Chapter 4

Gerald Hemminge’s disbelief erupted into the Chi like the blast of radiation from the collapsing dome.

“Land on Tau Ceti II? It’s out of the question!” he exclaimed.

He had returned to his post without a word of explanation for his abrupt departure, without even referring to it. His face looked scraped and irritated. A patch of chameleon bandage, nearly imperceptible, covered a spot under his jaw.

J.D.’s perception of him had changed now that she knew his failing. Instead of reacting to him as pompous and aloof, she pitied him. She knew she would find him even harder to deal with from now on.

“Don’t you think it’s time to cut our losses?” Gerald said.

J.D. pressed back against her couch, distressed by the prospect of another argument. She tried to center herself, seeking all the calm she could draw on. Stephen Thomas sat forward, ready with an angry retort. Victoria silenced him with a glance of warning. She had not yet transferred the transmission to public access, for which J.D. was grateful.

“No,” Victoria said. “It’s time to have something besides losses.”

“Chancellor Blades has repeated his request that you return to Starfarer,” Gerald said. “Several times.”

“Why doesn’t he tell us that himself?” Satoshi said.

“Because I’m the liaison, Satoshi. It’s my responsibility.”

“Please tell the chancellor that I appreciate his advice,” Victoria said. “But he has no authority over this department. “We’ve discussed the possibilities. We’re going to the surface of Sea — to Tau Ceti II.”

“It’s utterly foolish of you to stand on your team’s charter!” Gerald said. “These are extraordinary circumstances.”

“Of course they are. Anything that happened once we got here would be extraordinary circumstances. The charter exists for extraordinary circumstances.”

“You need all the expertise and advice available to you,” Gerald said, his voice curt. “You must come back to Starfarer for consultation.”

“Next stop, Earth,” Stephen Thomas said under his breath.

“We’re glad to hear anyone’s advice,” Victoria said. “That hasn’t changed. It won’t change.”

“I don’t know why I bother,” Gerald said. “I should have gone on strike the moment you mutinied —”

“Mutinied!” Victoria exclaimed. “This is a civilian —”

“ — and stayed out of the aggravation. I should get up and leave right now.”

“Why don’t you?” Stephen Thomas said.

“Because I take my responsibilities seriously, unlike other people I could name. You’ve caused the destruction of the most significant discovery —”

“Stop it!” All J.D. wanted was for the argument to end. “The dome collapsed because of the missile. We all know that.”

“You can’t prove it,” Gerald said.

“No. But tell me this. Do you believe the dome would have collapsed if we’d landed — but the missile hadn’t detonated?”

“No,” he said grudgingly.

“Nobody else has challenged that idea, either,” J.D. said. “Whoever left a welcome for us decided we weren’t worth welcoming. Can you blame them? They destroyed the information they left for us.”

“There’s no evidence of any concurrent destruction on the planet’s surface,” Satoshi said. “Not even any evidence for sentient tool-using beings native to this system.”

“The dome was a remote beacon, Gerald,” Victoria said. “It’s gone. Maybe Archaeology will be able to resurrect something, but there’s nothing left for the team to do here.”

“Then don’t do anything at all!”

“Doing something is our job.” Victoria’s smile was sad. “We’re going on a brief reconnaissance. A sample-collecting mission. Don’t worry about us.”

“I’m not —” He stopped. “I didn’t mean —”

“We all know what you meant,” Stephen Thomas said. “We appreciate your support a whole hell of a lot.”

“Stephen Thomas, we must behave in a professional manner. I know we’ve had our difficulties —”

Stephen Thomas laughed out loud.

“Just a minute, Gerald,” Satoshi said. “You can’t insist that we junk the expedition plans one minute, and insist on professional behavior the next.”

“Satoshi, I’m sorry, but we must admit that the expedition is a failure,” Gerald said.

“I’ll admit no such thing,” Victoria said, “and we’re back where we started. It’s pointless to go around in circles like this. We’re preparing for liftoff.”

She ended the transmission.

“I didn’t handle that well,” she said. “I didn’t handle it well at all.”

“You didn’t have much to work with,” J.D. said.

o0o

Preparing for liftoff included, among other things, straightening the kitchen. As she wiped off the table, J.D. giggled.

“What?” Satoshi said.

“This ought to be part of our record,” J.D. said. “Intrepid explorers on kitchen duty.”

“‘Wash the dishes, or no superluminal travel for you today’?”

“Exactly. All you ever read about in history books is the heroism, you never hear about the drudgery.”

“Right,” Stephen Thomas said. “Peary got the credit for getting to the north pole, but Matthew Henson did most of the work, and if they got to the pole at all he got there first.”

“When did you develop such an interest in ancient history?” Satoshi said.

“Researching our family.”

“Are we related to Peary?”

