J.D. saw her new house for the first time. She had known the houses formed part of the topography, built into hillsides with one wall of windows. But she had not expected hers to be beautiful.
“I love it,” J.D. said. “It looks organic, somehow. But why do it like this? Not to conserve energy, surely.” While Starfarer still flew within the solar system, the sun would provide all the power it could possibly use. Once it clamped itself to the universe’s web of cosmic string, the problem would be to keep from being overwhelmed by the energy flux.
“Not here and now,” Victoria said. “But we can’t know all the conditions we’ll face after we leave. The basic reason is aesthetic and ecological. The more plants on the surface, the less ground we cover with buildings and pathways and so forth, the more stable and resilient the ecosystem will be. The plants keep the air fresher, they soak up the runoff from rain — ”
J.D. glanced up. Starfarer was large enough to have its own weather patterns, including rain. Two different systems of clouds drifted over the land on the other side of the cylinder.
Victoria pointed at the most distant cloud system. “That far-overhead system will be near-overhead in half a rotation. The ecosystems analysts encourage rain in the cylinders — it’s easier and cheaper than air conditioning. Smells better, too.”
“No thunder and lightning, though, I’m sure,” J.D. said wistfully. That would be too risky, both because of all the electronics within Starfarer, and because of the amount of energy even a small lightning bolt can let loose.
“No, you’re right.” Victoria laughed. “That, they discourage.”
“It’s the one thing I missed in the Pacific Northwest,” J.D. said. “There was lots of rain, but hardly ever any thunder.” She hesitated. She wanted to ask so many questions about Starfarer and the alien contact department. But she would have time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“First thing,” Satoshi said.
“We’ll come and get you and go watch the solar sail test.”
They bid each other good-night. J.D. watched Victoria and Satoshi walk away, hand in hand.
o0o
Griffith glanced back at Earth one last time before leaving the transport. This was his first trip into space. He had known, intellectually, how far he would be from the planet, but the distance struck him emotionally only when he could hold out his hands and cup the world between them.
At this distance, it would take the very best surveillance equipment — perhaps even the next generation of surveillance equipment — to get fine detail from Earth. The starship would have to move to a lower orbit.
Griffith hated waste. Starfarer should never have been built this far out to begin with. A great deal of time and money and reaction mass had gone into its construction. Even though most of its mass came from cheap lunar material, O’Neill colony leftovers, it had required a significant number of Earth-to-orbit payloads.
Griffith moved into the starship, hand-over-hand along the grips. He was getting the hang of zero-g navigation, but he envied people with the experience to move naturally and gracefully.
He left the docking gate and entered the main body of Starfarer. He stopped at the center of the slope where he could look out into the cylinder.
Where Earth had been too small to believe, the cylinder was far too large. He was amazed and appalled by the amount of space. From where he held himself, the end of the cylinder appeared to slope up to meet the walls of the cylinder, the living space of Starfarer. He knew, though, that when he started to travel along one of the numerous paths leading away from the gate, the apparent gravity would increase. He would perceive himself climbing down to the floor.
Disorientation dizzied him. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. Keeping his gaze away from the weird slope and the enormous cylinder, he found the path leading to the proper section. He drew himself onto it and gripped the rail.
Lower on the slope, the artificial gravity held him on the stairs. He released his death grip on the railing. Other people on the path at the level he had reached were leaping up and down the slope like gazelles, like moon-walkers, ignoring the switchbacks, but Griffith moved slowly and steadily and cautiously. He felt dizzy. He supposed it was a psychosomatic reaction that resulted from his knowing that the cylinder was spinning, for he was below the level at which his inner ear ought to be able to detect the spin. The dizziness bothered him, for he was not much given to psychosomatic reactions.
He made some quick calculations about the population density of the starship. Though he knew he had done the calculations correctly — he made a policy of exercising his mind in this way, so as not to become too dependent on outside data-bases — the number struck him as so absurdly low that he sent out a line to the web and had it check his arithmetic. It was accurate. Then his amazement at the size of the cylinder — and there were two of them, one completely uninhabited, designed and intended to remain that way — changed to resentment and envy. The people who lived here had all the space in the world...
