The transparent skin of the sailhouse placed no barrier between the room, and space and stars and the sail outside. People floated in zero-gravity along one side of the curved glass wall: fewer people than should have gathered to watch the first full test of Starfarer’s solar sail.

Satoshi floated farther into the transparent chamber. The sensors surrounded him with melodic chords. Iphigenie DuPre, the sailmaster, drifted with eyes closed, listening to the musical reports, invisibly connected to the computers and control strands of the sail. Her long, lithe, dark limbs reacted with reflexive, minuscule motions as she ordered a strand tightened here, balanced there.

The sail, untwisting from its cable configuration, now appeared as a great sheet of silver, closely pleated.

Victoria and J.D. and Feral joined Satoshi. Still inside the access tunnel, Stephen Thomas hesitated. He pushed off gingerly, awkwardly, with one hand. In the other he carried a sack, which he had avoided explaining.

Satoshi looked around. Almost everyone in the sailhouse was faculty or staff. There were a few sponsored reporters, and Feral, and a number of remotes transmitting the event back to Earth, but none of the VIP visitors the expedition had prepared for. Chancellor Blades had chosen not to attend the test, and he had not even sent his usual deputy, Gerald Hemminge, the assistant chancellor.

Feral pushed off and started interviewing people, setting the background for his story. Starfarer navigated from one star system to the next via cosmic string. But once it reached a destination, it required other methods of propulsion: primarily the sail. Cosmic string provided macronavigation, the sail, micronavigation, though it sounded strange to apply the term “micro” to distances measured in millions of kilometers.

The sail was slow, but near a star it was steady. It had the great benefit of operating without reaction mass or onboard fuel. It would propel the starship from its entrypoint into the star system to a point from which it could re-enter the twisted space-time of a cosmic string. The alien contact team had a small, fast explorer to use in traveling between Starfarer and a new system’s worlds.

Feral drifted over to the sailmaster.

Iphigenie DuPre’s astonishing mathematical ability reached so deep that it appeared instinctual to anyone who overlooked her years of experience and practice. She was one of the first people to build a sail-ship and to sail it in space. She had designed most of the sail systems that racers used down around the O’Neill colonies. Once her sails started winning races, she retired from amateur competition and put her time into developing and marketing. She was probably the wealthiest person on board Starfarer, thanks to the popularity of sail-ship racing.

The challenge of a starship’s esoteric combination of propulsions had brought her to EarthSpace, and to Starfarer.

“Ms. DuPre — ” Feral said.

“Hush, now,” she said quietly. The tempo of the sensor melodies quickened.

Everyone fell silent, and the change began.

Tension eased at the ends of the pleated surface. The folds turned to close-set ripples.

The sail opened.

Liquid silver spread over blackness, widened, flowed like a flooding lake across the path of the Milky Way, and cut off the stars. One edge quivered. A vibration shimmered through the satin film. The shivering threatened to twist the surface out of shape, but control strands shifted and tightened and eased away the oscillation.

The sail grew.

Its complex harmonies filled the sailhouse. No one spoke.

The sail shivered with one final ripple, then lay quiet, stretched out across space. Satoshi imagined that he could see a slight curve in the surface, as the sail filled with the invisible solar wind. He imagined he could already feel the acceleration, already detect the most infinitesimal widening of the starship’s orbit.

The sensor melody decreased to a whisper.

“Full deployment.”

Iphigenie’s quiet statement filled the sailhouse like a shout. Her voice held suppressed laughter and excitement. She opened her unusual cinnamon-brown eyes. For a few seconds, no one else made a sound. Satoshi released the breath he had been holding.

“Watch it!”

The shout and an explosive “pop!” broke the silence. It sounded like damage, like decompression, like a breach of the sailhouse wall into the vacuum of space. Satoshi tensed, forcing himself not to jerk toward the noise. Any quick movement in freefall would send him tumbling.

A projectile shot past.

The champagne cork slammed into the transparent wall beyond him. It rebounded nearly as fast, hit the glass on the other side, and bounced again. It narrowly missed Satoshi and several other faculty members.

Somersaulting slowly backwards, Stephen Thomas laughed as the cork flung itself around the glass cylinder until it used up its momentum. Champagne pressed itself out of the bottle he held. Without gravity, the bubbles formed on the sides and bottom of the bottle instead of exploding upward; their pressure pushed the champagne out. As Stephen Thomas tumbled he left a liquid rope twisting in his wake. It fizzed softly.

Stephen Thomas looked like the star of some weird zero-gravity sport, celebrating a championship by trying to spray his teammates with champagne, but being defeated by weightlessness.

He’d have to be the star of something yet to be invented, Satoshi thought. He’s wrong for the most popular Earth sports: too slender for football, not tall enough for basketball, and far too beautiful for hockey.

Stephen Thomas spoiled the effect by bumping into the wall and snatching awkwardly at a glass handhold to stop his tumble. He came to a halt, still laughing, still holding the bottle. The twisting stream of champagne broke itself into spherical globules that drifted among the spectators.

“I was wondering how to split it up,” Stephen Thomas said. The pressure of the bubbles slowly pushed the last of the champagne into the air.

The cork tumbled lazily, having lost most of its momentum without hitting anyone in the eye. Everyone was looking at Stephen Thomas rather than at the sail.

He tossed his head. His long blond hair flipped back for a second, then fell forward again to drift in front of his eyes. He tucked it behind one ear.

“Congratulations, Iphigenie,” he said.

“Yes,” Victoria said. “Iphigenie, the sail’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She reached out and waved a rippling sphere of champagne toward her, placed her lips against it, and drank it with a kiss. Unlike most zero-g workers, she kept her hair long, but she wore it in a smooth mass of thin, heavy braids caught up at the back of her neck.

Iphigenie’s action broke the tension of waiting for deployment, and the fright of Stephen Thomas’s exploding champagne cork. Everyone clustered around Iphigenie, sphering her with their congratulations, surrounding her like the bubbles surrounding the wine; people caught and drank the fizzing globules of champagne that drifted and trembled in the air currents. Satoshi kissed one and let it flow between his lips. It dissolved against his tongue, dry and gentle and ephemeral.

Nearby, J.D. floated alone, watching the sail, occasionally glancing at the celebration with a slight smile on her lips. Satoshi waved a bubble of champagne in her direction.

“J.D., catch!”

Instead of reaching for the rippling bubble, she pushed her hand toward it to create a counter-draft in Satoshi’s direction.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s very kind of you, but I don’t drink. I quit when I started diving.”

Stephen Thomas paddled awkwardly toward them.

“Are you guys playing tennis with my good champagne?” He tried to capture it with the air-pressure of a gesture, and succeeded only in breaking it into several smaller drops. Satoshi caught one in his mouth and pushed one toward Stephen Thomas.

“Victoria! Feral!”

They joined him. Together, they drank the last bubbles.

“I knew I’d think of something good to drink this with,” Stephen Thomas said.

Satoshi chuckled. Victoria smiled and drifted close enough to brush her lips against his cheek.

In one direction, the sail lay taut. In the other, the twin cylinders of the campus rotated, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise, toward each other, and away. Beyond campus, at a great distance, the Earth hung in space, one limb bright and the rest of its face dark, a new Earth.

o0o

Most of the spectators had left the sailhouse. Stephen Thomas floated near the transparent wall. For once he felt almost comfortable in freefall.

Maybe, he thought, I ought to combine it with champagne more often.

“Are you coming?” Victoria asked.

“I’ll be along in a little while.”

Satoshi passed the sailmaster. “Thanks for the show, Iphigenie.”

“My pleasure,” she replied, too experienced in zero-g to disturb her equilibrium by turning.

Stephen Thomas watched his partners glide out of the sailhouse. He envied their grace. He knew he would get the hang of navigating in weightlessness soon enough — it had better be soon, because he hated feeling physically incompetent and off-balance, baffled and awkward.

Stephen Thomas was the last spectator. Intent on the sail, Iphigenie paid him no attention.

