Starfarers

J.D. made a noncommittal noise. It would be bad manners to point out that most of the scientists on board associated mostly with other scientists.

Victoria stopped short. "A moment—" Her eyes went out of focus and her face relaxed into a blank expression.

Her attention returned. "Damn!" she whispered. She looked shaken. "Come on, let's go!" She sprinted across the grass, ignoring the path.

J.D. pounded along beside her. "What's wrong?"

"I set Arachne to signal me if we got any more orders.

The chancellor has forbidden gatherings of more than three

190 vonda N. Mdntyre

people. This is outrageous'" She stowed so J.D. could keep up.

Like most people, J.D. needed to stand still and focus her attention inside her mind in order to communicate with Arachne. She would have to wait till they reached her destination to read the orders.

She had never noticed before that swimming and running used muscles differently, and she was used to swimming. She induced a pulse of the metabolic enhancer and gasped for extra air as the adrenaline hit.

**it really bums me," Victoria said, sounding not the least out of breath. "The U.S. demanded that we run the expedition under your constitution, and now it's breaking its own articles left and right. Who do they think they are?"

At the large hummock that covered the genetics department, she slowed and stopped. J.D. stopped beside her, still breathing heavily, her heart pounding from the enhancer.

When she had caught her breath, she straightened up.

"We think we're powerful and rich, I'm afraid," she said.

She felt both attacked and embarrassed because she had no defense. "It's an old habit."

Victoria looked abashed. "I shouldn't jump down your throat about it," she said.

They hurried into Stephen Thomas's office. Satoshi and Feral Korzybski had already arrived. Professor Thanthavong stood by the window, staring out, her arms folded. Iphigenie DuPre let herself gently into a worn bamboo chair, moving with caution outside zero-g.

Stephen Thomas stomped in. He stripped off his gray Star-farer t-shirt and attacked it with a pair of dissecting scissors. Like Zev, he had fine gold hair on his chest and his forearms.

"There's not a goddamned decent pair of scissors in the place," he said. He sawed at the neckband of the t-shirt. The crystal at the hollow of his throat changed from black to red to blue.

"What are you doing?" J.D. said.

"Complying with regulations." He ripped away the last few inches of the neckband and set to work on the sleeves.

J.D. closed her eyes and read the new orders. First, the prohibition against meetings. Second: "Starting immediately, personnel of Starfarer will wear standard-issue cloth-

STARFARERS 191

ing. Only regulation apparel will be tolerated." Third: "All faculty members will immediately suspend current research and prepare detailed papers describing the defense applications and implication of their work."

"You'd better shut the door," Victoria said bitterly.

"I think we should leave the damned door open," Stephen Thomas said.

"I think we're in for a fight," Satoshi said. "The clothing rule is trivial—"

"Speak for yourself," Stephen Thomas said.

"—but forbidding public assembly, and suspending research . . . This is serious."

J.D. sank down on the thick windowsill, her shoulders slumping. "I don't know what to do," she said. "My work doesn't have any defense applications, and nobody issued me any standard clothes. I didn't know there was such a thing."

"Don't worry about it, J.D.," Stephen Thomas said. "The orders are obviously illegal." He put on the shredded t-shirt, inside out. The printed emblem showed faintly through the wrong side of the fabric. "How do you like my 'regulation apparel'?"

Thanthavong turned away from the window. She was wearing a gray jumpsuit with Starfarer's insignia on the left chest.

"The orders may be judged illegal." She spoke in a calm and reasoned tone. "But defying them, especially publicly, could cause us a great deal of trouble before we ever get to court, much less win."

,. "Professor, don't you think they're just trying to provoke

us?" Victoria said. "Neither Chancellor Blades nor Earth

* Space has any authority to tell us who we can talk to or what research we're allowed, never mind what we wear!"

"Victoria, have you read your contract?"

"Sure," Victoria said. "I mean I skimmed it when it arrived. It was about a hundred megabytes of legalese, whoever reads that stuff? EarthSpace said do you want to go on the expedition? and I said sure and they said sign here, so I did."

She stopped, abashed by the admission, then looked around and realized that no one else, except Thanthavong, had read the contract through.

"The standard contract gives them a certain authority over you and your actions."

192 vonda N. Mdntyre

"The authority only extends as far as they can get somebody to enforce it," Stephen Thomas said.

"You can be as flippant as you like, Stephen Thomas,"

Thanthavong said. "But EarthSpace can ask any of the primary governmental associates to declare martial law."

The comment astonished everyone but Feral.

Thanthavong continued. "If they declare martial law and send troops—"

"Troops!" Satoshi said. "Good lord—'"

"—to enforce it, I think that our chances of continuing with the expedition are vanishingly small."

"You mean we're screwed," Stephen Thomas said.

"Well put."

"You aren't exaggerating, are you?" Iphigenie said. "You believe they may send armed forces to take us over.''

"I think the possibility is measurable."

For a few moments, no one could think of anything else to say.

"I don't understand why the chancellor decided these orders were necessary in the first place," Satoshi said. "Never mind whether he'll get away with them."

"It's the meeting tonight," Victoria said. "They don't want us to hold it. The other stuff is just for distraction."

"It's more than the meeting," Feral said.

"What can you tell us about this, Mr. Korzybski?" Than-thavong asked.

"It begins with the divers."

J.D. started. "What do the divers have to do with anything?"

"They applied for political asylum in Canada—"

"I know, but—"

"That's an embarrassment to the U.S. government. Which doesn't want to be embarrassed twice in a row. So you get the flak—more restrictions. I can't tell you where I heard this.

I haven't been able to confirm it, but it feels right. The rumor is that the divers fled because if they stayed they'd be coerced into spying."

Victoria turned to J.D. "Did you know about this?"

J.D. stared at the floor. "If Lykos makes a public statement about why the divers left, I can talk about what I know. Otherwise, I can't. Victoria, it doesn't matter—whether I

STARPARERS 193

knew or not, I wouldn't have made this connection. I should have, but ... "

"We're a resource," Victoria said. "We are. The starship is. The divers were a resource- Governments can tolerate unexploited resources. But not lost ones. Somebody has decided that letting the expedition proceed is equivalent to losing Starfarer.''

"So now they don't intend to allow us to proceed," Iphi-genie said-

"I don't think so."

"But—" J.D. heard someone in the hall. As if she were a conspirator, as if she were breaking a reasonable !aw by sitting in a room and talking with her co-workers, she fell silent and glanced toward the doorway. Her reaction caused everyone else to look in the same direction.

And so Gerald Hemminge appeared in a moment of quiet during which they were all staring at the doorway, during which it looked as if everyone, not just J.D., felt frightened and guilty.

"Perhaps you haven't heard the new rules," Geraid said.

"Dr. Thanthavong, I'm sorry to come twice in one day bearing unwelcome news—"

"We heard the damned rules. Gerald—ow!" Stephen

Thomas winced when Victoria elbowed him, too late to shut

him up.

Gerald scowled. "Haven't you any loyalty to anything?

You've all put me in an unpleasant position."

"I've about had it with you accusing me of treason every time I disagree with you!" Stephen Thomas said.

* He rose, but Victoria put one hand gently on his arm and

] drew him down again.

Gerald backed one fast step into the hall. "I can hardly •-, pretend I never saw you."

"You could," Stephen Thomas said, sounding calmer than he looked. "But you won't."

"Bloody right," Gerald said. "You have a great deal to leam about conspiracy. Perhaps you might close the door next time." He hurried away.

"As laws of conspiracy go," Feral said, "closing the door is a good one to start with."

Victoria buried her face in her hands, laughing. Satoshi 194 vonda N. Mclntyre

started to chuckle, too, and soon everyone but J.D. was laughing. J.D. saw nothing funny about being reported to whoever represented the law on Starfarer.

"What's he going to do?" J.D. asked.

"Write a memo," Stephen Thomas said.

"You aren't taking this very seriously."

"Bloody right," Stephen Thomas said in exactly the same lone of voice Gerald had used.

"You could have let him lecture us, Stephen Thomas, instead of insulting him," Thanthavong said. "We could have thanked him sincerely for correcting us. That way we would have a few more hours before it became obvious that we intend to defy the orders,"

Stephen Thomas looked abashed. Then he smiled, and J.D. wondered how anyone could see that smile and not let him get away with anything he wanted.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that Gerald asks for it, and

I can't resist."

"It is not necessary," Thanthavong said, unmoved, "to take advantage of every opportunity with which one is presented."

"D(? we intend to defy the order?" J.D. wished her voice did not sound so thin and scared-

They looked at each other.

"You are all young," Thanthavong said. "You have your achievements ahead of you. If we defy the order and fail, you will find that you have made Hfe difficult for yourselves. No one could blame you if you acceded to what may become inevitable."

"Is that what you plan to do?" Victoria sounded shocked.

"No," Thanthavong said. "On Starfarer, I have been able

to work—to do real work, the work I spent my life preparing for—for the first time in many years. I cannot go back to notoriety and promoting good causes- Nor will I pervert my science to war. My cause is the expedition."

"You aren't alone," Victoria said.

"No," Satoshi said. "You're not." A display formed over the desk. "J.D. had a great idea. There's my report."

He had sent a single sentence to Arachne:

"My research has no defense applications."

STARFARERS 195

Despite their defiance, the group in Stephen Thomas's office could not help but be affected by the orders. They left the genetics building one by one: Thanthavong, then Satoshi, looking overly casual; Iphigenie, and Victoria close behind her. Feral hesitated by the doorway, both anxious and excited.

As the office emptied, J.D. contacted Arachne for an update on the divers- Nothing further had appeared on the public news services: no statement by Lykos, no confirmation of the rumors Feral had heard, no message from Zev. Until the divers spoke out, J.D. felt she should remain silent about what she knew. She wished she had remained silent about them from the beginning. Then none of this would have happened.

She should have seen this coming. It was herjob to make connections between apparently disparate events. She should have realized, as Feral had, that the effect of the divers* night could spread to the expedition.

I let myself get too close, J.D. thought. I got sidetracked into . . . personal considerations.

As she was about to break the link, Arachne signaled her with a message.

It was from Lykos.

J.D. hesitated before accepting it.

Why am I so frightened? she thought. They got away, they're safe, and I said nothing that could have put them in more danger.

She traced her reaction deeper: she was afraid some observer might violate privacy laws, record her communication with the divers, and brand her a troublemaker.

But she had already crossed that line.

J.D. accepted the communication.

"J.D. Sauvage: where is Zev? His family has had no word from him since he stayed behind to join your expedition. We are concerned."

The message ended. J.D. looked up blankly. Nearby, Ste-

phen Thomas and Feral talked together. Feral glanced across at her and grinned.

"I think it's safe out there," he said. "Everybody else has slunk off like spies."

196 Vonda N. Mdntyre

Stephen Thomas looked over his shoulder, also smiling, but his smile vanished as soon as he saw her.

"Good god, J.D., what's the matter?"

"A friend of mine has disappeared."

Searching for the connections she had failed to see earlier, she told Stephen Thomas and Feral what had happened.

"I don't see that there's anything to be worried about,"

Stephen Thomas said. "So he went off by himself and didn't tell his mother. How old is he?"

"Seventeen or eighteen, I guess."

Stephen Thomas shrugged. "Sounds normal to me. He's growing up."

"But that isn't how divers act." ~

"That isn't how most divers act. But you've just said most of the divers went to Canada. He stayed behind. So he isn't 'most divers.' Q.E.D."

"He wouldn't scare Lykos."

"Not deliberately. Maybe he forgot."

"I guess it's possible ..." But she did not believe it. She could not make herself believe that Zev forgot to tell Lykos he was all right, forgot to ask if his family had made it to Canada, forgot to tell J.D. he was going to try to join the expedition, even forgot to check his mail.

"No," she said. "It sounds perfectly sensible when you say it. but it couldn't have happened that way."

"If he tried to apply to the expedition, and he's only eighteen, they turned him down," Stephen Thomas said. "So he's probably on his way to join his family."

J.D. made connections she wished she could have overlooked. "Or he applied, and they realized if they kept him, they'd have a hold on the other divers. And what about Chandra?"

"The artist? What does she have to do with this?"

"She disappeared too. At the same time. She was supposed to meet me at my cabin, but I'd already left. Feral, you remember, you reminded me about her on the transport the other day. I tried to call her, I left a message. She never replied, but I didn't think anything of it. Now . . ."

"We've got enough to worry about without adding conspiracy theories!"

STARFARERS 197

"If the diver is being held," Feral said, "if Chandra saw something she wasn't supposed to . . ."

"Where are they?" J.D. cried. "How am I going to find them?"

"If your friend wanted to join the expedition," Stephen Thomas said, "why the heil didn't he wait till he got asylum in Canada, and apply from there?"

"I don't know. He probably didn't realize there was any danger. It's a long swim to Canada, and he was probably in a hurry. Maybe he came ashore to catch the bus into town!

And somebody was waiting for him."

She looked at Feral for confirmation. He shrugged unhappily.

"It could have happened that way."

J.D. rose.

"What are you going to do?"

"Find him, of course. Feral, will you help me?"

"I'll try," he said. He looked troubled.

"What?"

"Nothing. Nothing that hasn't happened before. But never on this scale."

"What?"

"My communication budget is running low."

"You can use my credit. Come on."

"You're going to try to find this guy from way out here?" Stephen Thomas said.

"From way down there, if necessary."

J.D. left the office.

Stephen Thomas followed. "J.D. ! If you go to earth now, you might not be able to get back!"

"I know it. I can't help it."

"But—"

She swung angrily around. He stopped short.

"If he's in trouble, it's my fault! If he's in trouble and Lykos finds out where he is before I do, she and the other divers will leave whatever haven they've found to go and get him."

"Why?" His voice was full of skepticism and amazed disbelief.

"Because he's part of their family. Because that's how divers are."

198 vonda N. Mdntyre

The derision vanished from his expression. "I wish—" he said. "Never mind. But if there's any way I can help you, I will."

"Thank you," she said, startled into curtness.

"Iphigenie!"

The sailmaster turned and waited for Victoria.

"Are you going back out?"

"Mm-hmm. I feel more comfortable watching the sail."

"Would you take a look at this?" Victoria handed Iphigenie the module that held her new string calculations.

"What is it?"

"Results out of a new symbolic manipulation. Usable results."

"Why do you want me to look at them?" she said. "I'm in charge of intrasystem navigation. Not transition."

' 'I ran some other numbers. If you use the sail during lunar passage, we could take this approach ... "

Iphigenie looked at Victoria, looked at the module, and gave it back.

"I don't think so," she said.

"But it's faster, more efficient, and . . . sooner." The module lay cool in Victoria's hand. "Just take a look. Please."

"But transition's already planned! And I'm not finished testing the sails." Iphigenie did not take the module. "It's too risky!"

Victoria laughed. "Riskier than what we're already planning?"

"I suppose not," Iphigenie said, nonplussed. "But why do you want to change things?"

"Have you figured out whether Starfarer can outrun a transport if it has to?"

"No."

"It can't," Victoria said. "And we won't be out of range for weeks."

"Of course not. We planned it that way. We have a lot of supplies still to take on."

"So if... what Professor Thanthavong said, happens, we'd have no way to stop it, eh?"

STARFARERS 199

Iphigenie pushed her hands across the tight braids of her black hair.

"It won't come to that. It can 'r."

"Don't be naive."

"Victoria, if we're called back, I'm the one who has to take the order. I'm the one who has to reverse the sail and decelerate ... I don't want to do that."

"I know you don't. But everything that's happened makes me think that's what's next. No matter what we do."

Iphigenie pointed with her chin toward Victoria's hand, toward the module carrying the new calculations.

"Sooner, you said?"

"Much sooner. The string section we're aiming for now is way to hell and gone out by the orbit of Mars. If you change the sails as we go around the moon, if we use the new solution . . . we'd only need one pass around the moon."

"One!"

"Yes. We'd be aiming for the nearest point on the string."

Iphigenie frowned. Victoria could imagine her setting up the problem in her mind, solving it. The sailmaster rocked back on her heels, astonished.

"Tomorrow! We'd encounter the string late tomorrow! But we're not ready. We're not supplied, half our people are gone."

"We're being set up to be stopped!"

"What about the people who are planning to stay behind?

What about the rest of us? Everyone has agreed to a certain plan. If we do this secretly, the expedition members will be people who have been lied to and abducted. They'd rebel, and I couldn't blame them."

"I don't intend to do this in secret. A transport docks tomorrow, just before lunar passage." Victoria discussed outrageous possibility with deliberate calm. "After passage it can leave again, right on schedule. Anybody who wants to can go."

Iphigenie gazed blankly through her.

"The alternative," Victoria said, "is getting slapped down to low earth orbit."

"Are you sure of your solution?"

"Yes."

2 00 vonda N. Mdntyre

Victoria held out her hand and opened her fingers. As if in stow motion, Iphigenie reached out and took the module.

"That is," Victoria said, "I'm as sure of those numbers as I was of the others."

Iphigenie snorted. She, like everyone on board, was aware of the inherent uncertainty in cosmic string solutions. The uncertainty was small . . . but it existed.

"I'll look at it," Iphigenie said.

"Thank you."

Iphigenie started away. A few paces on, she turned back.

"You know, Victoria, if I agree to this, we'll be at Tau Ceti without a complete test of the sails. Navigating will depend on a propulsion system that's nearly experimental."

"But you built them. You're the best."

"Yes. Except once you get beyond a certain size, solar sails are all different. You cannot know for sure how they'll behave." She tossed the module in the air and caught it.

"That's the only copy of those numbers," Victoria said.

Iphigenie caught the module and lowered it carefully. The modules were abuse-resistant, but they had limits.

"I didn't have to Join this expedition, you know," she said grumpily. "I could have stayed home and spent my money."

"I know. Why did you join?"

"Because just building the sails wasn't enough. Nor was spending money." She put the module in her pocket and patted it. "I make no promises."

