Chapter 2

Starfarer lay in the far distance, barely visible to the naked eye. Charge-coupled binoculars brought the ship into view, its dual cylinders spinning, the mirrors lined with light, the sailhouse an eerie glow floating among the cables, and beyond it all a silver line that soon would unfold into a tremendous solar sail.

oOo

Each house in the campus cylinder of Starfarer lay underground, partly hidden by a low hill, daylit by one whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the house where Victoria lived, her partner Satoshi Lono trudged into the main room, looking for coffee, anticipating its smell. Grass mats rustled under his bare feet. He yawned. He had stayed late at a lab meeting, with no solution in sight to the problem of one of his graduate students. Fox could not apply for a permanent position on the expedition because her twenty-first birthday fell six months after the starship’s departure.

When the meeting ended, knowing he would not be able to sleep, he had spent several more hours on the web, analyzing map complexes. When he finally slept, he dreamed those maps. Bright images of stacks of contour descriptions still filled his mind.

He stopped.

A weird piece of equipment stood in the middle of the main room. The AS that cleaned the house circled the contraption, like a cat stalking a gigantic insect. The AS rolled forward, its antenna outstretched. It backed off and circled again.

The piece of equipment, complicated in form but primitive in design, consisted of twisted glass tubes fastened together and supported by a metal rack. The feet of the rack dug into one of Satoshi’s better grass mats.

The AS, hovering, tapped the glass tubes again.

“It’s all right,” Satoshi said. “Look at it and remember it and leave it alone.” The AS hesitated, assimilated the information, then rotated and rolled away. When the partnership first got it, it had had the same reaction to, and the same instructions about, the shirts Stephen Thomas stored on the floor. Satoshi wondered how Stephen Thomas so often contrived to leave things lying around that the cleaner could not figure out what to do with. Satoshi liked living in a neat environment. It irritated him to be put in the position of having the urge to pick up after one of his partners.

“It’s too early for this,” Satoshi muttered. Deciding to assimilate his own advice, he detoured around the mess in the middle of the main room and stopped in the kitchen nook, wondering what had happened to his coffee.

He was not at his best in the morning.

Everything did not always go exactly as planned on Starfarer. The campus was rough and new, the equipment at the shakedown stage. But the kitchen nook was hardly leading-edge technology. It should have had his coffee ready for him. Instead, the pot stood on the counter, half full of cold, malodorous dregs. He poured it out and started over.

Stephen Thomas strolled into the main room, put his arms around Satoshi from behind, and rested his chin on Satoshi’s shoulder. His long blond hair tickled Satoshi’s neck.

“Good morning.”

“Did you drink my coffee?”

“Huh? I drank some last night when I got in, why?”

“Dammit — !” Satoshi woke up enough to be irritated. “You could have left it the way you found it.”

“I didn’t think of it. It was late and I was tired.”

“It’s early and I’m still asleep!”

“God, all right, I’m sorry. I’ll make you some.”

“It’s done now.” Satoshi took the cup to the table and sat in a patch of sunlight by the sliding windows. He deliberately ignored the contortion of glass tubing.

For the thousandth or the millionth time, he missed Merit. Times like these reminded him of before the accident, when the everyday details of the partnership ran smoothly, practically unnoticeably, under Merry’s management. It was weird how something as inconsequential as a cup of coffee could bring back the grief. He hunched his shoulders and sipped the bitter coffee and tried to put the feelings away.

Satoshi loved Stephen Thomas, of course, but living with him the past couple of weeks had not been easy. Satoshi could not figure out why his youngest partner’s idiosyncrasies and occasional blithe self-centeredness bothered him more with Victoria away.

“You’re mad at me,” Stephen Thomas said.

Satoshi took a gulp of coffee. “No, I’m not. Yes, I am. I don’t know. It’s early and I’m still tired and I just wanted some coffee.”

“I offered to make you some.”

“You give strangers more respect than you give the people you sleep with.”

Stephen Thomas laughed and kissed him. “I respect you in the morning. Except maybe right after you wake up.” He left Satoshi sitting in the sunlight, returned to the kitchen nook, and started opening drawers and cupboards looking for something for breakfast.

Satoshi made allowances for Stephen Thomas. He thought of Victoria as the strongest one in the partnership, and of himself as the calmest in a crisis, and of their younger partner as the most flighty. But only Stephen Thomas had kept his center after the accident. Satoshi doubted the partnership would have survived without him.

He wished he could get coffee to taste right. Starfarer was not yet self-sufficient for food; half of what they used they had to import, not from Earth but from the O’Neill colonies. Maybe coffee plants could grow properly only on Earth, the way some types of vegetables and fruit grew properly only in certain places. Like Walla Walla onions. No amount of research or experiment ever reproduced that sort of biological synergy.

Satoshi found it some comfort to suspect the existence of unknowable secrets, like perfect coffee, Walla Walla onions, and his younger partner’s lab equipment.

