Victoria woke when the sun-tube spilled light through the open wall of Stephen Thomas’s bedroom. Stephen Thomas lay on the far side of the bed, stretched on his side, his hair curling down across his neck and shoulder, one hand draped across Satoshi’s back. Satoshi sprawled in the middle of the bed, face down, arms and legs flung every which way, his hair kinked in a wing from being slept on wet. Victoria watched her partners sleeping, wishing they could stay in bed all morning, in the midst of the comfortable clutter. The scent of sandalwood lingered.
Stephen Thomas yawned and turned over, stretching. He rubbed his eyes and blinked and yawned again, propped himself on his elbow, and looked at her across Satoshi. Satoshi snored softly.
“Good morning,” Stephen Thomas whispered.
“Good morning.” Victoria, too, kept her voice soft. “Is that how weasels screw?”
He laughed.
“Shh, you’ll wake Satoshi.”
They got up, creeping quietly away so Satoshi could wake up at his own pace. Stephen Thomas grabbed some clean clothes from the pile in the corner. Victoria had no idea how he always managed to look so good. When she referred to his room as a midden heap, she was only half joking.
o0o
After a shower, Victoria smoothed the new clothes in her closet but resisted the urge to wear them. They were party clothes, inappropriate for work. She put on her usual jeans and shirt and sandals, reflecting that back on Earth, on almost any other campus, what she had on would be considered inappropriate for a professor.
Victoria smelled something burning. Something burning? Stephen Thomas’s incense — ? She hurried into the hallway. She stopped short. The smell of food, cooking, filled the apartment.
None of the three surviving members of the partnership was much of a cook. Merit had known how to cook. These days Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas ordered meals from the central kitchen when they had time to eat together.
Victoria drew a deep breath. Getting upset because someone had decided to make breakfast was silly. It was just that the homey smell brought back memories.
Satoshi was the best cook among them, but Victoria knew from long acquaintance that Satoshi was not cooking breakfast. If he was even out of bed she would be surprised. That left Stephen Thomas.
“He can burn water” had always been a metaphorical phrase to Victoria, until Stephen Thomas once put water on for coffee, forgot about it, and melted a kettle all over the heating element.
The breakfast smelled much better than burning water or melting kettles. Stephen Thomas was always trying new things; maybe cooking lessons were his newest enthusiasm.
Victoria headed to the main room. At the stove, Feral Korzybski glanced over his shoulder.
“Morning,” he said. “I wanted to make myself useful.” He gestured to the set table, the skillet. “You folks sure don’t have much equipment.”
“We don’t cook here very much,” she said. “No time.”
“It’s a hobby of mine,” he said. “I think this will be edible.” He poked the edges of the big omelet, letting the uncooked egg run underneath to sizzle against the hot pan. “Are you ready for tea?”
“Sure.”
He poured boiling water into her teapot.
“I talked to the database — ”
“Arachne,” Victoria said.
“Right, thanks. I talked to Arachne about what was available for people to cook. Strange selection.”
“Not if you consider how and where it’s produced. We’re beginning to grow things ourselves. But a lot of fresh stuff, and most everything that’s processed, is from one of the colonies.”
Stephen Thomas sauntered barefoot into the main room. He wore orange satin running shorts and a yellow silk tank top. Victoria tried to imagine the combination on anyone else, and failed.
“What’s for breakfast?” he said.
Feral dumped the filling into the omelet and folded it expertly. “Let me see if I can remember everything I put in it. The eggs were fresh — that surprised me.”
“We grow those here.”
“With or without chickens?”
“With.” Victoria laughed. “We aren’t that high-tech.”
“The mushrooms are reconstituted but the green onions and the tomatoes were fresh. I was hoping I could get micrograv vegetables, but Arachne didn’t offer them. I’ve seen them in magazines — perfectly round tomatoes, and spherical carrots, and beans in corkscrews — but I don’t know anyone who can afford to cook with them.”
“We don’t get any of those out here. The colonies export them all to Earth. There are problems with growing plants in quantity in micrograv, so whatever you get is labor-intensive. Especially those corkscrew beans.”
“I can see where they would be. That’s it — except for the cheese. The package said. ‘Tillamook Heights.’”
“That’s from a colony. The people who run one of the dairies there emigrated from someplace called Tillamook — ”
“It’s on the west coast of the United States,” Stephen Thomas said to Victoria. “A few hundred kilometers south of Vancouver.” He liked to tease her about her Canadian chauvinism, about the way she sometimes pretended to know less about the United States than she really did. He could get away with it.
“ — and they wanted to name the dairy after their original place. But ‘Tillamook East’ or ‘Tillamook South’ didn’t sound right, so: Tillamook Heights.”
“I like it.” Feral rubbed his upper lip and gazed blankly at the omelet, filing the information away, thinking of how to use it in a story.
“Your omelet’s about to burn,” Victoria said.
He snatched the pan off the single-burner stove.
“Damn!” He lifted the edge of the omelet. “Just in time. Where’s Satoshi?”
“Still asleep, probably.”
“Damn,” he said again. “I thought you were all up. This is no good cold. I’ll go get him.”
“Don’t, if you value your life,” Stephen Thomas said. “Trust me, he’d much rather eat your omelet cold than have you wake him up. You would, too.”
“All right,” Feral said, doubtful and disappointed.
The omelet tasted wonderful.
“The coffee’s great,” Stephen Thomas said. “What did you do to it?”
Victoria took his cup and tried a sip. It was much stronger than she was used to, but tasted less bitter, almost the way coffee smelled.