J.D. gave Feral access to her credit account so he could get in touch with his mysterious sources. J.D. herself made a call she wished she could put off.

She expected to have to leave a message for Lykos through

the web. Instead, she reached the diver quickly, voice and

screen both. Lykos looked strange with her pale hair dry,

standing out in loose ringlets instead of soaked with seawater,

slicked against her skull.

"You haven't heard from him, have you?"

J.D. waited through the annoying, awkward pause.

"No," Lykos said. "I would have let you know. I have

been searching."

"Lykos, I think it's possible that he's been kidnapped."

STARFARERS 2 01

When J.D.'s message reached Lykos, the expression on the diver's narrow, wild face changed from distraught to confused to angry.

"Only one entity would do such a thing, and 'kidnapped' is not the proper word for it. Let us speak plainly, J.D. Because of his family's actions, he has been taken into custody, arrested—he is under restraint."

"It's possible—but if they offer to trade his freedom for your return, you've got to say no and you've got to make it public. You've got to make everything public."

"At the risk of Zev's life?"

"The one thing they can't afford is to hurt him! If we can get any proof—even any evidence—that he's under arrest, they'll have to let him go. He hasn't done anything!"

"He has refused to spy for them."

"He's got no obligation to spy for them, and they have no authority to make him. Oh, Lykos, don't let them use your loyalties against you."

The diver spread her fingers and smoothed her springy hair with the translucent swimming webs. J.D. had seen divers on their return from weeks-long trips with the whales, and she had never seen anyone as drained with exhaustion as Lykos.

"We cannot abandon him, J.D."

"I know it. I do know it. I can't either. I promise you—"

"No more promises! I am finished with humans' prom' ises." Lykos cut the connection. Her image faded.

J.D. collected herself. She could not blame Lykos for her

* reaction, but it upset her nonetheless. She glanced over at ?-' Feral. He had only been working for a few minutes. Nevertheless, J.D. wanted to ask if he had found anything yet. She knew he would tell her when he did. If he did.

J.D. spent the afternoon running up a large debit against her account, trying to track Zev down. She was afraid to spend too much. If she went back to earth, she would have to pay for it herself.

After several hours' useless work, she canceled all the communications and cut herself off from Arachne. She looked over at Feral, who had barely moved in an hour. His eyelids flickered. He was lost in the web, lost in a fugue of communication.

2 02 vonda N. Mdntyre

Infinity sat cross-legged under a spindly aspen sapling. The light faded around him as the sun tubes changed from daytime orientation to night.

He felt discouraged. Maybe nothing would have been settled at the meeting tonight, or maybe everyone would have agreed that Starfarer should be given over to the military. But at least they would have come to some resolution if there had been a meeting.

He smelled smoke. Burning was dangerous on the starship, so he followed the smell- The scent was vaguely familiar, but not a grass fire.

Kolya Cherenkov sat on a boulder beneath the overhanging branch of a magnolia tree. He held a thin burning black stick cupped in his hand. As Infinity watched, Kolya tapped the cigarette on a projection of the boulder, adding a few feathery flakes to a small pile of ashes. Infinity watched, fascinated, as Kolya lifted the cigarette to his lips and drew smoke into his mouth, into his lungs.

Infinity had found other tiny scatterings of ashes and, now and then, smelled a wisp of smoke. But he had never actually seen anyone smoke a cigarette, not for real, only in very old, unedited movies. Back in Brazil, when he was a child, his adult relatives had passed around a pipe of tobacco on rare occasion. The smoke made them act as if they were mildly drunk. He wondered if Kolya would act drunk; he could hardly imagine it.

Kolya breathed curis of smoke from his mouth and nose.

The smell was unpleasant, much harsher and stronger than what Infinity recalled of the pipe smoke. He wondered why people in old movies blew smoke at each other. He would not like it if a lover blew this smell into his face. Suddenly he sneezed.

Startled, Kolya turned. He closed his cupped fingers around the cigarette. He let his hand hang idly down. He blushed.

"I didn't mean to scare you," Infinity said- "I just . . ."

It was all too obvious that Kolya preferred no one to know about his cigarette.

The cosmonaut brought the cigarette back into view.

STARFARERS 2 03

"I suppose I had to be discovered eventually, but I hope you won't say anything about my ... vice."

"Everybody has vices." Infinity believed in leaving people alone. Nevertheless, he was shocked to see Kolya doing something as dangerous as smoking. You could get cured of the damage nowadays, but the damage was unpleasant, as was the cure. So was the cause, as far as Infinity was concerned. Nobody had ever succeeded in removing all the factors that caused lung damage and still ending up with something anyone wanted to smoke.

Kolya drew in one last lungful of smoke, then stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out against the black lunar stone. He put the cigarette away.

"I only have a few of these left," he said wistfully, "and then I'll have to stop, for I won't be able to get any more. And I'm an old man. I doubt I'll come back from our trip."

Not meaning to, not wanting to. Infinity felt a sudden anger at the cosmonaut. Kolya never participated in campus meetings, never made his preferences public, never criticized the attacks on Starfarer. He did nol care that tonight's meeting had been canceled, that meetings had been forbidden. He probably did not even know. He would not have come to the meeting if it had been held.

"Maybe there won't be any trip!" Infinity exclaimed.

"What? Why?"

"Don't you know? How can you not know they want to turn us into a warship? How can you spend all your time with that Griffith guy and not know he's trouble? Florrie took one look at him and knew he was after us!"

"Ah. I did wonder why he was here ... But all he seemed interested in was plunging me into nostalgia." He rubbed his fingertips across a smooth place on the rock; he raised his head and gazed across the cylinder, past the dimming sun tubes. Far-overhead lakes, ruffled by a breeze, sparkled gray with the last light.

"If you want this expedition to happen," Infinity said, "you've got to help us. Only I don't know how you can.

Maybe it's too late."

Kolya made a low, inarticulate sound of understanding, perhaps of acceptance.

2 04 vonda N. Mclntyre

"Infinity," he said kindly, "you are making it most difficult for me to retire as a hermit."

Infinity said nothing.

"There is a meeting tonight?"

"There was. It's illegal, now."

"Truly? I have not done anything seriously illegal in many years. Shall we attend this meeting?"

He rose and headed for the amphitheater. After a moment, Infinity shrugged and followed him.

"Feral!"

J.D. shook the reporter's shoulder.

"Feral! Come out of it!"

Hooked deep into Arachne's web, he jerked upright as if awakened from a deep sleep.

"What?"

"You're going to have to stop."

"Why? No, J.D., I've got some good leads. A little more time—"

"I'm sorry. It's impossible. This is costing too much, and it isn't doing any good. I'm reserving a place on the next transport to earth. They won't sell me a ticket if I've run my credit past its limit."

"But Stephen Thomas said—"

"And I said I have to go!"

"Okay."

Dejected, they stared at each other.

"You like him, don't you?" Feral said suddenly.

"What? Who?" J.D. was confused by the abrupt change of subject,

Feral grinned. "Stephen Thomas. You like him."

"I like almost everybody I've met up here so far."

"That isn't what I meant."

J.D. shrugged, uncomfortable. "I think he's a very attractive man. What has that got to do with anything?''

"Are you going to do anything about it?"

"Don't be ridiculous." J.D. felt herself blushing. "What 205

2 06 vonda N. Mdntyre

kind of a question is that? Are you a stringer for gossip magazines, too?"

Feral laughed. "No. I was just curious."

"I have more important things to think about!"

Feral grinned at her, unabashed. "I think he's beautiful, myself." He jumped to his feet. "I'm starving! What time is it?"

"It's almost eight. The time the meeting would have started, if we were still having a meeting." Just in case, she checked to see if the new rule had been reversed. It had not.

"I didn't get any lunch," Feral said. "I'm going to go find something to eat. Want to come along?"

"No, thanks. I'm not hungry."

"Don't give up, J.D. I put out a lot of feelers. Some of them might touch something."

"I hope so." He regarded the search for Zev as a game to be won, and no great tragedy if he lost it; nevertheless, J.D.

appreciated his help. "Thank you, Feral. Whatever happens."

"See you later."

He can go on to the next story, J.D- thought. But I can't.

She rose and paced back and forth. She wished she were near the ocean, where she could swim until she was exhausted. Sometimes exhaustion helped clarify her thoughts:

it left her with no energy for confusion or extraneous information.

She made contact with Arachne again and requested a place on tomorrow's transport. It was full. Almost empty coming in, full going out. Under any other circumstances she would have taken the news with resignation and waited for the next ship. This time, she used her status, demanded a place, and got it.

She smiled bitterly. The chancellor's refusal to accept her credentials had worked to her benefit, if being helped to leave Starfarer was a benefit. As far as the records were concerned, she was still attached to the State Department, still an associate ambassador.

She had nothing to do now except wait, and worry. She tried to put Zev out of her mind.

She could not help but think about what Feral had said.

She wondered if she were as transparent to anyone besides

STARFARERS 2 07

the reporter. Another blush crept up her neck and face. If Victoria had noticed, or Satoshi . . . they must have thought her reaction to Stephen Thomas terribly amusing. She did not worry particularly that Stephen Thomas had noticed. Extremely beautiful people learned to blank it out when ordinary people found them attractive. J.D. supposed it was the only way they could manage.

She would have to get over his extraordinary physical beauty. He was a real person, not some entertainment star she would never have to worry about meeting.

Maybe it won't matter, she thought, downcast again, I have to go to earth. I may never make it back into space; I may never see Stephen Thomas, or Victoria, or Satoshi, again after tomorrow.

"J.D. !" Victoria said.

J.D. jumped.

"Hi, sorry, didn't mean to scare you," Victoria said. "Do you want to come to the meeting with me?''

"I thought there wasn't going to be one."

"There isn't supposed to be one. But everybody I've talked to is going anyway."

"I don't know ... are you sure—? I mean—damn!" She stopped and blew out her breath. "AH right." What else can they do to me, she thought, even if they do decide I'm a troublemaker?

"Did you find your friend?"

"No." J.D. started to tell Victoria that she was leaving in the morning, to find Zev and try to free him, but she could not bring herself to say it.

They crossed the campus. As they walked up the last small hill before the amphitheater, they heard voices welling up and tumbling past like water.

"Maybe we should outlaw meetings more often," Victoria said drily. "Usually we only take up the first few rows of seats."

J.D. followed her along a path cut around the hillside. The daylight was slowly fading.

"Couldn't you run the meeting electronically, rather than having to get everybody together, having to build a place— and what do you do if it rains?"

"If it rains, we usually postpone the meeting. If it rains 208 Vonda N. Mcintyre

tonight, I suspect we'll all sit here and put up with getting wet. Every hill had to be sculpted; we designed one as an amphitheater. Sometimes people put on plays. As for meeting electronically . . . you haven't been to a lot of electronic meetings, have you?"

J.D. remembered in time not to shake her head. They worked all right."

"A few.

"Small groups?"

"Five or six people."

"That's about the limit. Somehow it's easier to interrupt somebody's image than to interrupt them face-to-face." She gestured at the flat crown of the next hill, coming into sight as they circled the smaller rise. "Besides, if people have to put in some physical effort to attend, the ones who come are more committed. The meetings are smaller, and believe me that makes a difference."

A

A

A

A

"Not tonight, though." C

"No. Not tonight. Satoshi! Stephen Thomas'" ~

Victoria's partners, twenty meters ahead, stopped and waited for Victoria and J.D. to catch up.

The path brought them to the foot of a circular slope, grass-covered, shaped like an ancient crater. Trails led up its sides to tunnel openings, where a couple of dozen people milled around on the hillside.

"What are they doing?" J.D. asked.

"Beats me," Satoshi said. "I thought it was the custom to go inside and then mill around."

About half the people already there wore either standard-issue jumpsuits or t-shirts and reg pants. J.D. wished she had taken Thanthavong's advice and found some regulation clothing to put on, but the whole subject had vanished from her mind while she searched for Zev.

Neither Victoria nor Satoshi had changed: Victoria wore a tank top and shorts that had started out as reg pants but were no longer recognizable; Satoshi had on baggy cammies with all the pockets, and another, or the same, sleeveless black t-shirt. Stephen Thomas wore his formerly regulation clothes as an insult to the orders. Though he had turned the t-shirt right side out, he had obliterated "EarthSpace," and he had painted designs on the legs of his trousers as well.

STARFARERS 2 09

They joined the group outside the entrance to the amphitheater.

"What's the matter?" Victoria asked Crimson Ng.

"Look." The artist nodded toward the opening of the entry tunnel.

A piece of string blocked the amphitheater.

"All the entrances are like that."

Whoever had put up the stnng had chosen a symbol far

more powerful than any gate or lock, a symbol for the fragile

rule of law.

Victoria pulled down the string. One part of her tried to justify her actions, but another knew she had passed a boundary she had never wanted to cross. She felt neither anger nor triumph, only sadness.

She walked into the amphitheater. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and the others followed.

Victoria had never been the first person inside the amphitheater. It felt bigger than usual. The sound of her sandals scraping the ramp echoed in the silence.

The amphitheater, completely circular with rising ranks of stone benches all around, contained only a small platform in its center. All the plays presented here had a limited number of cast members.

Victoria headed toward the left entrance and Stephen Thomas went to the right. Satoshi loped down the ramp, across the stage, and up the other side to the opposite entrance.

On a hillside facing the amphitheater, Griffith watched Sa-toshi Lono of the alien contact team pull the string barricade away from one of the entrances.

Griffith had decided not to attend the meeting. Though he could not listen in, in real-time, since there would be no voice link for a meeting that was not supposed to exist, he would be able to watch the recording. He would do nothing to interfere with the meeting or to alter its course. He would not inject the presence of a stranger.

Then he saw Nikolai Cherenkov climbing the hill.

Griffith bolted to his feet and stood poised between duty and desire. For one of the few times in his life, the desire won out.

210 vonda N. Mclntyre

When Griffith reached the amphitheater, he could not find Cherenkov in the crowd. Disappointed, he stood in the shadows and watched.

Victoria hurried through the far tunnel. Outside the fourth entrance, her colleagues watched as she pulled down the barrier and wrapped the string around her wrist.

"Is the prohibition off?"

"No." She went back inside.

Ordinarily she and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas remained apart at meetings, preferring to speak and act as individuals. Tonight they made an exception, sitting together as the alien contact team. She rejoined her partners and J.D. Stephen Thomas lounged on the wide seat, stretching his long legs.

"I didn't think there were this many of us left on campus," Victoria said as the seats began to fill.

People gathered in clusters to argue and talk.

"Why isn't anyone standing on the platform?" J.D. asked Victoria.

Victoria glanced down the slope. "Nobody ever stands on the platform."

"Isn't it for whoever's speaking? Whoever runs the meeting?"

"No. We don't work that way, with one person trying to direct the rest, or only one person allowed to talk at a time." She smiled. "Though you have to be willing to face disapproval if you interrupt someone who's interesting, and somebody eventually talks to anybody who interrupts a lot.''

The amphitheater filled quickly, infinity Mendez. passing the team, did a double take.

"What's that?" he said to Stephen Thomas, with a gesture of the chin toward the decorations on his pants. "War paint?"

"In a manner of speaking," Stephen Thomas said. "Any suggestions?''

"Wrong tribe," Infinity said, and found himself a seat.

"Did he mean he's from the wrong tribe to ask, or I picked the wrong tribe to use symbols from?" Stephen Thomas said, bemused.

"You're the cultural expert in this family, my dear," Satoshi said.

STARFARERS 211

Stephen Thomas grinned. "Maybe I should look up some samurai symbols."

"Maybe I should gel you an ostrich feather headdress,"

Victoria said.

"From Africa?"

"Of course not. I wouldn't know which band to choose. I meant from the Queen's Guards."

"Hey," he said, "if you're really going to go ethnic on me, get me—" Without any signal, the amphitheater fell silent around him. Stephen Thomas lowered his voice to a whisper. "Get me a red Mountie jacket."

The lower third of the amphitheater had filled; another hundred or so people sat scattered around the remaining two-thirds of the terraces. It was a less colorful group than usual: people of all shapes and colors would ordinarily have been wearing clothes of all designs and colors. Victoria felt comforted and strengthened by the number of her colleagues who complied with the trivial rule, but broke the important one.

By a couple of minutes after the scheduled beginning of

the original meeting, all the participants sat together silently

in the dusk.

Suddenly a wide patch of bright sunlight illuminated the meeting. The sun tubes spotlighted the amphitheater and left the rest of the campus dark.

Victoria took a deep breath and ignored the warning of the light.

"Victoria Fraser MacKenzie," she said. She remained sitting; though she projected her voice, she spoke in a normal tone. After a pause of a few seconds, she continued. "Today's changes, particularly the impoundment of funds, affect my family and my work just as they affect everyone on the expedition, whether or not they're citizens of the United States. I'm angry, and I'm frightened by what the actions imply. I think we're expected to panic. I think we must not.

I think we must continue as if nothing had happened. And I think it would be polite to send a message to the United States, expressing our regret that they are no longer financially able to participate in the expedition."

Victoria kept her tone serious and solemn, and did not react to the murmur of appreciative laughter.

212 Vonda N. Mcintyre

Other members of the expedition said their names and aired their frustration and anger.

Some of the Americans defended their government and some apologized for it; some of the non-Americans excoriated it; several people explained, unnecessarily, the political situation that had caused the trouble. Some defended the right of any associate to withhold funds, to which the response was that no one questioned the new U.S. president's right to act as he had. It was his good sense they wondered about.

"Infinity Mendez." He paused after saying his name.

"I think it's true that we can't panic. But if we pretend nothing's happened, if we don't fight back, they'll take more and more and more until they leave us nothing."

The intensity of his soft voice left the amphitheater in absolute silence. He raised his head and glanced around.

"I think . . ." Tension grabbed his shoulders; something more than shyness silenced him. He ducked his head. "I have nothing more to say."