He laughed, a quick sarcastic bark. Back in the world, there was arable land, there was useless land, there were restricted wildernesses, and there were cities. Not much space remained for stretching out. The spoiled academics who lived up here had no idea how fortunate they were. Or, more likely, they knew perfectly well. No doubt they had planned it this way.
They had better enjoy their luxury while it lasted. Soon everything would change.
The path forked. He let Arachne guide him to the proper track. Below him, on the slope, the pathways branched and branched again, like a river splitting and spreading its fingers across a delta. Otherwise the pathways that had begun so close together, in the center of the cylinder cap, would end at great distances from each other. By following the correct branch, Griffith could reach the proper longitude of the cylinder.
No one had come to meet him, which was as he had planned. He preferred being left to himself. He would observe in anonymity and make his recommendations without any fuss.
The departure of several of the associate nations could only help in the conversion he planned. It could be made to look as if they were grasping at a convenient excuse and cutting their losses, finding the starship project to be too big, too expensive for their budgets. And, who knew? That might even be true.
A few associates might hold out, but the change had begun and it could not be stopped. At this point, objecting to the use of the starship as a military base came close to treason. Unfortunately it would not look good to arrest half the faculty and staff of the expedition even if Griffith found evidence against them. Never mind. Arrests would be unnecessary. By the time he finished his work, the scientists would give up and go home.
Griffith knew there must be people on board who disagreed with the majority view, but who feared to speak up against it. He hoped to discover them.
He took a mental glance at a map of the campus transmitted by the web. His perception of the transmission made it overlap his sight, like the tactical display on the window of a fighter jet. Most people had to close their eyes to receive visually oriented information from the web.
The map led him to the guest house. He climbed the path and walked under the hill and through the open doorway. It irked him that he would be forced to stay in an underground room. Back on Earth he lived high in a skyscraper, and he had waited a long time — and paid several bribes — to get an apartment looking over the city and the flat stark plains beyond. Having paid the bribes still troubled him.
The lobby was deserted and empty. Not even an AS waited to serve him.
“Hello!”
No one replied. Griffith went behind the desk, intending to go into the back and rout out whoever or whatever was supposed to be in attendance.
A sheet of paper rustled beneath his shoe. He picked it up: a sign, blown to the floor by a breeze. It carried a notice in several languages, beginning with French. He glanced farther down and found the English version.
“We regret that we are not here to aid you. Our government has called us home for consultations.”
Griffith snorted at the idea of hotelkeepers’ being called home for consultations. His briefing had neglected to mention that France held the guest house concession and that all its personnel would be gone by the time he arrived.
“Please choose a chamber from our diagram and consider our house yours during your stay. We have no locks so no code is required. Please put soiled linen into the laundry chute. Fresh linen may be retrieved from the armoire in the hallway.”
The lack of locks irked him even more than the idea of staying underground. Not that he was stupid enough to bring anything sensitive with him, but if anyone found out who he was they would not know that, and they might search his belongings. Besides, some people would snoop even without suspicions to go on.
Griffith was a very private person.
He glanced at the diagram. Two rooms out of ten had been spoken for. He left signing in till after he had seen what the guest house had to offer.
He strode along the ramp leading to a second-story hallway. The interior wall was blank. Doors to the guest apartments opened from the exterior wall. Each end of the hallway led out onto a balcony and exit ramp.
The guest-house was more pleasant than he expected, and, though it was indeed underground, each room flowed into its own small terrace just beneath the crest of the hill. All the rooms were similar, with one wall of windows. The hillside sloped to a stream and a small grove of trees. The furnishings were Spartan: a futon, a small desk, woven mats on the floor. His shoes crunched on the floor coverings.
To give himself the most privacy, he chose the room next to the most distant exit. He dumped his things, apparently at random, on the futon, then left to take a long exploratory walk.
o0o
Floris Brown waited in the transport until someone came along to help her. The excitement of the trip had begun to catch up with her, and she felt tired. She dreaded the return to gravity. Weightlessness was a blessing, easing the aches of lift-off as well as the aches of age that she had suffered for twenty years.
As she waited, she looked out the dorsal port.
The bow of the transport obscured her view of the inhabited cylinder, but the wild cylinder spun slowly in the distance. Even farther away, the furled sail lay waiting for its test deployment. It looked like a huge, tautly-twisted silver cable.