He would be glad when Victoria got home. It seemed like forever since they had talked. Before she left they had all agreed to communicate via the web, which was relatively cheap, rather than by voice link from Starfarer to Earth, which was expensive. What with the eagle eye being kept on campus expenses, everyone was on their best behavior about keeping personal calls on their own accounts.

She’ll be back soon, Satoshi reminded himself. She’ll even be back in time for the solar sail’s first full test.

Stephen Thomas returned from the kitchen nook carrying a bowl of white rice with a raw egg on top, a plate of pickles, and a cup of milky tea. He knew better than to offer any of it to Satoshi.

“I miss her, too,” he said.

“Yeah,” Satoshi said, then, “dammit, I wish you wouldn’t do that. It bothers me, and it drives Victoria crazy.”

Stephen Thomas laughed. “You guys act like I was reading your minds. I don’t read minds — ”

“Of course not, but you do answer questions before people ask them, and you comment on things people haven’t even said yet.”

“ — I read auras.”

Satoshi groaned. He wished Stephen Thomas would stop this silly joke, even if he believed it, because it did nothing either for his credibility or for that of the alien contact team. Stephen Thomas was unusually sensitive to other people’s moods and feelings — when he wanted to be. That, Satoshi believed. But he did not believe Stephen Thomas could see something nonexistent.

“Let’s splurge and call her,” Stephen Thomas said.

Satoshi sipped his coffee, tempted.

“Come on,” Stephen Thomas said. “She’s on the transport, it won’t cost that much.”

“Okay.”

They connected with Arachne.

Because the hypertext link was on, as usual, the web boxed recent references to Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. The screen refreshed, adding a new article about the banquet that British Columbia’s premier had hosted in Victoria’s honor. Curious, Satoshi brought it up to read.

“Oh, my god,” he said.

“What?”

“Look.”

“Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: ‘No.’

“Last night, British Columbia’s premier hosted Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, the Canadian physicist-astronaut who heads the deep space expedition’s alien contact team, at a formal dinner. This is Fraser MacKenzie’s last trip to Earth before Starfarer departs for an alien star-system, overcoming relativity’s limits on speed and achieving superluminal transition energy via the ‘cosmic string’ that has moved within range of our solar system during the past decades.”

“Cosmic string” and “superluminal transition energy” were highlighted, indicating that the reader could obtain fuller explanations of the terms through the hyper. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas continued reading the main body of the article.

“After dinner, Fraser MacKenzie conversed informally with the premier and others about the expedition. The first question put to her concerned the U.S. proposal that Starfarer be converted into a mini-O’Neill colony, to help relieve Earth’s population pressure. Fraser MacKenzie acquitted the starship’s cause well, pointing out that the O’Neill colonies were constructed not as population valves, but as bases which would create and supply the necessities: food, water, air, and shelter from the vacuum, in order to permit human beings to live in space without draining Earth’s resources.

“‘Starfarer,’ Fraser MacKenzie stated, ‘is much smaller than the existing O’Neills, neither of which have made any difference whatever in the population of Earth, nor were ever intended to.’ She also explained cogently why the starship had to be large enough to sustain its own ecosystem. ‘Sending the expedition out in a traditional ship would be extremely costly,’ she explained. ‘The starship was created out of leftover lunar material from the O’Neills. By living within a functional ecosystem, we can plan to be self-sufficient. Madame Premier, we hope to return within a year or two, but the truth is that we have no idea how long we might be gone. We don’t know what we’re going to find or how far we’re going to have to go to find it. If we set out with nothing but processed stores, we run the risk of running out of everything: food, water, and air. Mechanical recycling, as on a traditional ship, isn’t efficient enough.’

“It was at that juncture that the premier asked Fraser MacKenzie for a description of the benefits to be gained from the expedition, and Fraser MacKenzie declined to offer one.

“The premier, reacting with surprise, pressed her for a more complete reply to her concerns about what the country might expect to gain from our enormous investment.

“‘Madame Premier,’ Fraser MacKenzie said, ‘I cannot tell you what scientific advances will result from the deep space expedition. If I could, there would be no need for us to go on the voyage at all. I could speculate,’ Fraser MacKenzie continued. ‘So could anyone with a minimal level of scientific literacy. But speculation is a game. The history of humanity is a record of explorations intended for one purpose that have completely different effects. People didn’t walk east across the Bering land bridge, or sail west across the Atlantic, because they expected to find North America. We didn’t go to Mars expecting to break through to superconducting bioelectronics.’

“The premier pointed out that we did go to Mars with a purpose in mind. Fraser MacKenzie agreed, and suggested that anyone who wished could access a library database and inspect half-a-thousand gigabytes of information on the experiments already planned for Starfarer. However, Fraser MacKenzie would not describe any benefits that would surely accrue to society on account of these experiments.