"My name is Thanthavong." The geneticist paused. "We have a guest."

Thanthavong drew the attention of the meeting to Griffith, standing in the shadows at the entrance of a tunnel. For a moment he looked as if he might try to fade into the shadows completely. Instead, he moved forward and took a stance both belligerent and defensive.

"I have a right to be here," he said. "More right than you do. I'm a representative of the U.S. government, and this ship was built with U.S. funds."

"Partially," Thanthavong said. "But this starship is a public institution of the world, and by law and custom our meetings are open. No one has suggested that you have no right to attend. But you are not a member of the expedition and I am inviting you to introduce yourself."

"My name is Griffith. I'm from the GAO."

"You are welcome to sit down, Griffith . . . if you wish to observe more closely.''

He sat, reluctantly, on the top terrace, as near to the exit as he could be. He must have heard the soft, irritable mutter that rose when he announced his occupation. Gradually the complaints fell to silence.

STARFARERS 213

"Satoshi Lono." Satoshi paused. "If we fight—what form of action will we take? Legal battles? Public relations? If we consider physical resistance, where do we set the limits?"

The silence that answered the words "physical resistance" lasted some time. Then, inevitably, people began to look toward Infinity, the first person to mention fighting. Uncomfortable at the focus of the attention, he glanced up the slope toward Griffith.

"I can't say," Infinity said. "I don't know."

"Satoshi, what do you mean when you say 'physical resistance'?" Thanthavong opened her strong, square hands.

"Bare hands against military weapons?"

"I had in mind civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, like this meeting, but—we do need to consider what we'd do if . . ." He let his sentence trail off, unwilling to complete the comment.

"If we were invaded?" Thanthavong said.

"Gerald Hemminge." Unlike the other speakers, he leaped to his feet, and he barely paused. "You have gone from attending an illegal meeting to a discussion of fighting and invasions' Invasions? You are all conspiring against our own sponsors' Satoshi, who do you believe you're speaking to, revolutionaries and terrorists?"

At that, several people tned to speak at once.

Satoshi rose, folded his arms, and stood quietly looking at Gerald until the commotion died down. Beside him, Victoria prepared herself.

"I see nothing revolutionary," Satoshi said, "about wanting to do the job we were sent up here for."

"Even if a more important job has developed back home?

We're needed. The ship is needed. None of you is willing to admit it, and I'm sick of you all. You forget—'The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.' "

"I'm sick of hearing that quote abused," Satoshi said. "Jefferson wasn't talking about the danger of foreign powers-even King George and the whole British Empire. He was talking about the danger of handing over our freedoms to a despot of our own!"

Gerald picked out Griffith at the top of the amphitheater.

"Did you hear that? He's called your president a despot!"

214 vonda N. Mclntyre

Griffith glanced around uncomfortably. "I'm just an accountant," he said.

Gerald made a noise of disgust. "The chancellor sent me

here in the hopes of talking sense into you all. I see that I've

wasted my time." He stalked out of the amphitheater.

"Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov," the cosmonaut said in the formal way of the meeting. He was only a few rows away from Griffith, who could not understand how he had missed him till now.

"I am your guest," Cherenkov said. "You have given me your hospitality and asked nothing in return. But now I must behave as a guest should not, and assume privileges that a guest does not possess. Your governments tell you that if you give up your ambitions and turn this starship into a watching and listening post, you will be benefiting the security of your countries and of the worid. They tell you that if you accede to these demands, you will be helping my country return to itself." He paused.

Griffith tried to calm his own rapid heartbeat, but his usual control deserted him. He anticipated what Cherenkov would say. The cosmonaut would accept this chance to work against the people who had overwhelmed his country and sentenced him to death. He would speak to the meeting; he would bring everyone together in an agreement to evacuate the starship without resistance.

Cherenkov and his wisdom and his patriotism would give Griffith a spectacularly successful completion to his task.

"What your governments have told you is a lie," Cherenkov said. "Whether it is deliberate falsehood or ignorance, I will not speculate. But I tell you that outside the Mideast Sweep, nothing anyone can do will help anyone within it."

Griffith clenched his fingers around the edge of the stone bench. He was shaking.

"The changes are coming," Cherenkov said- "But they must come from within, they must evolve- Evolution requires patience. The changes gather slowly, until they reach a level that cannot be held back. I tell you that if the rulers perceive danger from outside, they will find scapegoats within their own territory. You will only visit more death and more pain

STARFARERS 215

upon innocents. The changes will be eliminated and the evolution will cease."

He waited to be questioned. No one spoke.

"Thank you for permitting a guest to speak," he said. He slowly climbed the stairs. When he reached Griffith, he stopped.

Griffith gazed up at him, stunned and confused. The expression on Cherenkov's face, full of memories and grief, broke his heart.

"Come with me, Marion," Kolya said. "Neither of us has a place in this decision."

Griffith had to push himself to his feet. Kolya took his elbow and helped him. They walked out of the tunnel. The darkness closed in around Griffith like an attack.

Griffith swung toward Cherenkov, his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched.

"How could you say that? I thought you, at least, would understand!" He fought to keep his voice steady. "Do you want to go on the expedition so much that you can throw away your patriotism? Is your brain so bumed by cosmic rays that you've forgotten what the Sweep did to you back there, what they did to your family—" "I do not permit anyone to speak of my family," Cheren-kov said in a quiet voice that stopped Griffith short. "And my memory of what happened to me is clear."

"I'm sorry," Griffith said. He could not recall the last time he had apologized to someone and meant it. "But this is a chance to stop them!"

"It is not. I said what 1 said because it is true."

"But—"

"Why are you so concerned, Marion, if you are nothing but an accountant?"

"I—" At the last moment he caught himself and kept himself from admitting his purpose. He turned away. "I admire you," he whispered. "I thought you'd want this to happen."

"No," Cherenkov said gently. "There's too much blood already, on the land I came from. Blood is too expensive to use as fertilizer."

Griffith glanced back at him. Cherenkov smiled, but it was a strained and shaky smile, and after a moment it vanished.

216 vonda N. Mcintyre

"But freedom—"

Cherenkov made a noise of pure despair. "You cannot get freedom by shedding more blood in my country! You can only get more blood!"

"Then what should we do?"

"I told you. You should do nothing." He took Griffith by the shoulders. "Your meddling helped create the problem in the first place. So did our own. We cannot pretend otherwise. We cannot continue to meddle, as if we never did any damage." His fingers tightened, as if he wanted to shake Griffith hard. Instead, he let him go. "I am wrong, of course. You can still do that."

Griffith felt as if he had plunged into an icy sea. He shook from the inside out, with a deep, cold tremble. He knew that if he tried to speak, he would be breathless.

"You have always done that," Kolya said. "You probably always will do that."

He walked away.

Cherenkov departed. Everyone understood the effort it had taken for the cosmonaut to speak. Beside Victoria, Stephen Thomas sat slumped with his elbows on his knees, no longer sprawling relaxed and cheerful on the amphitheater bench.

He had watched Kolya closely, and Victoria recognized the intensely focused expression: Stephen Thomas sought his aura. Though Victoria did not believe in auras, she knew that Stephen Thomas could be pretematurally sensitive to other

people's feelings, that he could imagine and experience Kolya's grief and desperation.

Victoria felt the chill of frightening truth: what happened to the expedition, to Slarfarer, would affect far more than the people on board.

She searched the meeting for Iphigenie DuPre- She found her. The sailmaker was watching her. Iphigenie inclined her head slowly, carefully, down, then up.

"Crimson Ng." The small, compact artist leaned forward and gestured toward Victoria. Red river-valley clay was ground permanently into the knuckles of her delicate hands. "What did you mean when you said we ought to go on as if nothing had happened? How far do you think we should take it?*'

STARFARERS 217

Victoria spoke carefully, deliberately. "I think," she said, "that we should take it as far as it can go."

She imagined that she could feel the stream of tension and excitement, anger and fear, coalescing into a powerful tide of resolution.

"We now have even more reason to continue the expedition as if nothing had happened."

"That's easy to say, Victoria, but it's hardly a plan of action. How do you propose to continue if we're put under martial law and under guard? We're risking that already just by meeting."

"We were already at risk of that. We mustn't let it happen."

"Have you joined Satoshi and Infinity in wanting to fight?"

"I never said I wanted to fight," Satoshi said. "I said I was afraid we might have no alternative."

"Satoshi is right," Infinity said. "We'll have no choice, and what we want doesn't matter."

' "We do have a choice," Victoria said. "We can choose not to be here if they try to take over."

"Great. So, we abandon ship? How is that going to—"

Crimson cut her words short. "That isn't what you mean, is it?"

"No. I mean move Starfarer. Use a different approach to the cosmic string. A much closer one. One that takes us to transition tomorrow night."

J.D. gasped-

The meeting's order slipped abruptly into chaos.

Despite the confusion, Victoria felt the meeting flow in the direction she had chosen. She felt opinions and decisions gather together like the individual streams of a watershed, from a state of unfocused, chaotic indecision and rage, toward a cohesive opinion flowing like a river.

She waited until her voice could be heard.

"The expedition members must agree to the change," she said. "There will be time—not much, but enough—for anyone who wants to return to earth to leave by the last transport."

"We aren't fully provisioned," Thanthavong said. "Half our equipment hasn't arrived—"

218 vonda N. Mdntyre

"And half our faculty and staff has left! I can't help it. If we want the expedition to exist, this is our only chance."

"We'd be trying to outrun a—a cheetah with an elephant."

"The elephant has a big head start," Victoria said drily, keeping up her bravado. The others were less successful; their response was a feeble, frightened laugh.

"Christ on a mongoose, Victoria," Stephen Thomas said.

"You want to steal the starship."

Stephen Thomas's comment, thoughtless and casual, threw Victoria off center and broke her influence. The gathering's flow toward agreement, toward decision, splashed up against a dam of doubt and fear.

"I can't believe you said that," Satoshi muttered.

"Steal it!" Victoria said. "That's ridiculous."

"But I think it's a great idea!" Stephen Thomas said. "I'll vote for it."

No one else spoke. Victoria stood alone in the silence.

Stephen Thomas and Satoshi stood up beside her. J.D. remained in her place, fidgeting. She looked at Victoria, stricken, then plunged to her feet. Victoria took her hand and held it.

They waited.

Scientists, researchers, modem middle-class people, had no experience with taking such risks. Intellectual risks, yes, sometimes; even risks to the reputation, if the subject was large enough, the potential great enough. But this kind of risk . . .

"You're asking us to become lawbreakers," said a senior member of the geology department. "Renegades."

"We did that just by coming into the amphitheater tonight," Satoshi said drily.

"I'm suggesting that we change the schedule," Victoria said. "We've always left the possibility open."

"Don't downplay the seriousness of what you suggest,"

219

220 vonda N. Mdntyre

Thanthavong said sharply. "If we adopt your plan, we'll be going against powerful forces—"

"I thought you agreed with me!"

"I do. But we cannot go into this light-hearted or lightheaded. Everyone who chooses to go should know the consequences. Everyone who isn't sure should leave the expedition."

"Wait a minute," Crimson said. "You're talking as if we've already agreed to this—we haven't! And it sounds like if we do ... we can never come home."

"We'd have to face the consequences when we did come back," Victoria said.

"You're asking us to give up our families, our friends ... "

"Crimson, those risks aren't new. They have nothing to do with the question we have to decide right now."

"Hey," Stephen Thomas said, "if we come back at all,

we'll bring enough with us for the politicians to overlook our

misbehavior."

"Victoria herself said we might not find anything'"

"What do I have to do to live that down?" Victoria said, an edge in her voice. "I wasn't trying to predict the future,

I was trying to explain what science is about and how you conduct it! But I wouldn't be here if I thought the expedition was for nothing, and nor would you."

Alzena spoke. "I cannot agree to risk ecological stability by leaving our support systems prematurely. It could mean disaster."

Infinity spoke again. "I tell you that if this starship is held back from its journey for one year, for three years, it will never recover. It will never leave orbit- It won't have an ecosystem."

They had all seen films of the central plaza of Santa Fe, blasted into rubble, poisoned, destroyed.

No one disputed what Infinity said. But Alzena's warning could not be shrugged off.

"Despite the dangers, I propose that we accelerate the mission's departure to Tau Ceti," Thanthavong said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the worid. "I propose that we take advantage of Victoria's new transition solution." She rose to her feet.

Victoria waited.

STARFARERS 221

By ones, by twos, by small groups, the members of the deep space expedition rose to signify their agreement.

On the way home, Victoria felt simultaneously elated, frightened, and drained. She walked with Stephen Thomas;

J.D. and Satoshi followed close behind.

"Say, Victoria . . ." J.D. said.

"Victoria, you did it!" Stephen Thomas said at the same time.

"No thanks to you," Victoria said.

"Now you're mad at me. Shit, I couldn't resist the line.

And after all, it's true."

"It is not, and even if you had to say it, you should have realized what lousy timing it was."

"Come on, now," Satoshi said mildly. "It turned out all right."

"Maybe. We still have a long way to go."

Victoria fell silent, knowing that the argument embarrassed Satoshi, especially since J.D. was with them. She wished she could get into a straight-ahead fight with Stephen Thomas. It seemed as if ever since she got home. every other conversation she had with him deteriorated into bickering. She could not understand why. Maybe they just needed to clear the air.

"J.D., what were you going to say a minute ago?"

"I ... this is hard—"

They heard footsteps approaching at a run.

"Hey, wait for me!"

Feral rushed up, panting.

"Somebody said you had the meeting! Why didn't you tell me? What happened? Damn!"

"You should have been there," Stephen Thomas said. "You missed the creation of—"

"Stephen Thomas!" Victoria said sharply.

"What?"

"1 think we have to start being careful what we discuss in front of Feral."

"He was in my office while we were 'conspiring,' for god's sake," Stephen Thomas said. "You didn't object then."

"I didn't think of it then. So shoot me."

"Don't you trust me to tell your story straight?" Feral exclaimed.

222 Vonda N. Mcintyre

"Your interests can't always coincide with ours."

"Maybe we could tell him what happened, off the record,"

J.D. said hesitantly.

"This is bullshit," Stephen Thomas said. "We made the decision in a goddamned public meeting. It's to our advantage if Feral tells our side. Otherwise it'll all come from the chan-cellor—or the GAO. Feral, Victoria's research produced a second transition solution. Faster, shorter, better. And sooner. At the meeting we agreed to move the schedule up."

"And I missed it—? Damn! I obviously haven't cultivated my sources properly."

"It's been a tough day," Satoshi said. "We didn't exclude you on purpose—"

"Never mind the apologies. Tell me everything that happened. How soon—?"

Victoria walked ahead, angry at Stephen Thomas more because he was right then because he was telling Feral everything. J.D. hurried to keep up with her.

"Victoria, I have to go back to earth."

Completely-shocked, Victoria stopped short and faced J.D.

"What?"

"It's Zev. The diver. He's disappeared. This is hard to explain, but I have to help him—"

"Help him! What about us? My god, J.D., this expedition exists to support you! You can't leave it now."

"I have to. I have responsibilities—"

"What about your responsibility to us? You let us put ourselves on the line without telling us what you'd decided, you stood with us for the change—how could you do this?"

"I'm sorry," she said, unable to meet Victoria's gaze, staring at her feet like an embarrassed child. "I tried, but . . . The expedition isn't only for me, that's silly—"

"If you think it's silly, then maybe you'd better leave."

"But—"

They reached the tumoff to J.D.'s house. J.D. stopped;

Victoria continued, into the darkness.

"Um, maybe I'll see you tomorrow?" J.D. said.

Victoria could not trust herself to speak. Satoshi, Stephen Thomas, and Feral, unaware of what J.D. had decided, paused long enough to say good night to her; their voices, the words indistinct, faded behind Victoria.

STARFARERS 22 3

"Victoria, wait!"

She broke into a run.

The courtyard surrounded her with a soft carnation scent.

The lights glowed on in the main room of the house, responding to her approach. At the open French windows. Victoria kicked off her shoes and stepped inside, onto the cool, rustling reed mats. Their texture usually pleased her. Her vision blurred. Stephen Thomas's complicated distillation equipment hunkered on the floor like some misbegotten creature in a cheap special-effects movie.

Opening the door, Stephen Thomas came in and stood beside her, just gazing at her.

Victoria walked across the reed mats, passing the still.

"I wish you'd move that thing," she said. "Good night."

Stephen Thomas watched as she vanished into the back corridor. Satoshi and Feral came in behind him.

"Is she all right?"

Stephen Thomas shrugged, mystified and upset.

"Maybe I'd belter go stay at the visitor's house," Feral said. "I've really thrown a monkey wrench into this . . ."

"No," Satoshi said. "You're our guest. Victoria and Stephen Thomas and I obviously have some misunderstandings to clear up between us, but we shouldn't inflict them on you."

"Come sit down," Stephen Thomas said. "I want to tell you about the meeting."

Feral hesitated, tempted.

"Go ahead," Satoshi said. "I'll talk to Victoria."

In her bed, Victoria curled around her pillow and thought about going back into the main room, behaving the way Stephen Thomas always did, acting as though she had said nothing for which she needed to apologize. But she did need to apologize. And she could not quite face it tonight.

"Victoria?"

Satoshi tapped lightly on her door. Victoria remained silent. He slid the door a handsbreadth open. He knew she was awake; she never went to sleep this fast, even when she was exhausted. Especially when she was exhausted.

"Can I come in?"

"Yes."

224 Voncfa N. Mdntyre

He slid into bed beside her, kissed her on the forehead, and held her till she fell asleep.

J.D. lay in bed in the darkness, unable to relax.

I might as well have stayed with the divers and never even

come to Starfarer, she thought. Damn! Why is this happening?

Staying with the expedition tempted her with such force that she had to stop thinking about the possibility, the good reasons, the rationalizations. She would return to earth with the reputation of being a troublemaker. She might be barred from her adopted profession. She might fail to find Zev; she might be arrested and put in jail as soon as she touched down.