The sail lay almost motionless in space, but every now and again the silver surface shimmied. When it did that it looked alive, like some huge aether-breathing animal, twitching its flank to drive off a fly.

Stephen Thomas wondered if a space-living creature would have an aura. Idly, he narrowed his eyes and focused his vision beyond the center of the sail. He had never thought of seeking the aura of an inanimate object. The idea amused him. He did not expect to find anything.

He looked.

Gradually, as if the act of searching for it caused it to appear and grow, a pale violet light glimmered along the edges of the sail. It flowed down the feedback lines and crept across the sail’s face.

Stephen Thomas gazed at the lavender light until it swept all the way to the sailhouse, surrounded the transparent cylinder, and wrapped it in a transparent gauze of illumination.

Iphigenie did not react to it, though every now and again she glanced out at the sail as if her eyes and her instincts could tell her more than the feedbacks and computers and musical sensors. Stephen Thomas said nothing of the aura. She would probably shrug it off or laugh or refuse to look for it, or all three.

It always amazed him when he saw something so direct, so spectacular, and everyone else was oblivious to it. He could never persuade his partners to try to see what he could see. Victoria, in particular, was so open-minded about other things: she had to be, or she would never have won her job.

The effort of seeing began to tire him. He let his concentration wander. The perception vanished as if he had snapped off the current powering the violet light. The sail billowed silently before him, plain silver again.

o0o

Chandra tried to persuade herself that being on the run, hiding out from — who were those guys? — in a fishing camp would be good stuff to record, but the truth was that she hated this part of it. The cabin smelled stale and fishy. The bed was both lumpy and too soft. The window, which could have looked out on the water, opened onto a grotty gravel driveway sprouting dusty weeds. And the bathroom was really nasty.

The diving sequence would be great. It would reproduce her utter terror at being pulled underwater, her certainty that she was about to drown. But this place would ruin the rest of the experience. It would do nothing for either her reputation or her bank account. It had to go. She had to end the sequence somehow, but she did not see how she would find the time to do any restaging and still make it onto the spaceplane.

“How do the folks who own this place make a living?” she said. “We’re the only ones here. I bet we’re the only ones who were ever here.”

“It is not fishing season,” Zev said. “This is a place where humans fish. I mean where they sleep when they are too tired to fish.”

“Oh.”

“If it had not been here,” the diver said, “you would still be swimming.”

“Listen,” she said, “that was a great sequence. That was real terror. Nobody has ever gotten anything that intense before. They all think their sex scenes are so great. Hah.”

The young diver wandered around the wooden cubicle, touching things at random: the rough, threadbare ticking on the mattress, the frame supporting the upper bunk, the planks of the drafty door, the doorknob.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Chandra said.

The diver looked at the handle curiously. “Why? Will it break?”

“I mean I don’t think you should go outside. Those guys are probably still looking for you.”

“Oh.”

“What do they want?”

“All I wanted was to join the deep space expedition.”

“Distler hasn’t made that a criminal offense,” Chandra said. “Not the last time I heard, anyway. There must be something else.”

The diver took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They want divers to do things for them that we do not wish to do. I think they would have taken me away and kept me until they made my family come back from Canada.”

“They were going to kidnap you?”

The diver shrugged and changed the subject. “What is that room?”

“It’s the bathroom. Only there isn’t any bath. I guess you don’t need to take baths out in the ocean.”

“We like to rub ourselves on smooth rocks or scrub ourselves with sand.”

“Close enough. Turn on the faucets in the sink if you need water. Do you have to stay wet like the guy in that old tv series?”

“No. Do you like that show? I do, too. But divers are not from Atlantis. There is no such place. Divers can live on land. I never have, though. I am not used to it.”

Suddenly something protruded from the diver’s crotch. Chandra watched, startled, as the male diver, whom she had assumed to be female, extruded his penis and began to pee on the floor.

“Wait! Stop! What are you doing?”

His penis slid back inside. “Peeing,” he said, equally startled. He looked down. “I never did it on land before. It is not very aesthetic, is it?”

“No, especially if you do it on the floor!”

“What should I do?”

“Wipe it up, to begin with.”

“But I need to pee.”

Chandra sighed and showed him the toilet, then fled, embarrassed, when he started to use it in front of her. Very few things embarrassed her, but this sequence of events was getting weird.

He came out of the bathroom, carrying their single ragged towel. “Why did you run away?”

“Because — Wait!” she said again. “This isn’t a hotel.” She snatched the towel, put it back in the bathroom, and threw him a wad of paper tissue. “I don’t think we get maid service and clean towels every day with this room.”

He wiped the floor, gazed at the sodden paper for a moment, then carried it into the bathroom and got rid of it.

“I didn’t run away,” Chandra said when he came back. “I left to give you some privacy. It isn’t polite to piss in front of other people.”

Fine gold hair, nearly transparent, almost invisible except when the light struck it just right, covered his whole body. His pubic hair was slightly thicker, slightly coarser. She stared at the smooth flesh between his legs. She could stare at anyone or anything, anytime she liked, because no one could tell where her eyes were focused.

“It is not considered polite to piss on land, you mean,” the diver said. “Divers think nothing of it. I did wonder what that small room in the corner of J.D.’s cabin was. She always kept the door closed.”

“J.D.! J.D. Sauvage? Do you know her?”

“Yes.”

“This is all her fault!”

“I do not believe it,” the diver said. “She would not lend herself to this occurrence. Please do not talk of my friend that way.”

“She was supposed to be there! Where does she get off, forgetting our appointment?”

“She left for the starship,” the diver said. “And if she had not, she would be hiding along with us.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Chandra scowled. The nerve ridges on her forehead twisted. “Serve her right.”

“She would probably know what to do,” he said.

Chandra glared at him, but the silver-gray nerve tissue that hid her eyes and allowed her to stare also prevented her from glowering effectively.

Zev changed the subject. “Are you allowed to eat in front of each other?”

“Of course. What a dumb question.”

“Why ‘dumb’? You do not pee in front of each other. I do not understand why eating is so different. I know only one land-bound human. J.D. is almost a diver herself. I cannot compare her customs with yours.”

“Okay, I see your point. Are you a guy, or are all divers built like you?” Chandra said.

“I am male, if that is what your question means. I am physiologically mature, though I have not yet fathered anyone.”

“You mean you’re a virgin?” Then she had to explain “virgin.” The diver laughed.

“No — how foolish. We don’t even have a word for that. We play all the time — whenever we meet another family. J.D. says regular humans don’t do that. And she said regular humans have to learn how not to be fertile. You have to concentrate on it. Divers have to learn how not to be sterile.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s how we designed ourselves. External genitals would cause hydrodynamic drag.”

Chandra waited for him to continue, but he seemed to think that told her all she needed to know.

“Nobody ever put it quite like that to me before,” she said. “Which is probably a good thing, since I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Male humans have to learn to raise their temperature in order to become sterile — you know this?”

“Sure.”

“I had to learn to extend my scrotum — do you understand? And when I father someone, when a diver from another family chooses me, I will have to leave it extended long enough to overcome the sterility my body temperature causes.”

“Sounds dangerous, if a hungry shark comes along...”

“If a hungry shark came along, I think I would not mind putting off parenthood a few more weeks in order to withdraw myself.” Zev grinned.

“What about women?”

“Women who are divers learn to ovulate, and do so only when they choose someone to conceive with.”

“How did we get off on this subject?”

Zev looked hurt. “You expressed interest.”

“I guess so. But I’m a lot more interested in how we ended up being here.”

“That does not interest me anymore. I am interested in how to get out.”

“Me, too.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Zev said. “I must tell my mother where I am.” His eyelids flickered.

“Wait!” Chandra grabbed him and shook him roughly before he could hook into the web.

He opened his eyes again. “What is wrong?”

“The web’s probably being monitored!”

“Oh. I did not know that was allowed.”

“Maybe not, not usually, but I bet they’re doing it.”