“The head of Starfarer’s alien contact team offered two reasons for her refusal. The first was the pure science mode of many of the proposals. ‘Science,’ she insisted, ‘is not meant to create useful applications of scientific knowledge.’ Her second reason was more esoteric. ‘A proven hypothesis may have useful applications,’ Dr. Fraser MacKenzie stated. ‘However, a scientist does not do an experiment to prove a hypothesis. A scientist does an experiment to test a hypothesis. You may guess about the answer that nature might give back to you. You may even hope for nature to give you a particular answer. But you can’t know what answer you’ll get until you’ve performed the experiment. If you did, or if you thought you did, you’d be back two thousand years when experimentation was looked upon as unnecessary and vulgar, or, worse, back a thousand years when belief was more important than knowledge, and people who challenged beliefs with knowledge were burned at the stake.’

“The premier observed that the new president of the United States, Mr. Distler, occasionally behaved as if he would like to consign research scientists in general and scientists attached to Starfarer in particular to precisely that fate. Fraser MacKenzie admitted that she had, on occasion, felt singed by some of his comments. ‘Science involves risks,’ she explained. ‘One of the risks involved is that of failure. President Distler, unfortunately, chooses not to acknowledge the possibility of risks, or of failure.’ Fraser MacKenzie added that she did not expect the expedition to fail — after all, her life will be at risk if it does fail. But the risk of failure is a possibility.

“The premier then asked Dr. Fraser MacKenzie if one risk could be that Canada’s investment in the starship might result in no benefits at all.

“Victoria Fraser MacKenzie replied with a single word: ‘Yes.’“

Satoshi read the article, frowning, but Stephen Thomas laughed with delight.

“About time somebody said straight out that we’re not up here to discover the twenty-first century version of Teflon!”

“The Teflon hypothesis slides down more easily.”

“No, it’ll be great. People love mystery, and that’s what we’re heading for.”

“I wish you were right,” Satoshi said. “But you’re not.”

“Hey, Satoshi?” Stephen Thomas said.

“Hmm?”

“Does Victoria really talk like that when she’s in Canada, or was it just the reporter?”

“A little of both. You’ve been to Vancouver with Victoria, didn’t you notice she uses more Canadian and British speech habits there?”

“I noticed her accent got stronger, but I was putting most of my energy into trying to make friends with her great-grandmother. For all the good it did me.”

“Grangrana’s okay. She disapproves of the partnership in theory but she likes us as individuals.”

“She likes you. She’s not so sure about me,” Stephen Thomas said, with his usual certainty about the accuracy of his perceptions. “Why did the article keep calling Victoria ‘Fraser MacKenzie’?”

“They don’t much go for middle names — that’s a British tradition, I think. They figure Victoria’s got one of those unhyphenated double last names. Like Conan Doyle.”

“Wonder what they’d do with my name?”

“Probably figure you didn’t have any last name at all.”

Stephen Thomas laughed and hit him, light and playful, in the ribs.

The message filter suddenly beeped and started to fill up with call requests, mostly from strangers, mostly from people outside Starfarer, and mostly for Victoria. Satoshi sifted through them.

“Good lord,” he said. “If we call these people back, we’ll use up our communications budget for the next six months.”

“Call them collect,” Stephen Thomas said. “And tell them Victoria isn’t here.”

“How to win reporters and influence public opinion, by Stephen Thomas Gregory,” Satoshi said.

oOo

The message filter in Victoria’s cubicle signaled and then sang. Still half asleep, disoriented by darkness, Victoria tried to sit up. The restraints of her sleeping-web held her gently in place and she remembered where she was. A streak of light fell across her; the fabric door did not quite close.

“Answer,” she said. “Hello?”

After the short time-delay, Satoshi spoke.

“Love, have you seen the news today?”

“I’m not even awake yet.” She was surprised to hear his voice. “I think I slept the clock around. What time is it? Never mind, what’s up?” she said quickly, not waiting through the reply delay of Starfarer communications laser-to-satellite-to-transport and back. She did not want to waste expensive time on trivialities.

“You have a huge slug of messages from admirers of your interview,” Stephen Thomas said.

“What interview?”

“I’m not sure you can call them all admirers,” Stephen Thomas said.

“Some are from people up here,” Satoshi told her, “but a lot are from Earth.”

Victoria waited through the delay. She and Satoshi had perfected the technique of holding two simultaneous conversations on the communications laser, letting their comments cross and recross, one exchange being held during the reply delays of the second. To his own irritation, Stephen Thomas had not quite got the hang of it. Keeping him in the discussion, Victoria restricted herself to one line of thought and talk.

“The web’s reporting on your banquet,” Satoshi said. “And your conversation with the premier. You’d better look at it. They emphasized your not wanting to speculate on what benefits Starfarer might bring back.”

Victoria felt a hot flush of embarrassment spread across her face.