“I’ll show you. It’s not hard, but if you boil it you might as well throw it out and start over. That’s what I did with what you had in the pot.”
Feral ate part of his omelet, occasionally glancing with some irritation at the warmer where he had left Satoshi’s share.
“It isn’t the same warmed over,” he said. He got up, poured coffee from the thermos into a mug, and disappeared down the corridor.
Victoria and Stephen Thomas looked at each other. Stephen Thomas shrugged.
“It’s his hide,” he said.
Feral returned unscathed. He got the last quarter of the omelet out of the warmer and put it at Satoshi’s place. A minute later Satoshi himself appeared, wearing Victoria’s hapi coat, carrying the coffeecup, and apparently wide awake. He joined them at the table.
“Nice morning, isn’t it?” He sipped his coffee. “That’s very good,” he said. He put it down and started eating his omelet.
Victoria watched him, amazed.
“Do you want a job?” Stephen Thomas said to Feral.
“No, thanks. I’m self-employed.”
o0o
J.D. woke very early in the morning, too early, she thought, to call the other members of the alien contact team. Feeling restless, she went for a walk. She suspected that on board Starfarer she would have trouble getting enough exercise, here where she would have neither opportunity nor time to swim several hours each day.
A stream trickled past her house. She followed it. Soon a second stream joined it, and the combined watercourse cut down through the hill. J.D. found herself walking between sheer cliffs.
The cliff must be designed, J.D. thought. There had been no time for the stream to cut it. Starfarer’s interior topography was carefully sculpted. Striped with stone colors, this sculpture looked like a water-eroded cliffside of sedimentary rock.
J.D. rounded a bend and stopped in surprise.
Beside the stream, someone scraped at the bank, probing with a slender trowel. A blanket lay on the ground, covered with bones.
“Hi, good morning,” J.D. said. “What are you doing?”
The young digger glanced at her and stood up, stretching her back and her arms. She was small and slight, with a sweat-band tied around her forehead. It rumpled her short straight black hair.
“Digging for fossils,” she said.
J.D. looked at her askance. “It seems to me,” she said, “that if you’d found fossils in lunar rock, the news would be all over the web by now.”
“Not digging to take them out,” she said. “Digging to put them in.”
“You’re making a fossil bed?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you think we deserve some prehistory, too?”
J.D. leaned over the blanket. The relics resembled the exoskeletons of huge insects more than any mammalian bones.
“Whose prehistory is this?” she asked.
“Whoever came before.”
“Whoever came before didn’t look much like us.”
“Of course not.”
“What department are you in?”
“Archaeology.”
“But — ” J.D. stopped. “I think I’m being had.”
“I’m Crimson Ng. Art department.”
“J.D. Sauvage. Alien contact — ”
“You’re the new AC specialist! Welcome on board.” She stuck out her grubby hand. J.D. shook it.
“But why are you burying fossils of a different species?”
“I’m just one of those crazy artists,” Crimson said.
“Come on,” J.D. said.
Crimson opened up to J.D.’s interest.
“Every time the argument about evolution comes along again, I start wondering what would happen if it were true that god invented fossils to fool us with. What if god’s got a sense of humor? If I were god, I’d plant a few fossils that wouldn’t fit into the scheme, just for fun.”
“And that’s what these are? Does that mean you’re playing god?”
“Artists always play god,” Crimson said.
“Don’t you believe in evolution?”
“That’s a tough word, ‘believe.’ Believing, and knowing what the truth is — you’re talking about two different things. Human beings are perfectly capable of believing one thing metaphorically, and accepting evidence for a completely different hypothesis. That’s the simplest definition of faith that I know. It’s the people who don’t have any faith, who can’t tell the difference between metaphor and reality, who want to force you to believe one thing only.”
“I can’t figure out who you’re making fun of,” J.D. said.
“That’s the point,” the artist said with perfect seriousness. “Everybody needs to be made fun of once in a while.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” J.D. said. “I can get along without being made fun of for two or three days at a time without permanent damage.”
Crimson glanced at her quizzically, then picked up one of the artifacts. The long and delicate claw nestled in her hand. J.D. could imagine an intelligent being with those claws instead of hands, a being as dexterous and precise as any human.
“What happens if everybody forgets you’ve put these things here,” J.D. said, “and then somebody comes along and digs them up?”
“My god, that would be wonderful.”
“What will people think?”
“Depends on who they are. And how smart they are. I’m trying to create a consistent prehistory, one that doesn’t lead to us. Maybe future archaeologists will figure it out. Maybe they’ll realize it’s fiction. Maybe they won’t. And maybe they’ll think it was god playing a joke, and they’ll laugh.”
“And then they’ll figure out that you made the bones.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Crimson said. “I grew them very carefully. You shouldn’t be able to tell them from real. And I cooked the isotopes, so the dating will be consistent.” She grinned. “Got to get back to work.”
She returned to her fossil bed.
J.D. watched her for a few minutes, then continued on beside the stream. She smiled to herself. She wished she could tell Zev and the whales about this. They would, she thought, find it very funny.
o0o
Though she was curious how J.D. had liked her first night on the starship, though she was eager to get out to the sailhouse for the first full test of Starfarer’s solar sail, and though she was anxious to get over to the physics department and get back to work, Victoria also wanted to give Satoshi and Stephen Thomas the presents she had brought from Earth. But she wanted to do it when they were alone. As she was thinking up a polite way to ask Feral to leave for a while, Stephen Thomas put one hand on the reporter’s shoulder.
