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  Starfarers

  Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

  Nervous and excited and rushed and lale, J. D. Sauvage hurried down the corridor of the terminal. The satchel carrying her personal allowance thumped against her hip. The other passengers had already begun to board the spaceplane.

  "J.D. '"

  Victoria Fraser MacKenzie strode toward her. J. D. was aware of the attention of the other people in the waiting area, surely recognizing Victoria, perhaps also wondering who the heavy-set, sunburned newcomer might be. Victoria was the sort of person one noticed. Though she was small and compact, she had a powerful presence. Everything about her was intense:

  her energy, her eyes, the black of her hair, her passionate defense of the deep space expedition. She had been much in the news lately.

  She extended her hand. J.D. took it. The contrast of Victoria's hand, dark and smooth, the nails well groomed, to her own, the skin roughened by exposure to wind and sea. the nails pared down as short as they could get, made J.D. wish she had had more time to prepare for this trip.

  "I'm glad to see you," Victoria said.

  "Were you afraid I'd changed my mind again?"

  "No. Not once you agreed. J. D. . . . I know how important your research is to you. But the expedition is unique.

  The orcas will still be here when we get back. The divers, too."

  1 hope so, J.D. thought, but she did not say it aloud.

  "Come on," Victoria said. "We'd better hurry."

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  They walked into the entry tunnel and joined the end of the line.

  "This is your first trip up. eh?" Victoria said. "Is there anything you want to know thai they didn't cover at the orientation?"

  "Urn ... I missed the orientation."

  "You missed it?"

  "I was down at cargo. It took longer than I expected."

  "Was there a problem?"

  "They didn't want to load my equipment."

  "Whyever not?"

  "Because it didn't look like equipment to them. They tried to redefine it as personal and make me take only what I could fit in my allowance."

  "What kind of equipment is it?"

  "Information, mostly."

  "Why didn't you put it on the web? Arachne can always give it back to you."

  "Most of it is books, and most of the books I have aren't in any databases."

  "You could have had them scanned."

  "Some of them are unique, though, and they get so beat up when you send them out for scanning. I didn't have time to do it myself."

  "What kind of books are you talking about?"

  "Old ones. You won't understand until you see them." ,

  "How many did you bring?"

  "Three hundred fifty-seven kilos."

  "Good lord."

  "That isn't really very much, when you're talking about books."

  "And it isn't half what any experimental physicist would bring. As for a geneticist—" Victoria laughed. "Considering all the stuff Stephen Thomas brought, you'd think he was single-handedly in charge of diversity and cloning."

  "Is he?"

  "No, that's his boss. Professor Thanthavong."

  "I'm really looking forward to meeting her," J.D. said.

  "Do you think I'll get a chance to?"

  "Sure. She's not standoffish at all. The more you can forget she's famous, the better you'll get along with her, eh? Any-

  STARFARERS 3

  way, Stephen Thomas still does some bioelectronics. though that's pretty much been taken over by the developers. He's branched out into theories of non-nucleic-acid inheritance. Exogenetics. One of our celebrated 'nonexistent' disciplines. The equipment he needs is pretty standard lab stuff, but when he came up, he brought a lot of extraneous things."

  "How did he talk it all through cargo?"

  Victoria made a strange little motion of her shoulders, a gesture of amused disbelief. J.D. wondered why she did not simply shake her head. Maybe it had something to do with her being Canadian. J.D. had studied a number of different cultures, but had never looked past the superficial resemblance of Canadian culture to the majority culture of the U:S. She decided not to admit that to Victoria.

  "If you ask Arachne for the definition of 'charm,' " Victoria said. "it gives you back a picture of Stephen Thomas Gregory."

  J.D. followed Victoria to their places. Victoria helped her transfer her allowance into a string bag, then showed her how to strap in against the upright lounge. It held her in a position with her hips and knees slightly flexed.