“I’ll read it, of course. I thought I was having a conversation, not doing an interview for the record. Nobody was introduced to me as a reporter, and who ever reports Canadian news, eh?” She sighed. “I never met the premier before. She’s honorable, I admire her. I wanted to tell her the truth, so she could understand what it is we’re about.”

With growing unease, she waited out the delay. Despite her cynical remark about Canadian news, she should have realized that anything the head of Starfarer’s alien contact department said to the premier of British Columbia was fair game for reporters.

It was late and I was tired and keyed up, she told herself. And then there were those toasts...

But I know better, she thought. I know better than to let my guard down, ever, and still sometimes I do it. What is it about people? Why do they prefer it when we claim we know everything? What’s wrong with the truth, that not everything’s been discovered?

“I understand what you were trying to do,” Satoshi said. “But I wonder if there’s any way to downplay it after the fact?”

“Oh, bull,” Stephen Thomas said. “Don’t do that! You said just what needed to be said, Victoria, and anybody who doesn’t back you on it has shit for brains.”

“I can defend my comments. I can’t retract them, Satoshi, not if I was quoted correctly. And it sounds like what I said is what got reported.”

Victoria was glad of the privacy scramble that kept inquisitive types with backyard antennae from listening in on laser calls. She had more or less become accustomed to the casual profanity Stephen Thomas used, but in public it still embarrassed her. And the first time he swore in front of Grangrana...

“We just wanted to make sure you’d seen the article,” Satoshi said. “So you’d have some warning if people pounce on you about it. We’d better get off the line. I love you. Goodbye.”

“Wait,” Stephen Thomas said. “Did Sauvage finally show, or not? And I love you too.”

“Yes, she’s on board. I’ll tell all about that when I get home. It’s complicated. I love you both. I wish we had a picture. Bye.”

She ended the connection.

Why did I feel so comfortable about telling the premier the cold hard truth about science? Victoria wondered. I was ready to back off if I picked up disapproval, if she wasn’t prepared to hear it.

She had not picked up on disapproval because the premier had not shown any. Whatever her reactions to Victoria’s comments, she had let Victoria make them. She had listened, and Victoria still believed she had understood.

Victoria closed her eyes, linked with the web, and let it play the article behind her eyes. When it ended, she decided it had been written without malice, but with an eye for the flashy line.

Victoria sighed and unfastened the restraint net. She wished she were already home, in bed with Satoshi and Stephen Thomas. She felt so lonely. She grabbed her shirt and struggled into it and swiped her sleeve across her eyes, pretending her vision had not blurred. Right now Satoshi and Stephen Thomas were almost as far out of her reach as Merry. But she was on her way home.

oOo

Chandra left the inn and used the pedestrian tunnel to cross beneath the highway. The cold damp tunnel smelled of cement. On the other side she stepped out into dry hot sunlight. Traffic rushed past on the magnetic road behind her. All last evening the other guests had babbled interminably about the good weather. Chandra, however, felt cheated. She had come to visit a rain forest. She expected rain.

She started recording, waited until the nerve clusters gnarling her face and hands and body started to throb, and stepped beneath the trees. The light dimmed to a weird gold-green, and the temperature dropped from uncomfortably hot to cool. She hurried deeper into the forest, hoping to outdistance the sound of the traffic as well as the next group of visitors. At first she walked gingerly, preparing for pain to catch up to her, waiting for the dullness of too much medication. To her surprise, her body worked fine, swinging along the trail. She had balanced the pills perfectly against the pain, astonishingly intense, of having spent all the previous day on horseback. This morning the muscles of her inner thighs had hurt like hell. Until she took a painkiller she could barely walk.

Time pressed too hard for her to give herself a day off to recover, so she masked injury with drugs and hoped to get the dosage and the mixture right. If she had to wipe any recordings because of distorted body reactions, those images would be lost forever.

Chandra intended never to repeat an experience. She could relive them on recording, if she felt like it, but she wanted every bit of reality to be new.

The nerve clusters that ridged her face felt hot and swollen.

She left the sunlight behind. Inside the forest, the light possessed more dimensions. The trail led through cool green shadows. To her left, dusty gold light hung suspended in a shaft that passed through a rare break in the cover. In every direction, great treetrunks stretched a hundred meters high. Chandra stepped off the path, though she was not supposed to, and spread her arms against a tree she could not begin to span. Three people might have reached halfway around it.

Moss covered the bark. She rubbed her cheek against it. Its softness astonished her. She compared the feel to feathers, to fur, but neither description acknowledged the gentle green irregularity. She looked up. Every branch bore a coat of moss that looked like it had dripped on, then begun to solidify. The ends of the branches, the new year’s growth of intense green needles, had begun to outdistance the relentless creep of the moss. When the branch stopped growing for the season, the moss would catch up. The cycle would continue, another turn.