A young man dove into the transport, sailed through the aisle, and stopped himself just above her. She smiled at him. Everyone on the transport had been so clean-cut. This was the first person she had seen who dressed in a manner she found familiar and comfortable. He was a big man, with dark skin and hair so black it had blue highlights. He wore ragged blue jeans and a black leather vest; he was clean-shaven but his hair was long, tied back in a pony-tail, fanning out behind his head. Despite his youth, sun-squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes.
“I’m your liaison. Infinity Mendez.”
“Hello.” She extended her hand. “My name is Floris Brown.”
He took her hand and held it rather than shaking it. His hand completely surrounded her skinny, wrinkled fingers. She felt embarrassed by the gnarled blue veins.
“We don’t shake hands much in zero g, Ms. Brown,” he said. “One more force to counteract.”
“Please call me Floris.”
He unfastened her seatbelts with deft and impatient movements, then turned his back to her. The fringe on his leather vest dangled raggedly.
“Grab your stuff and grab hold,” he said.
The fastenings stuck. She fumbled at the net.
He made a peculiar motion of his hands and shoulders that caused him to rotate toward her. Without comment, he unfastened the net, stuck it under his arm, and presented her with his fringe again. She wound her hands in the cut leather. It felt warm and slippery. He gathered his strength, like an animal about to leap.
She was afraid he would wrench out her arms, but he pushed off carefully and glided with surprising smoothness between the seats of the transport, drawing her after him. They were the last people to leave the passenger compartment. Even the waiting room had cleared out.
“How are you on hills?” Infinity asked.
“Slow,” she said.
“Okay.” He took her to an elevator. “Hold on, and keep your feet near the floor.”
He pointed to one surface, which Floris would not necessarily have chosen as the floor except for the orientation of the grasps and the painted outlines of footprints.
“This’ll feel weird. Something to do with the spin. You need a physicist to explain it, but you get used to it. Down,” he said to the elevator. It complied.
At first she thought he must have told her the wrong surface to keep her feet near, for she felt a force drawing her toward the surface of the elevator at her back. Gradually, as the elevator slid toward the floor of the cylinder, the force slid, too, pulling from a more and more horizontal orientation till it felt and acted like gravity, staying steady and “down.” The elevator stopped.
“Most folks don’t come this way,” Infinity said. He set off toward the bright end of the tunnel.
Floris stepped out of the elevator. She stumbled. Strange how she could have gotten so used to weightlessness in two days. She steadied herself and followed Infinity Mendez, trying to keep up.
Returning to gravity was not as hard as she had feared. Starfarer’s seven-tenths g made walking easier than back on Earth.
She stepped cautiously out into the cylinder, into fresh cool air. She looked around, then up. For a moment she shrank back, as if the whole incredible construction might collapse upon her. Pictures failed to reproduce the feeling of observing one’s world from the inside, from above. Floris felt as she imagined a fifteenth-century explorer might have, had he crossed the equator and discovered the people on the other side really did walk upside-down on the far side of the world. She stepped gingerly out of the tunnel, crossed the semicircle of rock foam at its base, and stood on the new grass.
She glanced at her liaison.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Not many old people on board Starfarer,” he said. “Not as old as you, anyway. I hardly know anybody who’s old.”
She tried not to be offended. She wondered how many other people on board Starfarer had grown up in space, in a society that was missing the entire eldest generation.
“Don’t you have grandparents back on Earth?”
“Somewhere. I don’t know. Come on.” Carrying her things, he strode off across a bright green lawn that lay between rougher fields. His unshod feet barely marked the grass. She followed, wondering if she, too, should take off her shoes. When she glanced back, the tender new blades had sprung back from his tread, but she had left marks on the grass and on the ground.
He had already crossed half the field. She gave up trying to match his speed; it was impossible. Instead, she walked at her own pace. She wondered if the people on board Starfarer would be able to accept her limitations.
Her limitations were one of the reasons for her being here: to help people remember the variety of human beings.
Infinity turned and watched her from a distance.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Then why are you going so slow?”
“This is as fast as I can go.”
“Oh.”