“Uh-uh. Probably not to Henson, either, though I thought we might be. I figured that Victoria and Grangrana must have heroic predecessors. So I was reading about intrepid black explorers.”

“We had heroic predecessors, all right, and they did come north,” Victoria said. “But they stopped in Nova Scotia for a couple of generations.” She fell silent, polishing a bit of counter top that was already clean. J.D. saw the worry return to her face. Like J.D.’s complex but remote family, and Stephen Thomas’s difficult father, and Satoshi’s exemplary parents, Victoria’s great-grandmother remained back on Earth with no way of knowing whether Starfarer, or anyone on board, had survived the military carrier’s assault.

Zev’s mother, Lykos, and the other divers and orcas could not even be sure he had reached the starship and joined the expedition. The military carrier had jammed Starfarer’s normal space communications for several hours before the starship reached transition.

Now the expedition was cut off from home. Communication was theoretically possible but thoroughly impractical, for only an enormous mass could reach transition energy. If it was possible to send electronic communications through transition, no one yet had figured out how.

Victoria carefully clipped the polishing cloth into its place so it would not drift around when they returned to zero g.

“Everybody get on your best behavior,” she said. Her voice and her demeanor had returned to normal. “We start transmitting as soon as we get back to the circle. I promise to try not to argue with Gerald anymore.”

o0o

The collapsed alien dome appeared in the middle of Infinity’s living space, then dwindled in the distance to a gray dimple on the silken surface of the satellite’s arid and airless plains.

“Look,” Esther said. “Arachne’s back.”

Infinity sat up in bed and watched the scene change as the Chi lifted off, transmitting the view behind it. The flat land gradually curved; the sharp horizon came into view, the bright silver gray of the rock stopping abruptly at the edge of the black sky. Within a couple of minutes, the holographic image displayed the entire satellite of Tau Ceti II.

The gray of the satellite intensified, turning blue, blue-green, brilliant white, as Arachne’s attention turned to Tau Ceti II and the planet’s image faded in over that of the satellite.

Infinity reached out to his link, checking the web. Arachne’s reply felt tenuous, tentative. The computer was testing itself, first diffidently transmitting the Chi’s hologram, now allowing a few essential people and services to interconnect while it tried its own strength. Infinity found himself near the top of the web’s access list. Being singled out made him uncomfortable.

He detached himself from the web, got up, and collected his clothes. Esther sat crosslegged in the tangle of sheets, watching him dress. He reached through the hologram to pick his vest up off the floor.

“I better get back to work. Make yourself at home.” He slipped into his vest.

“Are you going outside?

“I’ve been lounging around about enough.”

“What, six hours rest in the last two days?”

“Rest? Oh. Is that what you call it?”

Esther grinned. “I’ll come with you. Toss me my pants, will you?”

He did; she grabbed them out of the air and put them on without getting up, sticking her feet through the leg openings and into the air. She sat up and hitched the pants over her hips, then grabbed the fluorescent jacket and put it on again. She had left her shoes by the door

“I wish you’d signed up for the expedition,” Infinity said.

“I think I did,” she said, her tone dry.

“I mean formally.”

“Not enough flying involved,” she said. “The alien contact team didn’t request a pilot. And I’m a lousy gardener.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“No.”

“Would you want to help with damage control?”

“Sure.”

They left his house and walked through the garden, passing through the edge of the desert patch.

Infinity stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

He squatted beside the cactus and slid his fingers in between the thorns. Frowning, he stroked the leathery skin.

“It looks okay to me,” Esther said.

Infinity shrugged unhappily.

“Maybe it’s got cactus blight,” Esther said.

“It shouldn’t have anything. It’s cloned from a cell stock. Virus free.”

“Certifiers can screw up.”

“I hope they didn’t,” Infinity said. “If they made a mistake on this, they could make a mistake on the other stuff. If anything happens to the plants, we’re in big trouble. The ecosystem will crash.”

“It’s just a cactus, Infinity,” Esther said. “The ecosystem doesn’t depend on one cactus. How can you tell something’s wrong with a cactus, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Infinity said again.

“I thought you grew up in cactus country.”

“Me? No, I grew up in Brazil. I’ve never even seen a cactus in the wild.”

“Oh. Then I have more experience with cactuses than you do. And I can tell you, you can never be sure what’s going on with a cactus. I had one once, in a window box, and it was dead for six months before I noticed.”

Infinity stood up. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s just supposed to show you that cactuses never reveal whether they’re dead or alive. So yours is probably okay.”

“Or dead,” Infinity said.

He glanced back once as they left his garden. The skin of the cactus had felt spongy, not solid and firm as he had expected. He worried.

“How did you figure out there was something wrong with your cactus?” he asked Esther.

“The cat knocked it over, and it didn’t have any roots.”

Infinity winced.

