise not to trouble me again."

136 Vonda N. Mclntyre Griffith hesitated.

"It is that, or nothing," Kolya said.

"All right," Griffith said. "Deal."

Victoria returned to campus feeling a little drunk, more from excitement than from champagne.

"That was something, wasn't it?" She giggled.

"It was," J.D. said. "It was. I guess . . . we're really on our way."

"We are." Victoria turned down the path toward Physics Hill. "Come on, I want to show you your office."

"I don't really need an office," J.D. said. "I've never had one—1 won't know what to do with it."

"First rule of academic life," Victoria said. "Never turn down the perks."

They reached a long low barrow with strips of windows that squinted out along the bushy slopes. The hallway behind the offices was cool and dank, a tunnel lined with gray rock foam. On the left, doors opened into offices. Someone had made an attempt to brighten the hallway with photos of particle interactions, abstract art of lines and curves and colli-

sions, and fractal movies.

"Nobody needs offices anymore," Victoria said. "But if we did all our communicating through Arachne, we'd never get out of bed. Here's my office." She opened a door. Few of the doors in the main cylinder of Starfarer opened automatically. The simpler things were, the less there would be to fix, light-years out in interstellar space.

"We're old-fashioned here in Physics Hill," she said. "We even have a conference room, down at the end of the hall. I know lots of people who claim they can do conferences by link, but I like being face-to-face."

J.D. followed Victoria into her office- The entire exterior wall was a window, open from waist height to ceiling. The hillside dropped away steeply, ten meters to the ground below. Victoria's desk was an extruded slab of rock foam; the chair was bamboo and rattan.

A display hovered in the comer. Victoria glanced at it. Numbers and symbols crept across it, a new one every few seconds.

STARFARERS 13 7

"Still working," Victoria said.

"What is it?"

"Cosmic string calculations. For navigating, once we reach transition energy. It's ferociously complicated to figure out where you're going once you grab a piece of cosmic string, and even harder to figure out a reasonable way back.''

"But those calculations are already done. Aren't they?"

"The set for our first trip, sure. But I've been spending a lot of time working out better methods of doing the calculations."

"How long before it's finished?"

"Don't know. No way to tell. This is a new symbolic manipulation routine. Solving cylindrical stress-energy tensors is tough. This one's been running for two weeks already, but that's nothing. The shortest solution so far took fifty-three days."

She watched the display for a few seconds, then blew out her breath and turned away. "I never let Arachne send this stuff straight into my head- It's hypnotic."

Suddenly she stared at the display again. "Except . . ."

She fell silent for so long that J.D. grew concerned.

"Victoria?" she said softly.

"What? Oh, sorry." She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. "I have an idea. I think it might speed things up some more. Solve the problem more elegantly ..."

"Go ahead and work on it. The office can wait."

She was tempted. "No, it's okay—your office will only take a minute."

Victoria led J.D. to her office, two doors down, and tried to open it. It remained closed.

"It's supposed to have been cleared by now," she said.

"Maybe it's fixed on me. Open my office, please,

Arachne," J.D. said. She echoed the request over her link. Nothing happened- Then she remembered it was a simple mechanical door. She tried the door handle. Nothing happened.

"I'll be damned," Victoria said. She described a query path to J.D., who followed it into Arachne's web.

The bursar had not yet assigned her any office space. Nor had the chancellor accepted her appointment as alien contact specialist.

138 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"This is outrageous," Victoria said. "It's my decision to invite you onto the team. Accepting your appointment is nothing but a formality'"

"The rules must have changed," J.D. said.

"A lot of things are changing around here."

"This is scary. Victoria."

"It's ridiculous, that's what it is. Damn! Come on, you can use Nakamura's office till we get things straightened out. I know I have access to it."

"I don't know ... I'd hate to invade his privacy."

"He didn't leave anything behind to invade. He's not coming back. He quit."

"For good? Are you sure? Why did he quit?"

"I'm not sure I can tell you."

"Is it a secret?"

"No. It's just that it's hard to explain why someone quits when they're brought up to be infinitely polite and never mention when something is wrong or tell you what it is. I don't even know that anything was wrong. Except it must have been, or why would he have quit? He wasn't recalled. Maybe he decided we don't have a chance to get out of orbit. He might have decided to cut his losses."

"Maybe he read the article about the selection process.

Maybe he felt humiliated."

"That article was all speculation," Victoria said.

"Was it?"

Victoria hesitated. The article had claimed that the selection of Starfarer's personnel depended more on political considerations than academic qualifications.

"I don't like to think so," Victoria said. "I like to think my family's application blew all the other possibilities out of contention. But I'll never know if a bunch of politicians got together and looked at the candidates and said, Say, we need more Canadians to make Ottawa happy, and never mind the qualifications. I decided to stop worrying about it."

J.D. followed Victoria uncertainly to another office.

It, too, refused to open.

"This is embarrassing," Victoria said. "I am angry."

"Victoria, please don't go to any trouble for me- I have more than enough room in my house, and that's where all my

STARFARERS 13 9

books are. I'll see you later, okay? What should I wear to the party?"

"The party? Oh, anything you like. It's informal, and you dress better than most of us."

J.D. smiled. "It will take a white before I fit in with the Starfarer look," she said. "Most everything I brought with me is new." She shrugged. "Oh well. I never was in the height of fashion."

"Don't worry. I usually don't dress up, but I might tonight because I haven't had a chance to wear my new clothes. Stephen Thomas always dresses up, and Satoshi never dresses up."

"You have an interesting family."

"That's sure true," Victoria said. "What's your family like? Do you have any sisters and brothers?"

J.D. giggled.

"Wrong question?"

"No, not at all," J.D. said. "But it's complicated."

"Tell me." Victoria said, intrigued.

"Okay, you asked for it. My mom was fifty, past childbearing, when she and my dad got together. I have a halfbrother and a half-sister from her previous biological family. Her partner in an intermediate relational family brought along his daughter. He and Mom didn't have any children with each other, but his daughter is also my half-sister."

"You lost me there," Victoria said.

J.D. grinned. "That's where I lose everybody. What happened was, my dad didn't want to father children. Chemical toxin exposure. He worried about gene defects."

"Couldn't he get them fixed?"

"That was expensive and chancy. It was another few years before the technology was perfected. Anyway, when my folks decided they did want to raise a kid together, my dad's full sister donated an ovum and my mom's previous partner donated the sperm."

"So your dad is your half-father and your mother isn't genetically related to you."

"No, it's more complicated than that. My mom is my nuclear mother—induced meiosis and nuclear body transplant into my aunt's ovum,"

14 0 vonda N. Mdntyre

"And you're related to your father through mitochondrial inheritance."

"Right, even though I got the mitochondrial DNA from

his sister. But those are maternally inherited, so Dad's and

his sister's are identical."

Victoria whistled. "That's as complicated a personal pedigree as I ever heard. You have four biological parents?"

"Five, since they needed a surrogate."

"Truly impressive. Family reunions must be interesting."

"We've never had one," J.D. said. "We get along all right, but we aren't particularly close. Cool but cordial."

"What did they say when you joined the expedition?"

" 'Congratulations, dear. Have a good time.' "

"Hm." Victoria contrasted that reaction with the reactions she and her partners had received. Grangrana was quietly and fiercely proud, Stephen Thomas's father disbelieving, and Satoshi's folks ecstatic for him and for them all. Practically the whole range, Victoria thought.

After J.D. left, Victoria hurried back to her own office, sat at her desk, and composed herself outwardly. She cooled her anger, persuading herself that the mix-up about J.D.'s office must be just that, a mix-up. Reacting uncivilly would not help. It might even slow up a correction.

The research display kept catching at the comer of her vision. All she really wanted to do right now was work on her new approach. Instead, she put in a call to the chancellor's office.

J.D.'s remarkably calm about this, Victoria thought. She hasn't spent enough time in the academic worid.

The office was only part of the problem. Until all J.D.'s paperwork went through processing, the bursar would not activate her salary. Victoria had been handling the partnership's accounts since Merry's death. She suspected life could quickly become difficult in the face of a financial setback.

Chancellor Blades had arrived on the transport incoming that Victoria had taken, outgoing, back to earth. She had never spoken to him or met him and she knew very little about him. She wanted to be fair to him. But he was from the U.S., so she found it hard not to suspect that he was

purely a political appointment.

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She supposed he would be at the welcome party tonight.

The rest of the faculty and staff would use the opportunity to welcome him, since he had pled the press of work and declined to have a party of his own. Perhaps it would have been better to wait till then to talk to him . . .

"Chancellor Blades's office." Chancellor Blades's AI answered the call. It possessed a deliberate, soothing voice, a display pattern of pastel colors.

"Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. Director Blades, please."

"The director cannot speak in person at this time," the AI said. "Would you leave a message, please?"

"Yes. Chancellor, there's been an unfortunate oversight.

J.D. Sauvage's appointment hasn't been formally accepted.

Her office is locked. This is awkward. And I'm concerned that her salary not be delayed."

"The message has been placed on his register," the AI said. "Thank you."

The voice and the pattern faded.

Victoria swore softly.

Trying to think of some other way of solving J.D.'s problem, Victoria glanced at the research display. Its moving background figures took her in. Soon another display formed before her. Her thoughts began to manipulate its space. She forgot everything else.

Victoria hurried through the courtyard and into the house.

"I'm late," she said to Satoshi. "I know it, sorry, but I had to get that new manipulation up and running. I think it's a real breakthrough! I'll be dressed in a minute—damn!"

"Victoria, relax. What's wrong?"

"I want to take Ms. Brown some carnations. It won*t take long to dig them—" She opened the storage cupboard and rummaged around for the rock-foam pot she knew was in there somewhere.

Satoshi came up behind her and put his arms around her.

"I'm all ready. I'll dig them for you." He was wearing his usual cargo pants and tank top.

"Would you? That would be great."

"You've got plenty of time. Stephen Thomas just got home, too."

Victoria took a quick shower and stood in front of her 142 vonda N. Mcintyre

closet for a minute, deciding what to wear. Finally she chose her suede pants and the new lace shirt. She liked the way the lace felt, softly scratchy against her skin.

Stephen Thomas finished dressing just when she did. They returned to the main room together. J.D. had already arrived.

"You all look wonderful!" she said. She looked as if she had tried to dress up, but did not quite know how.

Stephen Thomas wore his turquoise shirt for the first time. Instead of his usual plain gold stud, he wore an earring Satoshi had given him on his last birthday. It twisted up behind his ear and drooped forward again, dangling small emerald crystals all the way to his shoulder. A second loop of crystals branched off from the back and draped across his long blond hair and over his other shoulder.

Satoshi handed Victoria the newly potted carnation, and they set out for the party.

Victoria walked with Stephen Thomas, J.D. with Satoshi.

J.D. evened out the group and made walking on the narrow pathways less awkward, though of course not the same as before, walking with Merit. It surprised Victoria to find herself thinking of before with only a dull ache, instead of a deep hard pain. Maybe she was beginning to heal. Finally.

She shook herself out of that train of thought, knowing how fast the depression could hit her.