She hoped he would come back and help her, but he simply waited, watching with puzzlement rather than impatience. When she reached him, she wrapped her thin fingers around his elbow before he could stride off and outdistance her. Though his forehead furrowed when she took his arm, he tolerated the touch.
Floris found it astonishing to walk inside a starship in the same way she would walk through a meadow. She tried to remember the last time she had walked through a meadow. She had been living in the city for many years.
The starship seemed empty. Occasionally she would see someone at a distance, but Infinity took her to the next meadow, a rougher, wilder one, and after that she saw no other people.
Floris kept up as long as she could. When she was young she loved to take long walks. She hated to admit that even in low gravity she no longer could do it. Finally she let go of Infinity’s arm and sank down on a boulder with a sound of distress and exhaustion.
“I’m going to get you a cart.”
Floris remained silent until her heartbeat steadied. “You said it wasn’t very far. But we’re in wilderness! Where are the people?” Above, on the other side of the starship, there were tracks and paths, streams and buildings, and the movement of small spots that she took to be human beings.
“There’s lots of open space, but plenty of people live around here. Some of them have, you know, left, but they’ll be back. We’re almost there.”
She pushed herself to her feet.
They walked through a wide, shallow valley that cut diagonally across the cylinder floor. A creek ran through its center, bubbling over jagged cracked stones to a confluence with a larger stream. Bushes grew in ragged scatters. Straight bare vertical branches crowded together along the creek bank.
“Pretty, huh?” Infinity said.
“It’s half-finished. Like everything else I’ve seen.”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s true. You should’ve seen it before the ground cover sprouted. Mud. What a mess. When the lilacs grow some more, it’ll be solid green over there. They’ve already got buds. And look at the willows. See the pink and red and yellow at the tips? That’s where they’re growing.”
Floris tried to find comfort in the faint haze of color that tipped the bare willow twigs, but the ragged landscape depressed her.
“How do you know so much?” She did not mean her tone to be so sharp.
“I planted most of it,” Infinity said mildly. “There’s not much call for station builders anymore, but I didn’t want to go back to the O’Neills. I like working outdoors. So I transferred to gardening.”
She barely heard him. The far curve of the cylinder loomed overhead, and the bright reflected sunlight dazzled her. She wanted to get inside, beneath a roof. She wanted to rest.
“Do you even have roofs here?” she said. Her voice was faint.
“Sure,” Infinity said. “How else would we keep the rain off?” He stopped. “And here’s your roof itself.”
Floris stared, appalled. “They promised me a house,” she said. She felt near tears.
It looked like pictures she had seen of ancient pueblos, abandoned for centuries. This one had been abandoned so long that even the climate had changed, and the clean dry rock was covered over with dirt and moss and growing things. It was full of windows and doors and pathways and stairs. She knew she would have trouble getting around in it.
“Here you are,” he said. He opened a sliding window and led her inside.
“I don’t want to live in a cave,” she said. “They promised me a house.”
“This is a house. What’s wrong with it? It’s as good as anybody’s got, and better than most. The chancellor lives down the path a way.”
He led her across a treacherous carpeting of slippery woven grass mats to a stone windowseat. She sat, gratefully.
“All these mats are gifts,” Infinity said. “People on campus made them for you. There’s a welcome party for you tomorrow night.”
The underground apartment felt dank and cold. Floris shivered.
Hearing footsteps, she glanced up. A tall figure strode past her outer doorway and vanished.
Infinity stared out the window.
“You know who that was?” Awe took his low voice down another half octave.
“I have no idea,” Floris said.
“It was Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov. He lives here, but I’ve only seen him a couple of times. You know, the Russian — ”
“I remember.”
Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov had defected when the Mideast Sweep recalled the Russian cosmonauts. Now he lived permanently in space. He was nearly Floris’s age, and very famous. He could not return to Earth because the Sweep had convicted him of treason, in absentia, and sentenced him to death.
“He lives here? In my house?”
“No, sure not. The way it works, it’s easier to put together a bunch of houses at a time, then put a hill over top of them. You’re in kind of a triplex arrangement, and Cherenkov has the one highest up.”
“Who lives in the third part of the triplex?”
“Thanthavong. The geneticist.”
Floris frowned. The strange name sounded familiar, but she could not place it.