“Lykos will be worried.”

“She’ll be a lot more worried if they catch you!”

“That is true,” Zev said.

o0o

Kolya came in from outside, drugged with dizziness and wonder. The path of stars lay before him, a web passing across his image of reality. The vision would remain for a while; then, as it faded, he would be drawn to the stars again.

He opened the fastenings of his spacesuit.

He had watched the sail unfurl. He hated it. It cut off a significant portion of the sky. But he loved it, too, because every increment of time added another increment of velocity to the ship’s speed, pulling it toward the stars. Soon —

“General Cherenkov? Is everything all right?”

Kolya started violently and stumbled in the awkward half-removed suit. Marion Griffith lunged forward, caught him, and held him on his feet.

“Bojemoi,” Kolya said, “don’t you know it’s dangerous to startle a — someone with a background like mine? Have you been waiting all this time?”

“Yessir. My apologies, sir, I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you saw me... and then I couldn’t tell.”

“Several hours outside will affect the vision. Why are you still here?”

“I wanted to talk to you, and since you said I couldn’t go outside, I decided to wait.”

“If I reward your preposterous devotion, will I encourage its continuation?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, sir.”

“I mean that I like my privacy. I have not made that sufficiently clear to you. What do you want?”

“Only to hear what it was like in the early days, in space. When you didn’t have all this. When it was tough, and dangerous. About the years when you went back to Earth. And about coming back up here, when you knew you’d never be able to leave again.”

“I believe that the expedition will be both tough and dangerous. More than we can conceive. As for the rest — all that is in the archives. I sat for the cameras answering questions for... far too long.”

“I know,” Griffith said. “I saw you. I watched the tapes. But it isn’t all, there’s nothing about the years when you disappeared. And it isn’t the same as hearing it straight, being able to ask questions...”

“The years when I... disappeared... are not fit stories for civilized people. Are you civilized, Marion?”

“I... I think so.”

“I’m going to walk back to my house,” Kolya said. “If you wish, you may walk with me, and I will answer what questions I choose. In return you must promise not to trouble me again.”

Griffith hesitated.

“It is that, or nothing,” Kolya said.

“All right,” Griffith said. “Deal.”

o0o

Victoria returned to campus feeling a little drunk, more from excitement than from champagne.

“That was something, wasn’t it?” She giggled.

“It was,” J.D. said. “It was. I guess... we’re really on our way.”

“We are.” Victoria turned down the path toward Physics Hill. “Come on, I want to show you your office.”

“I don’t really need an office,” J.D. said. “I’ve never had one — I won’t know what to do with it.”

“First rule of academic life,” Victoria said. “Never turn down the perks.”

They reached a long low barrow with strips of windows that squinted out along the bushy slopes. The hallway behind the offices was cool and dank, a tunnel lined with gray rock foam. On the left, doors opened into offices. Someone had made an attempt to brighten the hallway with photos of particle interactions, abstract art of lines and curves and collisions, and fractal movies.

“Nobody needs offices anymore,” Victoria said. “But if we did all our communicating through Arachne, we’d never get out of bed. Here’s my office.” She opened a door. Few of the doors in the main cylinder of Starfarer opened automatically. The simpler things were, the less there would be to fix, light-years out in interstellar space.

“We’re old-fashioned here in Physics Hill,” she said. “We even have a conference room, down at the end of the hall. I know lots of people who claim they can do conferences by link, but I like being face-to-face.”

J.D. followed Victoria into her office. The entire exterior wall was a window, open from waist height to ceiling. The hillside dropped away steeply, ten meters to the ground below. Victoria’s desk was an extruded slab of rock foam; the chair was bamboo and rattan.

A display hovered in the corner. Victoria glanced at it. Numbers and symbols crept across it, a new one every few seconds.

“Still working,” Victoria said.

“What is it?”

“Cosmic string calculations. For navigating, once we reach transition energy. It’s ferociously complicated to figure out where you’re going once you grab a piece of cosmic string, and even harder to figure out a reasonable way back.”

“But those calculations are already done. Aren’t they?”

“The set for our first trip, sure. But I’ve been spending a lot of time working out better methods of doing the calculations.”

“How long before it’s finished?”

“Don’t know. No way to tell. This is a new symbolic manipulation routine. Solving cylindrical stress-energy tensors is tough. This one’s been running for two weeks already, but that’s nothing. The shortest solution so far took fifty-three days.”

She watched the display for a few seconds, then blew out her breath and turned away. “I never let Arachne send this stuff straight into my head. It’s hypnotic.”

Suddenly she stared at the display again. “Except...” She fell silent for so long that J.D. grew concerned.

“Victoria?” she said softly.

“What? Oh, sorry.” She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. “I have an idea. I think it might speed things up some more. Solve the problem more elegantly...”

“Go ahead and work on it. The office can wait.”

She was tempted. “No, it’s okay — your office will only take a minute.”

Victoria led J.D. to her office, two doors down, and tried to open it. It remained closed.

“It’s supposed to have been cleared by now,” she said.

“Maybe it’s fixed on me. Open my office, please, Arachne,” J.D. said. She echoed the request over her link. Nothing happened. Then she remembered it was a simple mechanical door. She tried the door handle. Nothing happened.

“I’ll be damned,” Victoria said. She described a query path to J.D., who followed it into Arachne’s web.

The bursar had not yet assigned her any office space. Nor had the chancellor accepted her appointment as alien contact specialist.

“This is outrageous,” Victoria said. “It’s my decision to invite you onto the team. Accepting your appointment is nothing but a formality!”

“The rules must have changed,” J.D. said.

“A lot of things are changing around here.”

“This is scary, Victoria.”

“It’s ridiculous, that’s what it is. Damn! Come on, you can use Nakamura’s office till we get things straightened out. I know I have access to it.”

“I don’t know... I’d hate to invade his privacy.”

“He didn’t leave anything behind to invade. He’s not coming back. He quit.”

“For good? Are you sure? Why did he quit?”

“I’m not sure I can tell you.”

“Is it a secret?”

“No. It’s just that it’s hard to explain why someone quits when they’re brought up to be infinitely polite and never mention when something is wrong or tell you what it is. I don’t even know that anything was wrong. Except it must have been, or why would he have quit? He wasn’t recalled. Maybe he decided we don’t have a chance to get out of orbit. He might have decided to cut his losses.”

“Maybe he read the article about the selection process. Maybe he felt humiliated.”

“That article was all speculation,” Victoria said.

“Was it?”

Victoria hesitated. The article had claimed that the selection of Starfarer’s personnel depended more on political considerations than academic qualifications.

“I don’t like to think so,” Victoria said. “I like to think my family’s application blew all the other possibilities out of contention. But I’ll never know if a bunch of politicians got together and looked at the candidates and said, Say, we need more Canadians to make Ottawa happy, and never mind the qualifications. I decided to stop worrying about it.”

J.D. followed Victoria uncertainly to another office.

It, too, refused to open.

“This is embarrassing,” Victoria said. “I am angry.”

“Victoria, please don’t go to any trouble for me. I have more than enough room in my house, and that’s where all my books are. I’ll see you later, okay? What should I wear to the party?”

“The party? Oh, anything you like. It’s informal, and you dress better than most of us.”

J.D. smiled. “It will take a while before I fit in with the Starfarer look,” she said. “Most everything I brought with me is new.” She shrugged. “Oh well. I never was in the height of fashion.”

“Don’t worry. I usually don’t dress up, but I might tonight because I haven’t had a chance to wear my new clothes. Stephen Thomas always dresses up, and Satoshi never dresses up.”

“You have an interesting family.”

“That’s sure true,” Victoria said. “What’s your family like? Do you have any sisters and brothers?”

J.D. giggled.

“Wrong question?”

“No, not at all,” J.D. said. “But it’s complicated.”

“Tell me,” Victoria said, intrigued.