The trail led past Florrie Brown’s house, a triplex built beneath a hill, with balconies and windows nestled against the slope. Professor Thanthavong lived in the middle house, and Kolya Cherenkov had the top floor. A field separated the house from the trail. Late crocuses, daffodils, and irises glowed in the grass, forming a carpet of Byzantine pattern and complexity. Hyacinths and lilies of the valley had just begun to poke their rolled outer foliage from the ground. The herd of miniature horses stood knee-deep in blossoms.

“They’re going to eat your flowers!” Esther exclaimed.

“That’s okay,” Infinity said.

“Wait a minute. You’re upset because one cactus might be dead, but you don’t mind the minis eating your flowers?”

“They’re mostly eating the grass. Besides, they’re supposed to eat the plants. The cactus isn’t supposed to die.”

Half the mares had foaled. Fillies and colts scampered and squealed, their hooves tapping the ground. They were no bigger than long-legged cats.

The herd’s stallion was a five-hand appaloosa with a temper in inverse proportion to his size. But at the moment he was standing on the porch of Florrie’s house, nuzzling Florrie’s hand, looking for treats. Fox, one of the expedition’s graduate students, scratched the little stud behind the ears.

Florrie saw Infinity and waved. Infinity waved back.

“Let’s go say hi,” he said to Esther. “Be sure she’s okay.”

“Sure.”

He left the trail and entered her yard, Esther beside him. They passed the newly-dug area where Infinity had put in rose bushes, protecting them with a spun-glass mesh on bamboo stakes.

“I remember her,” Esther said. “She was on one of the last passenger transports. Why’s she in mourning? I didn’t hear that anybody died.”

“Nobody did. She just dresses like that, mostly in black. She likes black eye makeup, too.”

At their approach, the appaloosa stud jerked away from Fox and Florrie, stamped his forefoot, snorted, and clattered off the porch. Squealing and nipping, he rounded up the patient, indulgent mares and their excitable foals. The herd moved ten or fifteen meters before the mares stopped to graze again.

Fox laughed. “You embarrassed him, you guys. He wasn’t enjoying himself, nope, not him.”

“We’ll have to plant him some carrots,” Florrie said.

On Fox’s arm, Florrie started toward Infinity and Esther. Moving carefully, she planted one foot on the porch and stepped sideways to the ground. Tiny bells, braided into one of the three long locks of her hair, jingled in a high register.

A hologram of Tau Ceti II followed her.

“Hi, Florrie,” Infinity said. “Hi, Fox.”

“Infinity.” Florrie’s voice, always soft, sounded feathery.

“This is my friend Esther Klein. Is everything all right?”

“Yes. Yes. I never thought — Esther, is it? Hello, do you know Fox? — I never believed I’d see this. A new star system, a new world.”

Infinity smiled. People reacted strongly, for or against, to the Grandparents in Space program. Infinity had always thought it was a good idea. It had taken Florrie a while to get her bearings here, and she was a little eccentric. Everybody on board Starfarer was eccentric. The quality had nothing to do with age.

Florrie was doing fine. Fox had practically adopted her. Or maybe it was the other way around.

“Thank you for the roses,” Florrie said.

“You’re welcome.” Roses took a lot of hand labor, a lot of care, but he did not begrudge it to her. “It might be a while before they bloom.”

“No,” she said. “Look.”

She moved to the bushes, where they could get a better look past the fence.

The white bud of a rose had just begun to open.

o0o

In the Chi, Victoria waited while Gerald Hemminge, brusque and disapproving, signed off after liftoff. She signed off in her turn, and transferred the public channel to an exterior view.

She let her breath out in a short, sharp sigh.

“No arguments, anyway,” she said. “This time.”

“That was masterful,” Stephen Thomas said.

If she had been in a gravity field, Victoria would have let herself flop back in her couch. As it was, in zero g, she reached over her head and grabbed the top of her couch, pulled herself back against the cushions, and shook herself all over.

“Masterful! I sounded like a zombie!”

“You did keep your voice flat. Restrained. Our friend Gerald, on the other hand, showed some evidence of tension.”

“I could barely understand him,” Zev said.

“He was doing his upper-class Brit number on us,” Stephen Thomas said. “It doesn’t even work on Victoria. It took me weeks to figure him out. He has this weird accent he can use. From a distance it sounds like perfect English. But when you try to listen to it, none of the words make any sense.” Stephen Thomas raised his chin and made an exaggerated “o” with his mouth. “Too many rounded tones,” he said, extending all the vowels. He did sound just like Gerald, nearly as incomprehensible. “You’re supposed to be intimidated.”

“I was confused,” Zev said. “I thought perhaps he was ill.”

Stephen Thomas laughed out loud.

“The accent used to intimidate me,” Victoria admitted. “Until I spent some time in England. It’s all a game. I quit playing it.”