“They say she came up here because she couldn’t get any work done back on Earth. She was too famous, and the publicity just kept going on year after year.”
“Publicity about what?”
“The anti-virus. She invented it. Before I was even born, but don’t you remember?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Ms. Brown — ”
“Floris. Florrie.”
“ — I’m sure they won’t bother you. I’ve been planting here for weeks and this is the first time I’ve seen Cherenkov. Thanthavong leaves for her lab at dawn and hardly ever comes back before dark. I bet you won’t see Thanthavong any more than you see Cherenkov.”
“But I want to see people! That’s why I came up here! Do you think I want to be all alone?”
She might as well have stayed on Earth. Only two things prevented her from demanding that Infinity Mendez take her back to the transport. The first was that she felt so tired. The second was that though the starship would fly into the darkness and disappear, it had a good chance of returning. Back home, entering the darkness forever was a possibility she had to face every time she worked up the nerve to leave her apartment.
“I didn’t mean nobody would talk to you. Sure they will. I meant nobody would bother you if you didn’t want to be bothered.”
Floris turned away from the window and huddled on the seat. When she applied to the program, it had all sounded wonderful. A house of her own, and people to talk to anytime she wished, and no worry about being sent away. Instead, here she was in an unfurnished concrete apartment, with only two neighbors, both foreigners, both so famous they would probably not even deign to speak to her, and one of them a hermit.
And both of them, she suddenly realized, elderly.
She tried to remain calm.
“You’ve brought me here and put me in an old people’s home,” she said.
“What? No, I didn’t, I mean, there isn’t any such thing on Starfarer.”
“I don’t believe you. My children wanted me to go to an old people’s home. I can’t. I’ll die.”
Floris pushed herself to her feet and crossed the slippery mats.
“I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said, and walked out into the valley.
o0o
The net bag full of presents bounced gently against Victoria’s side, and the muscles of Satoshi’s back moved smoothly beneath her hand. As she walked beside him toward their house, she slid her fingers under the black tank top that showed his shoulders to such good advantage. The heat of his skin made her shiver. He tightened his arm around her waist. Victoria covered his hand with her free hand, and laced her fingers between his.
Everything around her felt and looked and smelled and sounded sharp and clear and vivid, as if happiness had intensified all her perceptions, as if she possessed more than the normal number of senses. For tonight, she would put aside both her desire for some uninterrupted work time, and her worries about the expedition.
The low round hills had gone gray in the shadowless twilight. The sun tubes dimmed nearly to darkness as Victoria and Satoshi turned off the main path and strolled up the gentle slope toward the house. Hills formed the interior topography of both the campus cylinder and the wild cylinder. Hills increased the sense of privacy as well as the usable surface area, but they made Victoria feel closed in. Despite her years in Vancouver, she had spent much of her childhood in and around Winnipeg. She always expected to be able to see long distances to the horizon. Starfarer had no horizon.
Dwarf fruit trees lined the approach to the house. Because of her trip, Victoria had missed the peak of Starfarer’s first real spring. The cherry blossoms had already fallen. The petals lay in pink and white drifts across the path.
The hillside that covered Victoria’s house stretched one long low ridge in a semicircle to form a courtyard in front of the main windows. Victoria and Satoshi rounded the tip of the ridge. They were home.
Victoria stopped. Scattered patches of flowers covered the inner slope of the ridge. In the fading light, the blue-gray foliage lost most of its color, but the petals glowed a brilliant, luminous white.
“They bloomed!”
Satoshi smiled. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
When Victoria left for Earth, the pinks she had planted had been nothing but hard gray buds. Now they spotted the slope with color and spiced the air with their scent.
Victoria bent down, cupped one of the pinks between her hands, and breathed its carnation fragrance. She left it unplucked, though there must be a thousand flowers on the hillside, white ones, pink ones, white with bright red veining. When they spread and grew together, they would cover the bank with dusty-blue ensiform leaves.
The house was still dark — Stephen Thomas must not be home yet. As Victoria and Satoshi approached, the inside lights came on, casting bright patches across the courtyard. French windows formed the entire exterior wall of the house. They were, as usual, wide open. Only Stephen Thomas insisted on using the front door, which he had chosen. It was solid and opaque, a tall rock-foam slab with a rounded top. Stephen Thomas was an unregenerate fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. Victoria liked to tease him that he was far too tall to live in a hobbit-house. He must be of elven stock. Sometimes she wondered.