  "Where are the controls for this thing?" J.D. looked for the way to turn the lounge into a chair. "How do you sit down?"

  "You don't," Victoria said. "It takes a lot of energy to keep your body in a sitting position in microgravity. It's much easier to lie nearly flat. Or stand, depending on how you look at it."

  J.D. thought about how it would feel to sit and stand and lie stretched out in space, comparing it to her diving experience.

  "Okay," she said. "I see. That makes sense." She grasped the armrests. Fright tinged her excitement, not unpleasantly.

  Her fingers trembled. Victoria noticed her nervousness and patted her hand. The sound patterns changed as the space-plane readied itself for takeoff. J.D. would have sworn that like a bird or a dolphin she could fee! the increase in the magnetic field, the shift and slide of it as il oriented itself to thrust the spaceplane down the long rails. Of course that was absurd.

  Victoria finished transferring her own allowanc from the 4 Vonda N. Mclntyre

  carrier to the compartment. She had several acceleration-resistant packages, but most of her allowance consisted'of fancy clothes, similar to what she was wearing.

  "Victoria," J.D. said hesitantly, "do people dress, um, more formally on board then they would back here?"

  Victoria was wearing an embroidered shirt and wide suede trousers caught at her ankles with feathered ties.

  "Hmm?" Victoria closed the compartment and gave J.D.'s satchel to the artificial stupid waiting to take them off the plane. Getting out of earth's gravity well was too expensive to spend the acceleration on suitcases. The AS buzzed away,

  "I couldn't help but notice what you're wearing. I didn't bring anything like that, if that's what's called for on the ship."

  Victoria glanced at her, then chuckled. J.D. shifted uncomfortably. She had thrown away most of her beat-up old clothes, and ordered new ones that she packed without trying on. She had not had time even to consider buying anything formal.

  "I'm not laughing at you," Victoria said quickly. "Just imagining going to the lab in this outfit. We're pretty casual on campus. But sometimes I get tired of casual. I always fill up the extra comers of my personal allowance with silly clothes- You can get necessities back home. It's the things you can do without that you start to miss."

  "I see," J.D. said, relieved-

  "Don't worry, you'll fit right in. There's no dress code, and the environment is moderate. Too moderate, I think. We don't have weather, we have climate. I wouldn't mind some snow, or a thunderstorm. Satoshi thinks it's too cold, but he's spoiled—he grew up in Hawaii."

  Victoria leaned against her couch and fastened the straps.

  "I'm ready," she said. "So let's get going."

  "I should tell you something," J.D. said.

  "Oh?"

  The careful neutrality in Victoria's tone told J.D. that her own original decision—to turn down the invitation to join Siarfarer's alien contact department—had had an effect mat would take time to overcome.

  "I resigned from the Department of State," J.D. said.

  "And turned back my grant."

  "Did you? I'm glad. I'm sorry I snapped a
t you about STARFARERS 5

  having such close ties to your government. But these days you never know when they might slap 'classified' all over your research." Suddenly Victoria grinned. "Though if you were still an ambassador, that would put you higher on the protocol list than the chancellor, eh?"

  "I was more on the level of special attache, and anyway the orcas don't use titles. They don't even understand them, as far as I could ever tell. It's one of those human concepts like ownership or jealousy that if you finally get through a hint of what it means, they just think it's funny. We're pretty funny to them in general. I used to wonder if they let me hang around for my entertainment value."

  "What made you decide to quit?" Victoria asked bluntly.

  "I thought about what you said, about the arguments between the U.S. government and EarthSpace. I worried."

  "As do we all."

  "I didn't want divided loyalties." J.D. felt guilty for making two true statements and implying a direct connection between them. For the moment, though, she could not explain to Victoria, to anyone, her real reasons for all her decisions of the last few days.

  She stared out the window at the mountain slope, the tree-line a few hundred meters below, the peaks receding to blue in the distance.

  "Don't worry," Victoria said, mistaking her distraction.

