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STARFARERS 2 9

  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 gnari-ing 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 reMve 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 tree trunks 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

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  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 different silence than 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 gray 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

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  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 liny-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 mus-

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  cles. 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 tell, 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, leavmg a colonnade of six or eight trees rising on roots like bowlegs.

  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 lea
ves 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 STARFARERS 3 3

  band 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 thornbush 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 pan 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 gray.

  "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

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  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-wildemess 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.

  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.

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  "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."

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  "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 straightforwardness. 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 band-

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  wagon. 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 unfilled 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."