Some other artist would have watched the tree long enough to detect the growth of the moss. With a few hours’ observation Chandra could have stored enough images for fractal extrapolation. But she had no interest in electronic manipulation of the images she collected. She edited when she wanted to — she despised no-cut purists — but her aim was to collect as many images as she could, as accurately as she could, to preserve every sensation and impression. She rose and walked farther, deeper into the jungly forest.

The sounds of vehicles faded. The tourists passed beyond her hearing while she stood out of sight off the trail. More people would soon follow. She wanted and needed solitude. Not even the Institute had been able to persuade the park service to close the park and the highway for a few hours while she made her recordings. It had been difficult enough to get an entry reservation out of turn. Ordinary people, tourists, signed up two years in advance.

Knowing she would be ejected, perhaps arrested and prosecuted, if anyone detected her presence off the trail, Chandra moved on.

She passed into a silence different from any she had ever experienced. It was a cool, damp quiet, far from total. A stream, rushing steep from pool to pool, created a transparent wash of background. The electronic Doppler of a passing mosquito added a bright sharp line. An invisible bird warbled an intermittent curtain of sound. Chandra sat on the bank of the stream and let the smell and sight and sound and feel of the rain forest permeate her body. She gathered in the foaming rush of negative ions. The whole world smelled green.

At the top of the slope, the waterfall split. One rivulet splashed into a bubbling, swirling cauldron of water whitened by the agitation. The other spilled over a curved stone and ran smoothly into a still, clear pool. When she leaned over, her translucent grey eyes peered back at her.

Chandra stripped off her clothes. Naked, she climbed down the bank and slowly thrust herself into the frigid water. The numbing coldness crept up her gnarled feet and along her nerve-streaked legs. The flowing water rose into her pubic hair, lifting it as if with a static charge. She never hesitated when the icy stream touched her powerfully sensitive clitoris. She gasped and sank in deeper. Her nipples were always erect from the extra nerves; now they throbbed and ached as the water caressed her. Her toes dug in among the round, smooth stones.

She let the chill seep into her till all pleasure faded. She shivered uncontrollably, as if the glacier upstream had taken over her whole body. She turned and clambered awkwardly onto the bank, too numb to feel stones or roots, almost too numb to grab them and haul herself from the water.

The stream made a narrow break between the trees. A bit of sunlight crept in through the leaves. Chandra crawled to it and collapsed, exhausted and trembling and elated by what she had captured. As she sprawled in the sunlight, trying to regain the full use of her body, she could not resist replaying the stream’s sensations.

When the playback ended and her experiential body rejoined her physical form, she shuddered with the shock of the change from intolerably cold to nearly warm again.

As she rested, seeking the strength to rise and continue, she stretched out to touch everything within her reach. The range of softnesses in the forest amazed her: the green and feathery softness of the moss, the crisp softness of a tiny-leafed vascular plant growing amidst the moss, the unresisting plasticity of a circle of slime mold. The top of a fungal shelf felt like damp velvet. A slug glistened out from beneath a fallen branch. It was slick as wet silk, but it left behind a sticky, insoluble secretion on her ridged fingers.

A mosquito landed on her arm. She watched it dispassionately. Unlike a fly, it wasted no time with careful grooming. It set itself among the fine dark hairs and plunged its proboscis into her skin. She submitted to the thin, keen pain. She had read that the insect would bite, drink, and neutralize its own hemolytic enzymes before it withdrew.

The mosquito had read different texts. It filled itself with Chandra’s blood and whined away; then Chandra watched the itchy lump of the mosquito bite swell and darken. She concentrated on the unpleasant sensation.

When she had added the bite to her store, she realized that the cold of the stream had brought back the ache of her muscles. She quickly disconnected the recording, grabbed up her clothes and fumbled through her pockets, took another pill, and waited for the soreness to dissipate. She reconnected and got dressed as if nothing had happened.

Chandra climbed the stream bank and entered the trees again. Ferns grew in clumps and clusters, but the ground level was surprisingly clear. She had to make her way around an occasional enormous fallen tree. Whenever a tree fell, it opened a passage for sunlight and encouraged new growth. Saplings sprouted on the logs, then grew to full-sized trees, reaching around and to the ground with long gnarled roots. Sometimes the nurse log rotted away completely, leaving a colonnade of six or eight trees rising on roots like bow-legs.

Disconnected from the web, Chandra passed through the forest in ignorance of the names of most of the plants. She wanted to make a record of perceptions uncolored by previous knowledge. Anyone who wanted to use her piece as a study tape could do so by hooking into the web and requesting an information hypertext link. Chandra thought that would be like using a Rembrandt as a color chart.

Ahead, the sun streamed through a break in the upper story of the forest, illuminating a cluster of large, flat leaves that glowed gold-green. Light shimmered over the thick silver hairs covering their stalks. Chandra walked toward the plant, concentrating on its color, on the way the leaves spread themselves to the light, each parallel to all the others, as if the bush were arranged and lighted by some alien attention.