Stephen Thomas let the image of Sea coalesce in front of him as he unbuckled his safety straps and floated out of his couch.

“I’m going to take a nap before we orbit.”

“It’s awfully early,” Victoria said.

“So?” he said impatiently. “What’s the big deal? I want to be rested when we land. Maybe having a black eye makes you tired.” He paddled through the micro-gravity and disappeared into the body of the Chi.

Frowning, Victoria watched him leave.

“I’ve never known him to take a nap during the day,” she said to J.D.

Satoshi chuckled. “Go to bed, yes, but sleep?”

“Maybe things just caught up with him,” J.D. said. “I know my physical energy feels low.”

Victoria felt physically and emotionally stressed, but intellectually aroused and on edge. She let go of the head-rest of her couch and stretched her arms forward, rounding her spine. Her vertebrae cracked, one after the other, an inaudible pitter-patter from the base of her neck to the small of her back. She wished Stephen Thomas had stayed a few more minutes. He gave the world’s best back rubs, and she could use a back rub just now. She wondered how hard it was to give a back rub in micro-gravity.

“I’m anxious to reach Sea.” Victoria raised her head and glanced across at J.D. “I keep hoping that something, somewhere along the line, will work out the way we planned for the expedition.”

J.D. managed to smile.

o0o

The holographic globe of Sea hovered in the center of the observer’s circle. Beyond the hologram, beyond the transparent wall, Sea itself grew perceptibly larger.

Alone in the circle, Victoria slid into Arachne’s web. It was like walking through a new house, all the rooms clean and uncluttered, a house as yet unfurnished.

How much did we lose? she wondered uneasily. If she had been walking, she might have stumbled at the sudden shock of apprehension. If the web crash had wiped out all the data bases...

She had stored her new transition algorithm outside the web. In fact the only place it was stored was outside the web. In a moment of sheer paranoia that had embarrassed her at the time, she had taken all her research on transition approach vectors, archived it in hard form, and erased it from Arachne’s memory. Only in retrospect were her actions eminently sensible.

Under ordinary circumstances, the web kept everything for everyone: research data, operating instructions, health profiles, meeting announcements, interdepartmental sports standings, love letters, recipes, entertainment schedules... everything.

Victoria tried to reassure herself. It could not all have been lost, or the ship would not now be functioning as well as it was. The web must want to increase its strength before it replaced all the multifarious sets of information from its continuous backups. The web had recreated its linkages, the paths along which information could travel and in which information could be placed.

And then, as she watched, and listened, and perceived, the web began to fill itself with information.

A sharp signal attracted Victoria’s attention. Avvaiyar, a member of the astronomy department, wanted to talk to her by direct connection. Victoria hesitated. Like most people, she found it unnerving to communicate with another person directly through the web links. Victoria could never quite escape her feeling that it was too intrusive, too close a communication.

But it was private, and under normal conditions it was very fast. Its speed was a major reason for Victoria’s trepidation: the speed made it too easy to say something without thinking about it first.

Stephen Thomas is the only person I know who can get away with talking before he thinks, she said to herself, and smiled.

Victoria connected herself to the web. With Arachne back on Starfarer and Victoria on board the Chi, the inevitable time-lag of distance both interfered with the communications speed and intensified Victoria’s discomfort. Now she could reply too quickly, and have to suffer through the lag while a message crossed space to its recipient, as yet unheard, but irretrievable.

“It’s the system survey,” Avvaiyar said, her voice as clear and as distinctive as if she were standing, invisible, nearby.

“That was quick!” Victoria replied.

“I’m not nearly done. Only five percent. But what I’ve found in the five percent — !”

“Tell me.”

“Look.”

Victoria took a bit of her attention and glanced at Avvaiyar’s representation of the Tau Ceti system. The web poured the information directly into her vision centers.

She jerked back, startled by the brilliance of the conical volume Avvaiyar had surveyed. Tangled brushstrokes of lambent blue filled space above and below the plane of the system, and faint fine strands passed through the plane, between the paths of the orbits.

“What!” Victoria exclaimed, more an expression of surprise than of confusion.

“It’s cosmic string,” Avvaiyar said.

“I know, but...”

“A whole skein of interstellar string. Even if the other ninety-five percent of the system is completely bare of the stuff, even if I just managed to luck onto an unusual concentration — ‘Unusual’!” Her strained, disembodied laugh made the image of the star system pale. “Victoria, it’s as if we drove out of the back woods on a gravel road, and ended up on the world’s biggest freeway interchange!”

It was wonderful. The false color of the strings twined above, below, and through the system. In the small mapped segment, fully ten separate strands twisted through space. The more kinks, the more possibilities for changing direction and distance. Her eyes closed, Victoria gazed with rapture at the map.

“Victoria?”