The British countryside had influenced Victoria, too. The grass on the roof grew so long that it drooped, and occasionally Victoria trimmed the edges to resemble the thatched roof of an ancient Devon cottage. The thick shaggy grass made the house look as if it had eyebrows.
Victoria and Satoshi stepped through the open French windows. As Victoria kicked off her shoes, she noticed the contraption of glass and metal tubes that hunkered on the floor.
“I give up,” Victoria said. “What is it?”
“It’s a still. Stephen Thomas was going to find someplace else to put it. I guess he didn’t get around to it.”
“What’s it for?”
“He says that when his vines are established, and after he learns to make wine, he’ll be able to distill brandy.”
“What happened to the champagne he was going to make?”
Satoshi chuckled.
They circumnavigated the still.
The main room was plainly furnished. Woven mats covered the solar-fired tiles on the floor; the furniture was of rattan and bamboo. Alzena promised that soon a few trees could be harvested, but for now everyone who wanted furniture made of organic materials had to make do with members of the grass family, fast-growing annuals.
Victoria wanted a rug, but in order to get one she might have to persuade Alzena to approve growing a couple of sheep — it was probably too late to import any from the O’Neills — then raise them and learn to shear and spin and weave the wool herself. Victoria barely had time for her garden, not to mention the problem of persuading Alzena that sheep would not denude the hillsides. As indeed they might: one more factor Victoria would have to research if she proposed the project.
Victoria signaled the interior illumination to dim. As the last sunlight faded and the sun-tubes began reflecting starlight, the wall of windows and the skylights filled the room with a soft silver illumination.
“Stephen Thomas?”
No one answered.
“He better come home soon,” Victoria said. She let the carrying net slip from her shoulder to the floor, and flung herself onto the folded futon they used for a couch.
Satoshi joined her. Their shoulders touched, and their thighs. Satoshi’s kiss left his taste on Victoria’s lips.
Victoria heard Stephen Thomas’s voice, low and light and cheerful, unmistakable even at a distance. A second voice replied.
Stephen Thomas strode up the path and opened the front door. Kicking off his thongs, he took two long strides and flung himself onto the couch beside his partners.
“Let’s go to bed and screw like weasels,” he said.
Feral Korzybski, carrying a net bag, followed him into the house.
Completely unembarrassed, Stephen Thomas kissed Victoria and Satoshi and sprawled on the lounge beside them, one arm around Satoshi’s shoulders, fingertips brushing the back of Victoria’s neck. Of the members of the partnership, he was — at least in public — the most physically demonstrative.
“Uh, hello, Feral,” Victoria said. “Was the guest house full?”
Victoria felt glad that her dark complexion hid the blush that crept up her face. Stephen Thomas was only voicing the thought all three partners had. One of the things that first attracted Victoria to him was his ability to say exactly what he thought under most circumstances; and his ability to get himself out of the trouble that sometimes caused him. She reached up and touched his cool slender fingers where they rested against the back of her neck.
“There’s hardly anybody at the guest house,” Stephen Thomas said. “Feral checked in, but it’s kind of creepy over there. So I invited him to stay with us.”
Victoria looked at Stephen Thomas, surprised and unbelieving.
“I really appreciate the hospitality,” Feral said. “I don’t think I’d get a good feel for what it’s like to live here if I had to stay in the hotel.”
“But — “ Victoria stopped, not wanting to hurt Feral’s feelings.
“Let me show you to the spare room,” Satoshi said quickly. He got up.
Sometimes his good manners were too good to be believed. This was one of those times.
He took Feral into the back hallway. Stephen Thomas followed.
Disgruntled, Victoria sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. After a moment she got up and went unwillingly down the hall.
The corridor was almost dark. Lit only by daylight or starlight shining through roof windows, it ran behind the main room and the bedrooms. The rough rock foam remained unfinished. No one had taken the time to pretty it up. She passed Satoshi’s room and Stephen Thomas’s room and her own room.