If she stayed here, she would be an alien contact specialist.

And Victoria would not be angry with her . . .

She put aside the tempting thoughts and tried to sleep.

When she left, everyone would think she was running away, afraid to continue on the expedition. But for once in her life she was not running away.

Trying to sleep was hopeless. She took her notebook and pen into bed with her, and tried and failed to work on her novel.

At least I won't have to get used to writing electronically, she thought. Now I will be able to just go out and buy another notebook.

The thought gave her no comfort.

As he often did, Infinity went into the garden to sleep.

Carrying his blanket past the rosebush, he smelled the smoke of a cigarette near the battered lunar rock where Kolya liked to sit. The cosmonaut was nowhere to be seen; his footprints led away across dewy grass.

Infinity went farther around the edge of the garden, beyond the lingering cigarette smoke. He spread his blanket between some juniper bushes, where the smell was clean and pungent.

He wrapped himself up in the peace of the garden.

He did not mind the chill. Dewdrops formed on his blanket, glowing silver on the black leaves of the rosebush, which had hardly wilted despite being transplanted when it was wide awake. Though it would have been better to wait till Starfarer's mild winter, during the bush's dormant season. Infinity

STARFARERS 22 5

had decided to risk the rose rather than risking Florrie's age. He had wanted her to have her roses.

But of course she would leave the expedition now—she would have to. She had nothing to do with Infinity and the other renegades, and she would not want to remain on board Starfarer now that everything had changed.

Though the meeting had chosen the path he desired, he still felt uncomfortable with his part in it. He was not used to speaking up, using the force of his past to influence events. The expedition had to make the change. Without it, they were lost.

But if they failed in their attempt . . .

Hearing footsteps, he rolled onto his chest. The silence of the garden amplified the stealthy sound.

Griffith walked into the garden and stood in the starlight, looking up at the hill. Looking for Kolya. But the cosmonaut had walked away in the other direction.

You don't need to worry about Kolya, Infinity thought. Even if Griffith stops us, he can't have Kolya Cherenkov taken off Starfarer.

Or can he?

For anyone else up here, the plan's failure would mean the loss of job and ambitions and hope. It might even mean prison. But if Kolya went back to earth, it would mean his life.

Infinity lay without moving for an hour, watching Griffith watch and wait, wondering what he could do, how he could guard against the danger his outburst had caused.

After Griffith cursed softly to the night and walked away, Infinity lay thinking and worrying for a long time.

Victoria woke alone. She lay in bed, trying to enjoy the sunlight streaming through her open, uncurtained window.

For someone who achieved the impossible last night, she said to herself, you are surely in a terrible mood.

She had to apologize to Stephen Thomas for snapping at him. Maybe she should also apologize to J.D., but that was harder. She understood prior commitments and responsibilities ... it would be difficult to tell Grangrana that she might have to leave the house, and Greg was sure to grind Stephen Thomas through another emotional wringer. But the expedi-

226 vonda N. Mclntyre

tion members were putting their commitment to Starfarer first.

A

Victoria did not feel up to talking to J.D. Sauvagejust now. Every way she imagined the conversation, she ended up angrier than before, and J.D. ended up hurt and confused.

She burrowed deep under the covers and tried to go back to sleep.

Arachne's signal chilled her fully awake. She sat up and let the web display Starfarer's new orders.

When she finished reading the display, she gasped. She had been holding her breath with disbelief. She threw off her blankets and ran into the main room.

A

A

Stephen Thomas lounged in the sunlight like a cat. He rose abruptly when Victoria stormed in.

"Victoria, good lord, if you're still mad—'" ;

"Look at this." She formed a display so they could look at it together.

Stephen Thomas read the message, frowning. "Jesus H. i

Christ." -f-

A

Satoshi wandered in, blinking, blank with sleep. "If you've got to fight, why don't you fight quietly?"

"We aren't fighting. Look at this."

He, too, read the message.

It woke him up even better than coffee.

Griffith sat on the balcony of his room in the empty guesthouse. Small puffy clouds drifted between him and the sun tubes. He was as oblivious to the shadows they cast over him as he had been to the bright sunlight shining on him a few minutes before. He had not slept, he had not eaten. All he had done, all he could do, was think about Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov, and the Mideast Sweep, and the plans he himself had so carefully brought into being.

"Marion."

Griffith froze. He would not have believed anyone could come up behind him without his knowledge. He was fast and he was well trained, but he knew Cherenkov would be more than ready for anything he tried.

Maybe he deserved whatever Cherenkov chose for him.

"Are you responsible for the new order?"

"It was perfect," Griffith said. "It would alienate the STARFARERS 22 7

EarthSpace associates and convert the ship to military purposes, all at the same time."

"You are such a fool."

Griffith turned, carefully, slowly. Cherenkov faced him, empty-handed.

"All I ever wanted was to be like you," Griffith said. "As good as you—"

"You prove me right," Cherenkov said. "As good as me?

My country was destroyed! I had no little part in its enslavement. Is that what you want for yourself?"

"That isn't what I meant. I didn't know ... I didn't think . . ."

"No. Of course not. We old men send you young men out to do our dirty work, and we teach you not to think. Start thinking now! Is there any way to turn the weapons carrier back? Any way to stop this abomination?"

Griffith shook his head. The interaction dizzied him. He flinched down, cursing, and closed his eyes till his balance steadied.

"No," he said. "It's out of my control. If I were back on earth they might listen to me. Probably not, though. This is what they want to do. I just helped find a way to do it. If I changed my mind, they'd think you'd found a way to force me."

"And here I believed," Cherenkov said wryly, "that you were not permitted any weaknesses we might make use of."

"I'm not a robot!" Griffith glared at him. "I'm getting married next month! But when I'm . . . working ... I don't let myself think ... "

"Yes. That is the problem, isn't it?"

"That isn't what I meant, either, and you know it! What do you want me to say? That I'm sorry? I am, for all the good it will do!"

Cherenkov's expression was mild. "I didn't think you could surprise me, Marion, but you have." He sat on the wall of the balcony and let himself lean back over the ten-meter drop. "Several times over."

"Don't do that," Griffith said.

After a few moments, Cherenkov pushed himself forward again. He sat slumped, his hands hanging limp. His heavy, streaky hair shadowed his face.

228 vonda N. Mclntyre

"Have you any idea," he said, "how the leaders of the Sweep will react to Starfarer looming over them, after you have supplied it with nuclear missiles?"

Infinity entered his dim front room and brushed his fingertips through the commeal in the small pot by the door. He tossed his blanket toward a chair.

"Oh!"

"Florrie!** Infinity hurried forward lo take the blanket from her tap where it had fallen. "I didn't see you, I'm sorry. What are you doing here? What's the matter?"

She wore her multilayered black clothes and the shells and beads in the long patches of her hair. Her gray eyes looked very pale within their circles of dark kohl. Infinity wondered if the administrators had really thought they could bully her into wearing regulation clothing.

"I've been trying and trying to get you," she said.

"Why didn't you call me on the direct web? You could have said it was urgent."

"I don't know, I didn't want to, 1 thought you might be asleep.''

He guessed that all her contradictions meant that she, like a lot of others, felt uncomfortable using the direct link.

"Okay, I'm here now. What's wrong?" He had seen her a

couple of times since the party; she always had people with her, come to talk with her or help her, eat with her or cook for her. Her presence was a tremendous success. At least one thing had been going right, among so much else going wrong.

It was too bad she would be leaving. She ought to be home packing. The EarthSpace transport a few hours ahead of the armed military carrier would be the last civilian vessel to approach until Starfarer^ situation was resolved one way or another. EarthSpace had already sent out orders for no one to disembark, but it had no way of enforcing the demand or calling the transport back. The transport had to pick up more reaction mass from Starfarer. Otherwise it would have to power itself home with only emergency reserves: a tricky. risky maneuver.

"He was there again last night. He's always there. Can't I make him stop?"

"You mean Griffith?"

STARFARERS 22 9

A

• i-A

t

She nodded.

"I don't know. You could report him to the chancellor for harassing you."

"I'm sure he's figured out something to report me to the chancellor for, and you know who'd be believed."

"I know he scares you. But, Florrie, you know, he isn't really interested in you or me or anybody except Kolya. That's why he's always in your garden at night."

"He hasn't actually done anything . . ."

"Isn't it kind of pointless to worry? You'll be going back to earth on the transport. I guess he will be, too, but once you're home you'll probably never see him again. Are you packed? There isn't that much time. You do understand that it's the last chance to leave?"

She sagged in his chair as if she had suddenly reached the limit of her energy.

"Are they sending me away?" she said, so faint he could hardly hear her.

"No, not sending you, exactly . . ."

"Why should I have to go, when 1 didn't even have anything to do with the meeting? Nobody even told me it was happening!"

"Don't you want to go home?"

"This is my home now! I came all the way out here—why do you think I'd want to leave again?"

"Because everything's changed," Infinity said.

"Not for me," Florrie said.

One of Slarfarer's telescopes trained itself on the military carrier as it accelerated toward the starship. It hung in the center of the screen, apparently unmoving, but pushing forward at twice the delta-vee of a regular transport.

Victoria found her gaze and her attention drawn to the image no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on all the other things she had to think about.

The prospect of nuclear weapons on board Starfarer angered and distressed and saddened her more than any other element of the attempted takeover, even, strangely enough, the possibility that the starship would be turned into a low-orbit watchpost. The battle against arming the starship was

230 vonda N. Mclntyre

the hardest fight the alien contact team had taken on. Victoria stilt sometimes felt astonished that they had won it.

The one good thing the approaching military carrier had done was unify the faculty and staff- There were plenty of members who believed the expedition could present itself as peaceful while carrying defensive weapons, but even they were angered by the means being taken to arm the ship.

Victoria stared at the screen, at the dark ungainly carrier with its exterior cargo of shrouded missiles.

"They've been planning this for a long time," Stephen Thomas said. 'They must have. They can't have gotten it all in place and made the decision just since our meeting." He glanced at the image on the screen.

Feral stood beside him. They both looked at the carrier.

"I'm not so sure," Feral said. "I think they realized they had to work fast. I think I would have heard something, rumors ... "

"Like about the meeting?" Stephen Thomas said.

"Thanks very much," Feral said. "Rub it in. Wait till I

get my sources lined up, there won't be anything on this ship

I don't know about."

"Sounds intriguing."

"And see if I tell you any good gossip."

Victoria pulled her attention away from the image of the carrier.

"Stephen Thomas, please, I can't stand that. Will you turn it off? Or let me use the screen for a few minutes, then I'll go somewhere else and you can watch some more."

"Sure."

Stephen Thomas and Feral stood aside for her.

"Is this private?" Feral asked.

"I'm calling my great-grandmother. She'll have heard what's happening, she'll be worried."

Stephen Thomas glanced away, his expression frozen. He had to make a call to earth, too . . .

"What's the carrier's latest ETA?" Feral asked. "Will it get to us before we reach transition point?"

For a second Victoria could not figure out why Feral would ask Stephen Thomas a question to which he already knew the answer.

"We can't tell," Stephen Thomas said. "It depends on STARFARERS 231

how efficient Iphigenie's orbit is and how much extra acceleration the carrier's got—which is classified information."

Some animation returned to his face and entered his voice. Feral had asked just the right question to distract him, and he had given him an opportunity to lecture a little.

As Victoria requested an earth connection through the web, she wondered if Feral knew about Stephen Thomas's rocky interactions with his father, or if he had simply noticed his unease. Stephen Thomas did not often open up to anyone on such short acquaintance. She wondered, absently, if Stephen Thomas and Feral had slept together last night. Probably not;

no one in the partnership found much attraction in one-night stands. It would be uncharacteristic of Stephen Thomas to start something that would have to end so soon, with Feral leaving on the transport.

"The satellite relay is currently overloaded. Please wait. then try again."

Impatiently, Victoria complied with the unusual request.

"We'll get to the cosmic string before the carrier gets to us," Feral said.

"How the hell do you know that?" Stephen Thomas said.

"Because it wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing the other way around," Feral replied. "And besides, if the carrier gets here before we hit the string ... I won't be allowed to report the story."

"Feral," Victoria said, "do you know the old joke where the punch line is 'What do you mean "we," white man?' "

"You're right," Feral said, grinning, "That is an old joke."

"So, what do you mean, 'we'?"

"You don't think I could leave now, do you? This is the

best story I'll ever get the chance to cover! I'm one of you."

"You can't sign on at the last minute—"

"The last minute! I only applied about eight hundred times!"

"And you were turned down. I'm sorry, but—"

Feral laughed. Stephen Thomas started to chuckle.

"It isn't funny!"

"But it is, love. I'm sorry, it is."

"You're trying to pull off the biggest theft in the history of 232 Vonda N. Mcintyre

humanity," Feral said, "and you want me to worry about application rules?"

That brought her up short.

"Yes," she said. "I do. Maybe it sounds nuts, but if we use this rebellion as an excuse to throw out our laws and customs, we'll be in worse trouble than if we'd let Starfarer be taken over."

Returning to Arachne, she tried once more to make the connection. Once more she received the "Ail lines busy" message.

Stephen Thomas and Feral, both made somber by her comment. looked over her shoulder.

"What's going on?"

"Everybody calling out, just like me. Explaining why they're going. Or why they'll be back sooner than they expected."

All the members of the team, and everyone else on the faculty, had spent the whole morning making sure that everyone knew that they had to decide, immediately, whether to go or stay. Satoshi was off trying to reason with his graduate student. Fox, who had to leave and did not want to.

It was only a few hours till lunar transit, a few more hours till intersection with the cosmic string ... or takeover by the military carrier.

Victoria made a third attempt to connect with the web.

"Your communication request is in the queue. Please be patient."

Victoria frowned. "This is weird, eh?"

"Yeah." Stephen Thomas said. "Even if everybody up here called at the same time, Arachne's got plenty of channels."

They looked at each other.

"We're being cut off," Feral said.

"I don't ... " Victoria let her voice trail away,

"It's easy. Just interfere with our access to the relay satellite. Damn' I got two stories out, but the third—and the one I haven't done yet, the live report on reaching transition ... " He tangled his fingers in his thick hair and turned away with a shout of anguish.

Victoria stared at the blank screen. Not to be able to talk to Grangrana, maybe ever again . . . She slumped on the bench.

STARFARERS 233

Stephen Thomas knelt behind her, put his arms around her, and enfolded her.

"She'll understand," he whispered. "She'll know you tried. She'll understand."

Victoria put her hands over his and held him tight. A tear splashed down and caught where their fingers meshed, between his fair skin, her dark skin.

Victoria kicked off from the mouth of the entry tunnel and swam into the sailhouse. Iphigenie, entranced in Arachne's web, drifted in the center of the crystalline cylinder, in the midst of the eerie harmonies of the sail's controls. Only a few other people floated, scattered, within the sailhouse. This should have been a celebration. The changes made a celebration impossible.

The moon's shadow sped toward Starfarer as the moon caught up with the starship. With Starfarer's orbit widening, the moon would pass below. By then the enormous solar sail would have deflected the starship from its original course, setting it to skim the surface of the moon and arc out of the plane of the solar system, straight to the nearest point of the local strand of cosmic string.

Observers on earth saw the full moon about to occlude a bright new star.

Victoria waited in silence until Iphigenie's eyelids fluttered. The sailmaster gazed around, disoriented.

"Victoria ... "

"All set?"

Iphigenie's mouth quirked up at one comer, a wry smile.

"I sure wish I had some ground support."

"You can do it without."

"Of course I can," Iphigenie said.

She let herself spin, visually checking the starship cylinders, the sail, the moon, and beautiful blue-white earth in the distance.

235

236 vonda N. Mclntyre

"I keep imagining I can see the carrier already," Iphigenie said. "And the bombs . . ."

"Soon."

"Too soon. It's going to be close. And the transport, Vic-toria—the pilot's got to take on reaction mass and undock as soon as she can. Otherwise we'll have a civilian transport along for the ride. The last thing we need is a ship full of kidnapping victims." She pressed her hands against her tight, smooth braids. "Can we even communicate with the transport? Or are their systems 'overloaded,' too?"

"We're realigning an antenna," Victoria said. "The transport will hear us. We might get one voice link to earth. But that's it."

"I wanted a test," Iphigenie said- Her eyelids fluttered.

"How close do we have to cut things?"

"I won't know until after lunar passage. We won't have more than a couple of hours. Everybody who's leaving is going to have to cram themselves onto the transport fast. Are there a lot?"

"Not as many as I was afraid there would be."

"They'll all fit on one transport?"

"It will be crowded." Victoria shrugged- "They'll manage." She did not want to think about who was leaving. It made her too unhappy, too angry.

"I've got to concentrate," Iphigenie said. "Do you want to link in?"

"Yes!"

She slipped into Iphigenie's multidimensional mathematical space. Images poured through her connection with Arachne. Starfarer fell behind the moon.

Iphigenie drifted in her accustomed position, all her senses focused on the sail and the connection between Arachne and the sail, measuring control in micrometers.

The craters and maria on the sunlit limb of the moon vanished abruptly into darkness at the terminator.

The sun disappeared behind the earth; the earth disappeared behind the dark limb of the moon. Darkness overtook the starship. The bright sail dimmed. In starlight, it began to collapse. In the illumination of Iphigenie's instructions, Victoria felt the slackening sail's control strands tighten and shift and move.

STARFARERS 237

The dark moon looked huge, a great black shadow in space.

Starfarer plunged toward it.

Then the ship passed over it, as if over the dark depths of a sea. For a strange, unsettling time Victoria felt as if she were traversing the airless surface in a hot-air balloon, impossibly high.

As Victoria's eyes grew accustomed to the change in contrast, she saw features in the shadows, faintly illuminated by starlight.

Suddenly Iphigenie shouted in anger and in pain. An instant later Arachne jerked the web's connections from Victoria, flinging her into darkness and emptiness. Victoria gasped for breath and fought for consciousness.