“Okay, you asked for it. My mom was fifty, past childbearing, when she and my dad got together. I have a half-brother and a half-sister from her previous biological family. Her partner in an intermediate relational family brought along his daughter. He and mom didn’t have any children with each other, but his daughter is also my half-sister.”

“You lost me there,” Victoria said.

J.D. grinned. “That’s where I lose everybody. What happened was, my dad didn’t want to father children. Chemical toxin exposure. He worried about gene defects.”

“Couldn’t he get them fixed?”

“That was expensive and chancy. It was another few years before the technology was perfected. Anyway, when my folks decided they did want to raise a kid together, my dad’s full sister donated an ovum and my mom’s previous partner donated the sperm.”

“So your dad is your half-father and your mother isn’t genetically related to you.”

“No, it’s more complicated than that. My mom is my nuclear mother — induced meiosis and nuclear body transplant into my aunt’s ovum.”

“And you’re related to your father through mitochondrial inheritance.”

“Right, even though I got the mitochondrial DNA from his sister. But those are maternally inherited so dad’s and his sister’s are identical.”

Victoria whistled. “That’s as complicated a personal pedigree as I ever heard. You have four biological parents?”

“Five, since they needed a surrogate.”

“Truly impressive. Family reunions must be interesting.”

“We’ve never had one,” J.D. said. “We get along all right, but we aren’t particularly close. Cool but cordial.”

“What did they say when you joined the expedition?”

“‘Congratulations, dear. Have a good time.’“

“Hm.” Victoria contrasted that reaction with the reactions she and her partners had received. Grangrana was quietly and fiercely proud, Stephen Thomas’s father disbelieving, and Satoshi’s folks ecstatic for him and for them all. Practically the whole range, Victoria thought.

o0o

After J.D. left, Victoria hurried back to her own office, sat at her desk, and composed herself outwardly. She cooled her anger, persuading herself that the mixup about J.D.’s office must be just that, a mix-up. Reacting uncivilly would not help. It might even slow up a correction.

The research display kept catching at the corner of her vision. All she really wanted to do right now was work on her new approach. Instead, she put in a call to the chancellor’s office.

J.D.’s remarkably calm about this, Victoria thought. She hasn’t spent enough time in the academic world.

The office was only part of the problem. Until all J.D.’s paperwork went through processing, the bursar would not activate her salary. Victoria had been handling the partnership’s accounts since Merry’s death. She suspected life could quickly become difficult in the face of a financial setback.

Chancellor Blades had arrived on the transport incoming that Victoria had taken, outgoing, back to Earth. She had never spoken to him or met him and she knew very little about him. She wanted to be fair to him. But he was from the U.S., so she found it hard not to suspect that he was purely a political appointment.

She supposed he would be at the welcome party tonight. The rest of the faculty and staff would use the opportunity to welcome him, since he had pled the press of work and declined to have a party of his own. Perhaps it would have been better to wait till then to talk to him...

“Chancellor Blades’s office.” Chancellor Blades’s AI answered the call. It possessed a deliberate, soothing voice, a display pattern of pastel colors.

“Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. Director Blades, please.”

“The director cannot speak in person at this time,” the AI said. “Would you leave a message, please?”

“Yes. Chancellor, there’s been an unfortunate oversight. J.D. Sauvage’s appointment hasn’t been formally accepted. Her office is locked. This is awkward. And I’m concerned that her salary not be delayed.”

“The message has been placed on his register,” the AI said. “Thank you.”

The voice and the pattern faded.

Victoria swore softly.

Trying to think of some other way of solving J.D.’s problem, Victoria glanced at the research display. Its moving background figures took her in. Soon another display formed before her. Her thoughts began to manipulate its space. She forgot everything else.

o0o

Victoria hurried through the courtyard and into the house.

“I’m late,” she said to Satoshi, “I know it, sorry, but I had to get that new manipulation up and running. I think it’s a real breakthrough! I’ll be dressed in a minute — damn!”

“Victoria, relax. What’s wrong?”

“I want to take Ms. Brown some carnations. It won’t take long to dig them — ” She opened the storage cupboard and rummaged around for the rock foam pot she knew was in there somewhere.

Satoshi came up behind her and put his arms around her.

“I’m all ready. I’ll dig them for you.” He was wearing his usual cargo pants and tank top.

“Would you? That would be great.”

“You’ve got plenty of time. Stephen Thomas just got home, too.”

Victoria took a quick shower and stood in front of her closet for a minute, deciding what to wear. Finally she chose her suede pants and the new lace shirt. She liked the way the lace felt, softly scratchy against her skin.

Stephen Thomas finished dressing just when she did. They returned to the main room together. J.D. had already arrived.

“You all look wonderful!” she said. She looked as if she had tried to dress up, but did not quite know how.

Stephen Thomas wore his turquoise shirt for the first time. Instead of his usual plain gold stud, he wore an earring Satoshi had given him on his last birthday. It twisted up behind his ear and drooped forward again, dangling small emerald crystals all the way to his shoulder. A second loop of crystals branched off from the back and draped across his long blond hair and over his other shoulder.

Satoshi handed Victoria the newly-potted carnation, and they set out for the party.

Victoria walked with Stephen Thomas, J.D. with Satoshi. J.D. evened out the group and made walking on the narrow pathways less awkward, though of course not the same as before, walking with Merit. It surprised Victoria to find herself thinking of before with only a dull ache, instead of a deep hard pain. Maybe she was beginning to heal. Finally. She shook herself out of that train of thought, knowing how fast the depression could hit her.

Satoshi and J.D. chatted as they walked ahead. J.D. was beginning to relax with her new teammates. Victoria enjoyed talking with her. If someone had told her that discussing the plots of old short stories would be fun, she would not have believed them.

The discussion not only brought the team members into closer contact, but the members of her partnership as well. Victoria had never known of Satoshi’s summer herding cattle.

Victoria shifted the flowerpot from one hand to the other. She stroked the gray-green leaves and separated the blossoms. The scent of carnations rose around her and she smiled. She hoped Starfarer’s first grandparent in space would like her gift.

Stephen Thomas reached out and took her hand in a companionable way.

“You’re pretty excited,” he said.

“More mind-reading?”

“Hardly necessary.”

“I think I worked out something qualitatively different this afternoon,” Victoria said. “A real ‘a-hah!’ experience. I’m ready for a party! I’m so glad Ms. Brown is here — It isn’t the same as if Grangrana had agreed to come. But I’m glad she’s on board all the same.”

“I don’t understand why they picked her,” Stephen Thomas said. “She’s not a colleague. Even if she wasn’t past retirement, she was never a scientist. She doesn’t have a proper vita. I don’t even know what to call her.”

“By her name, probably.”

“You don’t need to be sarcastic. I’m just saying I have some doubts about the grandparents program.” Stephen Thomas grimaced.

“I thought you were neutral on the subject of age-mix. I didn’t realize you were opposed.”

“I can’t help it if my personal landscape is different on that subject than yours. And, look, if we get into a bad spot, we’ll have to worry about her.”

“Why? How will worrying help? She knows the risks as well as any of us. And she’s just as capable of making an informed decision.”

“There’s no more excuse for bringing elders up here than for bringing kids.”

“No excuse — ! I never heard you talk about Thanthavong or Cherenkov like this, by the way.”

“They’re different.”

“Not in terms of their ability to decide whether to join the expedition.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I meant they both have reasons to be up here. They have things to do.”

“Stephen Thomas, next you’re going to try to tell me that Nikolai Cherenkov was a hero of the Soviet Union for making scientific discoveries.”

Stephen Thomas blushed.

“I admire him, too,” Victoria said. “But let’s face it, holding the time-in-space record doesn’t mean much nowadays. There must be a couple of hundred people who can measure their experience in decades.”

“Okay, I’ll grant that Cherenkov is here because he wants to be and because a lot of us admire him. And maybe because he’s the only person in existence who’ll be safer on the expedition than they would be anywhere in the solar system. That doesn’t change anything. I still don’t see any reason to bring a grandmother up here just because she’s a grandmother. Besides, if she’s such a great grandmother, why isn’t she grandmothering her own grandchildren?”