Satoshi and J.D. chatted as they walked ahead. J.D. was beginning to relax with her new teammates. Victoria enjoyed talking with her. If someone had told her that discussing the plots of old short stories would be fun, she would not have believed them.

The discussion brought the team members as well as the members of her partnership into closer contact. Victoria had never known of Satoshi's summer herding cattle.

Victoria shifted the flowerpot from one hand to the other.

She stroked the gray-green leaves and separated the blossoms. The scent of carnations rose around her and she smiled. She hoped Sfarfarer's first grandparent in space would like her gift.

Stephen Thomas reached out and took her hand in a companionable way.

"You're pretty excited," he said.

"More mind reading?"

STARFARERS 14 3

"Hardly necessary."

"I think I worked out something qualitatively different this afternoon," Victoria said. "A real 'a-hah!' experience. I'm ready for a party! I'm so glad Ms. Brown is here—It isn't the same as if Grangrana had agreed to come. But I'm glad she's on board all the same."

"I don't understand why they picked her," Stephen Thomas said. "She's not a colleague. Even if she wasn't past retirement, she was never a scientist. She doesn't have a proper vita. I don't even know what to call her."

"By her name, probably."

"You don't need to be sarcastic. I'm just saying I have some doubts about the grandparents program." Stephen Thomas grimaced.

"I thought you were neutral on the subject of age-mix. 1 didn't realize you were opposed."

"I can't help it if my personal landscape is different on that subject than yours. And, look, if we get into a bad spot. we'll have to worry about her."

"Why? How will worrying help? She knows the risks as well as any of us. And she's just as capable of making an informed decision."

"There's no more excuse for bringing elders up here than for bringing kids."

"No excuse—! I never heard you talk about Thanthavong or Cherenkov like this, by the way."

"They're different."

"Not in terms of their ability to decide whether to Join the expedition."

"That isn't what I meant. I meant they both have reasons to be up here. They have things to do."

"Stephen Thomas, next you're going to try to tell me that Nikolai Cherenkov was a hero of the Soviet Union for making scientific discoveries."

Stephen Thomas blushed.

"I admire him, too," Victoria said. "But let's face it. holding the time-in-space record doesn't mean much nowadays.

There must be a couple of hundred people who can measure their experience in decades."

"Okay, I'll grant that Cherenkov is here because he wants to be and because a lot of us admire him. And maybe because

144 vonda N. Mcintyre

he's the only person in existence who'll be safer on the expedition than they would be anywhere in the solar system.

That doesn't change anything. I still don't see any reason to bring a grandmother up here just because she's a grandmother. Besides, if she's such a great grandmother, why isn't she grandmothering her own grandchildren?''

"Maybe for the same reason we aren't parenting any children," Victoria said.

"That isn't fair!"

"Sure it is. We chose to put off having children so we could join the expedition. Maybe her grandchildren are grown up. Maybe she decided we needed her more than they did. Maybe she didn't feel needed back on earth at all. Maybe she has a spirit of adventure."

"What's going to happen if we do meet aliens—"

"When," Victoria said.

"Whatever, and they see her and say, 'Why in the world did you bring her along?' "

"What would happen when we meet aliens if they didn't see her and they said, 'Where are your elders? How can we talk to people who cut themselves off from their wisest individuals?' Stephen Thomas, your argument has been used against every minority in history. 'You can't represent us, because you'd be talking to people who think you're less than human. For the sake of getting along, we're going to pretend to agree.' "

"I didn't mean it that way."

"Then don't suggest we deform our society to try to please some other culture. They're going to have to take us as we come."

**If you take that argument as far as it can go, we ought to bring kids along."

"There's a case to be made for that suggestion," Victoria said. "Maybe you should bring it up at the next meeting."

"Maybe this is a dumb argument. The age-mix decision's made now, we have one grandparent in space and maybe more to come. That's that."

"You're awfully passionate about it, now that it's too late. Why didn't you say anything at the committee meeting when we talked about age-mix in the first place?"

"Native shyness."

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Victoria laughed.

Stephen Thomas gave a small and self-deprecating shrug. "Everybody sounded so enthusiastic. I didn't want to break consensus."

"If you weren't concerned enough about the subject to talk about it at the meetings, I don't think you should second-guess it now.''

"I'm not going to embarrass you at the party, if that's what you mean."

"You haven't had good experiences with grandparents. Give Floris Brown a chance before you convince yourself she's going to be more of the same."

"I wish you wouldn't psychoanalyze me."

"And I wish you wouldn't read my aura, but that doesn't stop you."

Quite a way ahead, Satoshi turned back and beckoned to them.

"Come on, we're going to be late!"

He and J.D. waited till Victoria and Stephen Thomas caught up. Various tributaries had brought other people to the path. They passed the fossil bed, which was much farther along than the last time Victoria had seen it. She wondered if Crimson Ng intended to leave even a bit of bone showing, to indicate the bed's presence, or if hiding it completely was pan of its aesthetics.

The party was going great. Infinity had never run a big party before. Small ones, a few friends and strangers, sure, but nothing on the scale of an open invitation to everyone left on campus. If Florrie and J.D. Sauvage had arrived a few transports before, it would have been much larger, but as far as Infinity was concerned it was plenty big enough. Guests crowded the main room, listening to Florrie tell stories in her feathery voice; other folks had spilled out into the garden. Professor Thanthavong, the geneticist, and Alzena Dadkhah, the head ecologist, stood in the garden drinking fruit juice and chatting. Even the new chancellor had made an appearance, though he had already left. Infinity had hoped Kolya Cherenkov might come, but maybe that was too much to ask.

An hour before, Infinity had watched a cloud form diagonally far-overhead, close to the spiral path that would bring

146 Vonda N. Mcintyre

it over the hill garden just as the party was about to start. Rain had not been predicted anywhere on campus till later tonight, but even inside a starship, weather remained wild and free. Inside a starship it was only gently wild, but a drizzle would dampen a party as badly as a downpour.

The cloud drifted by. shadowing the garden. Infinity stood outside, watching it and talking to it in an undertone. Perhaps it listened. As its edge trailed past, it sprinkled a few drops onto the hill, leaving the air fresh and the flowers sparkling and the grass barely damp. Infinity thanked the cloud.

Arachne had arranged to leave bright one section of the sun tubes. A great shaft of sunlight washed down over the hill, keeping the garden full day while the rest of the campus lay dark, spangled here and there with light. Infinity would have preferred lanterns, strung light bulbs, even darkness and fireflies, but the attention, the trouble someone had gone to-even if the someone was a computer—clearly thrilled FIorrie.

Infinity took a glass of fruit juice and wandered out into the garden. The area around the hill lay in bright sunshine. Sunshine on campus was always noon in direction; only its intensity varied as the day progressed. Darkness encircled the pool of light.

Most everybody stood in clusters more or less on the paths, either because of the dampness or because they understood that the grass needed a few more weeks of growth in which to become established. Wildflowers glowed with jeweled colors. They had bloomed just in time, and Infinity felt pleased.

As far as Infinity could tell from the conversations he overheard, the guests had made a tacit agreement, just for tonight, not to discuss the troubles facing the expedition. They sounded more cheerful and relaxed than almost everyone had been for a long time.

He had worried that the guests might be bored with nothing but snacks and fruit juice, but no one appeared to mind the lack of mood-altering refreshments. The campus kitchen would supply food and drink for any reasonable gathering, but did not consider beer or wine to be nutritional necessities.

Infinity found alcohol uninteresting as a recreational drug, so he had never bothered to leam to make either beer or wine, nor had he gone out of his way to make friends with anyone who did. As for importing anything stronger from the

STARFARERS 14 7

O'NeiIls, that was out of the question on his salary even if he had had time to arrange it. The expedition paid him better than any job he could get on earth, but nothing like what it cost to import luxuries.

He sipped his fruit juice and sidled through the flower garden till he stood among the cactuses, in the penumbra between light and dark. He hoped people could see well enough out here; pulling cactus spines out of somebody's hand, or their butt, was no picnic.

Voices approached, disembodied by the darkness. A group of four people appeared out of the shadows. The alien contact team stood at the edge of the garden, still chatting with each other as they blinked and squinted and waited for their eyes to accustom themselves to the illumination. Infinity knew Stephen Thomas slightly; the geneticist had asked him for advice on planting grapevines. J.D. Sauvage was an unknown, and Satoshi and Victoria he had barely met. The personnel of the expedition liked to believe they avoided dividing themselves along class lines, but gardeners and scientists had very little to do with one another.

The team members strolled through the garden toward Florrie's house. Victoria carried a carnation plant, Satoshi a reed mat, Stephen Thomas a paper scroll.

Infinity took note of the alien contact specialist. She was plain and heavyset, pleasant enough but unmemorable. He wondered what alien contact specialists did.

The three old hands took J.D. through the garden, introducing her to everyone they passed. People greeted her and welcomed her and gave her small gifts.

"Victoria!" Someone Infinity did not know loped across the yard toward the team.

"Hi, Feral. Enjoy your first day on StarfarerT'

"It's fantastic—!'*

Kolya Cherenkov's voice spun toward Infinity out of the darkness, that odd, low, powerful voice. Kolya, too, paused at the edge of the light to let his eyes adjust. He continued talking, though he stared straight ahead and never glanced toward his companion.

Griffith stepped into the light and stopped beside Cheren-kov.

Griffith gave Infinity the weirdest feeling. An easygoing 148 Vonda N. Mcfntyre

man, Infinity seldom took an immediate dislike to anyone. In Griffith's case, he was willing to make an exception. He disliked his pushiness, he disliked his rudeness and his disrespect toward Florrie. Infinity admired Cherenkov, too, but Griffith's reaction bordered on worship. Such intensity in any area of life struck Infinity as dangerous.

Infinity had been on campus since before there was a campus, and had never met Cherenkov before today; Griffith, having just arrived, had spent the whole day with the cosmonaut. Disgusted with himself for feeling jealous. Infinity turned away from the pair and headed for the house to make sure everything was going smoothly.

Florrie sat in the window seat with her guests arrayed in concentric circles around her. She wore black pants, and red ankle boots over them, a long fringed black tunic, and black eye makeup.

The alien contact team approached her. J.D. turned aside to put the awkward handful of presents people had given her in a neat stack in the corner.

Victoria handed Florrie the carnations.

"I hope you're getting settled in," she said. "I hope you like Starfarer."

"Yes . . ." Florrie said. "I'm sorry, I don't know your name—?"

"Victoria—from the transport?"

"Oh ... of course." Florrie bent down to sniff the carnations.

Looking puzzled, Victoria stepped back.

Satoshi handed her the mat.

"It's not the same as having a rug," he said apologetically. "The mats last for quite a while, though."

"Thank you. You made this yourself?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Stephen Thomas knelt formally at her feet. Bowing slightly, he offered her a scroll that he held in both hands.

She untied the ribbon, unrolled the paper, and read it. Perplexed, she looked up at him. "A tea ceremony? I don't think

I ..."

"I'm trying to add the cultural roots of my family to my own personal landscape," he said- "Tea ceremony is an an-

STARFARERS 14 9

cient Japanese custom. I'm learning it, and I'd like to do it for you sometime."