“I’m here. It’s amazing.” She looked closer, with a quick, startled laugh when she realized she had physically leaned forward, as if to bring herself closer to the internal screen. She would have thought she had far too much experience with the web to fall into that novice’s reaction.

The web interpreted her body language, and brought the image closer and larger in her mind.

“Does anything about it strike you as odd?” she asked Avvaiyar.

Avvaiyar laughed again, a low, hoarse chuckle. “Such as its being here at all?”

Victoria’s smile spun over the web to the astronomer.

“That, too,” she said. “But I mean, a pattern.”

Avvaiyar remained silent for several long seconds.

“I see what you’re saying,” she said. “But, Victoria... This is a very small part of the system. Let’s look at ten percent, at least, before...”

Avvaiyar’s voice trailed off; the link between them weakened. Victoria caught it and strengthened it with her own energy.

“...before we start speculating,” Avvaiyar said.

“All right.” Victoria did her best to keep her message calm, but excitement trembled along the edges of the link to Avvaiyar. “I’ll wait for at least ten percent before I start speculating that the alien beings put the string here... left it here, on purpose, for us to find.”

Avvaiyar’s presence gave the impression that she was drawing a deep breath, none too steady.

“Just in case, I’ll give the distribution to a statistician or several,” she said. “Can you apply your algorithm to some of the strands?”

“I need one more magnification of structural detail,” Victoria said. “Then, sure, if Arachne’s strong enough. I could put a couple of copies to work at once.”

“Do you want to pick the strands, or shall I grab some at random?”

Victoria brought the image even closer, and extended a probe into it.

“That one,” she said, choosing a straight streak of false color. “For simplicity’s sake. “And this one over here.” She touched two strings that intersected, tangling in a Gordian knot. “For the challenge. Then if Arachne can handle it, pick a couple more that look interesting to you. And the closest one.”

“I’ll send you the magnifications in an hour or so.”

“Thanks.”

After Avvaiyar’s presence faded from the link, Victoria sat silent and thoughtful, her subjective gaze directed at the radiant blue filaments.

o0o

Victoria sailed into the kitchen, grabbed a handhold, and swung herself to a stop.

“There you are!” she said to J.D.

“Here I am,” J.D. said. “I thought I’d make some dinner. Are you hungry?”

“No,” Victoria said. “Wait, yes, I am. I’m ravenous!” She giggled.

“Victoria, what happened?”

Victoria could not help acting silly. She felt immensely joyful.

What she wanted to tell J.D. burst from her like bubbles from champagne.

“J.D., we can go anywhere!”

J.D. listened in silence to Victoria’s description of Avvaiyar’s discovery. She worked methodically, steadily, finishing the preparations for dinner.

“This system is right in the middle of a concentration of cosmic string,” Victoria said. “As if someone were weaving a three-dimensional tapestry with it, using the orbits of the planets as the warp!”

The alien contact specialist appeared remarkably calm, almost indifferent, as she put sandwich filling inside pocket bread and squeezed the opening closed. Instead of spinning with excitement, she remained braced against the counter, her feet tucked into the steady-straps.

She looked up.

“It’s deliberate.” She began to smile.

Victoria moved: had she been standing, she would have drawn away. As it was, she started to rotate around her center of gravity. She reached out and stopped herself.

“I just meant we have a lot more possibilities. I’m not quite ready —” She stopped, surprised by her own reaction. “Yes, I am,” she said. “That’s just what I think. Avvaiyar doesn’t want to agree yet, but that’s what she thinks, too.”

J.D. gripped the edge of the counter. One of the pita sandwiches floated away. She grabbed for it, slipping her feet free of the steady-straps and diving into the air. When she turned toward Victoria, spiraling as if she were swimming underwater, she started to laugh. She skimmed past Victoria, caught herself easily against the wall, and stopped. She hugged Victoria, wrapping her strong heavy arms around Victoria’s shoulders.

“I was so afraid,” she said. “So afraid we only had one chance, and we ruined it...”

Victoria patted J.D.’s arm.

“We’re lucky,” she said.

J.D. snagged the sandwich out of the air without losing any of its filling. She handed it to Victoria with a zero-g mock bow: when she bent at the waist, her head moved toward her feet and her feet moved toward her head, as if she had dived again, in the pike position. She straightened, giggling.

“Have you told the others?” J.D. asked.

“Not yet. I don’t want to wake Stephen Thomas, but let’s go find Satoshi and Zev.”

“Okay.” J.D. wrapped the extra pita sandwiches into a packet and put them under a strap on the counter. “Those are ready whenever anyone wants them.”

“Stephen Thomas will probably be hungry when he wakes up. If Satoshi’s in the exercise room, he won’t want anything to eat for a few hours.”

“Zev’s always hungry,” J.D. said. “He used to visit me at my cabin and eat all the ice cream.”

