Vonda N. McIntyre - Starfarers

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt

Nervous and excited and rushed and lale, J. D. Sauvage hur-

ried 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 Vic-

toria'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 impor-

tant your research is to you. But the expedition is unique.

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

too."

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

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

2 vonda N. Mcintyre

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 ori-

entation?"

"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."

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"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 resem-

blance 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,' " Vic-

toria 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

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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 experi-

ence.

"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 uncom-

fortably. 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-

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"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 at 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 be-

tween the U.S. government and EarthSpace. I worried."

"As do we all."

"I didn't want divided loyalties." J.D. felt guilty for mak-

ing two true statements and implying a direct connection be-

tween 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.

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

ward.

Victoria loved riding the spaceplane. She enjoyed the land-

ings, 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 grad-

ually 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 cultivate^n

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 pre-

tended 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 win-

dow 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.

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Sta\rfarers.txtNervousandexcitedandrushedandlale,J.D.Sauvagehur-rieddownthecorridoroftheterminal.Thesatchelcarryingherpersonalallowancethumpedagainstherhip.Theotherpassengershadalreadybeguntoboardthespaceplane."J.D.'"VictoriaFraser...

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