The light was very dim. Far beyond the spinning cylinders of the starship, the moon lay shadowed with starlight, craters black at the rim, fuliginous inside. On the other side of the sailhouse, Victoria could see the sail only as a shadow against the starfield. But she knew that without Iphigenie's control, without the solar wind to stabilize it, it would collapse, tangle, destroy itself.

The starship plunged toward the surface of the moon. The illusion of stillness changed abruptly into the reality of tremendous velocity.

The harmony of the control chords collapsed into dissonance. Victoria heard the other people in the sailhouse, all shadows, shouting in confusion, moaning in pain. They, too, had been hooked in.

Awkward with shock, she dog-paddled toward Iphigenie, who tumbled, rigid and quivering, through the air.

"Iphigenie!"

She had a pulse, but she did not respond to Victoria's voice or touch. She had taken the brunt of Arachne's abrupt withdrawal. Outside, the sail began to collapse upon itself. Iphigenie's eyelids nickered.

"Hard connection . . -" the sailmaster murmured.

Victoria grabbed her shirt and towed her toward the backup console at the edge of the sailhouse. She had never seen anyone use it, for the interface with Arachne made it obsolete. Unthinking, Victoria sent Arachne a signal to enliven the console. Of course nothing happened. Victoria felt foolish, and crippled. Losing her connection with the webworks was

Vonda N. Mcintyre

238

like losing a limb- Its phantom remained, perceptible but useless.

Victoria slapped the controls of the console. It registered activity. It connected with the starship's computer. Victoria let out her breath. If it had been Arachne itself that was damaged, rather than the computer's connections to the outside worid, the expedition would have ended right there.

"Iphigenie, are you all right? It's on, it's here, what should

I do?"

"Just . . . feed in the numbers . . ."

Iphigenie reached for the interface, but her long slender hands trembled. Her eyes rolled back and she fainted.

"Iphigenie!"

First Victoria had to remember her password, which she had not used in months. With the direct connection, the web recognized the pattern of her brain waves. At the first try she mistyped it. Whoever had to type anything anymore? Victoria never typed. On the second desperate try she got it right.

Then she had to search for the files in which she had so easily immersed herself under the sailmaster's tutelage. All Victoria could do was change Starfarer's path by rote, without the minute alterations Iphigenie would have made as she flew.

The other people in the sailhouse, recovering, paddled toward her through the dissonant notes of chaos.

"What happened? Is she all right?"

"I hope so," Victoria said. "She talked. Get her to the health center. Anne, please, would you log in and try to keep the tension even on the lines? Maybe there's a control program here somewhere, I don't know."

She heard at the edge of her hearing and saw at the comers of her vision that others were helping, working, taking Iphigenie to aid. Letting them go, she disappeared into the mathematical space that controlled the starship, seeing only the strange dimensions and hearing only a cacophony that she urged toward harmony.

The moon's gravity drew the starship out of the plane of the moon's orbit. In the original plan, Starfarer spent the next six months in a shakedown cruise. The alternate path drove the ship immediately to the nearer but more complex transition point.

STARFARERS 23 9

If the new plan succeeded, Starfarer would escape before the military carrier arrived with its nuclear arms.

The tones blended. To Victoria's ear the music lacked the simple beauty of Iphigenie's solutions.

The moon passed beneath the starship. The moon's sunlit limb changed from a bright flaring line, to a bow, to a crescent: dark of the moon to new moon to half-moon in the space of a few minutes.

The sail caught the sunlight again, silver, shimmering. The wrinkled center filled; the edges straightened.

Starfarer passed beyond the moon.

Within the cylinder, J.D, paused when the moon's shadow cut off the light to the sun tubes. She looked out the window of her house to watch the eerie midday eclipse pass over the land. It lasted too brief a time for the auxiliary power to kick in and illuminate the campus.

The light returned. Everything had, J.D. assumed, gone smoothly.

She glanced around the main room of her house. Mats given to her at the welcoming party remained rolled up and stacked. She had put off laying them out till she finished building her shelves. Slabs of rock foam lay just inside the door, unused, perhaps never to be used. Her books remained in their boxes. She could not take them back with her, for the transport would be too crowded. Many of the people leaving felt like refugees, forced to abandon everything. J.D. had heard the sadness and distress and anger in their voices. She sympathized with them, and knew she should feel lucky, if she had to leave, to be leaving before she could put her roots down very far.

Nevertheless, she felt uprooted.

Though the transport would not dock for an hour, J.D. left her house, empty-handed, and trudged down the path toward the cylinder's end.

Victoria crept silently into Iphigenie's room in the health center. The sailmaster lay bundled in a blanket with the edge pulled close around her face. Victoria sat nearby, prepared for a long wait.

"What happened?" Iphigenie whispered.

24 0 vonda N. Mclntyre

"Somebody crashed the web. Turned off the safeguards and crashed it. It was deliberate. It . . ." About to say that it blasted the web to shreds, she stopped herself. It scared her to think what the crash might have done to Iphigenie. "It caused a lot of disruption. But things are getting back together. How are you feeling?"

"I mean the orbit."

"It's pretty close to what you planned. But without any refinements."

"Did it work, Victoria? I want to know if it worked."

Victoria drew in a long breath and let it out. "I don't know yet. We won't know till we outrun the carrier ... or get caught."

Iphigenie moved weakly, rising from the bed, wrapping the blanket around herself.

"I'm going back out."

"Do you feel up to it?" "I don't like being in gravity, I've got to get out of here."

Though everyone else in the sailhouse had been hooked into Arachne through Iphigenie, and had felt the web's disintegration only secondhand, many other members of the faculty and staff had been routinely hooked in on the web during the crash. The overworked health center staff were treating everything from headache and nausea to coma. No one even noticed when Iphigenie and Victoria left.

Victoria helped Iphigenie out of the center. The sailmaster looked gray beneath her dark skin, and her hands were cold and clammy. But if she could improve the course by a fraction of a percent, it might make the difference between the continuation of the expedition, and its complete, permanent failure. They had gone too far now to back off from risk.

Once more in the crystal bubble of the sailhouse, Iphigenie glanced at the sail, at the moon, the earth, the sun, as if she could plot out the best course without any technical support at all. She gazed across at the hard-link, warily.

"Is Arachne back yet?" she asked.

A strange question; easy enough to check for herself. Victoria had been querying every couple of minutes, to no avail.

"No. No answer yet."

Iphigenie pushed herself toward the console. Drifting in STARFARERS 241

weightlessness with the blue blanket wrapped around her, she looked like a forlorn baby-blue ghost. She reached the console and worked over it for a few minutes, every so often reaching up to pull a drifting comer of the blanket closer.

"That's it," Iphigenie said. "That's as good as it gets. You did well, Victoria. Thank you."

Returning, exhausted, from the sailhouse, Victoria realized that it lacked only a few minutes till the transport's departure. She had vowed not to go to the waiting room, not to bid goodbye to anyone who chose to leave the expedition.

But when she reached the corridor that led to the transport access, she realized her vow was a cruel and petty one.

She pushed off toward the waiting room.

Ten meters ahead, someone wearing long black garments pulled herself doggedly forward, trying to maneuver with one hand while using the other to hold the excess fabric of her long, drifting skirt. Each time she let it go, the skirt crept up around her knees.

Such heavy clothing was rare on board the starship, and Victoria could not think who might be wearing it. She caught up and glanced curiously sideways.

"Alzena!"

The chief ecologist continued without pausing. Her chador covered everything except her hands and her face.

"Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?"

"I'm going back to earth. I can take only one set of clothes."

"But you can't leave'"

"I must. If I remain, illegally, my family will be shamed."

"What about your work? The ecosystem depends on your knowledge. The whole expedition could succeed or fail—"

"You don't understand, Victoria. You can't. All the branches of your family are Western. My family is different.

I have obligations that have nothing to do with my work."

"So you're going to wrap yourself up in mourning—"

"It is not mourning, and you know it. It is traditional, and I must be wearing it when I reach earth. It's one thing to adopt Western dress up here, in private, quite another to appear in public—there will be cameras . . . My family will see me. I cannot embarrass them."

242 Vonda N. Mclntyre

Victoria looked away. This was a facet of Alzena she had never known about. She would rather not have met the Al-zena who would abandon a position of respect, authority, accomplishment, and freedom, in order to return to a circumscribed existence and submit herself to rule by accident of birth.

The ecologist was correct. Victoria did not understand. She could not understand actions that seemed to her more alien than anything she could imagine encountering in a distant star system.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry for your decision. I'm sorry things worked out this way."

"So am I," Alzena said.

Distressed, Victoria hurried on. leaving the ecologist behind.

J.D. let herself hover by the wall of the transport waiting room. She felt limp and distressed; if there had been any gravity at all here she would have been sitting slumped in a chair. Other soon-to-be-ex-expedition members filled the room. The noise level was high and harsh, but the talk and argument and recriminations and last-minute goodbyes often fell into the middle of strange abrupt silences.

As the transport approached, the public address speaker broadcast the conversation between its pilot and Starfarer's traffic controller. They had a direct radio link, independent of communications satellites. They exchanged information in a sort of technological ritual, just the same as always, as if

nothing had happened.

J.D. knew about the attempted sabotage of Starfarer by the disruption of the web. The web had safeguards, to protect people hooked in during crashes. Someone had deliberately overridden them. J.D. could not understand the mind of someone who would hurt people on purpose. Worst of all, it had to be someone on board Starfarer.

The sabotage had angered a number of people to the point of changing their minds about leaving. J.D. would have been among them if she had been departing for any reason but the divers.

She shivered, closed her eyes, and extended a tentative tendril toward Arachne. If the web was re-formed, if the con-

STARFARERS 24 3

nection to the satellite had been restored, she could ask once more if Zev had been found.

No reply.

She was about to go looking for a hard-link to the computer when Victoria entered the wailing room. She paused in the hatchway and looked around. J.D. averted her gaze, wishing Victoria were seeking someone else, but knowing why she must be here.

The transport docked with a faint low-frequency thud, a faint vibration of the walls.

Even without looking, J.D. knew it when Victoria touched the wall nearby and brought herseif to a halt at J.D.'s side.

"Hi."

"Hi."

Victoria took J.D.'s hand. J.D. flinched, startled by her touch.

"Please," she said. "Victoria, I'm sorry. I have to leave.

I can't—" Her throat tightened. If she kept speaking she would break down.

"I know," Victoria said. "I know it. That's why I came.

To tell you that I do understand. I'm furious, but not at you. I think you're an admirable person. I wouldn't have the courage to do what you're doing."

"Thank you for trying to make me feel better ... " Her smile felt shaky. "It isn't working."

The hatch door opened and people came out. A crowd had already formed around the hatchway. The last transport would be packed. Half its incoming passengers were refusing to disembark. J.D. could not blame them, and besides, as Sa-toshi said, anyone who could be talked out of being on the expedition for any reason probably should not have joined it in the first place.

Though J.D. was one of the passengers who actually held a confirmed reservation, she did not expect to claim her couch. The transport could accommodate all its passengers only because freefall gave them three dimensions rather than two in which to place themselves.

"I hope you find your friend," Victoria said.

"Thank you."

The last few people straggled out of the hatchway. Hardly noticing them, J.D. hugged Victoria, who embraced her

244 Vonda N. Mclntyre

tightly. Finally they drifted away from each other, still holding hands.

"I guess ... "

J.D. noticed a pair of youths, strangely familiar, moving through the waiting room, among the other new people. She lost sight of them.

"I guess I'd better go." Everyone else had already crowded into the transport.

Victoria put one hand on either side of J.D.'s face, leaned forward, and kissed her lips. J.D. felt herself blushing, but did not pull away.

Victoria let her hands slip away from J.D.'s face. Reluctantly, J.D. pushed off from the wall, moving backward through the hatchway.

"Goodbye."

The doors began to close.

"Goodbye."

Beyond Victoria, the strange youths headed for the exterior hatch. One, awkward in weightlessness, pushed off too hard.

She tumbled toward a group of equally inexperienced people.

The other youth, of indeterminate gender, wearing an incongruous baggy business suit and an even more incongruous hat, swam after her, caught her, and steadied her. This youth was an old hand up here, swimming in the air like water-Even as J.D. thought, It couldn't be! she lurched forward through the last crack between the closing doors. They slammed open, then shut again as she barreled back into the waiting room.

"Zev!"

The youth in the business suit spun toward her—and continued turning. He pulled off his hat, freeing his astonishing pale hair, and flung the hat hard in the opposite direction of the spin. His rotation slowed. He touched the wall and launched himself toward J.D.

"J.D. ! I did not see you—how did you know I was coming? We thought we kept it a secret. I have a different name

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt now. And I am Chandra's assistant."

J.D. looked at him, baffled. He dodged around her, skimming past her, very close, never touching her.

Chandra made her way to them, hand over hand along the

STARFARERS

245

transport wall. "Thanks for leaving me hanging like that. Is that your idea of gratitude?"

"This is Chandra. Chandra, I forgot my new name."

"It doesn't matter. You can go back to being Zev."

"What happened?" J.D. cried. "I don't understand any of this!"

Zev laughed and hovered above them. "What does it matter? We're here now."

Chandra answered her. "It's like Zev said. He's my grad student in the art department. My agent got him a temporary new identity."

"Your agent must be pretty extraordinary."

Zev swooped between them, pushed off gently from the surface beyond their feet, and passed behind J.D.

"She is. She knows some amazing people. She even knows people who can make publishers pay them their royalties on time."

"That is amazing. Zev, stop, slow down!"

"I cannot help it, this is exciting."

She took his wrist as he passed, and drew him toward her.

She had forgotten how warm his skin always felt. In the sea, heat radiated from him, perceptible a handsbreadth away.

"Come here, let me hug you."

"But you said, about being on land—"

"Never mind what I said. For a minute, we can be divers again."

Zev smiled his luminous smile and pulled himself to her and hugged her tight- He hid his face against her neck. His breath whispered against her collarbone. J.D. felt as if she had been dying of starvation and thirst and loneliness without knowing it, until this moment, and now it did not matter because she was no longer dying.

Victoria hovered nearby while J.D. and Zev hugged each other, floating upside down in relation to Victoria's orientation.

The artist grabbed onto a handhold. She clung tight, her

eyes shut, the weird swellings on her face and hands dark with increased circulation.

She opened her eyes. They were a dull silver-gray. She seemed to look directly at Victoria.

246 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"I have to hook into the computer!" she said. She thrust her chin toward Victoria, arrogant, desperate. "Otherwise I'm going to start losing stuff. Why isn't it responding?*'

"The web's been disrupted," Victoria said. "We're in a lot of trouble here—are you sure you want to stay?"

"Of course. How long before you've got a functional web?"

"I don't know."

"I can't afford to wait—do you have portables? Backups?

A hard-link?"

Victoria almost snapped at her, almost said, I have better things to do than worry about art.

But the truth was that she did not have anything better to do, with Iphigenie capable of watching the course, and also being watched over to be sure she did not slip into shock. Victoria had nothing better to do than worry. She might as well worry about something.

'''•Where did you get that suit?" J.D. was asking.

"Chandra had it made for me."

"It fit him better," Chandra said, "before he decided he ought to be able to swim in it."

"She says it should fit more closely, but I like it this way.

Is it good space clothes?"

"It's unique," J.D. said. "And so are you."

Victoria smiled. "Come on," she said to Chandra. "I'll get you to a link." She reached out to lead the artist, who ignored her hand and pushed off past her, dog-paddling.

"I'm not blind, you know."

Victoria kicked off after her, nonplussed, but relieved to know that Chandra had not chosen some form of altered sight, even blindness, in pursuit of her art.

Instead of ricocheting toward the hatchway, Victoria grabbed a handhold and stopped herself, her attention caught by a change in the familiar tones of the conversation between the transport pilot and Starfarer's traffic controller. Chandra reached the hatch, turned to look for Victoria, scowled, and dog-paddled back toward her.

"Starfarer control, no go, repeat, no go. Abort undocking procedure."

"What's the trouble, transport? Your pattern's normal." STARFARERS 24 7

"EarthSpace orders. The transport isn't to disengage from the starship."

Victoria cursed softly. If the pilot followed orders, if the transport remained with Starfarer. the expedition would have the choice of aborting transition, or vanishing with a transport full of people who did not want to go. At worst, hostages, kidnapping victims; at best, a bunch of very hostile individuals.

Chandra reached Victoria, still dog-paddling, slow but steady. She clutched Victoria's arm and pulled. They tumbled until Victoria grabbed the wall and stopped them.

"Come on!" Chandra sounded as desperate as a child who badly needed a bathroom. For all Victoria knew, the sensation of full sensory recorders was the same as full bladder and bowels.

"Just a second, this is serious."

The discussion between pilot and controller frayed around the edges, the pilot's voice losing some of its good-old-boy, feminine version, self-confidence, while the controller held desperately to the precise, rigorously unaccented EarthSpace communications English.

"Transport, you are cutting your window very thin. Starfarer will not, repeat not, approach another before transition. You will be at risk of needing a tow.''

A transport pilot would never live down making a mistake that required a tow, but this pilot's actions were deliberate.

"Hurry!" Chandra wailed.

"Shut up!" Victoria whispered, out of practice with doing the math in her head, hampered by being cut off from Arachne. Just how long did Starfarer have, to persuade the pilot to change her mind and disobey EarthSpace orders? If Chandra felt uncomfortably full, Victoria felt desperately empty.

J.D. and Zev swam over to her, Zev already smooth and graceful in freefall. He had taken off the suit coat, but still gave the impression of swimming within his clothing.

"Will they be stranded?" J.D. asked. "If they undock late—will anyone rescue them?"

"They're probably coordinated with the earner, hoping to stop us. The real question is, what if they don't undock? I don't want to go into this as kidnappers."