“Feral,” he said, smiling, “thank you for breakfast. Why don’t you go look around, and we’ll see you in the sailhouse later.”
“Huh? Oh. Okay.” He drained his coffeecup. “I’d like to visit the alien contact department,” he said to Victoria. “Would that be all right?”
“Sure. This afternoon.”
“Thanks.” He sauntered cheerfully out of the house.
“How do you get away with that?” Victoria asked.
Stephen Thomas looked at her quizzically. “Get away with what?”
“Never mind.” She picked up the carrying net and opened it flat on the table.
“This is for the household,” she said. She pulled out a package of smoked salmon.
“We should save this for sometime special,” Satoshi said. “Maybe even after we leave.”
One thing habitat designers had not figured out was a way to grow anadromous fish in a space colony. The salt marshes, so important to the ecosystem, could not support deep-water fish.
Victoria handed Stephen Thomas a rectangular gold box. He took it carefully and hefted it gently.
“I know what this is,” he said.
“I had my fingers crossed at liftoff,” Victoria said. “It survived.”
Stephen Thomas grinned, opened the box, and drew out a bottle of French champagne.
“Victoria, this is great, thank you.”
She had known he would like it. And she knew why he liked it. Before Stephen Thomas joined the partnership, she had never drunk good champagne. By now she had tasted it several times. Saying that she had drunk it hardly seemed accurate, for each sip flowed over the tongue and vanished in a tickly barrage of minuscule bubbles.
“Something else for a special occasion,” Stephen Thomas said. He was never stingy with his things. Whenever he managed to get good champagne to Starfarer, he shared it with his partners.
“I bought it in a fit of enlightened self-interest,” Victoria said.
She handed Satoshi one of his presents. “Not quite on the same scale, but...”
He smiled, carefully unfolding the tissue paper from the package of chili paste. Victoria and Stephen Thomas always brought back chili paste for him. Victoria could not stand the stuff herself. Sometimes she wondered if, in fifty years, Satoshi would confess that forty years before, he had developed a loathing for chili paste, but wanted to spare the feelings of his partners.
“We’ll have to get something good to drink with it,” he said.
“Oh, no, not my champagne,” their younger partner said. “If you’re going to blast your taste buds, you can do it with local beer.”
Victoria gave Stephen Thomas his second package. This one was as light as the first had been heavy. He untied the scarf that wrapped it. Victoria never wrapped his presents in paper, because wrapping paper was hard to come by in the starship and he always tore it.
She had brought him two of the loose silk shirts he liked. The ones he had now he had worn almost to rags. He still wore them. He lifted the new turquoise one, and saw the bright red one beneath it.
“Victoria, these are incredible!” He put on the turquoise shirt. It intensified the clear blue of his eyes. He stroked the smooth fabric. “How does it look?”
“How do you think?” She put one hand on his shoulder and let her fingers slide down his back. The silk felt soft; his muscles, hard. He met her gaze and reached out, letting his arm match the curve of hers.
“It looks terrific, kid,” Satoshi said. “Don’t wear it into any dark bars — we’ll have to wade in and rescue you.”
They all laughed. Victoria wished it were evening; she wished they were sitting around the dinner table getting silly on champagne. She handed Satoshi his second present.
He unfolded the wrapping, smoothed it, set it aside, and opened the plain white box.
He pushed aside the cushioning and lifted out the white bowl. The sunlight touched it and turned the graceful rounded shape translucent. Satoshi caught his breath.
“It’s absolutely beautiful.”
“It rings,” she said.
He tapped it with his fingernail. The porcelain gave off a soft, clear tone. Satoshi looked at her. The smile-lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Thank you.”
“When I saw it...” Victoria said, “you know, if anyone had told me I’d be moved nearly to tears by a porcelain dish, I’d’ve told them they were nuts.”
Last she gave him the stones she had picked up on the beach after her first meeting with J.D.
“These... they aren’t really anything, just something I found. I thought you might like them.”
They were gnarled and smooth, like wind-blasted trees; some had holes bored straight through them. A few carried holes bored partway through, with the shell of the creature that had made the hole left behind, stuck inside after it bored its way in, and grew. One stone was a mass of holes, till nothing was left but a lacework of edges.
“I kept hoping nobody would pick up my allowance and say, ‘What have you got in here, rocks?’ If I admitted I was carrying plain rocks out of the gravity well, no telling what Distler would do with that.”
Satoshi chuckled. “These aren’t just plain rocks.” He held one in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. Victoria recognized it as the one she had kept in her pocket all the way back home; rubbing it had given it a slightly darker color.
Victoria found herself in a mood more suitable for the end of Christmas morning: glad her partners liked what she had brought for them, but sorry that the occasion had ended.
They spent a few minutes tidying up, giving the dirty dishes to the house AS, then left to meet J.D. and go out to the sailhouse to watch the solar sail’s first full deployment.
As Victoria left the house, she saw Satoshi’s porcelain bowl in the center of the table. The gnarled sea-worn stones lay artlessly, precisely placed within its smooth white concavity. Victoria gazed at the stones, at the bowl. The arrangement’s effect was calming, yet it was also arousing, and in a definitely sexual way. Victoria wondered how Satoshi had managed that.
o0o
Griffith woke at the silent arrival of an AS with his breakfast from the communal kitchen. He had slept as he always slept, soundly but responsive to his surroundings, waking once just before dawn when a bird startled him by singing outside his window.