She hesitated outside the fourth bedroom, the room that should have been Merit’s. Then she berated herself silently. She would have an excuse for her feelings if anyone had ever used this room, if it had real memories in it. But the accident occurred before they ever even moved here. Overcoming her reluctance to go in, she followed her partners. Overcoming her reluctance to let a stranger use it would be more difficult.
The partnership used the room for nothing, not even storage. Victoria had seldom gone into it. The AS kept it spotless. It remained as impersonal as a hotel, with a futon folded in one corner and no other free-standing furniture, only the built-ins. Stephen Thomas stood just inside the door, suddenly uneasy, and Satoshi stood by the closed window, looking out into the front yard.
“We weren’t expecting company,” Victoria said.
Feral tossed his duffelbag on the floor.
“No, this is great. I don’t need much, and I promise not to get in the way. This will really help. Isolation is no good for getting decent stories.”
o0o
J.D.’s house was very quiet. The thick rock foam walls cushioned sound. Woven mats, gifts from co-workers as yet unmet, softened the floor. A futon lay in her bedroom. Victoria had apologized for the sparseness of the furnishings, but after the beach cabin this house of three rooms felt perfectly luxurious.
Still, a lot of work remained before her new place would feel like home.
She ought to try to sleep, but she was still wide awake. The season on Starfarer was spring, and the days were lengthening. It lacked at least an hour till darkness.
Her equipment — her books — had not yet arrived from the transport. She could ask Arachne for something to read. Instead, she curled up on her futon and dug her notebook out of the net bag.
She worked for a while on her new novel. She tried to write a little every day, even when she was busy with other projects. Writing helped her to imagine what it could be like if... when, she told herself... the expedition met other intelligent beings.
Her first novel had enjoyed less than magnificent success. Critics complained that it made them feel off-balance and confused. Only a few had realized that it was supposed to make them feel off-balance and confused; of those, all but one had objected to the experience. That one reviewer had done her the courtesy of assuming she had achieved exactly what she intended, and she valued the comments.
She knew that nothing she could imagine could approach the strangeness of the expedition’s first contact with non-Terrestrial beings. She could not predict what would happen. It was the sense of immersing herself in strangeness that she sought, knowing she would have to meet the reality with equanimity, and wing it from there.
Her library contained a number of novels and stories about first meetings of humanity and alien beings. Those she reread most, her favorites, embodied that sense of strangeness. But it troubled her considerably to find so many fictions ending in misjudgment, incomprehension, intolerance; in violence and disaster.
J.D.’s stories never ended like that.
She put the novel away, got up, and opened the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside lay a long, narrow terrace, bright green with a mixture of new grass and wildflowers.
Victoria had said she could do whatever she liked with the terrace — whatever she could find the time to do. J.D. recognized some of the meadow flowers from the wilderness, but she had never done any gardening. She had no idea where to start. She liked the big rock over at one edge. Barefoot, she walked across the delicate new grass and sat on the heat-polished stone. It had been blasted to slag sometime during the creation of Starfarer. The melted curves sank gently into the earth. The rock was warm from the heat of the day, but J.D. imagined it remained hot from the blast that had shattered it from its lunar matrix. She imagined heat continuing to radiate from it for eons.
The starship had no sunsets, only a long twilight. Darkness fell, softened by starlight shining on the overhead mirrors. Rectangles of light, other people’s uncurtained windows and open doorways, lay scattered across the hillsides. The air quickly cooled, but J.D. remained in her garden, thinking about so suddenly finding herself a member of the alien contact department.
J.D. liked Victoria. She felt grateful that the expedition’s original rejection of her application, and her brief rejection of their subsequent invitation, had not destroyed the possibility of friendship. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas she did not know well enough to assess.
J.D. shivered. She thought about kicking in the metabolic enhancer, but decided against it. The rush would remind her of the sea, and the whales, and the divers, and Zev.
She might as well let the artificial gland atrophy. She would probably never need it again.
She rose and went inside.
The interior of her house was as cool as the terrace. She had not yet told Arachne her preferences for temperature and humidity and light-level and background sounds. If she took off the outer doors and the curtains, as Victoria suggested, to open her house to the artificial outdoors, most of that programming would be superfluous. J.D. thought she would leave the doors and the curtains as they were. After the damp, cold mornings of the cabin, the idea of stepping out of bed onto a warm floor appealed to her.