“Maybe for the same reason we aren’t parenting any children,” Victoria said.

“That isn’t fair!”

“Sure it is. We chose to put off having children so we could join the expedition. Maybe her grandchildren are grown up. Maybe she decided we needed her more than they did. Maybe she didn’t feel needed back on Earth at all. Maybe she has a spirit of adventure.”

“What’s going to happen if we do meet aliens — ”

“When,” Victoria said.

“Whatever, and they see her and say, ‘Why in the world did you bring her along?’“

“What would happen when we meet aliens if they didn’t see her and they said, ‘Where are your elders? How can we talk to people who cut themselves off from their wisest individuals?’ Stephen Thomas, your argument has been used against every minority in history. ‘You can’t represent us, because you’d be talking to people who think you’re less than human. For the sake of getting along, we’re going to pretend to agree.’“

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Then don’t suggest we deform our society to try to please some other culture. They’re going to have to take us as we come.”

“If you take that argument as far as it can go, we ought to bring kids along.”

“There’s a case to be made for that suggestion,” Victoria said. “Maybe you should bring it up at the next meeting.”

“Maybe this is a dumb argument. The age-mix decision’s made now, we have one grandparent in space and maybe more to come. That’s that.”

“You’re awfully passionate about it, now that it’s too late. Why didn’t you say anything at the committee meeting when we talked about age mix in the first place?”

“Native shyness.”

Victoria laughed.

Stephen Thomas gave a small and self-deprecating shrug. “Everybody sounded so enthusiastic. I didn’t want to break consensus.”

“If you weren’t concerned enough about the subject to talk about it at the meetings, I don’t think you should second-guess it now.”

“I’m not going to embarrass you at the party, if that’s what you mean.”

“You haven’t had good experiences with grandparents. Give Floris Brown a chance before you convince yourself she’s going to be more of the same.”

“I wish you wouldn’t psychoanalyze me.”

“And I wish you wouldn’t read my aura, but that doesn’t stop you.”

Quite a way ahead, Satoshi turned back and beckoned to them.

“Come on, we’re going to be late!”

He and J.D. waited till Victoria and Stephen Thomas caught up. Various tributaries had brought other people to the path. They passed the fossil bed, which was much farther along than the last time Victoria had seen it. She wondered if Crimson Ng intended to leave even a bit of bone showing, to indicate the bed’s presence, or if hiding it completely was part of its aesthetics.

o0o

The party was going great. Infinity had never run a big party before. Small ones, a few friends and strangers, sure, but nothing on the scale of an open invitation to everyone left on campus. If Florrie and J.D. Sauvage had arrived a few transports before, it would have been much larger, but as far as Infinity was concerned it was plenty big enough. Guests crowded the main room, listening to Florrie tell stories in her feathery voice; other folks had spilled out into the garden. Professor Thanthavong, the geneticist, and Alzena Dadkhah, the head ecologist, stood in the garden drinking fruit juice and chatting. Even the new chancellor had made an appearance, though he had already left. Infinity had hoped Kolya Cherenkov might come, but maybe that was too much to ask.

An hour before, Infinity had watched a cloud form diagonally far-overhead, close to the spiral path that would bring it over the hill garden just as the party was about to start. Rain had not been predicted anywhere on campus till later tonight, but even inside a starship, weather remained wild and free. Inside a starship it was only gently wild, but a drizzle would dampen a party as badly as a downpour.

The cloud drifted by, shadowing the garden. Infinity stood outside, watching it and talking to it in an undertone. Perhaps it listened. As its edge trailed past, it sprinkled a few drops onto the hill, leaving the air fresh and the flowers sparkling and the grass barely damp. Infinity thanked the cloud.

Arachne had arranged to leave bright one section of the sun tubes. A great shaft of sunlight washed down over the hill, keeping the garden full day while the rest of the campus lay dark, spangled here and there with light. Infinity would have preferred lanterns, strung light bulbs, even darkness and fireflies, but the attention, the trouble someone had gone to — even if the someone was a computer — clearly thrilled Florrie.

Infinity took a glass of fruit juice and wandered out into the garden. The area around the hill lay in bright sunshine. Sunshine on campus was always noon in direction; only its intensity varied as the day progressed. Darkness encircled the pool of light.

Most everybody stood in clusters more or less on the paths, either because of the dampness or because they understood that the grass needed a few more weeks of growth in which to become established. Wildflowers glowed with jeweled colors. They had bloomed just in time, and Infinity felt pleased.

As far as Infinity could tell from the conversations he overheard, the guests had made a tacit agreement, just for tonight, not to discuss the troubles facing the expedition. They sounded more cheerful and relaxed than almost everyone had been for a long time.

He had worried that the guests might be bored with nothing but snacks and fruit juice, but no one appeared to mind the lack of mood altering refreshments. The campus kitchen would supply food and drink for any reasonable gathering, but did not consider beer or wine to be nutritional necessities.

Infinity found alcohol uninteresting as a recreational drug, so he had never bothered to learn to make either beer or wine, nor had he gone out of his way to make friends with anyone who did. As for importing anything stronger from the O’Neills, that was out of the question on his salary even if he had had time to arrange it. The expedition paid him better than any job he could get on Earth, but nothing like what it cost to import luxuries.

He sipped his fruit juice and sidled through the flower garden till he stood among the cactuses, in the penumbra between light and dark. He hoped people could see well enough out here; pulling cactus spines out of somebody’s hand, or their butt, was no picnic.

Voices approached, disembodied by the darkness. A group of four people appeared out of the shadows. The alien contact team stood at the edge of the garden, still chatting with each other as they blinked and squinted and waited for their eyes to accustom themselves to the illumination. Infinity knew Stephen Thomas slightly; the geneticist had asked him for advice on planting grapevines. J.D. Sauvage was an unknown, and Satoshi and Victoria he had barely met. The personnel of the expedition liked to believe they avoided dividing themselves along class lines, but gardeners and scientists had very little to do with one another.

The team members strolled through the garden toward Florrie’s house. Victoria carried a carnation plant, Satoshi a reed mat, Stephen Thomas a paper scroll.

Infinity took note of the alien contact specialist. She was plain and heavyset, pleasant enough but unmemorable. He wondered what alien contact specialists did.

The three old hands took J.D. through the garden, introducing her to everyone they passed. People greeted her and welcomed her and gave her small gifts.

“Victoria!” Someone Infinity did not know loped across the yard toward the team.

“Hi, Feral. Enjoy your first day on Starfarer?”

“It’s fantastic — !”

Kolya Cherenkov’s voice spun toward Infinity out of the darkness, that odd, low, powerful voice. Kolya, too, paused at the edge of the light to let his eyes adjust. He continued talking, though he stared straight ahead and never glanced toward his companion.

Griffith stepped into the light and stopped beside Cherenkov.

Griffith gave Infinity the weirdest feeling. An easy-going man, Infinity seldom took an immediate dislike to anyone. In Griffith’s case, he was willing to make an exception. He disliked his pushiness, he disliked his rudeness and his disrespect toward Florrie. Infinity admired Cherenkov, too, but Griffith’s reaction bordered on worship. Such intensity in any area of life struck Infinity as dangerous.

Infinity had been on campus since before there was a campus, and had never met Cherenkov before today; Griffith, having just arrived, had spent the whole day with the cosmonaut. Disgusted with himself for feeling jealous, Infinity turned away from the pair and headed for the house to make sure everything was going smoothly.

Florrie sat in the window seat with her guests arrayed in concentric circles around her. She wore black pants, and red ankle-boots over them, a long fringed black tunic, and black eye makeup.

The alien contact team approached her. J.D. turned aside to put the awkward handful of presents people had given her in a neat stack in the corner.

Victoria handed Florrie the carnations.

“I hope you’re getting settled in,” she said. “I hope you like Starfarer.”

“Yes...” Florrie said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name — ?”