Only one of the other guests had slept in the guest house. The other had yet to make an appearance; Griffith would have heard if anyone had come in during the night. No one had taken any notice of Griffith, and his things remained undisturbed.
He wolfed his breakfast, hungry after two days in zero gravity. Leaving by way of the emergency exit rather than the front door, he set off to continue his exploration.
Griffith had read all the plans, all the speculations, all the reports. He knew why Starfarer resembled a habitat instead of a vehicle. He understood the reasons for its size. He even understood the benefits of designing it to be aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, both his irritation and his envy increased as he strode along paths that led through what for him was, even in its raw and unfinished form, a paradise. He had no chance at all of living in a similar environment back on Earth. He did occasionally work with — more accurately, for — people who were extremely wealthy or extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. They owned places like this. But regular scientists, regular administrators, regular government employees, lived in the city and liked it. They figured out ways to like it, because they had no choice.
People who had lived here would never consider going back to the crowds and noise and pollution of Earth. Not willingly. Back on Earth, Griffith had been skeptical of the suggestion that the personnel of the starship intended to take it away and never bring it back, either turning it into a generation ship and living on it permanently, or seeking a new, unspoiled planet to take over. That suggestion smacked too baldly of conspiracy theories for Griffith. Now, though, he found the idea more reasonable to contemplate.
The contemplation made his analysis easier.
He looked up.
The sun-tubes dazzled him. He blinked and held out his hand to block off the most intense part of the light. To either side of the mirrors, the cylinder arched overhead, curving all the way around him to meet itself at his feet.
He had seen such views looking down from a mountain, during brief training exercises outside the city. Looking up for a view was disorienting. A multiple helix of streams flowed from one end of the campus to the other. Here and there the streams flowed beneath the green-tipped branches of a newly-planted strip of trees, or widened and vanished into a bog of lilies and other water-cleansing plants; or widened into silver-blue lakes or marshlands. A wind-surfer skimmed across one of the lakes. The brightly-colored sail caught the morning breeze. Small gardens formed square or irregular patches of more intense green in the midst of intermittent blobs of ground cover.
It would all be very pretty when the plants finished growing together over the naked soil. But it was unnecessary. Machines could clean the water and the air nearly as well as the plants could. Well enough for human use. A ship a fraction this size could store years and years’ worth of supplies. Griffith found the claim of the necessity of agriculture to be questionable at best. Wind-surfing was a quaint way of getting exercise, but treadmills and exercise bikes were far more efficient in terms of the space required, not to mention the time. If the scientists had intended to set out on a proper expedition they would have designed a proper ship.
Griffith tried to imagine what the cylinder would look like when all the plants reached their full growth. As yet the intensely green new grass remained thin and tender, brown earth showing between the blades. Other ground cover lay in patches, not yet grown together, and most of the trees were saplings, branchy and brown. Some of the vegetation in the wild cylinder, according to the reports, had been transported from the O’Neills, but most came from single-cell clones engendered on board Starfarer. It was far too expensive to import bedding plants or trees all the way from Earth. The cell banks of Starfarer boasted something like a million different kinds of plants and animals. Griffith thought it extravagance and waste.
He kept walking, following a faint, muddy path worn through new grass. They should at least pave their paths. He saw practically no one. Half the people working on Starfarer had been called back by their governments in protest over the changes the United States was proposing in Starfarer’s mission.
Griffith had drafted most of the changes.
Now that he was here, he could see even more possibilities. If he had to, he would accede gracefully to the objection that the cylinder was too large to use as a military base. He would turn the objection to his advantage. The body of the cylinder was a treasury of raw materials, minerals, metal ore, even ice from deposits of water that had never thawed since the moon’s formation. Starfarer could be mined and re-created.
He would rather see it used as an observation platform and staging area. That way its size would be useful. It could be as radical a training ground as Santa Fe, the radiation-ruined city. Griffith had spent a lot of time there, wearing radiation protection, inventing and testing strategies against urban terrorism and tactical weaponry. He imagined working up here under similar conditions. It would be easy to evacuate the air from the cylinders. A space suit could hardly be more cumbersome than radiation garb.
He did not see any problem in taking over the starship. Now that Distler had won the election, Griffith’s political backing was secure. MacKenzie’s ill-considered comments could only speed things along.
When he first started studying the starship, he could not believe it was unarmed, that its naive philosophy allowed it — required it! — to vanish into the unknown without weapons.
Getting weapons on board was Griffith’s next priority.
o0o
Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas walked over to J.D.’s house. Victoria wished she had invited her to breakfast. She would have, if she had known that Feral would be around.
None of the paths on board Starfarer, even the paved ones, had been designed for three people walking abreast. In this the starship was much like Terrestrial towns. Satoshi was in the middle, so Victoria and Stephen Thomas alternated walking on the verge. Knee-high bushes sprinkled dew against Victoria’s legs.
“Hello!”
They paused at the edge of J.D.’s yard. She appeared in the open doorway and beckoned them inside.
“Good morning.”
“How did you sleep?”
“Just fine. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get used to a new place, but this feels like home.”
They followed her into the main room. Her boxes of books stood in stacks; books from opened boxes stood in stacks. J.D. had set several of the packing boxes together to form makeshift shelves. Starfarer’s houses contained few bookshelves, since everyone used the web or temporary hard copy.
“This will have to do till I can get something more substantial. What do I do to requisition some boards?”
“Plant a tree,” Stephen Thomas said.
J.D. looked at him curiously.