The silvery covering on the stems consisted not of soft hairs, but of sharp, wicked thorns. Chandra touched one with the nerve-thick pad of her forefinger. Like the mosquito, the thorn pierced her skin. The pain of the stab burst into acid agony, and she had to exert her will to keep from snatching her hand away. Her blood welled in a glistening drop around the thorn, spilled thick and warm down her finger, and pooled in her palm.

She expected the pain to fade. Instead, it increased. Her hand burned. Angry at herself, she jerked away from the thorn: too fast. Its tip broke off beneath her skin. She snarled a curse and put her hand to her mouth, trying to suck out the point. Her blood tasted bitter, as if it were poisoned.

Pain and shock separated Chandra from terror. Though her hand felt hot, the rest of her body felt as cold as if she were still in the pool. Chandra stumbled away from the gold-green plant. She had no idea which direction to move to meet the trail. If she kept going she must hit it eventually, for it made a complete circle, and she was inside. Hoping to extricate herself, she kept going as long as she could.

The thorn bush disappeared behind and among a thousand tall, straight tree trunks. Chandra sank to the ground. The illusion of softness disappeared when the rotting evergreen needles poked through her clothes and scratched her skin.

She cursed again and sent a Mayday to the web.

She waited.

Pain altered Chandra’s perceptions. Time stretched out to such a distance that she feared she would use up all her sensory storage. Yet when she checked the remaining volume, she had filled it only halfway.

She heard the ranger approach; she raised her head slowly. He towered above her, scowling.

“Whatever possessed you to leave the trail?” His face wavered. When it solidified again, it carried an expression mixed of pity and horror. “Good lord! What happened to you?”

She lifted her hand. Blood obscured the swelling. He knelt down and looked carefully at the place where the thorn had penetrated.

“I got a lot of good stuff,” she said, to reassure him and herself.

“You stuck yourself with a devil’s club thorn,” he said, both unimpressed and contemptuous. “But...” He touched the other swellings, the ridges of nerves tracing her fingers and palm.

“That isn’t part of it,” Chandra said. Talking tired her. “I mean, it’s part of me.” She took a deep and frustrated breath and blew it out again. “Don’t you know who I am?” Exhaustion tangled her words. “I’m supposed to be like that.”

He was staring at her eyes. The biosensors covered her eyes with a film of translucent grey.

“My eyes, too,” she said.

The ranger kept his expression neutral as he returned her to the lodge.

Chandra slept for a long time. When she woke, the medication had caused her hand nearly to finish healing. Only a residual swelling remained, but it was enough to squeeze the accessory nerves and disrupt all her finer sensations. As for the pain, it had faded till the persistent ache took more of her attention.

She spun into the web. Her agent and her manager were fighting with each other, the one urging her to take care of herself, the other urging her to get back to work. Ignoring them both, she called for her schedule to look at which experiences had been arranged, which arrangements were causing problems, and what she might have to rearrange. She resented the delay, but her results would be worth it.

She thought she would still have time for the sea-wilderness visit before catching the spaceplane to Starfarer. The starship contained no oceans, only shallow salt marshes and freshwater lakes. Chandra wanted to collect diving beneath the ocean before she left Earth. Since she hated to swim, since the whole idea of diving made her claustrophobic, the coming task was a challenge. Ordinarily she preferred to go out on her own, but this once she was glad she would be accompanied by an expert.

Before her schedule appeared, the web displayed a priority message. The ranger had written her a ticket for leaving the trail. The fine was considerable. She could contest it if she wished.

She thought of staying, in order to explain about the results being worth it, but that would mean more delay. She could stay and explain and record, but lots of people made recordings of court cases. Chandra was not interested in repeats.

She signed the ticket so it could subtract the fine from her account.

It was worth it. She had a lot of good stuff.

oOo

Victoria and J.D. floated near the transparent wall of the observation room, watching the stars and the distant starship.

“I thought the sky was beautiful from the wilderness,” J.D. said. “But this...”

Victoria gazed at the region of doubled images created by the local strand of cosmic string.

“Could you see the lens effect from where you were? There it is.” She pointed, tracing out the line where the string bent light from the stars behind it.

“I see it,” J.D. said. “But you’ve been out there.”

“I’ve been as close as anyone. Yet.” Cosmic string had fascinated Victoria from the time she was a child. It drew her to astronomy, thence to physics.

Cosmic string, a remnant of creation, formed a network through the galaxy. The strings vibrated in a cycle measured in eons, a cycle now taking a strand past the solar system and within reach of Earth’s current technology.