Victoria bit into her sandwich, savoring the crisp vegetables. The hydroponics that cleaned and freshened the air and water of the Chi created a pleasant byproduct: fresh vegetables. Carrying her dinner, she headed out of the kitchen.

J.D., floating nearby, plucked an escaped leaf of spinach from the air, popped it into her mouth, and followed Victoria.

“I hope Stephen Thomas isn’t coming down with something,” Victoria said.

“That would be a shame.”

“Yes. But everybody always gets colds, every time a transport comes to Starfarer with some new bug. Once in a while a nasty strain of flu comes along as well.” She ate a bite of her sandwich. “J.D., how do divers interact immunologically with ordinary humans? What I mean is... is Zev in any danger from us? Could he catch a minor illness and get seriously ill from it?”

“I doubt it,” J.D. said. “The divers have evolved several of their organic systems. Their lungs. Their immune systems. Zev is less likely to catch anything from us than you are to catch it from any new group of people.”

“Good,” Victoria said, relieved. “I didn’t know. When it isn’t your own field, and you don’t know for sure, you worry.”

“Do you and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas have trouble talking about your specialties with each other?”

“Yes, it’s awful. Physics and geography and genetics are so far removed from each other. Once in a while our projects have weird little points of intersection. Some of the algorithmic work I do, for instance, and the work Stephen Thomas used to do with superconducting bioelectronics. He needed some multi-dimensional networking analogs —” She stopped, and grinned. “But you see what I mean, eh? I’m talking Old High Martian.”

“I don’t suppose it was intuitively obvious that the quickest-paths results and the electronics work would dovetail so gracefully.”

“No, it wasn’t... until after we did it.”

Victoria bounced off a wall, using the bounce to turn a corner and head toward the exercise room. Music filled the hallway, getting louder as she moved forward.

Trees sped past. Following the topography of a hilly road, they leaped upward, dropped downward, their leaves fluttering as if from the wind of their motion.

Satoshi, within the hologram, pedaled hard on the stationary bike. He wore nothing but shoes and a tight pair of riding shorts. Toe-clips secured his feet so he could expend energy on the extending stroke and the contracting stroke alike. Sweat covered his body with a fine sheen. A droplet reached the limit of its surface tension, formed a sphere, detached itself, and floated, quivering, toward the ventilator intake.

A fast drum rhythm filled the room: several drums, steel and leather, very loud.

Zev sat on the other bike, outside the hologram. He watched Satoshi for a moment, pedaled furiously, then stopped and let himself float off the seat. He had rolled his trouser legs up to his knees, exposing his bare, clawed feet and his brown, gold-furred calves. When he saw J.D., he let himself slip free of the bike and glided past her, brushing her shoulder with his fingertips.

“Satoshi!” Victoria had to raise her voice to be heard over the noise. “Stop! It’s making me dizzy!”

Satoshi glanced around and saw her. His eyelids fluttered once. The music softened. The hologram faded away.

“Hi,” he said. He stretched. “That’s better. I was beginning to feel the calcium jump right out of my bones.” He grabbed a towel and wiped his face and his chest. “And I needed to think.”

“I’ll never understand how you can think through all that racket.” Victoria smiled. “And when your brain is deprived of oxygen, too.”

Satoshi always claimed that he got some of his best ideas while running plus-spin — the hard, “uphill” way — around the inside of the campus cylinder.

“I thought it was loud at first, too,” Zev said. “But Satoshi said, feel it through your skin. He’s right. It’s almost like being back in the water. Now I understand about loud music.”

J.D. handed Zev half her sandwich. He bit into it, floating beside her in reverse orientation.

“I have something to show you.” Victoria let Avvaiyar’s map form in the middle of the exercise room, then watched in pleasure as Satoshi realized the implications of the information.

o0o

Quite late, Feral returned to the partnership’s house. It was lonely and silent, with the family gone. The distillation apparatus that Stephen Thomas had liberated remained in the middle of the main room, waiting for Stephen Thomas to keep his promise to Victoria to put it away. In time he planned to use it in making brandy from the wine he planned to ferment from the grapes of the vines he intended to plant.

Feral requested the broadcast from the Chi. As it came on, Victoria locked the visuals onto the planet, bid Starfarer goodnight on behalf of the whole team, and shut down the audio feed.

Disappointed not to see Stephen Thomas, Feral requested a repeat of a broadcast the Chi had sent earlier in the day. Arachne complied.

On the audio, Stephen Thomas discussed the possibilities of what they might find when they landed. Life: that was certain. Life teemed, abundant and obvious, on the surface of Tau Ceti II.

The image formed, overlapping the mechanical jumble of the still. Tau Ceti II appeared, ghostlike, with the still’s condensing tube sticking out of its north pole.

Feral laughed, moved the image to a clear space, and shrank it a bit. While he watched, he set to work dismantling the still.