“Wood is scarce,” Victoria explained. “The trees are still growing. What you want is some slabs of rock foam.”
Stephen Thomas picked up one of the old books, handling it gingerly, as if it would disintegrate in his hands. As it probably would.
“Why do you have all these?”
“For research. They give me ideas that I try to build on.”
“Nothing a human being is going to think of is going to match a real first contact,” Stephen Thomas said.
“No,” J.D. said. “It’s not. But the ideas are for mind-stretching, not script-writing.”
She picked a book out of an open box. The cover painting looked like a peeled eyeball.
“Here’s one,” she said. “It’s got a story in it called ‘The Big Pat Boom,’ by Damon Knight. Aliens visit Earth and decide that cowpats are great art. They want to buy them and take them back home — to alien planets. So everybody on Earth tries to corner the market in cowpats. What would you do?”
Victoria laughed. “What would I do with a cowpat? Yuck.”
“What,” Stephen Thomas asked plaintively, “is a cowpat?”
Satoshi explained. Stephen Thomas snorted in disbelief.
“I can’t even think how I’d move a cowpat,” Victoria said.
“I haven’t read the story in a long time,” J.D. admitted. “I forget the exact details. I think they let the cowpats dry before they try to move them.”
“What did they do about the dung beetles and the maggots?” Satoshi asked.
“I don’t know,” J.D. said. “I didn’t know about the dung beetles and the maggots.”
“Your science fiction writer must have used some poetic license,” Satoshi said.
“How did you get to be such an expert on cowpats?” Victoria asked.
“I’m a font of wisdom,” Satoshi said, doing a subtle imitation of Stephen Thomas in his occasional pompous mode. He grinned. “And I used to spend summers on Kauai herding cattle. I saw a lot of cowpats. Or steerpats, as it happens.”
“Come on,” J.D. said, “what would you do?”
“I’d go looking for some different aliens,” Stephen Thomas said.
“I guess I’d let them buy the cowpats,” Satoshi said.
“I think we should try to get the cow farmers — ”
“Ranchers,” Satoshi said.
“Okay, ranchers — to give the aliens the cowpats as a gesture of friendship.” Victoria chuckled. “Though I don’t know how that would go over with the proponents of free trade.”
“That’s a good idea,” J.D. said. “I hadn’t thought of that alternative.”
“The government would buy them and form a whole new bureaucracy to decide which aliens to give the shit to,” Stephen Thomas said.
Everybody laughed.
“I’d nominate our new chancellor to be the minister of that department,” Satoshi said.
J.D. glanced at him quickly, startled. Victoria found it interesting that the chancellor had earned Satoshi’s dislike so quickly. Satoshi was notoriously slow to take offense.
“Here’s one,” J.D. said. “About some kids who smuggle a cat onto a space station.”
“Don’t show that one to Alzena,” Victoria said. “She swore she’d draw and quarter anyone who smuggled a predator on board.”
One of the makeshift shelves collapsed. J.D. tried to catch the books as they spilled out in a heap on the floor.
“Oh, this is hopeless,” J.D. said. “But it’s been so long since I had my books out. I was afraid they’d mildew at the cabin.”
Satoshi picked up some of the fallen books and put them back in the box, setting it on its base rather than trying to use it as a shelf.
“I’ll walk you through requisition,” Victoria said. “The supply department can’t be busy these days... You can probably get some real shelves in a day or two.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“No problem,” Victoria said. “Come on, let’s go watch the sail test!”
o0o
Infinity led Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov toward the guest house, trying to explain the problem about Floris Brown. The trouble was, he felt so intimidated about talking to the cosmonaut that he kept getting tangled in his words.
“I took her to the guest house last night. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t just leave her in the garden. I sleep there sometimes, but you can’t let an old person sit out all night in the dew. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do have some experience speaking English.”
“I know that, I mean, I didn’t mean — ”
“I suppose you could not leave her to sit in the garden, but she might have come to her senses and moved back into her house if you had.”
“She’s pretty stubborn.”
Infinity glanced sidelong at Nikolai Petrovich. This was the first time he had talked to the cosmonaut. Physically, Cherenkov was still vigorous. He had been tall for a cosmonaut, nearly two meters. The bone loss of years in space, in zero-g, had given him a pronounced stoop. His posture caused him to peer out at the world from beneath his brows. Exposure to sun and radiation had weathered his skin as severely as if he had spent his life in the desert. His dark brown hair was turning gray in discrete streaks. Gray striped his bushy eyebrows.
He turned his head and caught Infinity looking at him. His gaze locked with Infinity’s.
His age was in his eyes. Infinity felt a chill, a prickle of awe.
Nikolai Petrovich smiled.
“Why do you think an old stranger like me would change her mind, when you could not?”
“You can tell her it isn’t a nursing home.”
“That is what she fears?”
“That’s what she said.”
“She thinks Thanthavong and I are geriatric cases.”
Embarrassed, Infinity tried to think of something to say. “She doesn’t understand...”
Cherenkov chuckled.
“Where does she wish to live?” the cosmonaut asked.
“She wasn’t quite clear on that. It sounded like she wanted to live in her own house by herself, but she also wanted her family around. I guess she couldn’t have either one back on Earth.”
“So she came here. Alone.”
“Right. She said they’d put her in a nursing home, and she’d die.”
“I see. I remain here... for similar reasons.”
“I know,” Infinity said.
It was not a nursing home that would kill Nikolai Petrovich if he went back to Earth. The executioners of the Mideast Sweep did not wait for their victims to turn themselves in.