"Are you . . . Japanese?"

"No, but that's part of Satoshi's background. I keep trying to get him to study it, too, but he doesn't want to."

"My family is pretty well Americanized," Satoshi said.

"And I'm trying to trace Victoria's family so I know what to study from Africa."

"Dream on," Victoria said, in a tone that sounded to Infinity just a shade bitter. "It would make more sense to study some Canadian customs, eh?"

"I would," Stephen Thomas said, "but I don't like beer." Victoria and Satoshi laughed.

"You are all three in the same family?" Florrie asked.

"Right, a family partnership."

Infinity thought the family partnership was a fairiy weird arrangement. No necessity existed anymore to promise sexual fidelity to one person or to a group. He wondered if J.D. Sauvage had to join the partnership in order to become a member of the alien contact team.

Florrie smiled, accepting the old-fashioned system.

"Goodness," she said, "I had no idea young people did that anymore. I was born in a commune. Sit here near me.

I'm sorry I don't have any chairs."

Stephen Thomas continued to kneel at her feet, like the hero of a martial-arts interactive, attending the dowager empress of Japan. Stephen Thomas looked pretty good, sitting seiw. Infinity thought, though he ducked his head loo far when he bowed.

Satoshi sat on the floor cross-legged, shirting uncomfortably now and then. At a little distance, Victoria drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. J.D. sat beside her, arms folded on her chest, her legs

outstretched and crossed at the ankles.

Infinity listened contentedly as Florrie recounted her parents' story, in which a group of people tried to form their own rural tribe, despite being culturally maladapted to communal living and inexperienced at subsisting off the land. Of course it ended badly, when Florrie was very young, but Infinity had a high aesthetic appreciation for well-meaning tragedies.

150 Vonda N. Mdntyre

Suddenly the atmosphere changed. Infinity felt it as surely as a change in temperature or a sudden wind. Stephen Thomas turned. Infinity looked toward the door. Kolya entered, carrying a small package.

Griffith paused in shadows, right behind him.

Infinity moved to one side of the room, farther from Griffith, trying to act natural rather than surreptitious about his desire to get as far away from the other man as possible. Without meaning to he glanced back, and found Griffith gazing after him, the complete, deliberate neutrality of his expression more frightening than any degree of emotion. Anger, or hatred, or contempt. Infinity might have confronted. The neutrality could not even be commented upon, though Infinity knew, and Griffith knew, that it meant: I notice you. I'll watch you, if it pleases me.

Someone toward the front of the room noticed Kolya. Flor-rie continued to tell her story, but people were distracted by the unexpected appearance of the cosmonaut. They began nudging each other, glancing back, exclaiming softly in surprise.

As far as Infinity could tell, no one else paid the least attention to Griffith.

Kolya acted as if he never noticed that anyone had noticed him. He hunkered down in a clear space and listened. Infinity wondered if Kolya found it amusing to hear Home's tale of a failed fling with communism in the mid-twentielh-cenlury United States. If he did, he was too well mannered to laugh in any of the wrong places.

When FIorrie finished, her audience applauded and Kolya unfolded to his feet. People made way for him- He stopped beside Stephen Thomas, who still knelt in front of FIorrie.

'*! brought you both small gifts of welcome," he said to FIorrie and to J.D. He handed FIorrie the package. "It is rather delicate."

As she opened it, her fingers trembled. Infinity was afraid she would slip and drop it, whatever it was, but the wrapping unfolded and floated to the floor, leaving a delicate, intricately painted eggshell in her hands.

"A souvenir," Kolya said. "I believe that they do not make them in my country anymore. Or, if they do, they do not export them."

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt STARPARERS 151

"Why, thank you, Mr. Cherenkov," FIorrie said.

Kolya handed J.D. a slip of paper. J.D. unfolded it, read it, and looked up.

"Thank you,'* she said softly, and buttoned the slip of paper into her shirt pocket.

FIorrie held the eggshell up and looked at it against the light. Infinity wondered if she understood what giving gifts meant here. Gifts were, more often than not, nonphysical:

oners of help or time or the gift of a skill. The kind of thing Kolya, apparently, had offered to J.D. People did not have many things to give, up here. Kolya probably had fewer than most. He had not, as far as Infinity knew, been back to earth in two decades. Other people returned to earth on leave and came home with full allowances; Kolya lacked this luxury.

Perhaps he had brought the egg into space with him on an eariy trip, or the last one.

FIorrie looked around. "I don't know where to put this," she said. "If I were back home I'd put it on the mantelpiece, but I have none here."

"There is a thread strung through it, to make it easy to hang up."

"In the window, then."

"Oh—" Kolya stopped. He looked uncomfortable, unhappy, but he said nothing more. Infinity had no idea what troubled him.

FIorrie rose and turned toward the window, looking for a place to hang the egg. Before she found one, Griffith appeared. Infinity had not even noticed him move. Griffith took the egg from her hand.

FIorrie reacted to Griffith even more negatively, more noticeably, than Infinity had. She drew back; the egg would have fallen and shattered if Griffith had not taken it carefully from her hand. He was more concerned about the eggshell than he was about FIorrie, for he showed no reaction to her fright.

"Sunlight will fade it," Griffith said. He took the eggshell to the corner farthest from the window, stretched up, and hung it from a hook set into the ceiling.

FIorrie *s aesthetic sense was better than Griffith's. The eggshell looked odd and lonely high up in the comer, where it was safe. It would have looked fine in the window, but not

152 vonda N. Mcfntyre

at the expense of its existence. Infinity could see that someone would have to build Florrie a table or a stand or a little cabinet for the egg, maybe with a bit of mirror behind it.

"Well!" Defending herself with indignation, Florrie sat

stiff and straight on the window seat.

Both relieved and embarrassed. Kolya offered Florrie a small bow.

"I hope you will be happy on our expedition," he said. "I hope you will be happy, too, J.D."

"Thank you, Kolya," J.D- Sauvage said.

In a moment the cosmonaut was gone.

Though the party inside took a little while to ease again, the party outside had loosened up considerably. As the light faded to dusk, people put lines out to Arachne for music.

Couples and groups danced on the grass, unsynchronized, each to a different interior melody. Infinity would have to reseed the center of the yard, after all. He did not mind too much.

He kept an eye on Griffith, trying to figure out what bothered him about the man. After Kolya left, Griffith acted like everyone else, mingling, chatting. But every so often, when Infinity glanced around, he found Griffith gazing at him with that scary neutral expression.

Infinity went inside. Florrie sipped lemonade. Stephen

Thomas still knelt at her feet—as far as Infinity could tell, he

had not moved. They chatted.

Infinity admired Stephen Thomas's new earring. He wondered who had made it and whether they would make a similar one for him, only with synthetic rubies instead of emeralds.

He joined Florrie and Stephen Thomas.

"You let me know if you get tired, Florrie," Infinity said,

"and I'll chase all these folks home."

She peered out the French doors. "Who is that man?"

Griffith stood alone on the porch.

"He said he's with the GAO," Infinity said.

"The GAO!" Victoria frowned, doubtful. "What's he doing, auditing our books?"

"Could be, I guess."

"He's a narc," Florrie said.

"What?"

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"A narc."

**I heard you, I just don't know what that means."

"Is the government going through anti-drug hysteria again?" she asked. "I gave up reading local news years ago."

"The main tantrum the U.S. is going through right now is about Sfarfarer and the expedition," Infinity said. "Plorrie, please, what's a narc?"

"Be careful around him," she said. "If you use any kind of drugs, he'll put you in jail."

Infinity and Stephen Thomas looked at each other, confused. What kind of drugs could get you put in jail? Most recreational substances were designed so their effects wore off quickly, and anyone who chose something more powerful ought to have the sense to check out their tolerance for it and make adjustments. Infinity had known people who too frequently sought out effects that were too strong—watching them was one of the reasons he did not drink—but he could not imagine involving the law in the problem. A supervisor, or a doctor, sure. Even the community council. But the law?

"You don't know much history, do you?" Florrie said.

"Not enough, I guess," Stephen Thomas said politely.

"You be careful. If you do anything they don't like, if you make trouble, they'll accuse you of using drugs and they'll ruin you. They take a real problem and they pervert the solution to it to increase their power over you. They'll take your job away. That happened to a friend of mine, and he didn't even use alcohol, much less something illegal. But he was a troublemaker! And they destroyed him for it!"

"I don't think you need to worry," Victoria said, keeping her voice gentle, neutral, almost as neutral as Griffith's expression. "We're all troublemakers up here, in one way or another. They can't get us all."

"Don't patronize me, young lady!" Florrie snapped, with a spark of real anger. "If you ignore me because you think I'm a senile old coot, you'll be sorry!"

"I don't think—it wasn't my intention—" Victoria's voice broke. She stopped. Her dark skin flushed, "—to patronize you."

Infinity suddenly shivered. He looked out the window at Griffith, wondering if Florrie was worried over the wrong details, but for the right reason.

154 vonda N. Mcintyre

When he glanced back toward Florrie and the alien contact team, Victoria had disappeared.

Victoria hurried to the edge of the garden, out of the light.

She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. Not someone. Floris Brown.

"Victoria?"

J.D. crossed the shadows and stopped beside her.

"What's wrong?"

"1 don't know. It's just . . ." She fell silent. "She had a perfect right to react that way, 1 was being patronizing.''

"There's a difference between being patronizing and being reassuring. I thought her reaction was kind of extreme."

Victoria shrugged.

"Why did what she said hurt you so much?" J.D. asked.

Victoria told J.D. about her own great-grandmother.

"I tried to get Grangrana to apply to the expedition, but she wouldn't. She's older than Ms. Brown, quite a lot. She's frailer. She traveled all over when she was younger, and now . . . she's tired. I'm worried about her. I don't want to leave her behind. I miss her, J.D., I miss her so much." Victoria smiled. "Grangrana can give you what-for, but she wouldn't ever slap you down."

"You wanted Ms. Brown to like you, didn't you?"

"I did. I think she's admirable, to apply for the program and come all this way. I thought she did like me. On the transport. But tonight she didn't even remember me."

"I'm sorry."

"isn't it strange," Victoria said, "how somebody can say a couple of words to you, and make you feel like a four-year-old?"

"No," J.D. said. "Not strange at all. Especially when it's somebody you want to make a connection with."

Victoria squeezed J.D.'s hand. "Thanks. For talking. For . . . noticing." She still felt shaken, as much by surprise at the intensity of her reaction as by Ms. Brown's words. She made herself smile. "What did Cherenkov give you?"

"Hey, Victoria!" Satoshi joined them. He carried J.D.'s presents in the crook of his arm. "J.D., you forgot these."

"Oh. Sorry. Thank you." She took them from him. "Kolya invited me to lunch," she said to Victoria. "He offered

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to make piroshki. I don't know what piroshki is, but I'm looking forward to finding out."

"Piroshki are the Russian version of fried dumplings or pasties or ravioli," SatoshJ said.

Satoshi put his arm around Victoria's shoulders. His bare skin touched hers through the open lace of her shirt. She put her arm around his waist, glad of his warmth.