The cosmic string made Starfarer possible. The starship would use the moon’s gravity to catapult it toward the string. Then it would grasp the string with powerful magnetic fields, and tap the unlimited power of its strange properties. Starfarer would rotate around the strand, building up the transition energy that would squeeze it out of Einsteinian space-time and overwhelm the impossible distances between star systems. When it returned to the starting point of its rotation —

It would not return to its starting point. From the point of view of those left behind, the starship would vanish. It would reappear... somewhere else.

That was the theory. Victoria had spent the better part of her career working on that theory.

“It’s incredible it could be so close and not affect the solar system,” J.D. said.

“We’re lucky,” Victoria said. “If it came close enough to cut through the sun, then we’d’ve seen some effects.” She touched her thumbs together, and her fingertips, forming a sphere with her hands. “The string distorts space-time so thoroughly that a circle around it is less than three hundred sixty degrees. So if the string passes through a region that’s full of mass...” She slid the fingers of her right hand beneath the fingers of her left. “Double-density starstuff. Instant nova.” She snapped open her hands. “Blooie.” She grinned. “But that missing part of the circle gives us an opening out of the solar system.”

“What do you think of the idea that the string is a lifeline?”

Victoria chuckled. “Thrown to us by a distant civilization? I think it makes a great story.”

J.D. smiled, a bit embarrassed. “I find the idea very attractive.”

“I’ll admit that I do, too — though I might not admit it to anyone else. I’d need some evidence before I got serious about it. And let’s face it, a civilization that could directly manipulate cosmic string — they’d think we were pretty small potatoes. Or maybe small bacteria.”

“Excuse me... You are Victoria MacKenzie, aren’t you?”

Victoria glanced around. The youth smiled at her hopefully.

“Yes,” Victoria said. “And this is J.D. Sauvage.”

“J.D. Sauvage! I’m glad to meet you, too.”

“Thank you.”

“And you are — ?”

“Feral Korzybski.” He offered Victoria a card.

“Really — !” She took the card and glanced at the printing: a sketch of a quill pen, his name, his numbers.

“I’ve seen your articles,” Victoria said. “I think you do an excellent job.” Victoria had not expected to encounter the public-access journalist here.

He blushed at her exclamation. “I just read your interview,” he said, “and I wanted to tell you how much I admire your straight-forwardness. I wonder... would you like to expand on what you said? I thought your comments made the beginning of a provocative piece.”

Despite his name, he looked quite domesticated. Victoria regarded him. He was not at all the way she would have imagined from his name and his articles. He had curly red-brown hair cut all the same length. In weightlessness it fluffed out around his head. His eyes were a gentle brown. His chin was round, his lips mobile and expressive.

“It wasn’t exactly an interview, and I think I’ve said as much as I need to... or want to.” Victoria smiled to take the sting out of turning him down. “I mean... I said what I meant. If I start explaining myself, it would sound like weaseling.”

“When I interview somebody,” he said, “they only sound like they’re weaseling if they really are weaseling.”

“I don’t have anything more to say right now. Maybe the opportunity will come up while you’re visiting Starfarer, eh? I’m sure you’ll find most people happy to talk to you.”

Feral Korzybski wrote about the space program. He had resisted jumping on the new U.S. president’s anti-tech bandwagon. As far as Victoria knew, all his articles appeared in public-access, not in sponsored news or feature information services.

“I really would like to talk to both of you about the alien contact team.”

“Have you been in space before?” Victoria said, changing the subject without much subtlety.

“No, first trip. First time I could afford it.”

“You’ve got a sponsor, then. Congratulations.”

“Sponsors are nothing but untitled censors!” he said with startling vehemence. “When you read sponsored stuff, you’re paying extra for the privilege of reading work that’s been gutted to make it acceptable. If I can’t make my name as an independent, I don’t want to do it at all.”

“How’d you get up here?”

“By saving for a ticket, like any other tourist.”

“But tourists can’t come onto Starfarer anymore. We’re too close to final maneuvers.”

“That took a lot of persuasion and a lot of calling in obligations. Including a few nobody owed me yet.” He looked away, obviously embarrassed by the admission of any flaw in his independence.

“If I can help you find your way around,” Victoria said, “I’d be glad to.”

He smiled shyly from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “I’d appreciate that. A lot. Will you talk to me off the record? ‘Deep background,’ we call it in the trade.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you,” Victoria said. “I just like to be warned when somebody’s about to start quoting me. All right?”

“Sure. What do you think about the Senate bill to transform Starfarer into a military base with remote sensing capabilities?”

“You don’t ease into anything, do you?”

“No,” he said cheerfully. “The argument is that we need more information about the Mideast Sweep, and more defenses against it.”

“I understand the argument, but the proposal has already damaged the expedition. You know about the recalls, I’m sure.”

He nodded. “It’s the last century’s space station all over again.”

“That’s right. We lost a couple of decades’ worth of original research and intercultural cooperation right there. Now, as soon as we start to recover, as soon as there’s hope for peaceful applications, your country is making the same damned mistake. You contributed more than half the funding and more than half the personnel, so your president thinks he can get away with this bullying.”