“Why did you come to me, instead of going to the housing committee?”
That was a good question. Infinity realized that the answer was, he wanted an excuse to meet the cosmonaut face to face. He was embarrassed to say so.
“There are lots of empty houses, but they either belong to people or they’re just shells. Nothing’s been finished in a couple months. There’s hardly anybody left on the housing committee to do the finishing. Just a few Americans and a Canadian and a Cuban.”
“You are still here. You are Cuban, perhaps?”
“No. I use the U.S. passport mostly, but my father was Japanese and Brazilian and my mother was United Tribes, so depending on what rules I pay attention to, I can claim four citizenships.”
“And four political entities can claim your allegiance. Complicated.”
“It could be, but political entities don’t spend much time claiming allegiance from metalworkers turned gardener.”
“More fools they,” Nikolai Petrovich said.
“Anyway,” Infinity said, “I can’t ask the committee to put her in somebody’s house, because we’re all pretending everything is going to be all right and they’re coming back and the expedition will go on the way it’s planned.”
“Pretending?”
“Yeah,” Infinity said. “What else? If the defense department decides they want us, they’ll have us, just like they get everything else they want.”
“You are cynical.”
“I know how it works!” Infinity said. He fell silent, wishing he had not spoken with such bluntness.
Nikolai Petrovich walked along beside him in silence for a while. “You said... your mother was from the United States? The Southwest?”
Infinity shrugged. It did not mean much to be from one of the southwest tribes anymore. He wished he had not given Cherenkov the key to his background by bringing up the department of defense. They had ripped the southwest land away from the people who inhabited it, and in doing so they had ripped the heart and soul out of most of the people Infinity had been closest to.
“We will not speak of it further,” Nikolai Petrovich said, “and we will continue to pretend. So Ms. Brown has the choice of the guest house, or the first level of our hill. You wish me to help you persuade her to live in the hill.”
“I thought she’d like it. Especially the garden... I think the best I could get for her, for a while, would be a place with no windows yet, and mud puddles outside.”
“The garden you made for her is beautiful,” Nikolai Petrovich said. “I notice the changes.”
“I saw your footprints sometimes, where you stood to look at things. I wondered what you thought about it,” Infinity said, feeling unreasonably pleased. “It’ll look better when it’s finished. When it has time to settle in and grow for a while. The other thing is, there’s a welcome party tonight and if it isn’t going to be at her hill I need to tell people where to go. Or whether to go at all. Um, are you coming?” The invitation was general, but he had done a special one for Cosmonaut Cherenkov, and left it not only in electronic form on the web but in written form on his doorstep.
“I seldom accept invitations these days,” Nikolai Petrovich said in a neutral tone. Infinity did not know if that meant he was going to make an exception, or if he was put out to have been invited. “A party, you say. Is this sort of thing to become a common occurrence?”
“I don’t know. Depends on her, I guess.”
“Perhaps I should encourage her to stay in the guest house,” the cosmonaut said drily. “I value my privacy.”
“Oh,” Infinity said. “I didn’t... I mean — I’m sure it won’t get too noisy. I’ll tell people to keep it down.” He stopped. “I’m sorry.”
“Nichivo,” Nikolai Petrovich said. “The truth is I am seldom at home and I probably would not notice. I had planned to go away later.”
“Then you will talk to her?”
“I am here with you, after all,” the cosmonaut said.
o0o
Griffith returned to the guest house. He had ten kilobytes of notes filed away in the web, scrambled and guarded, and plans for a tour of the infrastructure tomorrow. An inspector for the Government Accountability Office had complete freedom, and no one on board to answer to.
In the hall, he hesitated. Beyond the central stairway, one of the occupied rooms stood open. Several people laughed, and someone spoke. Griffith frowned, trying to place the familiar voice.
He strode quietly down the hall.
“You see that I would not be such a disaster as a neighbor.”
“No one will come to visit,” a second voice said, a voice that was quivery, feathery.
“Give it a chance, ma’am.” The third voice belonged to someone who had grown up speaking Spanish and English both, and at least one other language that Griffith, to his annoyance, could not pin down. He walked past the open doorway and glanced inside.
“They will visit if you wish. Believe me. I had to train them very hard before they gave up and accepted me as a hermit.”
Griffith stopped, staring at the man who sat hunched on the window seat. Griffith was more familiar with him as he had looked when he was younger, but age could not distort the wide, high cheekbones, the square line of the jaw. It only intensified the unusual gray streaks in the man’s dark hair.
“My god!” Griffith said. “You are Cherenkov!”
The younger man jumped to his feet, startled; the elderly woman flinched. The old man turned toward Griffith.
“Yes.” His voice was as calm as before. “But I prefer my acquaintances to address me as Kolya. Who are you?”
“Griffith, GAO. I heard your voice, I recognized it. Sir, I just want to express my admiration for your exploits, your bravery — ”
“I was very young,” Cherenkov said. Suddenly he sounded tired. “Only young people are foolish enough for that kind of bravery. Will you join us? This is Mr. Mendez, who is an artist of the Earth. This is Ms. Brown, who has just moved here.”
“You frightened me,” the old lady said with frail dignity.
“I didn’t mean to,” Griffith said. He looked her up and down. Grandparents in Space was a program he intended to use against the expedition. With Ms. Brown as the program’s first member, he thought his attack would be even more effective.
“Will you have some tea?” Ms. Brown said.
The chance to talk to Cherenkov lured him in.
“Sure.”