"He doesn't spend time with people very often," Victoria said. "He's given you a unique gift."

"What's wrong?" Satoshi asked her. "The way you rushed out ... "

"I'm okay now, but I'm going home." "Wait just a minute and we'll all go."

"There's no reason for you to leave, too—"

"Stephen Thomas is already making our excuses. It's getting late. There he is."

Stephen Thomas walked toward them, staring at the ground.

When he reached them he stopped and looked up. His fair skin was pale, his blue eyes dark-circled.

"Stephen Thomas—?"

"Let's go," he said shortly, and strode into the darkness.

People began drifting home soon after the light faded. Infinity was spared having to urge anyone to go, since everyone had to work the next day. Stephen Thomas surprised him by leaving so early—he could usually be counted on to close out any gathering, no matter how late it ran. He had bid good night to Florrie, then he had risen from his kneeling position as smoothly as if he had knelt at her feet only for a moment. Infinity wondered how he kept his feet from going to sleep.

The AS from the campus kitchen had already collected the bento boxes and taken them away. The housekeeper rolled about, looking for other things to do. As usual after parties on campus, no litter remained. Disposable eating utensils and suchlike did not exist out here. The AS carefully placed crumpled wrapping paper in a stack by Infinity's feet. Infinity smoothed the sheets out and folded them.

"You should keep this, too, Florrie," he said. "It's as much a gift as anything else you got tonight. Nobody manufactures wrapping paper out here."

She hardly heard him. She had not calmed down from her 156 vonda N. Mclntyre

Inaction to Griffith. Though she trembled with weariness, excitement and fear brightened her eyes.

"You will watch him, won't you?" she said. "Whatever he's about, you'll find out and make him stop."

"I can't do that," Infinity said. "How could I make him stop anything? He's a government representative, I'm a gardener. ''

"You've got to, that's all. You've got to."

"Please try to be easy. There's nothing I can do, and if there were I couldn't do it tonight. And, look, if he is some kind of spy or something, maybe you ought to be careful what you say about him, or anyway who you say it to. It might get back to him."

She glanced at Infinity, quickly, sidelong, and immediately fell silent.

"I don't mean me," Infinity said. "I don't like him either." He stopped, wishing he had kept that admission to himself. "FIorrie, do you need any help, or shall I leave you alone?"

"I don't need help."

"Okay, then, I just live over the next hill if you want to call me."

"But . . . you could brush my hair."

"All right," he said uncertainly. "Sure."

Except for the three long locks, she kept her hair cropped so close that he worried about scratching her scalp with the well-wom bristles of her brush. Her papery skin felt fragile.

The brush made a soft, whispery noise, like her voice. A bristle caught against one of the unshorn and braided patches.

He disentangled it. The shells and small pierced stones rattled together.

"Go ahead and take those out," she said.

Three diamond-shaped patches of hair lay in a diagonal line across the back of her head. There, her hair was heavy and thick. She had divided each section into two hanks and braided them with a soft leather thong from which dangled the shells and stones. He laid the thongs on the counter and brushed the long sections. She let herself relax into the chair;

she pushed her foot against the floor. Just once, then stopped trying to rock a chair that had no rockers.

Infinity found it pleasant to brush her hair. He had never

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done that for anyone before. After a while he thought FIorrie had gone to sleep. He stopped brushing. He would have to wake her—

"Thank you," she said. She opened her eyes. "Maybe I'll see you tomorrow."

"Sure," Infinity said. He put the brush beside the shells and stones and left her alone.

He walked home across the darkened campus, thinking about the strange day. Once he heard a noise: he stopped short and spun toward it, expecting to see Griffith gazing expressionlessly at him half-hidden by shadows.

The miniature horse herd's miniature stallion scamped the ground with its miniature hoof, snorted at him, and reared and whinnied. A moment later the whole herd galloped away into the darkness, making a noise like rain. Infinity smiled. When he got home, he took a blanket into his own garden, to sleep in the reflected starlight.

Griffith returned to the guesthouse in the dark, knowing he could walk safely anywhere and anytime up here, yet unable to shake off a practiced tension. His aggressive swagger let potential assailants know he was no easy target. Here he tried to tone it down, for it did not fit the character of Griffith of

GAO. On the other hand, he was not willing to be accosted even for the sake of his assignment.

He had complied with the rules of campus—of all the orbital habitations—to the extent of going unarmed. Even Griffith of GAO would never do that in the city. Being unarmed made him uncomfortable, and he wished he had at least tried to circumvent the laws.

He went to bed in his silent room. Lying on the thin hard futon, he listened. He heard nothing, no sign of the other guest, only the evening breeze brushing through the open windows.

Cherenkov had talked to him.

Griffith's thoughts kept returning to the question of how to persuade the cosmonaut to continue talking to him, to continue answering his questions. Griffith's mission to Starfarer seemed inconsequential in comparison to his need to leam everything he could about Nikolai Cherenkov. Today was the first time in a long time that he had felt the drive to know

158 vonda N. Mclntyre

everything about anything or anyone. At the party, Griffith had felt as if he wore his nerves outside his skin, sensitive to every stimulus that passed. He gathered everything in: observations ofCherenkov and information about the rest of the faculty and staff of the expedition as welt, the kind of indiscriminate data that would collect in the back of his mind, work like fermenting beer, and help him discover a way to complete his mission. But after Cherenkov left, the party bored him, the interactions between the people bored him;

their negative opinions about the new administration bored him.

The agreement he had made with Cherenkov must not stop him. As Griffith lay in bed, he let the prospect of the quest excite him. It pushed away the depression that had settled when he could no longer keep Cherenkov in sight. It recharged him.

In the darkness, he drafted a quick memo to his superiors.

Before he ever came here he had tried to tell them that directly co-opting the personnel would be hopeless. Now he could demonstrate it. The hope had been a foolish one to begin with. The crew of Smrfarer, the faculty and staff, as they referred to themselves, would all have to be recalled in one way or another. Then the starship could be converted.

Griffith encrypted his message, sent it back to earth, and fell asleep- He dreamed all night.

Kolya wanted to go outside again, but he knew that

Arachne, fussing over his radiation exposure, would go so far

as to call out human help to persuade him to stay inside.

Since he recognized his desire as a selfish one, he refrained from indulging in it. The only result would be that someone would be fetched, probably out of a warm bed. to come and talk to him.

He feared he had made a tactical error in conversing with Marion Griffith. The intensity of the officer's questions troubled him. He should have seen the problem coming when the fellow waited in the access tunnels for him. Even before that. Kolya tried to excuse himself on the grounds of having been spared the more obvious forms of hero worship during the past few years.

The person he looked forward to talking to was the alien STARFARERS 15 9

contact specialist. J.D. Sauvage and her profession fascinated him. He thought that if he were younger, if he had a different background, he might have tried to go into her field himself.

Since yesterday, he said to himself, you've added a party and a lunch date to your socializing. Soon your reputation as a hermit will be ruined.

Do you even remember how to make piroshki?

J.D. enjoyed working at night; she enjoyed the solitude and the long uninterrupted hours of quiet thought. She might have to change her schedule around, though, in order to spend time with the rest of the alien contact team. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas kept awfully normal hours.

She liked them all, which surprised her a bit. She liked Victoria in particular. The team leader sparked off ideas like phosphorescent waves. Satoshi was quieter, but what he said usually counted. As for Stephen Thomas . . .

She decided not to think about Stephen Thomas for a while.

She stayed awake for a long time after the party, reading, gazing out into the dark courtyard- Once she got up and rearranged the new woven mats on her floor. For all their homemade roughness, they made her happy, and a little scared.

The gifts represented a welcome that made her believe she had found a place where she might be at home. This disturbed her, because she had always believed that being an alien contact specialist meant remaining an outsider in her own culture—not just the culture of her country, but the culture of humanity as a whole.

J.D. took Kolya Cherenkov's note from her pocket and smoothed it out. He had given her, as Victoria said, a unique gift. She did not understand why he had given it to her, but she knew it was not to be trifled with or abused. In some ways, his was the welcome that meant the most to her.

Before she finally went to sleep, she checked her mail: the usual tsunami of junk, most of which she filtered out without even scanning; scientific journals; magazines of experimental fiction (interior landscapes, mostly; deliberately, stolidly human, but every now and again a story she could savor, save, and think about); no personal mail. Nothing from Zev. She

16 0 Vonda N. Mctntyre

scanned the news summary, lingering just perceptibly over the Pacific Northwest.

The divers, as usual, received no mention.

Victoria propped herself on her elbow next to Satoshi, who lay in the middle of his bed with Stephen Thomas on his other side. Stephen Thomas lay fiat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed on his chest.

"Do you think J.D. had a good time?" Victoria asked Satoshi.

"She seemed to."

"I wasn't about to say anything in front of her, but I'm so mad at the chancellor I could spit—he came early, he left early, he was too rude to stay and welcome her to campus'

Gerald was there—did he even speak to her?" She tried to remember seeing the assistant chancellor anywhere near J.D.

"I don't think so," Satoshi said. "We can't take this stuff personally, Victoria. It's all politics."

"They mean it personally and I take it personally, politics or not."

They heard a noise from the front of the house, sharp and loud, quickly stilled. Victoria sat up.

"What was that?" She started to rise. "Oh—Feral coming in." They listened as he tiptoed down the hall to the end room.

Concerned by Stephen Thomas's uncharacteristic silence,

Victoria glanced over at him. The crystal lay dull and black in the hollow of his throat. He had taken off his sexy emerald jewelry, but he had not replaced the regular gold stud.

"The hole in your ear is going to close up," Victoria said.

He shrugged.

Victoria slid out of bed and went into Stephen Thomas's room. His jewelry hung in a tangle on a rock-foam stand that someone in the materials lab had made for him. The gold stud was nowhere she could see it, so she picked out a little platinum ring and returned to Satoshi's bedroom. She stepped over both her partners, sat cross-legged beside Stephen Thomas, and smoothed his hair away from his ear. In the darkness, she had trouble finding the hole to put the earring in.

"Ouch, shit, that hurt!"

STARFARERS 161

Victoria leaned down and kissed his ear. "Better?"

"Give it here, I'll put it in." He took the earring from her and put it on. Victoria lay down beside him and put one hand on his hip.

"I'm glad to know you can still talk," Satoshi said.

"You've been awfully quiet since we left the party."

"You remember that conversation we had with Florrie?"

Stephen Thomas asked.

Victoria said nothing, wishing Stephen Thomas had not reminded her about talking with Ms. Brown.

"You hit it off pretty well with her, didn't you?" Satoshi said.

"Yeah, I did. I like her. I thought she'd be reactionary, but she's more open-minded than half the people up here."

"You just like her because she approves of our sleeping arrangements," Victoria said.

"That doesn't hurt. And you don't have to be careful of every word you say to her. But she goes off at a different angle, sometimes."

"What do you mean?" Satoshi said.

"What she said about Griffith."

"He was on the transport," Victoria said. "But I hardly ever saw him. I almost forgot about him."