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"That's what they're counting on," J.D. said. "It must be." "No'" the pilot shouted at the controller. Her angry voice sounded even more startling coming through a speaker which ordinarily transmitted the most civilized of exchanges. "I've got my orders. We're staying."

The controller replied. "I hope you are all prepared for a very long trip.''

Abandoning the sensory artist, Victoria headed for traffic control.

Griffith retraced the route he had followed with Nikolai Cherenkov, to the outer skin of the starship's campus cylinder. He had no need of Arachne's guidance, for he never permitted a computer hookup to substitute for his acute memory. He moved with quick caution. Everyone still on board must have plenty of things to worry about, but he did not trust their preoccupation to protect him from their anger. He doubted he would have time to explain if he were cornered by an infuriated mob; he doubted anyone would believe him anyway.

He wished he had made time to go through spacewalk orientation. A line through to Arachne would have helped make up for that deficiency, but the web was still down. He wondered who had crashed it, and why he had not been told of an ally on board the starship.

The tunnels grew increasingly dim, increasingly rough. He reached the tumoff to the airiock.

A dozen spacesuits hung in the access room. He touched Cherenkov's, but left it in its place. Even if it might have fit him, he lacked the gall to wear it.

I've lost a lot of gall in the last couple of days, he thought. Maybe now is where I get it back.

He picked a suit from its hanger and inspected it carefully, checking how the fittings worked. It was no more complicated than a radiation suit. He climbed into it.

"Strosvuitye."

Griffith turned, disbelieving. From the doorway, Cheren-kov regarded him with an expression as matter-of-fact as his voice.

"My faith in human nature is obviously at a low ebb,"

STARFARERS 24 9

Cherenkov said. "Otherwise I might have expected to see you here. You did understand what I said to you, didn't you?"

Griffith could not trust himself to answer the question. "I didn't expect to see you," he said. "This is the last place I expected to see you. What are you doing down here?"

"The same as you. Trying to save the expedition. Acting an old part, the part of an unregenerate hero." He spoke drily, self-deprecatingly.

"You can go back up, then," Griffith said. "There's no need for you to leave the expedition."

"You said you wanted to be like me, and I said you were a fool for it. You're still a fool."

"Thanks a lot," Griffith said. "What do I have to do, to make you—" He stopped.

"If you jump out into space and call for the carrier to rescue you, it won't turn aside from its prey. Its masters will not permit it."

"I think I know them better then you do, and you're wrong."

"I will not let you enter the airiock, Marion," Cherenkov said.

"How are you going to stop me?"

"I may be out of practice, but one does not forget certain survival techniques." He smiled. "Especially when one performs them against an opponent handicapped by spacesuit legs halfway down around his ankles."

"Don't laugh at me!" Griffith jerked the bottom of the spacesuit straight so he was no longer hobbled by the legs.

The back hung down behind him like an enormous tail. Che-renkov was right about his being handicapped, less by the suit than by his desperate wish not to fight with the cosmonaut.

"You can't seriously think I'd let you jump out instead!"

"That would be the more rational course," Cherenkov said.

"Because you're sure they will turn around to go get you?

That's fucking egotistical."

"I'm not sure. But I am sure that I have the better chance of slowing them long enough for Starfarer to reach transition."

"Maybe we ought to both jump out," Griffith said sarcastically.

250 vonda N. Mcintyre

"All right," Cherenkov said. "That would be an acceptable compromise."

Griffith hesitated.

"No," he said. "I can't allow it."

Curious, Cherenkov cocked his head. "But why? I'm sorry if I hurt your pride, believing your superiors will not stop to rescue you. Is that any reason to abandon a version of the plan that would work?"

"It's too risky," Griffith hesitated. "If they won't stop for me ... maybe they won't stop for you, either." "I see." Cherenkov let his long legs fold up; he sat on the stone floor and gazed at Griffith.

"You don't want to fight me, either," Griffith said. "I'll take that as a compliment." He managed to smile. "Checkmate."

"Not yet," Cherenkov said. "Only check."

J.D. watched Victoria soar away without a backward look.

She hesitated, tempted to follow. But surely Victoria would have asked for her help if she had wanted it. Besides, J.D. did not want to leave Zev.

"Just tell me where there's a link!" Chandra said. "God forbid I should use any of your precious time."

"I'm sorry," J.D. said. "Things are a little complicated up here right now. Come on, I'll find you a place to transfer your information."

She and Zev towed the artist out of the waiting room, past the people listening, fascinated and appalled, to the conversation between Slarfarer traffic control and the transport pilot.

"Zev, where were you all this time? Lykos has been worried, and I was just about to go back and help look for you."

"It was exciting. We almost got arrested."

" 'We'? You and the other divers? I thought—"

" 'We,' him and me," Chandra said. "I almost let them.

I've never been arrested, it would have been good stuff to collect. But they didn't look like regular police, and I was afraid it would take too long to get out."

"I suspect that's an understatement," J.D. said.

She led them down the corridor toward one of the auxiliary equipment rooms.

STARFARERS 251

"Do'both of you realize that we're headed for transition right now? That if you stay, you'll be on the starship permanently? The expedition may be longer than we planned . . . we've gotten ourselves in a lot of trouble."

Chandra laughed. "You think / was making an understatement? ''

"There's still time to get on the transport."

"J-D.," Zev said, "it would be silly to get on the transport. It is not going anywhere." He loosened his tie and pulled it off.

"I hope they change their minds about that, because Star-farer isn't about to change course."

"We can't go back," Chandra said. "By now they'll have figured out that my assistant doesn't exist, and maybe they'll have figured out who he really is. Besides, I'm in the art department, I signed on for the trip."

"Me, too," Zev said cheerfully. He pulled the shirttail out of his trousers and unbuttoned his shirt so it flapped behind him.

"All right . . . Whoa, stop."

They turned in at the equipment room.

"There's a link."

Chandra dove toward it. She would have piled headfirst into the wall if J.D. had not grabbed her as she passed. She had nothing to hold on to, to stop her, but their combined mass slowed them so they drifted to a halt before the console. Chandra did not notice. She hooked in with Arachne, fitting the direct sensors over her head.

The rhythm of her breathing changed: long deep breaths changed to quick hard gasps. Her body quivered, and the skin over the nerve clusters grew livid. She moaned. It embarrassed J.D. to watch her. She turned away and pushed off, letting herself drift toward the other side of the room.

"I'm glad you're here," she said to Zev.

"I, too." He glanced at her from beneath his arm. He hung sideways in the air in relation to J.D., with his knees pulled close to his chest so he could reach his feet. He was untying his shoes.

"Your mother must be glad you're all right."

"Did you call her already? When?"

"No, I haven't called her. Haven't you called her?"

252 vonda N. Mclntyre

"I could not. Chandra said they would know who I was if

I did that."

"She was probably right. Poor Lykos!"

"May we call her now?"

"We can try."

Leaving Chandra, J.D. led Zev to another equipment room and another hard-link.

But they could not get through to Lykos.

The transport pilot, having run out of arguments, turned recalcitrant, then surly. It was a quarter of an hour since she had replied to anyone.

Victoria took a second to check the position of the carrier.

It was only a few thousand kilometers away, a hairsbreadth in astronomical terms, and its relative speed was fast enough that as she watched, it came perceptibly nearer.

"They're close," she said. "They're really close."

"Not close enough," the traffic controller said. "They can't accelerate enough to catch us and still have time to decelerate enough not to crash."

"First good news I've heard all day."

Dr. Thanthavong arrived at traffic control.

"Can I be of any help?" she asked Victoria.

"Please," Victoria said with relief. "Surely she'll listen to you." She moved aside so the world-renowned geneticist could come within reach of the sound pickup.

"Esther, my name is Thanthavong."

There was a long silence.

"What?" the transport pilot said.

"My name is Thanthavong."

"So? Am I supposed to know you?"

Dr. Thanthavong drew her eyebrows together in surprise.

"I am Professor Thanthavong, the geneticist. I developed viral depolymerase- I want to try to persuade you not to interfere with the expedition."

"I never heard of you and I don't want to talk to any geneticist. What happened to Victoria?"

Thanthavong spread her hands, defeated, embarrassed, and yet drily amused. "And here I thought I was a universal historical figure." She returned the controller's sound pickup to Victoria.

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253

Victoria gathered her thoughts and tried again.

"Esther, you don't want to be responsible for the first hijacking in space, do you? You've got a duty to your passengers."

"The first hijacking'" the pilot said angrily. "You're a good one to talk about hijacking!'*

"We've all agreed what to do. Everybody on the transport has chosen to return—and everyone who chose to return is on the transport. Starfarer isn't going to change course. There isn't much time. If you stay docked ..."

"I don't believe you'll kidnap us," Esther said.

Victoria backed out of the pickup's range.

"I don't know what to say to her."

"Is there anyone on board she might respond to?"

Victoria could not think of anyone. She felt as if her thoughts were doing nothing but going around in confused little circles.

"Sure!" the controller said suddenly. "She's a pilot. Get Cherenkov.''

"Of course," Thanthavong said.

"Where is he?"

They both glanced at the controller, as if he could divine the cosmonaut's whereabouts.

He shrugged. "No idea."

Victoria reached for the web, but found only the empty biankness of the blasted connections.

"Maybe we could go look . . . ?"

But there were too many places to look, and too short a time left in which to look for him.

The traffic controller groaned. "Oh, shit. Listen."

The voice on the speaker changed.

"Starfarer, this is the carrier Hector. Reverse your sail immediately. The starship must begin to decelerate immediately or we'll be forced to take drastic action."

Kolya grabbed Marion Griffith and kept him from crashing to the floor. Kolya knew many ways of killing a human being, but very few ways of taking a person's consciousness without causing damage.

He hoped Griffith would be all right. The young officer lay

254 vonda N. Mdntyre

unconscious, but his pulse was strong, his breathing regular, and his larynx uncrushed.

Kolya could not have overcome Griffith by a direct attack. Instead he had let Griffith believe he saw an opening. When Griffith came at him, determined to overwhelm him, Kolya gained the advantage by knowing what he planned.

Kolya considered fitting Griffith into a spacesuit and taking him along. In the end, he decided against the plan. It was too dangerous. Griffith might be right to fear that the carrier would not pause to rescue one human being, or even two.

You will not thank me, I suppose, Kolya thought. But you are fortunate. You will continue with the expedition, while I must stay behind.

Victoria wanted to be in the sailhouse, in the observatory, anywhere but here. She wanted to be watching as Starfarer's magnetic claws grabbed the cosmic string; she wanted to be in the center of everything that happened.

"If you do not reverse the sail, Hector will shoot to cripple your ship."

"They can't be serious!" Victoria cried.

"Wait a minute!" the transport pilot shouted. She began to curse at the carrier.

Stephen Thomas shivered.

"I don't know about you. Fox, but I'm getting cold."

He did know about her. She was sitting on a washing-machine-sized ultra-centrifuge, and her teeth were chattering.

"You could've picked a warmer place to hide. A nice meadow in the wild cylinder, maybe."

"You have to sign in," she said. "You would have known where to look."

"Through all sixty square kilometers?"

"Go ahead, make fun of me. I'm not getting on the transport."

"I really appreciate this," Stephen Thomas said. "When

we get back, we all get to go straight to jail for kidnapping a

minor. A minor president's niece, at that."

"Look on the bright side, Stephen Thomas," Fox said.

"You'll get a lot longer sentence for helping steal Starfarer.

STARFARERS 2 55

Besides, maybe we won't get back." She sniffled. "It isn't fair!"

"I'm sorry. It isn't fair. But you still have to get on the transport and go home."

"I thought you were my friend!"

"Stephen Thomas?"

Stephen Thomas glanced over his shoulder. "In here, Sa-loshi. I found her."

Satoshi came into the cold room.

"Hello, Fox."

"Hello, Lono."

"This is not a great place to hide."

"I didn't think anybody would look here." She glanced at the rock in her hand. "You know ... if you tried to force me out, and I busted a few things in here, I might infect the whole ship with . . . with ... " She searched for a suitably horrible possibility. "With black plague."

"Forget it," Stephen Thomas said. "We don't keep pathogens on board except in transcribed form. You might as well

try to infect somebody with a book.''

"I bet I could do some damage to the gene stocks."

"You're a good geographer," Satoshi said, "but you haven't done any homework on genetics—or on the expedition's backups."

"Says who?"

"Says me," Stephen Thomas said. "Dr. Thanthavong doesn't take chances. We keep backups of everything at the other end of the building."

"Oh, yeah? Then how come you guys don't drag me up to the transport?"

"I don't believe in physical violence."

"I don't either," Stephen Thomas said, "but I'm beginning to understand its attraction."

The final countdown to transition began. As the carrier sped toward Starfarer, the starship's sail changed. Not reversing, as the carrier commanded, but withdrawing entirely.

In the sunless, starless place they would soon enter, no solar wind existed to fill it and keep it untangled.

"Redeploy the sail," the voice of the carrier commanded.

256 vonda N. Mcintyre

"You wilt not be permitted to draw in the sail. You must reverse it."

"The starship won't go into transition!" the transport pilot shouted. "I know these people, they won't—"

"Esther, undock now, dammit!" Victoria cried.

Victoria let her breath out hard. She wished she were with Stephen Thomas and Satoshi. She wished they were all with Iphigenie in the sailhouse. The halyards drew in the great silver sheet, stretching and compressing it into taut folds, gently twisting it into a cable kilometers long, but only a few meters in diameter.

"Magnetic fields at full strength," Arachne said through the speaker of the nearby hard-link- "Magnetic fields engaged."

"Shit!" Esther shouted. "Undock!"

"It's too late!"

"Undock, dammit!"

"Encounter," Arachne said, in its completely matter-of-fact computer voice.

The magnetic claws engaged with the cosmic string, transformed an infinitesimal percent of its unlimited energy, and began to build transition energy.

The countdown reversed, leading toward transition. Victoria imagined she could feel the increase of the starship's potential.

They can't stop us, she thought- No matter how fast the carrier moves, it can't catch us, it can't follow us, it can't stop Starfarer.

Ecstatic, she shouted in triumph and flung her arms around Thanthavong.

The voice of the carrier spoke.

"Fire."

A point of light detached itself from the carrier and accelerated at terrifying speed toward the starship.

The missile hit.

Starfarer shuddered.

Victoria gasped. She held Thanthavong tighter, as if she could protect her if the starship collapsed around them.

Drifting free, Victoria saw the ship vibrating, and felt the trembling of the heavy, oppressive air. The rumble of the attack pressed against her hearing, a drumming of such low frequency that she felt it in her bones.

"Esther!" The traffic controller's voice rose as he tried to reach the transport pilot.

J.D. and Zev propelled themselves into the traffic control cubicle, J.D. pale with shock, Zev excited.

"What happened?"

"The missile," Thanthavong said. "Was it armed?"

"It can't have exploded," Victoria said. "We'd . . . we'd know." She dove for the hard-link and desperately demanded real-time information on Starfarer's status.

Arachne responded sluggishly, but it did respond. The campus and the wild side both maintained their air pressure:

neither cylinder had been seriously breached. They had been built well, to retain their integrity under the stress of the spin, the pull of the solar sail, the unknown changes of transition.

Equally important, the starship remained magnetically bound to the cosmic string, gathering energy.

"We're still docked!" The transport pilot's voice sounded hollow and feverish. "I don't believe they—I'm going to—"

If the transport undocked now, Starfarer would pull it into transition, like a rowboat caught in the wake of a cruiser. But

257

2 58 vonda N. Mdntyre

the transport possessed insufficient mass to survive transition alone.

"Don't let them loose!" Victoria shouted to the controller. "What? Why?"

"It's too late—we're loo near transition' Get everybody back inside!"

The controller locked the transport into the docking module. The pilot swore at him, swore at their pursuers, swore at EarthSpace and Starfarer and scientists.

But at the same time she understood what was happening;

she understood the danger. No one knew for certain what the conditions might be outside the starship between the point when it vanished from space-time and the moment of its reappearance. Esther slammed the transport's hatch open, and, still cursing, ordered her passengers back into Starfarer.

Victoria searched the display. Arachne sent confused and erratic signals.

"The missile must have hit us a glancing blow," Victoria said.

"They can't have planned to do this," J.D. said. "How could they . . . ?"

"They are very determined to get what they want." Zev did not sound like the innocent J.D. had described.

Thanihavong hovered beside Victoria.

"Arachne's called in the damage control team," Victoria said. "But the cylinder's not seriously breached and the missile didn't detonate. Maybe it wasn't armed. Maybe it was only meant to cripple us. At least we're still on course- I hope there isn't an eight-point-five earthquake zone right over where it hit . . ."

Staring at the display, Thanthavong suddenly gripped Victoria's shoulder.

"It hit us directly beneath the genetics department," she said. "The gene stocks . . . sensitizing viruses . . ." She drew back, turned, and pushed off toward the exit. "I've got to get down there—"

Victoria went with her. J.D. and Zev followed close behind. They passed the transport waiting room, where the outbound passengers milled around in anger and outrage and despair.

They reached the hill leading to the floor of the cylinder.

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259

At first everything appeared normal in the interior of the starship.

Victoria saw the destruction around the genetics building.

It was as if someone had placed a circle of land on a plate. and tossed it, so it fell back almost into place, but collapsed and jumbled. The earth, so recently covered with the lacy green of new grass, broke open to reveal streaks of harsh red clay. Saplings and bushes lay uprooted, flung against each other, in irregular concentric circles leading outward from the point of damage.

The cracks in the earth cut across a hill, the hill that housed the genetics department.

Victoria plunged down the slope at a dangerous speed, leaving the other three behind. First she pulled herself along the handholds, nearly in freefall, then she took great leaping strides through microgravity, and then she ran, toward the earthquake zone, toward the broken streaks of earth.