As Griffith entered the room, Mendez sank down on the edge of the bed. Griffith could feel his attention, his suspicion, his fear. He was a strange-looking character, with long thick black hair tied up on the top of his head. He wore a couple of earrings and a grubby, fringed leather vest. Dirt was ground permanently into the knees of his pants. Pretending to be oblivious to the younger man’s discomfort, Griffith sat next to him. Cherenkov had the window seat, and Ms. Brown the only chair. The old woman leaned forward and tremulously poured another cup of tea.
“What is GAO?” Cherenkov asked. “I’m not familiar with that branch of the military.”
“GAO’s the Government Accountability Office, sir,” he said. “It isn’t military at all. I’m just here to do a few surveys. Check the outlays and so forth.”
“Ah. By your carriage, I took you for a military man.”
Griffith made himself chuckle. “Well, sir, the drill sergeant would accept that as a compliment. She said I was hopeless. I did my time, General, like everybody else.”
“Your sergeant drilled into you too much military courtesy. You must not call me ‘general’ or ‘sir.’ If you must use a title, ‘tovarishch’ will do. I still prefer ‘Kolya.’”
“I’ll try to remember, sir, er... Kolya. It wasn’t the sergeant who drilled that into me so much as ten years in government.” Cherenkov put him off balance. He sipped his tea to cover his discomfort, to conceal the intensity of his interest. He wondered if he could get Cherenkov to talk about the past without putting his own cover at risk. Griffith glanced at Mendez, sitting beside him and holding a teacup with surprising delicacy. “So you’re part of one percent for art,” he said.
“I’m a gardener,” Mendez said.
“But the general said — ”
“It was a joke,” Mendez said, looking down, embarrassed.
“A joke!” Cherenkov said. “Hardly. You are an artist, and my admiration is sincere. Floris, did you admire Infinity’s work when you walked through the garden?”
“I used to have roses,” she said. “But when I moved, there wasn’t any room for roses.”
“We don’t have too many roses up here yet,” Infinity said. “We needed ground cover first. Annuals are fastest. Roses take a while to get established, and they need a lot of hand labor.”
“Oh.” Ms. Brown’s voice was small and sad and disappointed.
“I could try to get some, though,” Infinity said.
Griffith decided the old woman was self-centered at best and getting on toward senile at worst, and he did not understand what she was doing here. The one percent program was bad enough; who ever heard of an art department on a scientific expedition? But grandparents? Next thing, they would be shipping kids up, or having their own. He supposed that if he were planning to create a generation ship he might want to begin with a complete age-mix. He filed the information away for further use.
“Floris,” Cherenkov said, “will you consent to be my neighbor for a week? If at the end of that time you prefer to move, I will speak to the housing committee on your behalf. I have some credibility here.”
She hesitated, watching him and blinking, like some elderly cold-blooded reptile waiting for the sun to warm her enough that she could move and think.
“They said I had to stay even if I didn’t like it,” she said. “I had to sign a paper.” She waited expectantly.
“Transportation is expensive,” Cherenkov said. “But papers can sometimes be changed. This I cannot promise, but if in a week you ask for my help in the respect of returning to Earth, I will do what I can.”
Though it would be better for Griffith’s purposes if Ms. Brown stayed, he thought Cherenkov would be doing the expedition a favor to have the old woman sent home whether she wanted to go or not. He could not imagine anyone refusing a request that Cherenkov made.
“I’d like to go to my house now.”
Ms. Brown made Griffith feel creepy, the way she responded to comments without really acknowledging them.
“Excellent,” Cherenkov said. “Infinity, I will entrust Floris’s comfort to you. I must hurry — I have another obligation.”
He left the room. Griffith put his cup down with a clatter and hurried after him.
“Sir! I mean, Kolya — ”
He caught up to Cherenkov, who continued without pause. The cosmonaut had a strange, careful way of walking, as if he feared that gravity would trap him forever on the ground.
“You said your name was Griffith,” Cherenkov said. “Is that your surname or your given name?”
“Surname.”
“And your given name?”
Griffith felt a blush rising. He had not blushed for years. He hoped his tan concealed it; he hoped Cherenkov did not notice. Then Cherenkov glanced at him, and Griffith knew that even if his tan did conceal the blush, Cherenkov noticed it.
“It’s Marion, sir.”
“It’s Kolya, sir,” Cherenkov said, mocking him a little.
“I don’t use my given name.” Griffith tried to keep his reaction cool, his tone cold.
“Everyone uses given names here. The informality is refreshing.”
Griffith kept his silence.
“You do not agree.”
“I think informality leads to sloppiness. There’s no clear chain of command here. I think that’s dangerous, especially in an environment as severe as space.”
“Spoken like a military man,” Cherenkov said, “or a government worker,” he added before Griffith could object. “But you are wrong. In such a self-contained environment, a certain democratic sloppiness can be turned to advantage. Why did you follow me?”
“You said you were going outside. Would you let me tag along?”
“Outside? I think not. That is dangerous without training.”
“Just to the staging area, I mean.”
“You may do that without my permission. The ship is open to inhabitants and visitors alike. You may be required to pass training to engage in certain activities, but no one is denied the opportunity to attempt the training.”
Griffith frowned. “That seems awfully loose to me.”
“Spoken like a true — government man.”