"He's weird. When Florrie said he was a narc—after she told me what a narc was—I tried to shrug it off." Stephen Thomas shifted uneasily. "But I think we ought to pay attention to her intuition."

"Oh, no, not another aura reader!" Victoria flopped forward and hid her face in Stephen Thomas's pillow.

"I don't know whether she is or not, but / looked at him. Dammit, that guy doesn't have an aura."

"Wouldn't that mean he's dead?" Satoshi asked.

"I don't know what it means," Stephen Thomas said.

"Since he obviously isn't dead."

Victoria raised herself from the pillows and propped her chin on her fists. "Maybe they've been improving robot technology in secret—"

"Laugh if you want. He said he's with the GAO—that may be worse than being a narc. I think he's trouble. Even if he's just an ordinary government accountant."

162 vonda N. Mclntyre

"There's not much we can do about him that I can see."

"There's got to be something." Stephen Thomas lay back and stared at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest, as if he intended to try to think of something right now, and stay where he was until he succeeded.

The solar sail drew Starfarer beyond the orbit of the moon.

During its construction, the starship held steady in the li-bration point leading the moon. With the sail deployed, Star-

farer accelerated out of its placid orbit. Each imperceptible increment of velocity widened and altered its path.

•y Because the starship took longer to circle the earth in its

wider orbit, the moon began to catch up to it. Soon it would

II I

pass beneath Starfarer, and the ship would use the lunar passage to tilt its course into a new plane.

•i- As the orbit increased in complexity, the logistics of trans

* '" port to Starfarer would become more difficult and more expensive.

In the middle of Starfarer's night, Iphigenie DuPre set in

motion the interactions of gravity and magnetic field and so-

11 lar wind to tilt the starship out of the plane of the lunar orbit. *'\ The angle would grow steeper and the spiral wider: the sail

*' plus the effect of traveling past the earth and the moon would

* soon drive the ship toward a mysterious remnant of the cre-

* - alion of the universe, a strand of cosmic string that would

* provide Starfarer with superluminal transition energy.

Starfarer prepared for lunar passage. Afterward, it would

be well and truly on its way. i /•

* Grangrana was making breakfast. Victoria could smell bis-y cuits, eggs, a rice curry. Coffee.

ll. Coffee? In Grangrana's house?

•Jk Victoria woke from the dream. She was on board Starfarer,

M, 163

164 Vonda N. Mcintyre

Grangrana remained on earth. The straight up-and-down sunlight of morning, noon, and evening reflected from the porch. Nevertheless, she smelled breakfast.

Satoshi, beside her, half opened his eyes.

"Is that coffee?"

"Uh-huh."

"Your friend Feral can stay if he wants," Satoshi said, and went back to sleep.

Victoria smiled, kissed the curve of his shoulder, tucked the blanket around him, and slid out of his bed.

In cutoffs and one of Satoshi's sleeveless shirts, Victoria went out to the main room. Stephen Thomas was up and dressed, in flowered cotton Bermuda shorts and a purple silk shirt. Victoria remembered rising partway out of sleep in the middle of the night when he left Satoshi's room and returned to his own.

Victoria dodged around Stephen Thomas's still.

"Good morning."

"Hi." The circles beneath his eyes had faded. He looked better this morning, not as shaken as after the party. But if he had thought of what to do about Griffith, he made no mention of his plans.

"Morning." Feral set a pot of tea in front of Victoria as she sat down.

"This is a real treat for us, Feral," Victoria said. "But you don't have to make breakfast every morning." The pleasure of having breakfast cooked and waiting gave her mixed emotions- She missed having a family manager, but it seemed disloyal to enjoy it when someone else did the tasks Merit had always smoothly, almost invisibly, taken care of.

"I know. I like to cook." He grinned. He had mobile, expressive lips that exposed his even white teeth when he smiled. "And everything I made this morning will reheat. Satoshi can sleep in if he wants to."

"Speak of the devil," Stephen Thomas said.

Satoshi arrived wrapped in his threadbare bathrobe, his wet hair dripping down his neck.

"Stephen Thomas, there's no clean laundry," he said in a neutral tone. "And you used the last towel."

"Uh-oh," Stephen Thomas said.

STARFARERS 16 5

"You might at least have hung it up so I could use it."

"It was wet," Stephen Thomas said.

"Yeah, welt, so am I." Satoshi accepted a cup of coffee. "Thanks, Feral."

Victoria sometimes wished Satoshi would simply blow his stack. He hardly ever did.

Stephen Thomas sighed. "I'll do some laundry. Today. A little later. Okay?"

Satoshi did not answer him.

"Want some curry?" Feral said.

"Sure." Satoshi wiped the sides of his face and his neck where water had dripped from his hair. His elbow stuck through a hole in the blue terry cloth. He had gotten away with bringing the robe to Starfarer by using it as packing material when they first moved here. He needed a new one, but terry cloth was far too heavy and bulky for an ordinary allowance.

Satoshi dug around in the cupboard among his collection of condiments. There was a hole in the back of the robe, too, just below his left hip. His tawny skin showed through it. Victoria was glad he hated sewing and would probably never darn the battered fabric.

Feral brought breakfast to the table. Satoshi opened the new hot chili paste.

"I'm looking forward to trying this stuff."

Feral laughed. "Don't tell me they import that here."

"Victoria brought it up in her allowance. What's life without red chili paste?"

"Quieter," Victoria said, and Satoshi smiled.

"This is pretty hot already." Feral offered Satoshi the curry.

"Good."

Feral passed the food around and sat across from Satoshi.

As she watched Satoshi put chili sauce on his curry and on his eggs, Victoria hoped he and Feral would not get into a competition of who could eat the hottest food- Despite long acquaintance with Satoshi, Victoria had never understood the lure of the more violent forms of Cajun, Chinese, or Mexican cooking. Even from a distance, the volatile oils were enough to make her eyes water.

166 vonda N. Mdntyre

Feral tasted the curry. "You're right, it isn't hot enough. Steve, would you pass the chili sauce?"

"Please don't call me Steve," Stephen Thomas said.

Feral looked up, surprised by the sudden change in tone of Stephen Thomas's voice.

"Stephen Thomas has this phobia about nicknames," Satoshi said.

Stephen Thomas scowled at Satoshi. "Do I have to let everybody call me anything they want? Maybe I should make up a nickname for Feral? In the North American style. Perrie.

Or the Japanese style, Feral-chan. Maybe the Russian style, Ferushkababushka.''

"Dammit, Stephen Thomas!"

Feral started to laugh. "It's okay, Satoshi," he said. "I can do without the Russian style, but I kind of like 'Feral-chan.' Stephen Thomas, I apologize. I won't try to change your name again. After all, if you've got three first names, it only makes sense to use at least two of them."

Stephen Thomas scowled, unwilling to be placated. "I don't have any first names," he said. "They're all last names."

"Will you accept my apology anyway? And pass the chili sauce?"

Stephen Thomas tossed the jar across the table. Saloshi winced and grabbed for it, but Feral caught it easily.

"You're really acting like an adolescent." Satoshi said to

Stephen Thomas. "And I wish you'd quit."

"I thought I was performing a public service." Stephen Thomas said. "That's one of the problems with this cam-pus—no kids live here."

Victoria went straight to her office. She had some more ideas about the cosmic string problem. Four different displays, each working on a separate manipulation, hovered in the corner. She glanced at them, though it was too soon to expect results.

One had stopped.

"I'll be damned!" Victoria said.

Her "a-hah!" equation had produced a solution. Already.

The quickest one yet, by several orders of magnitude. If it was correct- She looked it over. She felt like a bottle of Ste-

STARFARERS 16 7

phen Thomas's champagne, with the strange invigorated lightness that the joy of discovery always gave her. The solution felt right, as the problem had fell right when she chose it to work on.

"I'll be damned," she said again. And then she thought. if I hadn't had to go back to earth. I would have finished the algorithm a couple of weeks ago. We would have had plenty of time for Iphigenie to recalculate the orbit for the cosmic string encounter. We could have substituted this approach to the string for the first one we chose.

The approach promised a faster, more direct route to their destination. And it hinted at a safer and more usable way home from Tau Ceti, but Victoria could not yet prove that.

Nevertheless, she was outrageously pleased with her success.

Victoria collected the arrival coordinates and set the return calculations going. At the same time she packaged up the string solution.

As she was about to tell Arachne to send the information to EarthSpace for archiving, she thought better of it.

Then she did something that abashed her. But she did it anyway.

She made a hard copy of the solution and slipped the crys-

't( talline module into the pocket of her cutoffs and took the

results out of the web altogether.

* Stephen Thomas sat sipping his coffee until Feral and Vic

* toria and Satoshi had left the house. He hated it when Satoshi

* got so annoyed about trivial things like laundry, and then

* would not even admit he was mad.

%• All three members of the family had begun to deal with

1*- the grief of losing their eldest partner, but that did not resolve

* the problem of being without a manager. The strain was

-K showing as plainly as the holes in Satoshi's robe. Stephen J'' Thomas knew what needed to be done, but he did not know

*- how to make Satoshi and Victoria admit that (hey needed a

manager. He had even tried to figure out how to make the *' family finances stretch to hiring someone. It might have been

* possible back on earth; it might even have been possible on

* ' Starfarer if they were not buying the house. As things stood, 3, that solution was out of the question.

Jl,' Maybe Victoria, having finally begun to accept Merit's

168 Vonda N. Mclntyre

death, was also beginning to accept the need for other changes. She had, after all, started the connection with Feral.

She made no objection when Stephen Thomas invited him to stay. Stephen Thomas found Feral attractive, and he believed Victoria did, too, though he could not be certain she had admitted it to herself. And then there was the interesting fact that fora houseguest. Feral was making himself spectacularly useful.

I probably shouldn't have snapped at him about calling me "Steve," Stephen Thomas thought.

He finished his coffee. In no hurry, he left his bike on the porch and walked on over to the genetics department. He enjoyed watching the changes in the landscape he passed every day. When he first arrived, the naked earth-colored hillocks sent off rivulets of eroded mud with every rain shower. Puddles on the path turned red or yellow or blue with clay or white with sand: stark pure colors unleavened by organic content. Slowly the grasses and succulents, the bushes and bamboo, sprouted into pale green lace covering the new land.

The erosion slowed; now it had nearly stopped, and the vegetation covered the ground as if it had always been here. In many spots the gardeners had planted sapling trees, species either naturally fast-maturing or genetically altered to grow at enhanced speed. The primary colors of the soil had begun to dull into fertile shades of brown as the plants and the bacteria and the earthworms worked them.

According to Infinity Mendez, most of the wild cylinder would be permitted to grow and change by normal processes of succession, until in a hundred or five hundred years it would contain mature climax forests of several climates. The plan presented difficulties—never mind that no one expected Slarfarer's first expedition to last more than a few years; the starship itself should be essentially immortal. But many types of forest required periodic fires to maintain their health, and that of course could not be permitted within the confines, however large, of a starship. Other methods, mechanical and bacterial and labor-intensive human work, would have to substitute. Some of them had only been tried briefly and experimentally. This both troubled Stephen Thomas and excited his appreciation of the unknown.