“Victoria — from the transport?”

“Oh... of course.” Florrie bent down to sniff the carnations.

Looking puzzled, Victoria stepped back.

Satoshi handed her the mat.

“It’s not the same as having a rug,” he said apologetically. “The mats last for quite a while, though.”

“Thank you. You made this yourself?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Stephen Thomas knelt formally at her feet. Bowing slightly, he offered her a scroll that he held in both hands.

She untied the ribbon, unrolled the paper, and read it. Perplexed, she looked up at him. “A tea ceremony? I don’t think I...”

“I’m trying to add the cultural roots of my family to my own personal landscape,” he said. “Tea ceremony is an ancient Japanese custom. I’m learning it, and I’d like to do it for you sometime.”

“Are you... Japanese?”

“No, but that’s part of Satoshi’s background. I keep trying to get him to study it, too, but he doesn’t want to.”

“My family is pretty well Americanized,” Satoshi said.

“And I’m trying to trace Victoria’s family so I know what to study from Africa.”

“Dream on,” Victoria said, in a tone that sounded to Infinity just a shade bitter. “It would make more sense to study some Canadian customs, eh?”

“I would,” Stephen Thomas said, “but I don’t like beer.”

Victoria and Satoshi laughed.

“You are all three in the same family?” Florrie asked.

“Right, a family partnership.”

Infinity thought the family partnership was a fairly weird arrangement. No necessity existed anymore to promise sexual fidelity to one person or to a group. He wondered if J.D. Sauvage had to join the partnership in order to become a member of the alien contact team.

Florrie smiled, accepting the old-fashioned system.

“Goodness,” she said, “I had no idea young people did that anymore. I was born in a commune. Sit here near me. I’m sorry I don’t have any chairs.”

Stephen Thomas continued to kneel at her feet, like the hero of a martial arts interactive attending the dowager empress of Japan. Stephen Thomas looked pretty good, sitting seiza, Infinity thought, though he ducked his head too far when he bowed.

Satoshi sat on the floor crosslegged, shifting uncomfortably now and then. At a little distance, Victoria drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. J.D. sat beside her, arms folded on her chest, her legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles.

Infinity listened contentedly as Florrie recounted her parents’ story, in which a group of people tried to form their own rural tribe, despite being culturally maladapted to communal living and inexperienced at subsisting off the land. Of course it ended badly, when Florrie was very young, but Infinity had a high aesthetic appreciation for well-meaning tragedies.

Suddenly the atmosphere changed. Infinity felt it as surely as a change in temperature or a sudden wind. Stephen Thomas turned. Infinity looked toward the door. Kolya entered, carrying a small package.

Griffith paused in shadows, right behind him.

Infinity moved to one side of the room, farther from Griffith, trying to act natural rather than surreptitious about his desire to get as far away from the other man as possible. Without meaning to he glanced back, and found Griffith gazing after him, the complete, deliberate neutrality of his expression more frightening than any degree of emotion. Anger, or hatred, or contempt, Infinity might have confronted. The neutrality could not even be commented upon, though Infinity knew, and Griffith knew, that it meant: I notice you. I’ll watch you, if it pleases me.

Someone toward the front of the room noticed Kolya. Florrie continued to tell her story, but people were distracted by the unexpected appearance of the cosmonaut. They began nudging each other, glancing back, exclaiming softly in surprise.

As far as Infinity could tell, no one else paid the least attention to Griffith.

Kolya acted as if he never noticed that anyone had noticed him. He hunkered down in a clear space and listened. Infinity wondered if Kolya found it amusing to hear Florrie’s tale of a failed fling with communism in the mid-20th-century United States. If he did, he was too well-mannered to laugh in any of the wrong places.

When Florrie finished, her audience applauded and Kolya unfolded to his feet. People made way for him. He stopped beside Stephen Thomas, who still knelt in front of Florrie.

“I brought you both small gifts of welcome,” he said to Florrie and to J.D. He handed Florrie the package. “It is rather delicate.”

As she opened it, her fingers trembled. Infinity was afraid she would slip and drop it, whatever it was, but the wrapping unfolded and floated to the floor, leaving a delicate, intricately painted eggshell in her hands.

“A souvenir,” Kolya said. “I believe that they do not make them in my country anymore. Or, if they do, they do not export them.”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Cherenkov,” Florrie said.

Kolya handed J.D. a slip of paper. J.D. unfolded it, read it, and looked up.

“Thank you,” she said softly, and buttoned the slip of paper into her shirt pocket.

Florrie held the eggshell up and looked at it against the light. Infinity wondered if she understood what giving gifts meant here. Gifts were, more often than not, non-physical: offers of help or time or the gift of a skill. The kind of thing Kolya, apparently, had offered to J.D. People did not have many things to give, up here. Kolya probably had fewer than most. He had not, as far as Infinity knew, been back to Earth in two decades. Other people returned to Earth on leave and came home with full allowances; Kolya lacked this luxury. Perhaps he had brought the egg into space with him on an early trip. Or the last one.

Florrie looked around. “I don’t know where to put this,” she said. “If I were back home I’d put it on the mantelpiece, but I have none here.”

“There is a thread strung through it, to make it easy to hang up.”

“In the window, then.”

“Oh — ” Kolya stopped. He looked uncomfortable, unhappy, but he said nothing more. Infinity had no idea what troubled him.

Florrie rose and turned toward the window, looking for a place to hang the egg. Before she found one, Griffith appeared. Infinity had not even noticed him move. Griffith took the egg from her hand.

Florrie reacted to Griffith even more negatively, more noticeably, than Infinity had. She drew back; the egg would have fallen and shattered if Griffith had not taken it carefully from her hand. He was more concerned about the eggshell than he was about Florrie, for he showed no reaction to her fright.

“Sunlight will fade it,” Griffith said. He took the eggshell to the corner farthest from the window, stretched up, and hung it from a hook set into the ceiling.

Florrie’s aesthetic sense was better than Griffith’s. The eggshell looked odd and lonely high up in the corner, where it was safe. It would have looked fine in the window, but not at the expense of its existence. Infinity could see that someone would have to build Florrie a table or a stand or a little cabinet for the egg, maybe with a bit of mirror behind it.

“Well!” Defending herself with indignation, Florrie sat stiff and straight on the window seat.

Both relieved and embarrassed, Kolya offered Florrie a small bow.

“I hope you will be happy on our expedition,” he said. “I hope you will be happy, too, J.D.”

“Thank you, Kolya,” J.D. Sauvage said.

In a moment the cosmonaut was gone.

Though the party inside took a little while to ease again, the party outside had loosened up considerably. As the light faded to dusk, people put lines out to Arachne for music. Couples and groups danced on the grass, unsynchronized, each to a different interior melody. Infinity would have to reseed the center of the yard after all. He did not mind too much.

He kept an eye on Griffith, trying to figure out what bothered him about the man. After Kolya left, Griffith acted like everyone else, mingling, chatting. But every so often, when Infinity glanced around, he found Griffith gazing at him with that scary neutral expression.

Infinity went inside. Florrie sipped lemonade. Stephen Thomas still knelt at her feet — as far as Infinity could tell, he had not moved. They chatted.

Infinity admired Stephen Thomas’s new earring. He wondered who had made it and whether they would make a similar one for him, only with synthetic rubies instead of emeralds.

He joined Florrie and Stephen Thomas.

“You let me know if you get tired, Florrie,” Infinity said, “and I’ll chase all these folks home.”

She peered out the French doors. “Who is that man?”

Griffith stood alone on the porch.

“He said he’s with the GAO,” Infinity said.

“The GAO!” Victoria frowned, doubtful. “What’s he doing, auditing our books?”

“Could be, I guess.”

“He’s a narc,” Florrie said.

“What?”

“A narc.”

“I heard you, I just don’t know what that means.”

“Is the government going through anti-drug hysteria again?” she asked. “I gave up reading local news years ago.”