Griffith wondered again if Cherenkov were laughing at him, deep down under the intensity of his gaze. And yet even if the cosmonaut had pegged him as a military observer, what could he do? Exposed, Griffith might expect some uncomfortable moments. The more recalcitrant expedition members might denounce him. It would be verbal, not physical, abuse, of that he was certain. If Cherenkov blew his cover, Griffith would have to return to Earth. Having to send another observer could delay Griffith in implementing his plans. On the other hand, he already had most of the information he needed. A few more days...
He found it difficult to understand the core of resistance against the changes that had to occur. The deep space expedition was all very well when it was planned, two decades ago in a time of prosperity, civil international relations, and silence from the Mideast Sweep. All of that had changed. Starfarer had to change, too.
Griffith’s job would have been much easier if he had not had to deal with the researchers, the stubborn, self-centered idealists. As the starship had to change, the people had to change, too.
If Griffith could arrange to antagonize a few more countries into withdrawing from the expedition, the remaining personnel would not be able to continue alone.
He was doing a good job. No one would fault him for giving himself a few minutes. He wanted to get Cherenkov to talk about his experiences, and he knew it would not be easy. The general obviously felt no nostalgia for the past. Griffith held no power over this man; he could not demand a reply. He would have to be patient.
o0o
Kolya wished the young officer would follow someone else. It mattered little to him if Griffith were here under false pretenses. Kolya ignored politics with the strength of visceral aversion. He hated politics almost as much as he hated violence.
He also did not like to be followed. Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov had been followed by people who wanted to kill him and by people who wanted to worship him. The two experiences were not all that different.
He had become more and more private over the past two decades. One morning in the company of Infinity Mendez and Floris Brown tired him to a startling degree. The effort of remaining civil, pleasant, even cheerful, had drained him of the anticipatory energy he experienced before his spacewalks. Human contact affected him with a kind of sensory overload that only the emptiness and completeness of space could overcome.
Kolya entered the elevator to the outside, hoping Griffith would remain at the inner surface.
“It is boring and dark down there,” Kolya said. “Unpleasant. Stay in the sunshine.”
“It’s all right,” Marion Griffith said. “I want to see.” The officer stayed with him.
Griffith made Kolya uncomfortable. He showed too much interest in Cherenkov’s past. But Cherenkov did not exist anymore. Only Kolya existed. Kolya was not a pioneering cosmonaut or a heroic anti-terrorist or a terrorist traitor. Kolya was an old man who loved space.
The elevator fell through the inner skin of fertile dirt, through the underground water level, through the massive radiation-stopping shell of lunar rock.
Paying Griffith no more attention, Kolya analyzed his reasons for letting Infinity persuade him to talk to Floris Brown. What did it matter to Kolya if she lived on the bottom level of his hill, or in the guest house, or back on Earth, or out in the garden in the dew? Thanthavong never bothered him — she was no recluse, but she did spend all her time in the genetics lab. That was what she had come up here for, after all, to escape the demands of achievement and publicity and public adoration, to get on with her work. Like Kolya, but with more meaning to her life.
A lonely old woman living downstairs would demand attention, whether from Kolya or from others who would visit. Kolya could see nothing coming from the change but an invasion of his privacy.
He felt no obligation to offer anything to Floris, but Infinity was different. Kolya thought Infinity was far more admirable than any of the scientists, who worked in their minds, or he himself, who did not work at all anymore, except at tasks he chose, tasks that took him into space. It would have been possible to program an AS to do most of what Kolya chose to do, and an AI to do the rest. But no one had ever succeeded in programming an expert system to replicate a master gardener. To approximate, yes. Not to replicate. There was something about technological complexity, mechanical complexity, that machines could handle, and something about organic and aesthetic complexity that befuddled them. Kolya thought the gardeners, like Infinity, to be the most important people on board the starship.
The elevator stopped. Assuming a strong young military officer would be embarrassed to have his discomfort noticed, Kolya said nothing to explain the strange sensation produced by riding an elevator through a rotating environment. If Griffith had neglected to read his introduction manual on the way to Starfarer, that was his problem.
The artificial gravity was perceptibly stronger here, nearly one g. The radius of the cylinder’s outer skin was significantly longer than the distance from the axis to the inner surface. The increased radial acceleration increased the sensation of weight.
At the outer surface of the cylinder, the corridors were solid, rough, and ugly. Few people came this far down. If they wanted to space-walk, they went out at the axis and avoided the rotation. Kolya liked the rotation. He climbed into his pressure suit as Griffith watched.
“That doesn’t look too hard,” Griffith said, breaking the silence for the first time since they left the inner surface. “How long does the training take?”
Kolya had already drifted into the strange and vulnerable state to which he surrendered in space. Without a word, he stepped into the airlock and sealed it, leaving Griffith behind as abruptly as he had left Floris and Infinity.
The pump drew the air from the lock and back into the ship. Surrounded by vacuum, Kolya opened the outer hatch. He let the radial acceleration press him past the skin of the cylinder and into the harder vacuum of space. With the ease of long practice, he lowered himself onto the narrow framework that crept over the cylinder’s surface. He stood in the same orientation as he had inside the cylinder, with his head toward the axis of rotation. The outer skin of the cylinder lay a couple of meters above him. Nothing separated him from space except the cables of the inspection net.
Beneath him, the wild cylinder and the furled sail slipped past. Kolya sank to his knees, then inched flat. He let his arms dangle toward the stars. Someday, he thought, he would let himself slip from the framework and be flung away into space. But not quite yet. He was not quite ready yet.
Rotation took him out from between the cylinders. Before him, the stars made a fine, spangled sheet.
He lay there, still and silent, staring at the galaxy.