He strolled through the stand of smoke bamboo growing STARFARERS 16 9

above the genetics department and walked down the outdoor ramp to the main level. As he headed for his lab, he brought his current project to the front of his perceptions and immersed himself in it.

He passed the conference room, the first door after the entrance, so engrossed in his thoughts that he was five paces past it before he noticed the yelling. He stopped and went back.

"Wretched fucking government plots—" Anger and profanity sounded particularly odd in the beautiful faint accent Professor Thanthavong retained from her childhood in Southeast Asia.

Gerald Hemminge replied in a cool voice. "I came all the way across campus to give you this news in person. I didn't expect to be abused for my courtesy."

"But it's outrageous!" Thanthavong exclaimed, unrelenting- "How did you expect me to react?"

"Oh, come now, it's simply your Congress on one of its toots. They haven't passed their budget, or appropriations bill, or somesuch. Then all you Americans rush about pretending that the government is packing up and going home. American congressional shenanigans give the rest of us enormous entertainment."

Stephen Thomas had never been able to tell if Gerald patronized his colleagues deliberately, or if it was just the effect of his upper-class British background and accent. Stephen Thomas ignored academic hierarchies on principle, but even he thought it was not a survival characteristic for an assistant chancellor to patronize a Nobel laureate. Beyond that, he felt an enormous respect for Dr. Thanthavong, and he felt himself fortunate to work with her. Gerald's attitude annoyed him.

"I think I can tell the difference between a normal governmental screwup and a conspiracy!" Thanthavong exclaimed.

"I'm always astonished when you criticize your adopted country with such severity," Gerald said.

"It's bad enough when other Americans expect blind loyalty, but—"

"What's the matter?" Stephen Thomas said, before Thanthavong could finish. Having found a topic that could ruffle Thanthavong's usual restraint, Gerald managed to bring it into conversation whenever possible.

17 0 vonda N. Mcintyre

Stephen Thomas joined them. Thanthavong glared at Gerald for another moment, then broke away and turned toward Stephen Thomas. The tension eased just perceptibly.

"You haven't heard." Thanthavong blew out her breath in annoyance. '*No, I suppose not. Gerald came over to be sure I got the news in person, as he's been so kind to point out."

"All I've heard this morning is that the moon's going to pass without crashing into us." "Distler has impounded the United States' share of Star-farer's operating funds."

"Maybe it was the only way your president could think of to get your attention," Gerald said.

Stephen Thomas looked at him with disbelief. When the expedition first came together, Gerald had been as enthusiastic as anyone, as convinced of Starfarer's necessity. His attitude had changed recently, with the arrival of the new chancellor. He had not quite said out loud that he agreed with the idea of sending Starfarer into lower orbit, or even dismantling the ship. Stephen Thomas had given up arguing with him, because the arguments never went anywhere. Since Gerald never acknowledged anyone else's points, discussions began and ended in the same place. Besides, Stephen Thomas had finally realized that Gerald liked to argue, and would do it for fun. Arguing was not Stephen Thomas's idea of a good time.

"How can you be surprised?" Thanthavong asked Stephen Thomas. "Didn't you see it coming?"

"No. I didn't. The idea never crossed my mind."

"Something like this," Thanthavong said. "It had to happen."

"This isn't 'congressional shenanigans,' Gerald," Stephen Thomas said. "This is a serious attack."

"Yes, in the most vulnerable American area—the pocket-book."

Stephen Thomas let the jab fly past.

' 'It would be easier to prepare the expedition without any money than to continue without half our personnel," Thanthavong said.

Stephen Thomas frowned, trying to put a hopeful spin on the news. "Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. We're supposed to be self-sufficient eventually ... "

STARFARERS 171

"He's suspended the salaries of all U.S. citizens," Thanthavong said. "They*!! send out enough transports to pick people up, but they won't send supplies beyond what are already in preparation."

"That isn't quite true," Gerald said. "We can have anything we want, as long as we pay for it ourselves."

"Does he think he can starve us out?" Stephen Thomas said. "How long can it take to grow, I don't know, potatoes?"

"Somehow," Gerald said, "I cannot see you holding out for long on a diet of potatoes. You're looking at the situation from a far too personal point of view. Our civilization is faced with problems much bigger than ours—" "And the problems of one starship don't amount to a hill of beans," Stephen Thomas said.

"This isn't funny, Stephen Thomas," Thanthavong said.

"Yeah. I know."

"Putting off the expedition for two or three years," Gerald said, "might make the difference between survival and destruction."

"Starfarer cannot fill the new role the president suggests." Thanthavong said. "If the ship moves to a lower orbit, it will never leave the solar system. And I believe you know it."

She left the conference room,

"The same thing could happen to Europe and Britain as happened to half of Asia and Africa," Gerald said. "Perhaps it can't happen in North America—note that I place emphasis on 'perhaps.' I don't expect any native-born Americans to have a conception of what that means, but surely a naturalized citizen—"

Stephen Thomas remembered some of the stories Victoria's great-grandmother told about her friends and the Mideast Sweep. He felt distressed and off balance, unable to counter Gerald's arguments.

"Gerald," Stephen Thomas said, though it was hardly a survival characteristic for a professor to antagonize an assistant chancellor, "shut up." He followed Thanthavong out of the main room and went to his lab.

"Stephen Thomas!" His two grad students and his postdoc converged on him.

172 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"Give me a few minutes," he said. He went into his office and shut the door.

Stephen Thomas came out of his office and into the deserted lab. He wondered where everyone had got to. He wanted to talk to them; he had spent the whole morning with Arachne, and he thought he had figured out a way to keep the lab going. At least for a while.

The president's announcement had completely disrupted everything he had planned for today. In addition, the staff and faculty had put in enough recommendations to schedule a general meeting. Even Stephen Thomas had joined in that proposal, though he hated meetings. It would eat up the evening.

Stephen Thomas left the genetics building and headed for the park. As he walked, he set up another problem for Arachne to work on. Every twenty paces or so, his stride faltered as he rejected the results, changed a variable, and started another report cycle.

He barely noticed the blossoms that had opened since his last visit to the park. A kitchen AS stood next to a round table, waiting patiently with lunch. Otherwise, the meadow was deserted. In normal times every picnic table by the stream would be in use.

Stephen Thomas waited for Victoria and Satoshi. He pillowed his head on his arms. The bento boxes breathed a warm smell, but Stephen Thomas had no appetite. He was still linked up with Arachne, juggling numbers and trying not to see the pattern they insisted on producing.

"Stephen Thomas."

Stephen Thomas started when Satoshi touched his shoulder.

"Sorry."

"I was thinking."

"Yeah."

Victoria joined them. They embraced. Victoria and Satoshi looked as somber as Stephen Thomas felt. They had probably been doing the same calculations as he had.

Satoshi set the bento boxes out on the stone table, then sat on the rock-foam bench beside his partners.

"So," Victoria said.

STARFARERS 173

"They've really done it this time," Stephen Thomas said.

"How many graduate students are you losing?" Satoshi said.

"No one has bailed out yet," Stephen Thomas said, adding, to himself. As far as I know.

"All mine are Canadian," Victoria said. "The temps plan to stay as long as they can be sure of a transport home. But with the supply runs curtailed, my kids are scared."

Most of the researchers on board had several graduate students and post-doctoral students: till now, at least, it was considered quite a coup to win a position helping prepare the expedition. Most of the students were temps, permitted to stay only while the starship remained in range of the transports. Some had applied for positions on the expedition itself:

the ultimate make-or-break dissertation project.

"Leaving now sounds kind of shortsighted to me," Stephen Thomas said. "They wouldn't lose that much—unless somebody raised grad salaries when I wasn't looking." He tried to grin.

"What have you been doing all morning?" Victoria snapped.

"What? What arc you mad about?"

"Didn't you even read the new rules?"

"I got as far as 'Salaries and grants are suspended until further notice,' and I spent the rest of the morning figuring out how to keep the lab together."

"The new rules are that American grad students who quit now and go home still get their trips free. If they stay and change their minds later they have to pay for it themselves."

"Oh."

"Oh," Victoria said.

"Come on, Victoria, this wasn't my idea, don't take it out on me. And the money's only been impounded for a couple of hours. Distler will get overruled, or whatever they do.

Won't he?"

"I hope so, for you guys* sakes." Victoria turned to Satoshi. "What about your students?"

"Fox volunteered to slay on," he said drily.

Victoria laughed despite herself.

"I'm glad to hear somebody's expecting to come out ahead in this," Stephen Thomas said sourly. He opened his lunch,

174 vonda N. Mclntyre

closed it again, and stared at the variations in the table's surface.

Satoshi rubbed his shoulder gently. Stephen Thomas looked at his partners and look Satoshi's hand. Victoria reached across the table to him, her irritation dissolving into sympathy.

"Have you talked to your father yet?*'

Stephen Thomas shook his head—and immediately regretted it. The interaction of the cylinder's rotation with his inner ear made his field of vision twist and tilt. He squeezed his eyes shut and wailed for the weird sensation to stop.

"Oh, shit!" By now he should have got over the habit of shaking his head or nodding, or adapted to the weirdness.

He opened his eyes hesitantly. The world steadied. Satoshi put a cold glass in his hand. Stephen Thomas rubbed the side of the glass against one temple, then sipped the iced tea.

"Thanks."

"You okay?" Satoshi said.

"Yeah," Stephen Thomas replied, without nodding. "No,

I haven't talked to my father. Yeah, I'm going to have to. And I don't think I can get away with text only."

"No, of course not," Victoria said. "It's alt right, don't worry. Go ahead and call him direct. We'll manage."

"What are you going to tell him?"

"It beats the hell out of me," Stephen Thomas said. He felt not only embarrassed but humiliated. The feeling would only get worse when he called his father.

"Stephen Thomas—" Satoshi said, speaking tentatively.

"Satoshi—" Victoria said.

"We've got to work out something fair."

"I know it! But with only my salary, we're going to be lucky if we can keep the house. If we lose it, that's five years of work and all Merit's planning down the drain. Grangrana will have to move back to the city ... "

"I'll work something out with Greg myself!" Stephen Thomas surprised himself with his own vehemence. "And it won't be at the expense of Grangrana or the house. Dammit,

I've never pulled my financial weight in the partnership, I'm not going to start being a drain on it, too!"

"Maybe Greg will reconsider moving to Canada," Victoria said.

STARFARERS 175

Stephen Thomas flinched. "I don't think that's within the range of possible solutions." He tried not to sound defensive, but failed. That made him feel guilty and angry, for he knew Victoria was not leading up to a lecture on the best ways to save money. Her family had worked hard and long to pull itself into the middle class, but she seldom talked about their history. What few details Stephen Thomas knew, he knew from Satoshi. Stephen Thomas came from a family that had been middle or upper middle class since before Victoria's ancestors escaped to Canada. It was his father's own fault— perhaps not so much fault as bad luck—that had pushed him down to an income that did not meet subsistence without his son's help.

Victoria, reacting to his defensive tone, withdrew from the conversation, turning aside and gazing across the park.

"If you thought my financial responsibilities were such a y drawback, why did you invite me into this partnership in the

* first place?''