The impact flung Kolya against the wall of the tunnel. He slid toward the floor, half-stunned. The body of the starship moaned around him, the bonded rocks grinding together beneath the stress—of transition? Or had Iphigenie been forced to reverse the sail? He did not know whether to feel joy or grief. He turned on the radio in his spacesuit, but heard only confused fragments of talk. The web remained useless.

Kolya heard the faint high hiss of escaping air.

Startled, he flanged his helmet shut and hurried to Griffith, who lay half in, half out of his spacesuit. Kolya struggled, but soon realized he had no chance of getting Griffith into the suit. He grabbed a survival pouch from the emergency rack, dragged Griffith free, and manhandled him into the sphere. He sealed it and activated the oxygen reserve. The government agent remained unconscious.

1 did far too expert a job on him, Kolya thought.

He tried to drag Griffith in his silver sphere all the way to an elevator, so they both could escape to the surface. After ten meters he knew it was hopeless. Griffith, though not a large man, made a heavy, awkward weight in the full gravity of the starship's lowest level.

The sound of escaping air grew fainter as the atmospheric pressure fell.

260 vonda N. Mcintyre

Kolya felt a low, grinding vibration. The baffles were sliding shut. The elevator was already closed off. With one final burst of exertion, Kolya dragged Griffith beyond the moving baffle. He did not want to leave him, but he could do him no good if they both were trapped between airtight doors. Kolya plunged through the narrowing space and ran toward the airlock. Behind him, the misaligned panels shrieked in their tracks with a high-pitched squeal that traveled through the ground, vibrated into his body, and pierced his hearing.

I'll have to travel around the outside of the ship, Kotya thought, and find an undamaged entrance—or go all the way to the axis, if need be—and bring help. From outside, I might detect the position of the air leak, the extent of the damage.

He hoped he would be able to tell what had happened, what caused the impact.

Am I still willing, he wondered, to fling myself into the void and hope our pursuers will stop to rescue me? I will probably never know the answer to that question. By now our escape or capture must be sealed.

Kolya entered the airlock and started its sequence. The inner door slid shut, but refused to close the final few centimeters. Kolya shoved it until it caught, then waited impatiently while the airlock cycled. He held tight to the grips, afraid the lock might open prematurely and fling him out into space with the last of the air. It evacuated properly. At his feet, the hatch leading onto the outer skin of the starship opened halfway and stuck. He climbed down and squeezed through, no easy matter in the bulky pressure suit.

He lowered himself onto the inspection cables and headed for the next nearest of the access hatches that dotted the ship's exterior. With the outer surface of the starship at his back, he crawled rapidly over the cables like a four-legged spider.

Only the cables lay between him and space.

The spin took him in view of the saithouse, the furled silver sail, and the magnetic claws that reached to the cosmic string. Both claws and string should have been invisible: the claws, an energy field, had no substance, while the cosmic string had enormous mass but only the single dimension of length.

Yet Kolya perceived an odd, pointillist image: two flexing arms like tentacles, grasping a distant, slender thread. He could only see it when he observed it from the comer of his

STARFARERS 261

vision. Perhaps he imagined it all; perhaps he saw some perfectly natural phenomenon. Could Hawking radiation appear in the visible spectrum? Kolya did not pretend to understand cosmic string, or Hawking radiation for that matter.

The starship spun him past the magnetic claws and into the canyon between Star forces two cylinders.

He continued to crawl. He had nearly reached the next hatch.

But he had also moved into a region where the starship's smooth rock surface became cracked and jumbled.

Kolya raised his head. The ship curved gradually upward, forming a close horizon.

The cosmonaut stopped, horrified, disbelieving. He had come upon the cause of the impact and the damage.

Far from striking a glancing blow, then tumbling off harmlessly into space, the missile had plunged itself into the starship. It was lodged a meter deep in Starfarer's skin.

When the earthquake hit, Infinity knew what had happened.

He never doubted the accuracy of his perception.

"What was that?" Florrie jerked her head up, and the small

shells in her hair rattled- In the comer of her main room, the painted egg snapped from its thread. It fell, bounced on a woven mat, rolled in a half-circle, and stopped. It lay miraculously unbroken.

Infinity picked it up gently and handed it to Floris. He watched himself perform such an ordinary gesture, astounded.

He was in shock, he knew he was in shock. But he was powerless to shake away the stunned certainty that Starfarer's pursuers had behaved every bit as badly as he had feared they might. No: not quite as badly. They must not have used a nuclear warhead, or Starfarer would be dead.

Arachne's web remained silent. Infinity activated the console in the comer of Florrie's main room and used the hard-link to find the location of the damage and the condition of the ship. One of the few people left on board with hard-vacuum construction experience, he was part of the damage control team. He would liave to go below immediately. Starfarer possessed self-healing capabilities, but it had limits.

"What happened?" Florrie demanded.

262 vonda N. Mclntyre

Despite everything, the ship remained on course. Infinity was amazed.

"We've encountered the string!" He gave her the good

news and kept the bad to himself. "I have to go for a while,

Florrie. I'm sorry. Will you be okay?"

"Yes." Her smile was quiet, relieved, joyful. "Yes, I'll be fine. They can't make me leave now, can they?"

Despite everything, Infinity grinned- "They sure can't."

He left her sitting in her window seal, cupping the fragile egg in both hands.

Victoria broke into a run. Other people joined her, disoriented, shocked, appalled. She reached the edge of the tumbled earth. The genetics building looked like it had been shaken until it broke. She climbed across the rough ground.

She was the first to reach the entrance. The doorway had partially collapsed. Someone was trying to crawl between its crushed supports. Victoria grabbed the clutching hand.

"Help . . ."

"It's all right," Victoria said. "You'll be out in a minute, it's all right."

The green scent of crushed grass mixed with the dry tang of mineral dust and the meaty, organic smell of spilled nutrient medium. Broken rock scraped Victoria's legs and sides, and dirt from the sagging hill's turf sifted onto her. In the dimness of the destroyed building, Victoria could see Fox, Satoshi's recalcitrant graduate student. Fox gripped desperately at her hand.

"Hang on. Can you get a foothold? Pull yourself up, there's more room above you."

With Victoria's help. Fox scrambled higher. Panting, nearly sobbing, she dragged herself out of the rubble. Beyond her it was dark except for the light that reflected from a pillowy cloud of fog: evaporating liquid nitrogen.

"Is anybody else still in there?"

Fox gasped for air. "Satoshi, and Stephen Thomas, in the cold room . . ."

Victoria pushed past her and dove through the opening.

Sliding over the destruction and into the dark corridor, she sprawled on the floor beneath a layer ot cold vapor. She stumbled to her feet. The nitrogen fog flowed across her shoulders

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263

and swirled around her legs. Above it, she could breathe Emergency lights glowed faintly, but the dense mist concealed the floor. She had to feel her way along. Was the cold room the third door of the back side of the hall, or the fourth?

"Satoshi! Stephen-Thomas!"

"Victoria, down here'"

Satoshi's voice: Victoria caught her breath with relief. Resisting the urge to try to hurry, she moved cautiously through the dimness. Tendrils of freezing mist, so thick and cohesive they looked like a liquid, swirled around her hips.

Infinity struggled with an access hatch that led into Star-farer's underground. It opened about a handsbreadth, then stuck. Though the worst of the missile's impact had hit the genetics department, a couple of hundred meters away, the earthquake had jammed this hatch as well. He tried again to move it, not wanting to backtrack to a more distant entrance.

"Let me help."

J.D. Sauvage squatted beside him, grabbed the edge of the hatch cover, and settled herself.

Infinity nodded.

They both pulled. The alien contact specialist was a big woman. She powered her effort with her legs, not just her back.

The hatch gave, springing open and slamming out of their grasp. They jumped away. It thudded onto the ground, bounced, and settled.

"Thanks."

"Do you need help?" J.D. said. "Should I come with you?"

"I might have to go outside," he said.

He plunged through the hatchway.

Infinity Mendez disappeared into Starfarer's underground tunnels without really answering J.D.*s question. He was so shy and quiet that J.D. could not be sure whether he had been trying to ask her for help, or trying to tell her to stay behind. But he was all alone, and she could see that whatever the problem was at the genetics department, Victoria already had as much help as she needed. Maybe more help than she needed.

264 vonda N. Mcfntyre

J.D. climbed into the tunnel.

She could not be sure which way Infinity had gone, so she kept going down whenever she could.

She entered a region in which the effects of the impact became evident. An automatic baffle-door creaked open ahead of her. She stopped, scared: if the baffles malfunctioned they might blast her out into space.

Nothing happened: no wind, no shocking cold, no vacuum drawing the air out of her lungs. The door had closed in response to the impact, but the ship's systems opened it again when they detected no difference in the air pressure on either side.

Nevertheless, she accepted the warning. As soon as she reached an airlock's access room, she climbed into a pressure suit.

"—Cherenkov. Can anyone—"

The sound startled her. The disembodied voice emanated from the suit radio. She pulled the helmet shut. The transmission faded, then returned cleariy.

"This is Kolya Petrovich. Slarfarer has been hit with a missile, which has penetrated approximately one meter into the surface. I cannot move it myself. I need help, tools, a radiation gauge. Can anyone hear me?"

"Kolya?"

"Yes! I am here, who is it?"

"J.D."

"J.D., I do not suppose you have space construction experience?"

"No."

"I must have help."

"I'll go get somebody."

"There may not be time. Will you risk it?"

"I've never been outside in space' I wouldn't know what to do!"

"This is not a complex job," he said. "But I need more strength. More strength than I have."

By his voice, she knew he was tiring. J.D. looked around, hoping to see Infinity or some other damage crew member.

But she was alone.

"All right. I'll try."

She entered the airiock. The controls were all too simple.

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265

The 'cycle began. The lock pumped away the air and opened the exterior hatch.

J.D. looked down. The stars streaked past beneath her feet.

The only point of stability was the end of the exit ladder. She gripped her end of the ladder and lowered herself hesitantly. The starship loomed above her. Space lay below and all around, separated from her by nothing but the fragile web of cables.

The suit's airgun hung against her leg, useless. If she lost her grip, the cylinder's spin would fling her out into space.

No airgun couid power her back.

"Kolya?"

"I am still here. It is still stuck. Hurry, please."

"Where are you?"

"Orient yourself in the same direction as the spin. I am just over your horizon."

She did as he asked, clutching the cables. She knelt there, balancing precariously. It was as if she were being flung headlong into the Milky Way. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath.

"J.D. !••

She opened her eyes again. "Yes," she said. "I'm coming."

She had watched recordings of spacewalks; she had even experienced several direct sensory recordings. In every one, the effect had been of floating weightless in silent gentle space, with the stars a motionless background.

This was entirely different. She crawled across the cables with the stars blazing past beneath her. The spin gave her the perception that gravity was pulling her downward into an unending fall.

Her breath sounded harsh and sweat ran down her sides, more from fear than from exertion.

J.D. searched the upward-curving surface of the starship.

The cables shuddered beneath her hands and knees, loosened by the impact of the missile. In places the smooth stone surface had cracked, and broken rock projected toward her from above. One slab shifted and scraped against her back, startling her with its touch and vibration. She shrank down, gripping the cables.

266 Vonda N. McfnCyre

After a moment she pushed herself up again and crawled forward.

And then she saw the missile, a sleek shape designed for space-to-air flight, wedged in the cracked surface of the starship. His legs twined in the cables, Kolya struggled to loosen the missile. His perilous position terrified J.D. She hurried on.

"Kolya! Wail—"

"J.D. ' Bojemoi. I'm glad to see you."

She reached Kolya's side. The cosmonaut touched the flank of the missile and drew his gloved hand along its side. It shifted slightly, vibrating against the cables so they quivered in J.D.'s hands.

"Be careful.*'

"An elegant bit of warfare, this," Kolya said. "Go around to the other side, and brace yourself. Hook up your work line."

"Can it detonate?" J.D. asked.

"That I do not know."

"They couldn't have used an armed missile!"

"J.D., of course they could. Perhaps they thought that the threat alone would stop us. But I am not willing to bet the life of the starship on it."

J.D. saw what Kolya planned. She moved into place and hooked up her work line.

"I'm ready."

Suddenly the starship shuddered. The spinning stars wavered and brightened and disappeared. J.D. was surrounded by a multicolored, speckled, streaming haze. She gasped in wonder.

The starship had entered transition.

J.D. wanted nothing more than to lose herself in the sight of it. It flung itself toward her, upward, in an optical illusion of continuous approach that never came near. She shivered.

The cables flexed beneath her. She forced her attention away from transition, back to the missile and Kolya. But the cosmonaut, too, gazed downward past the cables, past the end of the missile, into transition.

"Kolya," J.D. whispered. "Kolya, we've got to get rid of this thing!"

STARFARERS 267

"So I felt . . ." Kolya did not look up. "But do we have the right to loose it in this unknown place?"

She wanted to follow his gaze. Instead, she reached out and touched his arm.

"Kolya," she said respectfully, without any irony or sarcasm, "Comrade Cherenkov, this missile could destroy Star-farer and all our friends."

Kolya looked at her. The faraway expression slowly faded from his face.

"Yes," he said finally. "You're right. Of course you're right."

Victoria slid between the crushed interior walls of the hill.

It was freezing. The cold fog of evaporating liquid nitrogen flowed past her feet. The smell was intense, of yeast and agar plates and nutrient medium.

"Over here. He's bleeding. I can't get it stopped."

She found Satoshi, awkwardly trying to hold Stephen Thomas above the unbreathable vapor, at the same time trying to staunch a bleeding head cut. There was blood all over, spattering Satoshi's hands and arms, covering Stephen Thomas's face, leaking between Satoshi's fingers.

Victoria pushed away bits of broken equipment, fragmented glass, crumbled rock foam. She reached Satoshi's side.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. He was bleeding, but he said it was just a scrape. We were on our way out, and he keeled over."

Stephen Thomas was heavily unconscious. His hand was cold, his pulse weak and fast. He must be badly wounded, there was so much blood, it covered his face and sprayed the front of his battered t-shirt and pasted his pale hair against his skin.

Rock foam panels grated together, rasping each other to

dust that sifted down in the dim light. The nitrogen fog crept

to Victoria's waist.

Stephen Thomas might have a concussion, or even a fractured skull. Victoria knew they should not move him, but she was afraid not to.

"Let's get him out of here."

They lifted Stephen Thomas and dragged and carried him

268 vonda N. Mclntyre

into the corridor. Satoshi tried to keep pressure on the head wound. A bright light glimmered along the top of the fog. It flashed in Victoria's eyes, dazzling her.

Zev appeared silently before them, carrying a flashlight.

He glanced at Stephen Thomas.

"Let me see." He moved Satoshi's hand. Blood pulsed from Stephen Thomas's forehead.

"Zev, don't, he'll bleed to death!"

Victoria and Satoshi both tried to reappiy pressure to the wound, but Zev pushed between them and leaned over their partner.

Victoria watched, shocked and appalled, as Zev bent down and placed his lips against the cut on Stephen Thomas's forehead. Before she could protest or push him away, he straightened up. Blood covered his mouth and his chin. Satoshi reached out to put pressure on the wound again, but Zev stopped him.

"Leave it be."

"What did you do?"

Victoria's horrified expression amused him. "I stopped the bleeding—what did you think?"

"I thought you were drinking his blood!"

Zev grimaced. "Do I look like a lamprey? Why didn't you—oh. This must be a difference between divers and people."

He pushed bloody, sticky blond hair away from the wound.

The cut had stopped bleeding.

"He is lucky," Zev said.

"Lucky!"

"This is not a serious wound—not on land. Divers fear head cuts because they bleed so, even a scratch like this one. Sometimes you can't stop them before the sharks smell the blood from far away, and come to eat you. But here there is no ocean and there are no sharks."

Stephen Thomas groaned. He opened his eyes, then closed them again.

"What-?"

"It's okay," Satoshi said. "We'll be out of here in a minute."

"This place looks so weird . . ." he muttered.

"Yeah, it's failing down around us. Let's go."

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269

In the uncertain light of Zev's flash, they helped Stephen

Thomas to the entrance, boosted him out of the ruins of Genetics Hill, and climbed after him.

As Victoria emerged from the frigid darkness of the ruined genetics building, the light from the sun tube abruptly faded.

Victoria looked up, as startled as a creature beneath a total solar eclipse.

She let out a cry half triumph, half sob.

Starfarer had reached transition.

Out of reach of its pursuers, the ship progressed toward an alien star system. Victoria had made its escape possible.

And right now, instead of feeling triumph, she asked herself if it was worth it.

Light, strange and watery, rose again as the starship drew energy from the magnetic claws and fed it into the tubes.

People surrounded her, some in protective suits, some carrying tanks of liquid nitrogen, some with isolation canisters-ASes and AIs also congregated around the entrance. Professor Thanthavong stood in the middle of it all, coordinating the beginnings of a salvage operation. As soon as she saw Stephen Thomas, she called a paramedic over to help him.

Stephen Thomas stumbled and opened his eyes. Their blue was startling in the mask of drying blood. He looked around groggily.

"What did you do to the light?" he said. He sank to the ground. "Why does everything look so weird?"

Victoria looked around. The campus was different, alien and frightening, in the light of transition.

"You've got blood in your eyes," Thanthavong said.

"Oh, yeah, I'm a real blue-blood . . ."

"Be quiet and sit still for a minute," the paramedic said.

Victoria knelt beside Stephen Thomas, concerned. At first she had thought she understood what he was talking about, but now she could not make sense of what he was saying.

Beside her, Satoshi rested his head on his knees, breathing deeply.

"You're going to have one hell of a black eye," the paramedic said to Stephen Thomas.

"A black eye!" Victoria exclaimed. "He was unconscious!"

"There's no serious trauma."

270 Vonda N. Mclntyre "Then why—"

Stephen Thomas laid his hand on her arm.

"I'm okay,*' he said. "I am. Honest. I fainted." He looked away, embarrassed. "I can't stand the sight of blood."

Relief made Victoria shiver, and then she started to laugh. When Stephen Thomas glared at her, she hugged him.