Flicking her eyelids closed, she scanned the web for mail. Nothing important, nothing personal.
Nothing from Zev.
She could send him a message. But it would be easier for both of them if she left him alone. Best for all concerned if she and Zev never talked again. Her eyes burned. She blinked hard.
She took off her clothes, crawled into bed, ordered the lights off, ordered the curtains open, and lay on her futon gazing into the darkness.
A quick blink of light startled her. She thought it was a flaw in her vision until it happened again, and again. Short, cool, yellow flashes the size of a matchhead decorated her terrace.
They were fireflies. She had not seen one for a long time. They did not exist on the west coast. They were even becoming rare in the east, in their home territories, because of the size and effects of the enormous coastal cities. Here they must be part of the ecosystem.
The ecosystem fascinated her. If it contained fireflies, lightning bugs, did it contain other insects? She would like bees — bees must be essential. But what about ladybugs? Surely one could not import ladybugs without importing aphids as well. No one in their right mind would introduce aphids into a closed environment intended to be agriculturally self-sufficient. If no noxious insects existed, but the ecologists were trying to establish songbirds, what did the songbirds eat? Did anything eat the songbirds?
J.D. drifted off into complexity, and sleep.
o0o
Victoria tapped lightly on Stephen Thomas’s door.
“Come in.”
The scent of sandalwood surrounded her. Stephen Thomas often brought incense to campus in his allowance. The incense stick glowed, a speck of pink light moving downward through the darkness. The sliding doors stood open to the courtyard, letting in the breeze and mixing the sandalwood with the spice of carnation. The pale white wash of reflected starlight silvered Stephen Thomas’s gold hair and his face in quarter profile. He turned toward her.
“Your hair sparkles,” he said.
“And yours glows.” She let her kimono fall from her shoulders and slid into bed beside him. He wore nothing but the crystal at his throat, as black as obsidian. He rolled onto his side. The crystal slipped along the line of his collarbone, glinting in scarlet and azure.
“Where’s Satoshi?” Stephen Thomas asked. “You guys aren’t mad at me, are you? Feral looked so downcast when he saw he’d be practically alone in the guest house...”
Victoria felt Stephen Thomas shrug in the darkness, beneath her hands.
“Satoshi’s in the shower,” she said. “He’ll be here in a minute. I’m not mad at you, exactly, but, god, Stephen Thomas, your timing is lousy.”
She brushed her fingertips down his side and stroked the hard muscles of his thigh and wished Satoshi would hurry up.
Stephen Thomas drew her closer. His soft breath tickled her shoulder.
“I think it’s damned nice of us,” Victoria said, “to use your room tonight so we don’t keep Feral Korzybski awake till morning!”
“What’s the matter with my room?” Stephen Thomas said plaintively. His room was a joke among the partnership. He collected stuff the way a magnet collects steel shavings. Victoria’s room was almost as Spartan as the fourth bedroom, and Satoshi’s works-in-progress were always organized. Stephen Thomas kept a desk full of bits of equipment and printouts, a corner full of potted plants, and he never picked up his clothes until just before he did his laundry.
“Nothing,” Victoria said. “I enjoy sleeping in a midden heap. But my room is right next to our guest, and we’ve never tested the soundproofing.”
Satoshi came in, toweling his hair. He launched himself across the room and came down flat on the bed beside Victoria. He smelled of fresh water and mint soap. A few droplets flicked off the ends of his hair and fell across Victoria’s face. His skin was cool and just barely damp from the shower.
He leaned over her and kissed her. The cool droplets of water disappeared in the warmth of his lips and his tongue. Satoshi reached past her and took Stephen Thomas’s hand. Their fingers intertwined, gold and silver in the dim light. Victoria reached up and joined her hand to theirs, adding ebony to the pattern. She hooked her leg over Satoshi’s thighs, and as she turned toward him drew Stephen Thomas with her, closer against her back and side. His breath quickened and his long silky hair slipped across her shoulder. Mint and carnation and sandalwood and arousal surrounded them with a dizzying mix. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas surrendered themselves to it, and to each other.