* Victoria's shoulders stiffened, but she neither spoke nor turned toward him.

Stephen Thomas stared at her, stunned.

"We invited you because we love you," Satoshi said. "Merry did. Maybe you do. But dammit, Victoria, sometimes I wonder—!" Stephen Thomas rose and started away.

t / I I

"Stephen Thomas—" Satoshi called after him.

Stephen Thomas flung his hand to the side, a gesture of anger and denial, warning Satoshi off.

Stephen Thomas crossed the park. He Jammed his hands

into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. He felt hurt and

confused by Victoria's reaction. He could not think of a way /- to explain the sudden change to his father.

Back at the park table, Victoria opened her bento box and stared at her lunch. She no longer felt like eating, either.

"How could he say that to me?" she cried.

"AH he wanted was a little reassurance," Satoshi said.

"He can't face this alone, Victoria,"

"His father isn't our only responsibility."

"But his father is one of our responsibilities. Stephen Thomas was open with us about it."

"He was. You're right. He's right." She sighed. "It's just that I get so tired of Stephen Thomas and Greg playing out

176 vonda N. Mdntyre

the archetypal American father-son relationship. And I still don't see how we're going to be able to juggle fast enough to keep everything in the air on one salary.''

"They can't impound the money for long—I'm sure Stephen Thomas is right about that."

"Saloshi, love, you and our partner are brilliant scientists. You arc ethical people. Stephen Thomas is charmingly neurotic and too spiritual for his own good—"

"Be fair."

"—and you are both great in bed. But between you, you have the political sense of the average nudibranch. This could take months to get resolved, and it will drain the expedition's energy the whole time. Don't hold your breath waiting for your next pay deposit."

Satoshi had not even opened his lunch. He looked down at his hands, flexed and spread his fingers, turned them over, and stared at his palms.

"I won't," he said. "And I don't see how we're going to keep everything in the air on one salary, either. If we help Greg out—" He hesitated, but Victoria knew as well as he did that they had a responsibility to the elder Gregory. Stephen Thomas had already made the commitment when they invited him into the partnership. "If we help Greg out, the house ... "

Victoria, scowling, rested her chin on her fists. "Let's not talk about losing the house until we have to."

"Maybe it was a dream all along."

"It was—but it was working, dammit!"

Under ordinary circumstances, they would never have had a hope of buying their house. Nobody living on ordinary incomes—even three ordinary incomes—could atford to buy property. But several years on the expedition, with no living expenses, gave them the chance to put most of their income

against the price while they were gone. It was Merit's idea and Merit's plan. Merit even, somehow, found a decent house that a real estate corporation was willing to sell.

"If one of us went back to earth for a few days ... "

"They will have to send wild horses up here on a transport to get me otf Starfarer\" Victoria said. "This is exactly what they're hoping will happen, and it's only taken us three hours to start thinking about leaving. If they shoot down our mo-

STARFARERS 177

rale, we'll argue, we'll abandon the expedition, we'll go groundside and get new jobs. I wouldn't go back even to lobby for us—they want us out of the sky, no matter what. They're collecting excuses. They have the associates' withdrawal to hold against us already. If the rest of us leave, they'll just come in and claim salvage—"

"I wasn't talking about leaving permanently."

"Let's not talk about leaving at all. If we lose our house, we lose our house. If we lose the expedition . . ."

"You're right," he said. "Of course you're right."

"Besides," Victoria said, trying to smile, "if we lose the expedition we can't afford a house anyway."

They hugged each other, then packed the bento boxes into the AS and sent it home to put the food away for dinner. Victoria wondered if anyone would be hungry then, either.

"The meeting tonight is going to be something," she said.

His graduate students had reappeared by the time Stephen Thomas got back to the lab. He wanted to talk to them, but the tension of having to explain things to his father would emotionally distort everything he said to them. He reached his office. When he touched the door, it crashed open without his meaning to slam it. He hesitated, then turned. All three students stared at him, startled.

"Don't anybody go anywhere," he muttered. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes."

In his office, Stephen Thomas asked Arachne to connect him to earth, and his father. The conversation would be awkward, because of the distance of Starfarer from earth and the resulting time delay. His father was no more proficient at holding two simultaneous conversations than was Stephen Thomas.

"Steve? I didn't expect to hear from you."

"How are you, Greg?" Stephen Thomas said. "My partners send their regards."

"Oh- Well. You say hi to Vicky and Satoshi for me."

Stephen Thomas could not help but smile. His father was the only person in the world who called him "Steve"; his father was probably the only person in the world dense enough to keep calling Victoria by a diminutive. He was sure Greg

178 vonda N. Mcintyre

would have shortened Satoshi's name if he could have figured out how to do it.

"Long time," Greg said. "What's the occasion? Have you settled the plans for your visit?"

"That's pan of why I called," Stephen Thomas said. "1

don't think I'm going to be able to get back to earth again."

"What? Why not? You didn't make it over here the last time you were on earth. You said—"

"I thought you understood about the conference. And how hard it is to reschedule transport trips—"

"What's the problem now? Have you—"

"Greg, have you heard any news today?" Stephen Thomas spoke before his father finished his question.

After the two-second delay, his father replied. "I never pay any attention to the news."

"There's a problem with the starship's operating funds," Stephen Thomas said. "Will you be all right if the next deposit is late?"

This time the delay was more than the two-second light-speed lag.

"What's happened? You're overextended?"

"I'm not! It hasn't anything to do with me directly, but it makes a personal trip out of the question. The money's held up in Washington. I don't know when I'll get paid next."

Again he waited, hoping for nonchalance, reassurance.

"This is cutting pretty close to the bone, Steve," Greg said.

"I'm sorry. I don't have any control ... I can't . . ."

While he was still trying to think of how to explain, the lag began and ended.

"Is it all up to you? In my day, when you got married, you didn't just marry your wife, you married her whole family, too."

"We're members of each other's families, Greg," Stephen Thomas said. "And Satoshi's got the same problem. Everybody up here who's from the U.S. has had their funding impounded."

Greg had taken a while to accept Victoria and Satoshi as individuals; accepting them as partners, and lovers, of his son was taking a good bit longer. Stephen Thomas wondered

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how Satoshi would react to being referred to as a wife, not to mention how Victoria would react.

"If you'd given me a little notice that you intended to cut me off—"

"Greg, that isn't fair!"

"—I'd've tried to make some other plans."

"That isn't fair," Stephen Thomas said again. Something else Stephen Thomas disliked about voice communication over this distance was that it was impossible to interrupt anyone, impossible to head them off from saying something they might regret, impossible to keep from hearing something he would regret. Stephen Thomas could not even react with anger, because he understood Greg's fear. He had hoped for some understanding, some encouragement, even just a little slack; and he knew he should have known better. All he could do was pretend not to be hurt.

"You don't even have any expenses up there," Greg said.

"At least that's what you told me. Haven't you put anything away in all the time since you got out of school?''

"The family's finances are too complicated to explain on long-distance transmission," Stephen Thomas said. "With the impoundment, we aren't going to have much extra."

"It's none of my business, you mean," Greg said.

"That isn't what I said. That isn't even close."

"I'll have to move," Greg said. "It will take me a while to find a cheaper place."

"Don't do that!" Stephen Thomas said. "It will cost you more short-term than you can possibly save, and with any luck this will just be a short-term problem. I wouldn't even have bothered you with it except I thought you should hear about the problem from me. I thought you'd be worried."

"I am worried. There's no way I can keep up the rent on this place. I never should have taken it to begin with. I wouldn't have, if you—"

"If you're set on moving, move to Canada!"

Stephen Thomas stopped. He could not even afford an argument right now. Though his hands were steady, he felt as if he were trembling. The trembling began in his center and spread outward, a reaction not of anger or fear but of disappointment and hurt, guilt that he felt though he did not believe he deserved it, and a wish to make everything all right.

18 0 Vonda N. Mdntyre

"Canada? forget it. I'm not moving to the ass-end of nowhere just to make things easier on you- If that means—"

"Greg, I'll do what I can, but I just can't manage as much as before. For a while. That's the best I can do."

"And I don't have any choice, do I?"

The web signaled that the communications link had been

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt broken from the other end.

Stephen Thomas hunched down in his chair. When he started getting an ulcer in grad school, he had studied a number of relaxation techniques, ways to control stress, methods of releasing anger and pain. Today none of them worked. The shaking had reached his hands. His chin quivered as he clenched his teeth and tightened his throat and squeezed his eyes shut. He felt like a forlorn child. He despised himself for his reaction. He clenched his fists and jammed them between his knees. Soundlessly he began to cry. Hot fat tears forced themselves out from beneath his eyelids. His nose began to run.

Stephen Thomas thought of himself as an emotional person, a person with open feelings. But he did not often cry.

He knew it was supposed to make him feel better, to release endorphins or hormones or enzymes or some damned thing-he knew what he could make all those biochemicals do in his experiments; he did not need to know what they did inside him. But crying never did make him feel better. It made him feel sick and slack and stupid, and he hated it. Other people's crying made him neither uncomfortable nor impatient. The partnership had seen a lot of crying over the past year. Stephen Thomas thought it was probably a good thing that after the accident, one member of the partnership grieved inwardly and alone. Victoria and Satoshi had both needed someone they did not have to comfort.

Stephen Thomas still grieved for Merry, the member of the partnership he had always been closest to, the first of the three he had met. When Merit first took him home to meet Victoria and Satoshi, the experience was disturbingly like being taken home to meet a date's parents for the first time. Never mind that Merry was considerably older than Victoria and Satoshi, who were both older than Stephen Thomas.

It was a long time before he could think fondly of the awkwardness of that first afternoon.

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"Are you done now?" he muttered. "Enough maudlin reminiscences?" The tears dried into salty tracks, stinging his skin.

Once in a while one of his students came into his office and cried. For those times, Stephen Thomas kept a couple of clean scraps of silk, remnants of a wom-out shirt. He dug around until he found one, then scrubbed at his face. He wished he could splash cold water over his head without having to see anyone first. But that was impossible.

Now that he had stopped crying he could bring the relaxation techniques into play. He practiced until he felt certain he would not break down again.

He returned to the lab. His students worked steadily, pretending he had not been upset when he arrived and disappeared, pretending not to notice his reappearance.

He crossed to the water fountain, bent down for a drink,

and let the stream of water splash over his face. As he straightened, he ducked his head to wipe the droplets away on the shoulder of his shirt. The water plastered a cold patch of thin silk to his skin.

Now everybody in the lab was looking at him.

"They've given us some new problems from groundside," he said, as he should have said that morning. "We'd better sit down and talk about them."

Griffith wandered through the places aboard Starfarer where people congregated. Everyone expressed complaints and outrage; gossip not only flowered, but formed seeds and dispersed them to sprout anew. Ignored in his guise of Griffith of GAO, Griffith traveled among me members of the expedition, pleased with himself for the chaos his minor suggestion had already caused. Yet the chaos bothered him, too, a little: finally he realized he was disappointed in the reactions he saw. He had assumed everyone would react this way; he had assured his superiors they would. But somewhere he held a suspicion—or had it been a hope?—that they might not.