  "The acceleration isn't bad at all."

  "I'm sure I'll be fine."

  The plane jolted slightly as it released itself from the gate. J.D. gasped and clutched Victoria's hand.

  Victoria smiled and let J.D. hold on as the plane slid forward.

  Victoria loved riding the spaceplane. She enjoyed the landings, but she liked the takeoffs even better.

  The plane accelerated, racing over its magnetic rails, its delta-vee increasing, pressing Victoria against her couch. The plane reached the bottom of the long fast slope and pulsed forward along the magnetic lines of force, driven faster and faster by a great roller coaster with a single unending rise.

  The magnetic rail flung the plane off its end and into the air. The acceleration ceased abruptly: heart-fall hit.

  "Wow" J.D. said, breathless.

  6 vonda N. Mcintyre

  "What do you think?"

  "That's the first time I ever rode a roller coaster that I liked."

  Victoria felt the slight pressure of her body against the seat belts as, in weightlessness, gravity no longer held her against her couch. Beside her, J.D. peered eagerly through the roof window as the blue sky gave way to a deep indigo that gradually faded to starry black.

  "It's just beautiful."

  "It is, isn't it?"

  The spaceplane rotated around its long axis and thfc earth came into view through the roof window. Despite the lack of gravity, the arrangement of the couches made the window feel like "up." Earth appeared to loom above her. Pofher first few trips into space, Victoria had tried to cultivated attitude of nonchalance about the sight of earth spinning slowly before her. Gradually, though, she realized that even the veterans of space travel never lost their awe, never grew hardened. No matter how matter-of-fact they acted about the dangers or the hardships of the early days, they never pretended to have the same cool indifference to earth, vulnerable and without boundaries, whole in their sight, a sphere they could cup in their hands.

  Victoria glanced at J.D., who stared up through the window with her mouth slightly open. Her short lank hair stood out from her head as if she were underwater.

  "1 never thought . . . I've imagined this, I've seen it in pictures and on film, even on sensory recording. I thought I'd know what it felt like. But it's different, seeing it for real."

  "It is," Victoria said. "It's always different, seeing it for real."

  The earth fell behind. The spaceplane slid smoothly into an orbit to catch up and dock with the transport to Starfarer.

  "What's it like to swim with the orcas?" Victoria said.

  "It's like this," J.D. said.

  "Like space travel?"

  "Uh-huh. Looking at earth from space is the nearest thing I've ever felt to being underwater and suddenly realizing that the light at the limit of your vision is the white patch on an' orca's side. Then when they come closer . . . They're magical. Until now I thought that if I could find the right words,

  STARFARERS 7

  I'd be able to explain it to everyone. But no one ever found the right words to explain—to me, anyway—how it feels to look at earth from space. Maybe no one can explain either."

  "Damn," Victoria said. "I wish we'd had this conversation a couple of days ago."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'd have stolen your line, when I talked to the premier last night. And I wish I'd thought of saying that to your Mr. Distler, when I testified last year."

  "/ didn't vote for him," J.D. said. "Not for senator—1 don't even come from the same state—or when he ran for president. Never mind, I know what you mean."

  "That's what I should have told him—that he couldn't understand why we wanted to be here unless he came and saw it for himself." Victoria made herself relax, balancing her body between the contour couch and the seat belts. She sighed. "Probably even that wouldn't have helped."

  "The orcas are interested in Starfarer," J.D. said.

  "The orcas? The divers, you mean?"

  "There's a diver who's interested, yes. But I mean the orcas themselves discussed applying to the expedition."

  "Outlandish," Victoria said.

  "Why do you say that?" J.D. asked mildly.

  "I can't imagine a cetacean on board a starship."

  "That's the trouble," J.D. said. "Nobody imagined it when they designed the cylinders- The ecosystem was evolved around salt marshes, but there isn't much Jeep water."

  "Would you have proposed transporting an orca to Star-farer if there was deep water?''