Now and again the image switched to the observer’s circle, to Stephen Thomas. Feral noticed his friend’s increasing comfort in zero g; he noticed that the bruises around his eyes had begun the multicolored process of fading, and he noticed that his hands still hurt. Every so often, as he spoke, Stephen Thomas rubbed the skin between the first knuckles of one hand with the thumb and forefinger of the other.

Feral liked to watch Stephen Thomas; he liked to listen to him.

The scene cut away. While it played in the background, Feral made contact with Arachne and did some snooping. He had a good deal of experience at gleaning information from public records. First he browsed through biographies. Gerald Hemminge: a straightforward, academic-administrator resumé. Good degrees from upper-class British schools. An idiosyncratic tinge here and there: a three-month Antarctica International Park fellowship.

“Lucky bastard,” muttered Feral, who had applied for the same fellowship, and been turned down.

If Gerald Hemminge’s bio was faked, the fake had been done by an expert.

He looked up Griffith: nothing. Since Griffith was a visitor, there was no reason for his curriculum vitae to be on file. Arachne knew his date of arrival, his guest house room number, the reason for his visit. GAO accountant. Feral snorted. He did not believe Griffith was a GAO accountant. Nobody believed Griffith was a GAO accountant. Unfortunately, that did not mean he had crashed the web.

Feral skimmed the bios of everyone on board, flashing through them, hoping some anomaly would leap out at him. Part of the problem was that most of the members of the deep space expedition had achieved recognition before they ever arrived on Starfarer. Their bios were long, complicated, and littered with hypertext links to papers, commentaries, articles, exhibits, competitions. Avvaiyar, Iphigenie DuPre, Chancellor Blades, Crimson Ng, Chandra.

“They really did all this stuff,” he muttered. “If I didn’t know it, I’d think they were snowing me with information overload.”

Even Fox had published several papers as an undergraduate.

Feral had a talent for turning the defensive tactic of information overload back on itself, pulling out details people never meant to reveal. Tonight, though, his talent failed him.

Before he ever came into space, Feral had read the biographies of the members of the alien contact team. Nothing then, or now, struck him as suspicious. But he could hardly pretend to be objective about the alien contact team.

He picked out the other people who were, in his mind, the least likely to be spies, and he spent extra time looking at their bios. Kolya Cherenkov, cosmonaut and hero of the Soviet Union. Miensam Thanthavong, Nobel Laureate. Florrie Brown. Infinity Mendez. And Iphigenie DuPre, solar sail designer, millionaire, and the person hurt most deeply by the web crash.

He found nothing.

Tired and dispirited, Feral disconnected from Arachne. He sat crosslegged on the floor and watched Stephen Thomas talk about Sea.

“I like too many people here,” Feral said out loud. “I don’t want anybody to be guilty. Not even Gerald, the arrogant sod. Stephen Thomas, what am I going to do?”

The image of Stephen Thomas, of course, did not answer.

Feral let the repeat cycle a second time.

An hour later, as the broadcast ended, Feral finished storing away the still.

It was the middle of the night, and Feral was tired. He was hungry, too, but cooking for just himself was too much trouble. He went to the fourth bedroom, the room he had begun to think of as his. It looked just the same as when the family offered it to him. Back on Earth, he never made much change in his physical surroundings. He traveled too much; he seldom stayed at home. Nevertheless, this room felt like his.

He took off his clothes. The air was cold, and so were the sheets. Tonight was the coldest the weather had been since his arrival. It was the middle of spring on board the starship. Feral supposed the temperature would bounce down the thermometer once in a while before summer came along.

Pulling the blankets around him, he closed his eyes and waited for sleep. But once he got in his cold bed, he felt wide awake. The air was more of a draft than a breeze. Feral made himself lie still for a quarter of an hour.

Just relax, he told himself. Any second you’ll fall asleep. You’ll wake up with sunlight, starlight, Tau Ceti’s light, reflecting into your room.

He remained awake. Though he was used to sleeping alone, and had been too busy getting his career started to do anything but sleep alone for a couple of years, he felt lonely.

He threw off the covers, got up, and pulled the window shut. Outside, on the bank surrounding the yard and the garden, white carnations glowed in starlight.

Turning away from the window, he found he did not want to lie down again on the cold futon. Instead, he went to Stephen Thomas’s room.

The windows were open, and the room was just as cold and just as silent as the rest of the house. But the scent of incense lingered on the air, and the clutter of projects and clothing, the earring tree, the rumpled bed, made the room comfortable and friendly.

Feeling a bit foolish, Feral straightened the sheets and slid between them. The bed smelled like Stephen Thomas, like the faint musky incense of his hair.

Feral had never fallen for anyone, man or woman, as fast and as hard as he had fallen for Stephen Thomas Gregory. It was more than his extraordinary physical beauty. There was much more to him than that, charm and strength and intelligence, and self-centered vulnerability. Feral wondered if Victoria and Satoshi took their youngest partner too much for granted.