Thanthavong hurried over, trailed by Fox and a couple of ASes. Machines had begun to work to clear the entryway of the genetics department.

"Did you see anyone else inside?"

"There's no one," Satoshi said.

"You're sure?" Thanthavong gazed at the ruined hill, her expression unreadable.

"Yes. I passed every lab and every office, from the top down, looking for Fox. There wasn't anybody."

"Yes. All right. Good . . ." Her voice trailed off.

Dr. Thanthavong, whose surface so seldom even ruffled, suddenly cried out in anger and in pain.

Victoria jumped to her feet, startled and scared. Then she went to Thanthavong and embraced her. "I'm so sorry," she said. "All your work—"

"It isn't that," Thanthavong wailed. "It's—" She sobbed and struggled for control. "It is that. But in forty years my labs never had a serious accident. And now, my god, look what they've done!"

J.D. and Kolya strained to move the missile. J.D. could feel the metabolic enhancer pumping inside her, but it was useless. It helped her endurance. What she needed right now was brute strength. Brute strength and the will to keep her attention away from the weird effects of transition.

Suddenly the missile shifted in its crater. The squeal of metal on stone vibrated through the skin of Starfarer, through J.D.'s suit, to her ears. It was the only sound except her breathing, her pulse.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the missile slipped free.

"Hold it!" Kolya shouted. "Keep hold of it!"

J.D. almost let it go. That was what they had been struggling for—! But the desperation in Kolya's voice stopped her.

She clamped her arms around the missile. It moved like a live thing. It escaped Kolya and wriggled half a meter down-

STARFARERS 271

ward through J.D.'s grasp. Nothing but J.D.'s safety line and her feet hooked around the cables held it.

The spin had brought them into the canyon between the

two cylinders, if J.D. let the missile go, it would ricochet

against the wild cylinder.

Her feet slipped, inexorably. Kolya grabbed her and the missile. She could see the sweat on the cosmonaut's face.

Sweat poured down her own face, down her body. Her arms shook with strain. She feared the warhead might detonate at any second, but she could not let it go. The spin, which had felt so fast a few minutes before, now slowed in her perception to a crawl.

Her feet sprang free of the cables. She gasped as her safety line snapped taut. It vibrated in the bass range like a huge alien instrument. Kolya shouted as the missile slid through his grasp. J.D. held it tighter. Kolya tried to pull her back, but all he could do was keep himself twined in the cables and clutch J.D.'s ankle.

Something changed.

She emerged from the canyon. Space opened out around her.

"Now!" Kolya said.

She released the missile. Starfarer's spin Hung it away, away from the starship, toward the constellations barely skewed by the vast distance the ship had traveled.

'. Kolya dragged J.D. to safety.

J.D. tried to speak. Her mouth was too dry.

"Come on," Kolya said. "Hurry."

s As quickly as J.D. could move, they made their way to the

y hatch and into the airiock. As soon as the inner door opened, I Kolya grabbed her arm and rushed her deeper into the ship,

* through the suit room and up, without even pausing to open ; his face mask.

* "What's wrong?" J.D. said. "We got rid of it!"

Kolya finally slowed and stopped. He took off his helmet.

"We should be safe here. I wanted to be sure—"

He cut himself off. The ship trembled with a faint vibration. J.D. looked down, toward the outer surface, as if she could see the missile through the floor.

Outside, the warhead detonated, sending out a wave of debris and radiation that blasted against the starship's thick skin of lunar rock.

272 vonda N. Mcintyre

Water slicked and darkened the floor of the lowest tunnel. Infinity kept watch for the teak. He could hear no rush of water, so the sealers must be working. He hoped the attack had not breached the main flow systems and let any significant amount of water escape into space.

It hurt him to see so much damage to the structure he had helped to build. Making Starfarer whole again would take more than letting the self-sealers creep into the cracks and cement the broken bits. That would be like letting a smashed bone heal without setting it.

Infinity hurried along the upcurving corridor. It truncated abruptly in a closed baffle.

As a precaution, he fastened the helmet of his pressure suit. Getting outside might be quicker and easier through another hatch, but that would be a ten minute walk, and more than that much again to return along the outside of the ship. He felt a certain urgency. He kept expecting to encounter other members of damage control, but so far he had seen no one.

He read the display on the baffle. It showed normal air pressure on the far side. He cautiously opened the door with the manual controls, stepped through into the next compartment, and closed the baffle behind him.

Soon he faced another airtight baffle. This display showed very low air pressure on the far side, a few millimeters of mercury, nowhere near enough to breathe.

Infinity paused, listening carefully. The rhythmic, muffled pounding was real, not his imagination. It came from beyond the closed door.

The pounding stopped. Infinity hit the baffle with the side of his fist. Nothing happened- Perhaps the pounding was nothing but a mechanical malfunction, or perhaps whoever was on the other side of the baffle could not hear or feel the vibrations of his fist. He stamped his foot.

One loud "thud!" answered him.

Infinity stamped again. Another "thud!" replied.

He emptied the air from the compartment he was in. When the pressure equalized, the baffle allowed itself to be unlocked, but Infinity had to force it open.

A burst of ice crystals exploded through the doorway, scattering like tiny needles against Infinity's suit. Ice crystals and

STARFARERS 2 73

snowflakes filled the chamber with sparkling white light, then fell straight to the floor and melted in the thin layer of water. At the same time, the temperature of the room fell abruptly and the floor froze in a slow wave. Infinity moved forward, his boots crackling on the ice.

Snow blanketed the room, covering a large lump in the middle of the floor. The lump lurched as whoever was within it pounded on the floor. The snow sifted off the silver emergency pouch and fell into small drifts.

Infinity turned the pouch to see its transparent panel.

Curled up like the worm in a jumping bean, Griffith glared out. He said something, angrily, but of course Infinity could not hear him. Instead of turning on his suit radio, Infinity grabbed the handles of the pouch and dragged Griffith back into the second chamber.

He left him lying there, helpless—he had no choice about that—while he closed the baffle. He moved some air into the chamber.

He was laughing uncontrollably.

By the time the chamber held enough air to carry sounds, he managed to stop laughing. He took off the suit helmet and wiped his eyes.

The survival pouch writhed against the floor.

"Get me out of here!"

Infinity unsealed the pouch. Griffith scrambled up and kicked away the emergency sphere.

"Damn! What's going on? Where's Cherenkov?"

Infinity did not know the answers, so he did not reply- He settled back on his heels. Griffith strode angrily away, but the closed baffle stopped him-

"How the hell do I get out of here?"

"Open the door."

Griffith fumbled at the controls. The baffle creaked. Radiating anger and impatience, Griffith waited. But when the door had finally slid aside for him to pass, he swung around and glared at Infinity.

"Don't you ever—ever—tell anyone about this!"

A day ago, an hour ago, Griffith would have terrified Infinity Mendez to silence with such a command. Now, Infinity regarded him quizzically. Griffith no longer held any power to frighten him.

274 vonda N. Mdntyre

"I'll tell anybody I want. anything I want. Don't you even have the guts to say thank you?"

And then—he tried not to, but could not help himself—he started to laugh again.

A microsecond's blast of bright white light spread through the interior of the starship, a flash almost too brief to perceive before the filters damped and darkened it. Stephen Thomas cried out and turned away, flinging his arms across his face. Starfarer plunged into dusk.

"That wasn't what I had in mind," Stephen Thomas said,

his voice muffled, his eyes still covered, "when 1 said 1 didn't

like the light."

The whole cylinder trembled faintly.

The sun tubes slowly brightened, radiating a more normal light. Victoria knew what must have happened. There was only one explanation for that kind of intense actinic blast. Somehow the missile had followed the starship through transition. And it had detonated. But somehow it was free of the starship, distant enough for Starfarer to survive the explosion. She started to shake. Satoshi knelt beside her and held her, and they drew Stephen Thomas into the embrace. Zev

sat on his heels nearby, watching them.

"We made it," Victoria whispered. "We're out of transition." Suddenly she caught her breath. "If the missile did detonate—Iphigenie is in the sailhouse! Is she—?"

Professor Thanthavong switched frequencies on her AS controller and opened a voice link to the sailhouse.

"Iphigenie, this is Thanthavong. Can you reply?"

"Are you all right?" Victoria said.

"Yes." Her voice was a whisper. "It's been . . . quite exciting out here."

"The shielding—?"

"It held. Victoria, I saw transition . . . And we are in the Tau Ceti system."

"It's incredible, Victoria!" The second voice from the saii-house belonged to Feral. "God, I think I'll change myself to be a sensory recorder like Chandra!"

"Don't do that." Victoria struggled to her feet, pulling Satoshi and Stephen Thomas with her. "We ought to be in

STARFARERS 2 75

the explorer," she said. "We're supposed to be continuing the expedition as if nothing had happened."

She reached for the web, expecting emptiness. To her surprise she touched a fragile strand, a tangle of thread tossed over the surface of the massed databases. Though Arachne would not reply, Victoria felt it growing and spreading, interconnecting, compelled to regain its multidimensionality.

"Stephen Thomas, do you feel up to going out?"

"I told you I'm all right! But. . ."He stared at the rubble of Genetics Hill.

"There's nothing you can do," Professor Thanthavong said.

"No more people are going in there till the AIs and the ASes have been through it." She spoke to all of them. "You aren't in danger of illness—we store no pathogens. But I want blood samples. I may have to mix you a depolymerase if you were exposed to sensitizing virus. It isn't something you want permanently floating around in your system." An AS buzzed up to her and offered her a half-dozen sampling kits. She took blood from Victoria and Satoshi and Zev and Fox, then came toward Stephen Thomas.

"You can have my shirt," he said hopefully.

"Very funny."

As the kit pulled ten centiliters of blood out of him, Stephen Thomas paled. Victoria was afraid he would faint again, but he averted his gaze and collected himself.

"Where is J.D. ?" Zev said.

"I don't know." Victoria looked around. "I thought she was right behind us."

"She does not like to run," Zev said. "She likes to swim."

Automatically, Victoria queried the web, but it was completely involved with its own reconstruction.

"I'm going to the explorer," Victoria said. "That's where I'm supposed to be, and that's where I'm going." She felt near to screaming with frustration. "J.D. knows where it is— maybe she'll meet us there."

They crossed the fields to return to the axis and the explorer dock. Zev tagged along. Victoria walked on one side of Stephen Thomas and Satoshi on the other, just in case.

"I really am okay," Stephen Thomas said. "But I'm going home for a few minutes." He turned toward Victoria, defensive, expecting her to object. "We're all a mess—"

276 vonda N. Mclntyre

"You're right," she said. They al! looked a wreck, particularly Stephen Thomas. Victoria grinned. "We can4! go exploring like this. Remember what your mother always told you about clean underwear."

Stephen Thomas said, "No, what?"

"What is underwear?" Zev asked.

The mini-horses pounded past, running, as horses run, in response to fright, their ears back, slick with sweat. Victoria smelled their fear.

On a hillock near the path, Kolya Cherenkov raised himself out of an access tunnel and climbed to ground level. He reached down and gave a hand to Infinity Mendez, then to J.D., and finally to the accountant from the GAO.

Zev ran toward J.D. and hugged her and swung around

with her. She gathered him in and kissed his hair, his cheek,

his lips, murmuring to him, telling him what had happened.

For a few minutes it seemed as if everyone tried to talk at the same time, explaining, questioning. Only Griffith stood apart. Victoria did not quite turn her back on him—she distrusted him too much for that—but she would not look directly at him; she could neither meet his gaze nor bring herself to speak to him.

"We had a plan to stop the takeover, Griffith and I," Kolya said. "A very foolhardy plan ... it might have worked. But then the missile hit, and things became more complicated.

Then we entered transition."

"You saw it? What did you see? Tell me!"

Kolya's expression sobered. "I ... I cannot describe it. I am sorry."

Envious and jealous and angry, Victoria looked for Griffith. She did not know what she wanted to say to him. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps she only wanted to glare.

"I didn't see it at all," he said. He turned around and strode away.

"He has ... things to think about," Kolya said apologetically.

"No kidding," Victoria said.

As soon as she and her partners had cleaned up, Victoria led the way up the hill to Starfarer^s axis, where the team's explorer waited in its dock on the hub.

STARFARERS 2 77

"Victoria!" J.D. sounded breathless. "Touch the web. The explorer—"

It took Victoria a moment to make her way through the reconnecting pathways.

Her steps faltered.

"Holy shit," Stephen Thomas said- Satoshi looked stunned. Zev reacted with a smile.

The explorer was receiving a transmission: a strong, regular signal of precise frequency. From outside Slarfarer. From within the Tau Ceti system.

"Let's go'"

Victoria broke into a run. She leaped through the gravity gradient, skimmed across the microgravity, and entered the zeio-g core.

The team members sailed weightless through the hallways.

They had to pass the transport to reach the next dock, where their explorer waited. Victoria glanced through the transparent partition into the transport's waiting room.

Though the transport passengers had disembarked, most of them remained at the starship's axis, as if they had been delayed by some minor mechanical glitch and would soon return to their places and fly home. AIzena, in her black clothes, huddled in a corner staring at the wall.

Gerald Hemminge saw Victoria. He launched himself toward the doorway, grabbed the doorframe to change his vector, and plunged down the hallway after her.

"Victoria!"

"I can't talk to you now." She kept going.

"But we've still a chance to recover from this awful mistake."

"Did your boss send you out to tell us that?" She was too excited to be bitter, but not too distracted for a little sarcasm. "I didn't see him—does he have his own private waiting room?"

"The chancellor wasn't on the transport," Gerald said.

"He accepted the leadership of this expedition, and he determined to remain."

"Nobody cares now, Gerald," Satoshi said. "Leave us alone."

Gerald saw Stephen Thomas. As the paramedic promised, he was developing a spectacular black eye.

278 Vonda N. Mclntyre

"Good god! What happened to you?"

"We nearly got squashed when your damned missile—"

"My missile! It belonged to your government—"

Stephen Thomas iunged awkwardly toward Gerald and grabbed him by the leg. Both men tumbled, bouncing from one wait to the other.

"Let go!"

Ignoring Gerald's protest, and his kicking, Stephen Thomas climbed up him until they were face to face.

"As far as I'm concerned, that fucking missile belongs to all the jerks who wanted to stop the expedition, and you're one of them!" He shouted, furious; he shoved Gerald away.

The reaction knocked Stephen Thomas against a wail. He had to scramble to get his balance. Gerald, more experienced in weightlessness, caught himself with his feet and pushed off again, still following Victoria.

"Victoria!"

"I told you I can't talk to you now. Gerald—we've got a signal. From the Tau Ceti system."

"But—that's wonderful'"

Victoria reached the explorer's hatch.

"I'm glad you understand. Now let us get to work, eh?"

"I do understand! This changes everything. If we go home now, with this evidence, we can start with a clean slate. Repairs, provisions, all our personnel—and then we can come back ... "

His voice trailed off. All four members of the alien contact team stared at him, unbelieving. Victoria felt completely unable to come up with a sufficient response to what he had

said.

When Zev followed J.D. into the explorer, Victoria neither objected nor tried to stop him. The alternative was to leave him out in the hall with Gerald.

Victoria headed for her couch. Before she relaxed into it. before the safety straps eased around her, she had already

begun the explorer's system checks.

As the systems signaled green and ready, the sensory overload of the last few chaotic hours flowed away, leaving Victoria physically drained but mentally hypersensitive.

Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and J-D. settled into their places in the circle. Zev drew himself into one of the places

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reserved for auxiliary, temporary members of the alien contact team, a place next to J.D.

Victoria glanced at each of her teammates in turn.

"Ready?"

"Let's go."

At Victoria's signal, the observation ports cleared and the explorer moved smoothly out of its dock. Starfarer fell away, its sail illuminated and filled by the new starlight-

They all gazed at their first close-up view of an alien star system.

A display formed, mimicking the system but exaggerating the planets so they would appear larger than pinpoints. Victoria compared the display to the system before them and showed her teammates the tiny disks of the planets, one halffull, and the other, closer one a slender crescent accompanied by the smaller crescent of its satellite.

"Christ on a unicorn," Stephen Thomas said.

"I'm recording now," Victoria said, "and transmitting back to Starfarer. We have not one but two terrestrial worlds— the second and third planets of the system—orbiting Tau Ceti. Starfarer entered the system midway between the two orbits.

A large moon, approaching lunar proportions, circles the inner terrestrial planet. The signal we are receiving emanates from that inner planet."

"From its moon," J.D- said hesitantly.

"You're right," Victoria said, surprised.

Arachne's web remained unstable, inconsistent. Victoria created a display and routed the signal into it. A holographic image formed at the center of their circle.

"This beacon wasn't meant to reach outside the system,"

Victoria said. "It's too weak. It was waiting. Waiting for us."

J.D. suddenly giggled. "Look at that."

Acting as a two-dimensional screen, the hologram laid out the transmission a single picture element at a time, in a Sagan frame one prime number of pixels wide by a second, different prime number of pixels high. A handsbreadth of the image was already visible, some structure already detectable.

"This is incredible," Victoria said. "We're getting it right

the first time."

"It'll be a map," Satoshi said with a smile.

"Genetic structure," Stephen Thomas said, joining in the 280 vonda N. Mcintyre

game they had often played, of trying lo decide how one alien intelligence would attempt its first communication with another.

"Uh-uh," Victoria said. "Electron orbitals."

"It won't be any of those things," J.D. said. "I don't know what it will be, but it will be something different."

"How will you reply?" Satoshi asked.

"Good question," Stephen Thomas said. "We've got a little explaining to do."

They watched as the beacon built up another scan line of black or white dots. Victoria began to think she could make out the pattern that was forming to greet her.

"What can you say to an alien being," she said, "after you've announced yourself with a thermonuclear explosion? "

"I don't know yet." Joy and excitement filled J.D.'s voice.

"I guess I'll just have to wing it."