Starfarers
Vonda N. McIntyre
V1.5 – broken paragraphs, spelling, garbage text corrected by paragwinn
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."
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?"
"Um ... 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-
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
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
"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 an
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.
"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 magi-
cal. Until now I thought that if I could find the right words,
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 conversa-
tion...
widez2