“The main tantrum the U.S. is going through right now is about Starfarer and the expedition,” Infinity said. “Florrie, please, what’s a narc?”

“Be careful around him,” she said. “If you use any kind of drugs, he’ll put you in jail.”

Infinity and Stephen Thomas looked at each other, confused. What kind of drugs could get you put in jail? Most recreational substances were designed so their effects wore off quickly, and anyone who chose something more powerful ought to have the sense to check out their tolerance for it and make adjustments. Infinity had known people who too frequently sought out effects that were too strong — watching them was one of the reasons he did not drink — but he could not imagine involving the law in the problem. A supervisor, or a doctor, sure. Even the community council. But the law?

“You don’t know much history, do you?” Florrie said.

“Not enough, I guess,” Stephen Thomas said politely.

“You be careful. If you do anything they don’t like, if you make trouble, they’ll accuse you of using drugs and they’ll ruin you. They take a real problem and they pervert the solution to it to increase their power over you. They’ll take your job away. That happened to a friend of mine, and he didn’t even use alcohol, much less something illegal. But he was a troublemaker! And they destroyed him for it!”

“I don’t think you need to worry,” Victoria said, keeping her voice gentle, neutral, almost as neutral as Griffith’s expression. “We’re all troublemakers up here, in one way or another. They can’t get us all.”

“Don’t patronize me, young lady!” Florrie snapped, with a spark of real anger. “If you ignore me because you think I’m a senile old coot, you’ll be sorry!”

“I don’t think — It wasn’t my intention — ” Victoria’s voice broke. She stopped. Her dark skin flushed. “ — to patronize you.”

Infinity suddenly shivered. He looked out the window at Griffith, wondering if Florrie was worried over the wrong details, but for the right reason.

When he glanced back toward Florrie and the alien contact team, Victoria had disappeared.

o0o

Victoria hurried to the edge of the garden, out of the light. She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. Not someone. Floris Brown.

“Victoria?”

J.D. crossed the shadows and stopped beside her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It’s just...” She fell silent. “She had a perfect right to react that way, I was being patronizing.”

“There’s a difference between being patronizing and being reassuring. I thought her reaction was kind of extreme.”

Victoria shrugged.

“Why did what she said hurt you so much?” J.D. asked.

Victoria told J.D. about her own great-grandmother.

“I tried to get Grangrana to apply to the expedition, but she wouldn’t. She’s older than Ms. Brown, quite a lot. She’s frailer. She traveled all over when she was younger, and now... she’s tired. I’m worried about her. I don’t want to leave her behind. I miss her, J.D., I miss her so much.” Victoria smiled. “Grangrana can give you what-for, but she wouldn’t ever slap you down.”

“You wanted Ms. Brown to like you, didn’t you?”

“I did. I think she’s admirable, to apply for the program and come all this way. I thought she did like me. On the transport. But tonight she didn’t even remember me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t it strange,” Victoria said, “how somebody can say a couple of words to you, and make you feel like a four-year-old?”

“No,” J.D. said. “Not strange at all. Especially when it’s somebody you want to make a connection with.”

Victoria squeezed J.D.’s hand. “Thanks. For talking. For... noticing.” She still felt shaken, as much by surprise at the intensity of her reaction as by Ms. Brown’s words. She made herself smile. “What did Cherenkov give you?”

“Hey, Victoria!” Satoshi joined them. He carried J.D.’s presents in the crook of his arm. “J.D., you forgot these.”

“Oh. Sorry. Thank you.” She took them from him. “Kolya invited me to lunch,” she said to Victoria. “He offered to make piroshki. I don’t know what piroshki is, but I’m looking forward to finding out.”

“Piroshki are the Russian version of fried dumplings or pasties or ravioli,” Satoshi said.

Satoshi put his arm around Victoria’s shoulders. His bare skin touched hers through the open lace of her shirt. She put her arm around his waist, glad of his warmth.

“He doesn’t spend time with people very often,” Victoria said. “He’s given you a unique gift.”

“What’s wrong?” Satoshi asked her. “The way you rushed out...”

“I’m okay now, but I’m going home.”

“Wait just a minute and we’ll all go.”

“There’s no reason for you to leave, too — ”

“Stephen Thomas is already making our excuses. It’s getting late. There he is.”

Stephen Thomas walked toward them, staring at the ground. When he reached them he stopped and looked up. His fair skin was pale, his blue eyes dark-circled.

“Stephen Thomas — ?”

“Let’s go,” he said shortly, and strode into the darkness.

o0o

People began drifting home soon after the light faded. Infinity was spared having to urge anyone to go, since everyone had to work the next day. Stephen Thomas surprised him by leaving so early — he could usually be counted on to close out any gathering, no matter how late it ran. He had bid goodnight to Florrie, then he had risen from his kneeling position as smoothly as if he had knelt at her feet only for a moment. Infinity wondered how he kept his feet from going to sleep.

The AS from the campus kitchen had already collected the bento boxes and taken them away. The housekeeper rolled about, looking for other things to do. As usual after parties on campus, no litter remained. Disposable eating utensils and suchlike did not exist out here. The AS carefully placed crumpled wrapping paper in a stack by Infinity’s feet. Infinity smoothed the sheets out and folded them.

“You should keep this, too, Florrie,” he said. “It’s as much a gift as anything else you got tonight. Nobody manufactures wrapping paper out here.”

She hardly heard him. She had not calmed down from her reaction to Griffith. Though she trembled with weariness, excitement and fear brightened her eyes.

“You will watch him, won’t you?” she said. “Whatever he’s about, you’ll find out and make him stop.”

“I can’t do that,” Infinity said. “How could I make him stop anything? He’s a government representative, I’m a gardener.”

“You’ve got to, that’s all. You’ve got to.”

“Please try to be easy. There’s nothing I can do, and if there were I couldn’t do it tonight. And, look, if he is some kind of a spy or something, maybe you ought to be careful what you say about him, or anyway who you say it to. It might get back to him.”

She glanced at Infinity, quickly, sidelong, and immediately fell silent.

“I don’t mean me,” Infinity said. “I don’t like him either.” He stopped, wishing he had kept that admission to himself. “Florrie, do you need any help, or shall I leave you alone?”

“I don’t need help.”

“Okay, then, I just live over the next hill if you want to call me.”

“But... you could brush my hair.”

“All right,” he said uncertainly. “Sure.”

Except for the three long locks, she kept her hair cropped so close that he worried about scratching her scalp with the well-worn bristles of her brush. Her papery skin felt fragile. The brush made a soft, whispery noise, like her voice. A bristle caught against one of the unshorn and braided patches. He disentangled it. The shells and small pierced stones rattled together.

“Go ahead and take those out,” she said.

Three diamond-shaped patches of hair lay in a diagonal line across the back of her head. There, her hair was heavy and thick. She had divided each section into two hanks and braided them with a soft leather thong from which dangled the shells and stones. He laid the thongs on the counter and brushed the long sections. She let herself relax into the chair; she pushed her foot against the floor, just once, then stopped trying to rock a chair that had no rockers.

Infinity found it pleasant to brush her hair. He had never done that for anyone before. After a while he thought Florrie had gone to sleep. He stopped brushing. He would have to wake her —

“Thank you,” she said. She opened her eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure,” Infinity said. He put the brush beside the shells and stones and left her alone.

He walked home across the darkened campus, thinking about the strange day. Once he heard a noise: he stopped short and spun toward it, expecting to see Griffith gazing expressionlessly at him, half-hidden by shadows.

The miniature horse herd’s miniature stallion stamped the ground with its miniature hoof, snorted at him, and reared and whinnied. A moment later the whole herd galloped away into the darkness, making a noise like rain. Infinity smiled. When he got home, he took a blanket into his own garden, to sleep in the reflected starlight.

o0o

Griffith returned to the guest house in the dark, knowing he could walk safely anywhere and anytime up here, yet unable to shake off a practiced tension. His aggressive swagger let potential assailants know he was no easy target. Here he tried to tone it down, for it did not fit the character of Griffith of GAO. On the other hand, he was not willing to be accosted even for the sake of his assignment.

