“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 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 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. “All 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 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 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. “A few. They worked all right.”
“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.”
“Not tonight, though.”
“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.
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 string 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.
o0o
On a hillside facing the amphitheater, Griffith watched Satoshi 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.
When Griffith reached the amphitheater, he could not find Cherenkov in the crowd. Disappointed, he stood in the shadows and watched.
o0o
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.
Stephen Thomas grinned. “Maybe I should look up some samurai symbols.”
“Maybe I should get 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.
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.
“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 tried 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!”
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 world. 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 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 burned 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,” Cherenkov 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 I 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.
“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.
o0o
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 preternaturally 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 Starfarer, 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?”
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 — ”
“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.”