  "Not one—several. They're social beings,-even more so than us. They get bored and slowly go crazy and die, all alone. They don't like to be confined, either, but they pointed out that when humans used to catch them they lived in much smaller places than the largest bodies of water on Starfarer, for longer than the expedition is planned to last."

  "Then you think it's a good idea."

  "I think it would be wonderful to have two different kinds of intelligent beings along on the expedition. I love the orcas, though. I love their freedom. They would have been willing to risk it, and I think they could have survived. But I wonder if they would have been happy?"

  8 vonda N. Mcintyre

  J.D. gazed out at space, at earth, where the oceans dominated. A weather system had just passed over the Pacific Northwest, leaving the area clearly visible.

  The clicks and squeals and stutters of the orcas echoed across the inlet. The cold, clear water moved with a gentle, irresistible power, rolling fist-sized stones one against the other on the rocky shore, creating a rumble of counterpoint to the calling of the whales.

  J.D. swam. The artificial lung, nestled against her back, absorbed oxygen from the sea and transferred it to her mask.

  Kelp waved below. A bright orange nudibranch swam past, propelled by its frilly mantle. At the limit of J.D.'s vision, a salmon flashed silver-blue in the filtered light.

  She shivered. Her metabolic enhancer could produce only so much heat. She could have worn a wet suit, but it limited her contact with the sea.

  Soon she would have to swim away from the mouth of the inlet and return to shore. She stroked upward and broke the surface of the clear green water. Before her, the inlet opened out into a part of Puget Sound where no one could go without an invitation. Apparently the divers would not invite J.D. into the wilderness today.

  The orcas remained out of sight around the headland. She could imagine them playing, oblivious to the cold, their sleek black and white bodies cutting the swells. By morning they would be gone. They could swim a hundred kilometers between one dawn and the next. Orcas never stayed in one place for long.

  The sun on her face made the water
feel even colder. J.D. turned and swam toward shore. Her cabin stood back among the Douglas firs that grew to the edge of the stony beach.

  Just offshore, she stopped at the anchored deck. She teased the artificial lung from her back and tethered it beneath the planks, where it would feed and breathe and rest and pump seawater through itself until she needed it again. She dove from the deck and swam easily home. Without the lung. she no longer felt a part of the sea.

  Barefoot, she picked her way among the beach stones. It-was getting on toward evening. In the shade of the trees it was cool, and inside her cabin it was chilly. She plunged into

  STARFARERS 9

  the shower. The sun-warmed water splashed over her. After

  a few minutes she stopped shivering.

  Toweling her short straight hair, she turned the heat on under the kettle for a warm drink.

  "J.D. ?"

  She started and wrapped the towel around her.

  "Zev, you're so quiet. You scared me."

  "I never meant to." The diver stood in the doorway. Fine white-gold hair clothed his mahogany body in a translucent sheen. He looked awkward, seeking her out on land. She felt awkward, talking to him when she did not have any clothes on. That was strange, because she swam naked with him and his family, divers and orcas alike.

  "Sit down, excuse me a minute." She fumed her back and took a last swipe with the towel beneath her heavy breasts, then pulled on a shirt and a pair of baggy black pants.

  "I thought to find you in the sea," Zev said.

  J.D. deliberately finished tying the drawstring. "I hoped to find you there. But I can't stay in the water forever."

  "We were talking," he said- He lowered his gaze and glanced at her sideways, with an expression both mischievous and shy. "We sometimes talk for a long time."

  "I've noticed that." On the solar stove, the kettle steamed. Being in a wilderness area, the cabin had to be rustic. It contained no electronics beyond her web link. Nothing operated by voice activation. Now that she knew how everything worked, it amused her to remember how long it took her to figure out all the mechanical switches. But it had not been very funny at the time.

  "Do you want a hot drink? I'm cold, and my fingers and toes are shriveled up like prunes."