He had complied with the rules of campus — of all the orbital habitations — to the extent of going unarmed. Even Griffith of GAO would never do that in the city. Being unarmed made him uncomfortable, and he wished he had at least tried to circumvent the laws.

He went to bed in his silent room. Lying on the thin hard futon, he listened. He heard nothing, no sign of the other guest, only the evening breeze brushing through the open windows.

Cherenkov had talked to him.

Griffith’s thoughts kept returning to the question of how to persuade the cosmonaut to continue talking to him, to continue answering his questions. Griffith’s mission to Starfarer seemed inconsequential in comparison to his need to learn everything he could about Nikolai Cherenkov. Today was the first time in a long time that he had felt the drive to know everything about anything or anyone. At the party, Griffith had felt as if he wore his nerves outside his skin, sensitive to every stimulus that passed. He gathered everything in: observations of Cherenkov and information about the rest of the faculty and staff of the expedition as well, the kind of indiscriminate data that would collect in the back of his mind, work like fermenting beer, and help him discover a way to complete his mission. But after Cherenkov left, the party bored him, the interactions between the people bored him; their negative opinions about the new administration bored him.

The agreement he had made with Cherenkov must not stop him. As Griffith lay in bed, he let the prospect of the quest excite him. It pushed away the depression that had settled when he could no longer keep Cherenkov in sight. It recharged him.

In the darkness, he drafted a quick memo to his superiors. Before he ever came here he had tried to tell them that directly co-opting the personnel would be hopeless. Now he could demonstrate it. The hope had been a foolish one to begin with. The crew of Starfarer, the faculty and staff, as they referred to themselves, would all have to be recalled in one way or another. Then the starship could be converted.

Griffith encrypted his message, sent it back to Earth, and fell asleep. He dreamed all night.

o0o

Kolya wanted to go outside again, but he knew that Arachne, fussing over his radiation exposure, would go so far as to call out human help to persuade him to stay inside. Since he recognized his desire as a selfish one, he refrained from indulging in it. The only result would be that someone would be fetched, probably out of a warm bed, to come and talk to him.

He feared he had made a tactical error in conversing with Marion Griffith. The intensity of the officer’s questions troubled him. He should have seen the problem coming when the fellow waited in the access tunnels for him. Even before that. Kolya tried to excuse himself on the grounds of having been spared the more obvious forms of hero-worship during the past few years.

The person he looked forward to talking to was the alien contact specialist. J.D. Sauvage and her profession fascinated him. He thought that if he were younger, if he had a different background, he might have tried to go into her field himself.

Since yesterday, he said to himself, you’ve added a party and a lunch date to your socializing. Soon your reputation as a hermit will be ruined.

Do you even remember how to make piroshki?

o0o

J.D. enjoyed working at night; she enjoyed the solitude and the long uninterrupted hours of quiet thought. She might have to change her schedule around, though, in order to spend time with the rest of the alien contact team. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas kept awfully normal hours.

She liked them all, which surprised her a bit. She liked Victoria in particular. The team leader sparked off ideas like phosphorescent waves. Satoshi was quieter, but what he said usually counted. As for Stephen Thomas...

She decided not to think about Stephen Thomas for a while.

She stayed awake for a long time after the party, reading, gazing out into the dark courtyard. Once she got up and rearranged the new woven mats on her floor. For all their homemade roughness, they made her happy, and a little scared. The gifts represented a welcome that made her believe she had found a place where she might be at home. This disturbed her, because she had always believed that being an alien contact specialist meant remaining an outsider in her own culture — not just the culture of her country, but the culture of humanity as a whole.

J.D. took Kolya Cherenkov’s note from her pocket and smoothed it out. He had given her, as Victoria said, a unique gift. She did not understand why he had given it to her, but she knew it was not to be trifled with or abused. In some ways, his was the welcome that meant the most to her.

Before she finally went to sleep, she checked her mail: the usual tsunami of junk, most of which she filtered out without even scanning; scientific journals; magazines of experimental fiction (interior landscapes, mostly; deliberately, stolidly human, but every now and again a story she could savor, save, and think about); no personal mail. Nothing from Zev. She scanned the news summary, lingering just perceptibly over the Pacific Northwest.

The divers, as usual, received no mention.

o0o

Victoria propped herself on her elbow next to Satoshi, who lay in the middle of his bed with Stephen Thomas on his other side. Stephen Thomas lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed on his chest.

“Do you think J.D. had a good time?” Victoria asked Satoshi.

“She seemed to.”

“I wasn’t about to say anything in front of her, but I’m so mad at the chancellor I could spit — he came early, he left early, he was too rude to stay and welcome her to campus! Gerald was there — did he even speak to her?” She tried to remember seeing the assistant chancellor anywhere near J.D.

“I don’t think so,” Satoshi said. “We can’t take this stuff personally, Victoria. It’s all politics.”

“They mean it personally and I take it personally, politics or not.”

They heard a noise from the front of the house, sharp and loud, quickly stilled. Victoria sat up.

“What was that?” She started to rise. “Oh — Feral coming in.” They listened as he tiptoed down the hall to the end room.

Concerned by Stephen Thomas’s uncharacteristic silence, Victoria glanced over at him. The crystal lay dull and black in the hollow of his throat. He had taken off his sexy emerald jewelry, but he had not replaced the regular gold stud.

“The hole in your ear is going to close up,” Victoria said.

He shrugged.

Victoria slid out of bed and went into Stephen Thomas’s room. His jewelry hung in a tangle on a rock-foam stand that someone in the materials lab had made for him. The gold stud was nowhere she could see it, so she picked out a little platinum ring and returned to Satoshi’s bedroom. She stepped over both her partners, sat crosslegged beside Stephen Thomas, and smoothed his hair away from his ear. In the darkness, she had trouble finding the hole to put the earring in.

“Ouch, shit, that hurt!”

Victoria leaned down and kissed his ear. “Better?”

“Give it here, I’ll put it in.” He took the earring from her and put it on. Victoria lay down beside him and put one hand on his hip.

“I’m glad to know you can still talk,” Satoshi said. “You’ve been awfully quiet since we left the party.”

“You remember that conversation we had with Florrie?” Stephen Thomas asked.

Victoria said nothing, wishing Stephen Thomas had not reminded her about talking with Ms. Brown.

“You hit it off pretty well with her, didn’t you?” Satoshi said.

“Yeah, I did. I like her. I thought she’d be reactionary, but she’s more open-minded than half the people up here.”

“You just like her because she approves of our sleeping arrangements,” Victoria said.

“That doesn’t hurt. And you don’t have to be careful of every word you say to her. But she goes off at a different angle, sometimes.”

“What do you mean?” Satoshi said.

“What she said about Griffith.”

“He was on the transport,” Victoria said. “But I hardly ever saw him. I almost forgot about him.”

“He’s weird. When Florrie said he was a narc — after she told me what a narc was — I tried to shrug it off.” Stephen Thomas shifted uneasily. “But I think we ought to pay attention to her intuition.”

“Oh, no, not another aura reader!” Victoria flopped forward and hid her face in Stephen Thomas’s pillow.

“I don’t know whether she is or not, but I looked at him. Dammit, that guy doesn’t have an aura.”

“Wouldn’t that mean he’s dead?” Satoshi asked.

“I don’t know what it means,” Stephen Thomas said. “Since he obviously isn’t dead.”

Victoria raised herself from the pillows and propped her chin on her fists. “Maybe they’ve been improving robot technology in secret — ”

“Laugh if you want. He said he’s with the GAO — that may be worse than being a narc. I think he’s trouble. Even if he’s just an ordinary government accountant.”

“There’s not much we can do about him that I can see.”

“There’s got to be something.” Stephen Thomas lay back and stared at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest, as if he intended to try to think of something right now, and stay where he was until he succeeded.