Without meaning to, he found himself near the hill where Brown and Cherenkov and Thanthavong lived. He walked into the garden. He could always claim to have come by to pay his respects to Ms. Brown. She had acted weird at her

182 vonda N. Mclntyre

party. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was senile. She must have taken health exams to be allowed to join the expedition, but maybe the stress of the trip from earth had affected her. Or maybe the exams had made a mistake in passing her. Maybe Griffith could find a use for that.

"Did you need something?"

Griffith leaped around, startled, crouching, ready to react. Immediately he knew he had threatened his cover. He pretended to stumble, catching himself awkwardly.

"Good god, you scared me," he said, forcing a petulant tone into his voice.

"Didn't mean to."

Infinity Mendez stood, brushing the dirt from his ragged kneepads. The rosebush at his feet had laid thin red scratches across his hands and wrists. He avoided looking into Griffith's eyes, and this made Griffith suspect that he had not fooled the gardener in the least. He scared Infinity far more than Infinity scared him, and he knew that if he decided to, he could terrorize the gardener into keeping secrets for him. Maybe even into working on his behalf. Griffith preferred to work alone, and though he would use a terrified ally, he would never trust one.

"I just thought I'd stop by and say hello to Ms- Brown." "There's some folks already visiting her."

Griffith could not tell if he was being invited in or warned away. He looked toward the hill-house, over Infinity's shoulder, seeking even a glimpse of Cherenkov.

"And Kolya's out," Infinity said in a flat, neutral tone.

"Kolya? You mean General Cherenkov?" He feigned disinterest.

"What are you doing up here?"

Griffith frowned at Infinity Mendez. He was not accustomed to being questioned by gardeners. Come to think of it, he was not accustomed to going to parties to which the gardeners were invited, either. It occurred to him that the starship's extreme democracy had probably gone too far. The word "anarchy" came to mind, and gave him another opening against the expedition.

"What business is it of yours?" Griffith said sharply.

STARFARERS 18 3

"Sorry," Infinity said, confused and scared. "Just a friendly question."

Griffith thought of saying that he was interested in more important things than whether the service staff put in all their time, but decided to withhold even that much reassurance.

Sending somebody all the way to lunar orbit to check on trivia was exactly the sort of thing one of EarthSpace's associates might decide to do.

He gave Infinity a cold, wordless glance and walked away.

Victoria crossed the courtyard and headed toward the cool " main room of her house. She hesitated on the threshold, narrowing her eyes with a twinge of annoyance. In the low light. the distillation equipment hunkered on the mats like a giant spider.

She found Stephen Thomas, bare to the waist, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a tumble of silk shirts, carefully picking y each one out of the pile, smoothing it, and folding it. He lifted the last one, the turquoise one Victoria had just given him. He stroked his fingertips across the fabric, changing the patterns of reflected light. He folded it fast, tossed it on the stack, picked the stack up and stuffed it into a cloth bag.

All Victoria's annoyance at him evaporated-"Stephen Thomas."

He jerked the ties shut and knotted them, stood up, and , threw the bag in the comer.

"No point in wearing everything out before we even go," he said. "Who knows how long it will be until I can get any more—before we come back, I mean."

f What he meant was that he could no longer afford to buy

'< new clothes- No one in the family could, but the restriction would hit Stephen Thomas worst. He looked upon clothing as decoration. It troubled Victoria to see him packing away his pretty shirts. She wished she had something to say to encourage him.

He had on regulation pants, gray twill with a Starfarer patch on the front of the thigh. EarthSpace maintained the tradition of its predecessors in designing a patch for each new space mission. Starfarer's was an eight-pointed star, flaring wide at its horizontal points, with the EarthSpace logo above and the starship's name below. Stephen Thomas picked up a

184 Vonda N. Mcintyre

gray t-shirt from his rumpled bed and dragged it on over his head. It carried the Starfarer logo across the chest.

On board the starship, a few people wore the patch, but only newcomers wore the t-shirt. She was surprised to see Stephen Thomas in it because he had been annoyed by it: the design was all right, he said, but who wanted to wear a gray t-shirt?

The real benefit of regulation clothing was that it was free.

"Stephen Thomas," she said. "About this afternoon—"

He interrupted her. "What I said was inexcusable." He reached out to her; Victoria took his hand.

*'I love you," she said. "Maybe I don't say so often enough."

"You do," he said. "You tell me, you show me ... But sometimes 1 can't hear it and I can't see it and I can't believe it."

He put his arms around her and leaned his forehead on her shoulder. She spread her fingers against his back and patted him gently.

When she stepped back, she appraised him. "I must say, you look all right in mufti."

"This isn't mufti—"

"It is for you," she said. "Who's going to recognize you, out of uniform?"

At that, he smiled.

J.D. sat in Nakamura's office, which Victoria had somehow contrived to have opened for her. She tried to work on her novel, but mostly she worried. Too many things had happened too fast; most of them scared and depressed her. She knew too much about the perversion of technology to be confident that the expedition would fend off this assault. She wished she had half Victoria's courage or Stephen Thomas's outrage or Satoshi's calm.

She leaned back and closed her notebook. Her shoulders hurl from leaning over it. The office had no desk, only mats and cushions. If she got her own office, she would ask for one with a desk.

Because of the shortage of wood and the absence of plastics, the furniture on campus looked odd to newcomers. If she got an office with a desk, the desk would be made of rock

STARFARERS 18 5

foam, a built-in extrusion of floor or wall. The fabric sculpture that served as a chair was far too soft to sit in for long. At first it was comfortable, cushiony; then her back started to hurt. She supposed she could requisition a bamboo chair like the ones in the main room of Victoria's house. Or maybe she would have to make it herself.

She had no reason to have office furniture, because she had no reason to have an office. Her work required no lab or special equipment; she could even get along without Arachne if she had to. She was attached only to the alien contact team, unlike her teammates, who also held departmental positions:

Victoria in physics, Satoshi in geography, and Stephen Thomas in genetics.

J.D. had asked to be in the literature department, which could have used a few more members. Like the art department, it was far too small to represent the cultural diversity of earth.

Her request had been turned down. An alien contact specialist did not qualify to be a professor of literature. What she did was too much like science fiction.

J.D. existed in limbo as far as the academic hierarchy of the campus was concerned. None of that bothered her. No matter how democratically the expedition tried to run itself, every department would have its office politics. She felt herself well out of them-

The chancellor had not yet accepted her credentials. J.D. wondered if that was campus politics, or something bigger;

or an oversight: nothing at all.

J.D. had to admit that she liked having a place of her own where she could go out and talk to other people if she wanted;

and right down the hallway from Victoria's lab, too.

She had no office hours because she had no graduate students, not even students of Nakamura's to take over. It had been decided, somewhere in the planning of the expedition, that it would be premature to train more alien contact specialists before anyone knew if any aliens existed to be contacted. Even the half-dozen specialists left out of the expedition, back on earth, had—like J.D. herself—begun to diversify.

Her stream of consciousness brought her, as it often did,

186 vonda N. Mcintyre

to the divers. She closed her eyes and asked Arachne for an update -

The news sent her bolting awkwardly from the low, soft chair. She stood in the middle of her bare office, her eyes open, the line to the web broken, but the information still hanging before her like the afterimage of a fire.

J.D. sank into the chair, pillowed her head on her crossed arms, and demanded that Arachne make a full search on the subject of the disappearance of the Northwest divers.

She was still there, shivering, when Victoria came looking for her.

"J.D. ? A bunch of us are getting together to talk—J.D. ? What's wrong?"

"It's the divers . . . They've moved out of their reserve."

She managed to smile. "To Canada."

Victoria smiled back. "That's a fine old tradition for political exiles—but why the divers? What's political about living with a pod of porpoises?"

"Orcas," J.D. said. "Nothing, from their point of view . . . Oh, Victoria, I can't talk about this. Maybe Lykos will make some kind of statement, but unless she explains in public—1 promised."

"This is why you almost didn't accept my offer to join the team, isn't it?" Victoria said suddenly.

"It was involved." She chuckled sadly. "It's an involved story. It's rococo. One might almost say Byzantine."

Victoria patted her arm. "They made it to Canada, eh?

Then they'll be all right. Don't worry about them."

"It's hard not to. They're wonderful. Victoria. They're so completely innocent. I mean that in a good sense. They're untouched by fears that twist us up, they've learned from the orcas what it means to live without hating anyone. But when

187

188 voncSa N. Mcintyre

they come in contact with our world, the innocence turns to naivete."

Victoria let herself rock back so she was sitting on the floor beside J.D.'s chair.

"That could get dangerous."

*'I know it. Oh, I hope they're all right."

"Tell me about them."

"Most of them are shy—much shyer than the orcas. I got to know one of them well—that was Zev—and I met nearly everyone in his extended family. Zev is different from the others. He's much more extroverted. He used to visit me at my cabin. He likes ice cream. Victoria, I'm making him sound like a pet, and that isn't right at all. He's smart and^ell educated in the things that matter to the divers. He's the diver I told you about, who wants to travel into space. I miss him ... At one point we talked about his applying to the expedition."

"But he didn't."

"No. I advised him against it. There isn't any ocean up here. I think he would have been miserably unhappy. The divers need their freedom. They travel a long way every day.

I couldn't keep up unless they chose to let me. No ordinary human can."

"Did you ever think what it would be like to be one of them?"

J.D. hesitated. "Alt the time. But it's illegal."

"In the States, it's illegal." Victoria gazed at her quizzically.

J.D. wanted to tell her more, but held her silence instead.

"Did your friend apply to Starfarer*"

"I'm sure he would have called me if he decided to. He

must have left with his family." She sighed. "It's just as well.

I guess."

"It would have been interesting to have a diver along with us," Victoria said. "I wish he'd thought of it earlier. And done it."

"He wouldn't have liked it."

"Maybe some of us won't like it. But we'll be here."

"I hope so."

"Do you want to come along to this meeting?"

"I guess so," J.D. said doubtfully.

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She pushed herself out of the chair and followed Victoria into the hallway.

"I still can't get through to the chancellor," Victoria said.

"It irks me not to be able to get you into your own office."

"The one I have will do fine," J.D. said, following Victoria's lead in making conversation. "Except the furniture. Is it all standard, or can I get something different? Should I build it myself?"

"You can if you like. If you know how. Or call the maintenance department. They'll furnish your office for you." She paused. "Or they would until yesterday. Who knows what today's rule is?"

They left Physics Hill and headed down a flagstone path, side by side.

"I expected the starship to be more automated than it is," J.D. said.

"With things like robotic furniture factories?"

"Yes."

"Slarfarer isn't big enough. We're planning to take along quite a few spare parts, for the ASes and so on. But we won't have the capability of building them from scratch.

With an automated factory you need another whole level of maintenance, either human or machine, to fix it when it goes wrong. No matter how advanced your robotics, human beings are more flexible. A lot of people who aren't scientists wanted to be involved in the expedition. The planning took that into account." She grinned. "Besides, can you imagine how boring it would be if nobody was on board but scientists?''