No point to feeling jealous: the connection between the members of the partnership was strong and solid. But Feral thought Stephen Thomas needed something he was not getting. Something had hurt him, and the wound had never quite healed. It was Feral’s intention to heal it, if he could.

o0o

Victoria slid her fingers between the door frame and the folding fabric that closed off Stephen Thomas’s room. The door opened a crack. The room was dark except for filtered blue light from Tau Ceti II.

The net of the sleeping surface hung loose, and Stephen Thomas drifted free outside it, his whole body relaxed, arms and legs extended, uncoordinated, as if he were floating underwater.

He probably would not hurt himself, but it was not particularly safe to sleep while floating around unrestrained. Victoria pushed off, came to a stop at his side, and put her arm around him.

“Stephen Thomas —” The heat of his body startled and scared her. “Stephen Thomas!” she said again, urgent.

“Huh? What?” He came awake slowly, sluggishly, his body hot, his skin dry. “What’s wrong?”

She held him; he struggled against her, as if fighting in a dream.

He relaxed suddenly: she was afraid he had fainted.

“Are you all right? Stephen Thomas!”

“Yes, what? What’s the matter? Lights, low.”

He sounded awake. In response to his voice command, the lights faded on and stopped at dusk. Stephen Thomas’s blue eyes had dilated to black.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, sure. Why do you keep saying that?”

He always woke up quickly, smoothly, with a languorous stretch. This awakening was different, discomforting.

“Because I was worried, eh?” she said. “You were in here floating around loose in the dark —”

“Was I?” He glanced toward the open sleeping net. “I guess I was. I had a dream, I was floating, and I got trapped...”

“Of course you did. You’re supposed to be trapped, and stay trapped, when you’re sleeping.” She put her hand to his forehead. Now he felt cold and clammy.

He flinched when she inadvertently touched the half-healed cut. He pushed her hand away.

“It’s still kind of sore, you know?”

“Let’s get you in some covers.”

“Okay.”

Stephen Thomas had a mild tendency toward hypochondria, and he enjoyed being fussed over. As long as he had nothing better to do, he never minded taking advantage of being ill. Satoshi had the opposite habit: on the rare occasions that he became ill, he invariably denied being sick.

“We don’t have time for you to catch cold,” Victoria said.

“I know it. But I haven’t finished my perfect cure yet.”

It annoyed Stephen Thomas, as it annoyed most geneticists, that they still could not cure common minor viral diseases. Thanthavong’s viral depolymerase had defeated most of the formerly fatal viruses, but the cure was unwieldy and unpleasant, involving as it did a deliberate infection with an artificial virus, and a couple of weeks of being very sick. For life-threatening diseases, the cure was worth it. But for the minor scourges of humankind, a depolymerase cure was worse than the illness.

Stephen Thomas shivered. Once he started, he could not stop.

Victoria towed him to his sleeping net and positioned him within it.

His patchwork quilt, a wedding present from Merry’s family, had floated free. Victoria retrieved it, fastened the quilt to the inner surface of the net, and tucked her partner in.

“Somebody must have brought a new strain of cold germ up on the last transport,” Victoria said. “Damn! I hope we don’t all get it.”

“My germs are thine,” Stephen Thomas said. “Thanks for the sympathy.” He really did look miserable, but that was partly because of the bruises. They had gone from black to livid purple, fading to sickly green at the edges.

“I’ll get you some flu-away,” Victoria said. “And some tea. You rest. Maybe you can fight it off, or maybe it’s a twelve-hour variety.”

Stephen Thomas pulled the quilt closer under his chin. “I hope so,” he said. “I’m not staying inside the Chi, that’s for sure.”

“Of course not,” she said.

But Stephen Thomas never responded very well to symptom-treating drugs like flu-away.

Victoria thought: Stephen Thomas will be awfully uncomfortable in his safe suit, where you can’t even blow your nose.

She left his room and went to get the medical kit.

“I’ll bet it’s Zev who’s got the flu,” she muttered irritably, uncharitably. “Probably some weird whale germ, and we’ll all catch it.”

She took a couple of medical patches back to Stephen Thomas: thermometer and flu-away.

He was already half asleep. Victoria stuck the thermometer to his skin, trying not to wake him, and watched with concern as the central numerals changed and the patch’s color intensified. Nearly forty degrees C.: much too high. She peeled the backing off the drug patch, pushed Stephen Thomas’s hair aside, and applied the patch behind his ear.

He winced, the bruised skin around his eyes tightening.

“I can taste it,” he said, sounding groggy. “Awful.”

“Let it work,” she said. “You’ll feel better in a while.”

She kissed him.

As she left him alone to sleep, she realized she had not told him about the string. She glanced back, but decided that the news would have to wait.