“He’s not my president. I didn’t vote for him.”

Victoria quirked her lips in a sardonic smile. “Nobody did, it seems like. Nevertheless, he is your president and he is bullying us. He’s violating several treaties. Unfortunately, your country is still sufficiently powerful that you can tell everybody else to take a high dive if we don’t like your plans.”

“What about the Mideast Sweep?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to keep an eye on them?”

“From here? You can do remote sensing from very high orbits, but why would you want to? You might as well use the moon. You don’t need something the size of Starfarer for spying. You don’t even need it for a military base powerful enough to blow the whole world to a cinder. Starfarer as a military base — even as a suspected military base — becomes vulnerable. I hope it won’t come to that. Look, Feral, your country is trying to make itself so powerful that it’s becoming paralyzed. When you rely solely on your weapons, you lose the art of compromise that created the U.S. in the first place. Soon your only choice will be between staying in the corner you’ve backed into, doing nothing... or blasting the whole building down.”

“Do you think we can talk the Mideast Sweep around to a reasonable position?”

Victoria had no fondness for the Mideast Sweep. To begin with, there was the sexual and racial discrimination they practiced. If she lived under its domination she would subsist at a level so low that it would barely count as human.

“I don’t know how much can be achieved with talk. But I hope — I have to believe — that the United States is a country too ethical to destroy a whole population because it lives under the control of an antagonistic hierarchy.”

“Does everybody else on the crew agree with you?”

Victoria chuckled. “Getting everybody to agree on anything is one of our biggest problems. One thing we do agree on, though, is that we aren’t ‘crew.’“

“What, then?”

“Starfarer isn’t a military ship — not yet, anyway, and not ever if most of us on board have anything to say about it. It’s only a ship in the sense that it can move under its own power. There’s a hierarchy of sorts, but it isn’t based on a military structure. There’s faculty and staff and technical support. It’s more like a university. Or a university town. Most of the decisions about how things are run, we try to decide by consensus.”

“That sounds awkward,” Feral said.

“Only if you hate five-hour meetings,” Victoria said, straight-faced.

“Don’t you have to be able to react fast out here? If there’s an emergency and there’s nobody to give the order to do something about it, doesn’t that put everyone at risk?”

“Starfarer has redundancies of its redundancies. With most emergencies you have plenty of time. As for the others... everyone who lives there takes an orientation course that includes possible emergencies and what to do about them. You have to pass it if you expect to stay. That’s how fast you’d have to react to an acute emergency — you wouldn’t have time to call some general and ask for permission.”

“What about sabotage?”

“There’s much more reason to sabotage a military installation than a civilian one. And a lot more explosive-type stuff sitting around to use to sabotage it with.” Victoria laughed. “Besides, in a group run by consensus, all a saboteur would have to do is come to meetings and block every proposal. That wouldn’t stop us cold, but it would slow everything down and drain a lot of energy.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think we already have a few saboteurs aboard.”

“How would you respond to an attack?”

“We have no response to attack. We’re unarmed. We had to fight to remain unarmed, but it’s an important part of the philosophy of the mission.”

“I meant response to an attack from Earth, or on Earth. If you were armed — suppose somebody attacked the U.S. or Canada. What could you do?”

“Not much. Even if we were armed, Starfarer’s in a lousy strategic orbit. It’s too far from Earth to be of use as a defensive or offensive outpost. Any of the O’Neill colonies would be more effective. And nobody is talking about making them into military bases.”

“Yet,” Feral said.

“Yeah,” Victoria said. “Yet.”

“You’re pretty emphatic about Starfarer in relation to solving Earth’s problems. Or not solving them.”

Victoria frowned. “I hoped you were on our side.”

“I’m not on anybody’s side! It’s my job to ask questions.”

“All right. People want the expedition to promise to go out and find easy, quick solutions. We can’t.”

“Promise it, or do it?”

“Either. We already know how to solve a lot of our problems. Take food. I don’t know the exact numbers — my partner Satoshi could tell you — but if we stopped the expansion of a couple of deserts for one year, we’d gain more arable land than ten Starfarers. If the U.S. hadn’t opposed family planning in the 1990s — ”

“There’s not much we can do about that,” Feral said. “After all.”

“But don’t you see? We act in stupid and short-sighted ways and then we behave as if we didn’t have any responsibility for those actions. Somehow that justifies our continuing to behave in the same short-sighted ways. Instead of trying to change, we hope it works better this time.”

“Do you see the expedition as a change?”

“Yes. I hope it is.”

“You use the word ‘hope’ a lot,” Feral said.

“I guess I do.”

“What do you hope for the expedition?”

“I’m the head of the alien contact department,” Victoria said. “That should give you an idea of what I hope for.”