down between his thighs.
Light washed the room. Starfarer's light always came from high noon, straight overhead, from the light tubes along the axis of the campus's cylindrical body.
Infinity had gotten used to the unchanging direction of the light before the campus was even finished. He
had belonged to the construction crew that built the starship. Infinity knew Starfarer from the outside in. Having helped build its shell, he now helped maintain its ecosystem.
Infinity covered Esther's hand with his own. She snuggled closer, still asleep. Moving away from her warm touch, Infinity slid out from under the covers, drew the blanket up around Esther's shoulders, and looked for his clothes.
It's sure harder to keep track of things without the artificial stupids, Infinity thought. They should have been released by now. . . .
Chancellor Blades had impounded them, but he could not control them anymore.
Maybe Gerald's been too busy to let them loose, Infinity thought. He smiled to himself. Big job, being acting chancellor of a bunch of revolutionaries. Probably Gerald had just not got around to the task. When Chancellor Blades impounded the machines, he got everyone's attention. The ASes did the kind of work nobody noticed till it did not get done. It was annoying to order dinner and get nothing; to find dirty clothes still lying around instead of washed and pressed and returned to the shelf.
What a lot of people did not realize was how important the ASes were to the health of Starfarer. The faculty thought of the ASes and mobile Als as conveniences. But the machines also watched and maintained and repaired the complex structure of the starship.
Infinity threw on his jeans and sandals and his leather vest, combed the tangles out of his long black hair, and left the coolness of his house. Outside, in his garden, bees buzzed loudly and birds called and chirped and rustled the bushes. The morning was warm for spring. The afternoon would be uncomfortably hot.
The quality of the light made him uneasy. Arachne filtered it so the radiation of Sirius resembled the light of the sun; still, its white harshness remained. It worried him. He belonged to the staff, not the faculty, so under
normal circumstances his responsibility was low and his authority negligible. Alzena Dadkha, the director of the ecology department, should have been in charge.
But Alzena was gone. Unable to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her family on Earth with her responsibility to the deep space expedition, she had fled with Europa and Androgeos. Europa had taken pity on A] zena's despair.
Infinity touched Arachne through his link, asking for access to the interior spectrum. The computer gave it without hesitation.
A bee whizzed past him, flying fast with an angry buzz.
Whether Arachne would or would not permit him to alter the light filters made no difference at all. The filters pegged out at their limits. He could have less light, or more. But he could not get a spectrum any closer to real sunlight than he already had.
The bee circled wildly. The frantic buzz stopped short. Infinity frowned. The fat honeybees were usually as placid as cows. He worked around them all the time, moved the hives, collected the honey. He had never even been stung.
He moved cautiously toward the last place he had heard the bee, expecting to find it nuzzling the center of a flower for pollen and nectar. But the flowers were still in the breathless morning.
A faint sound, not even a buzz, caught Infinity's attention. He found the bee lying on the ground, upside down, its wings battering uselessly against the earth. Its short life span ended in a burst of angry energy; its motion stopped and its legs curled up against its body.
I'd probably run around yelling, too, Infinity thought, if I realized I was about to die. But bees don't usually act like that. . . .
In the driest comer of his garden, he stooped to look at a barrel cactus. For a while it had flourished in this microenvironment. Something about it troubled him: the spongy feel of its skin when he carefully slipped his finger between its hairy spines.
Infinity's mother came from the American southwest, but she had fled to Brazil, a refugee, before Infinity was born. Infinity had never grown a cactus before, never lived where cactuses grew wild. His memories from childhood, before he came into space, were spotty and disjointed, of eroded land struggling to re-establish itself as forest, of displaced people grieving for land they had loved and disconnected from the new land where they now scraped out a living.
Information on cactuses was only one of the many things Arachne had lost when the system crashed. He wondered if anybody had hard references, if Alzena had left anything in her office when she fled. With plants, hands-on experience was best. But references were better than nothing.
He remembered what Esther had told him about her potted cactus. She only realized it had died when her cat knocked it over and it had no roots. He pushed gently at the barrel cactus. Was it releasing its grasp on the soil? Or was the soil just loose? He could not tell.
Better to leave it alone and keep watch on it. If he worried at it, he might damage it.
He hcaded for the administration building, trying again, as he walkcd, to ask Arachne for information about the artificials.
Arachne replied, but the reply contained no information.
It's like they don't even exist, he thought. What if Blades destroyed them, or threw them out into space? That would be crazy . . . but a lot of crazy stuff has been happening recently.
A holographic triptych, a replay of J.D.'s alien encounters, occupied the center of Chandra's large living room, hovering above the thick Berber carpet.
While most people on board Starfarer lived austerely, Chandra lived in a house full of stuff. When she decided to join the deep space expedition's art department, she had ordered a lot of expensive furniture and sent it on ahead. Other people built their own furniture of bamboo and rock foam and canvas. They covered the floor with woven mats. Chandra saw no reason to limit herself to local materials and amateur labor. She made plenty of money; she could afford to indulge herself. Back on Earth, her name on a new production guaranteed attention, reviews, and more royalties than she could spend.
Crimson Ng sat companionably beside Chandra. She watched the replays of Nerno's nest, toying idly with a model bone, part of her newest sculpture. Crimson held the bone up between her and the holographic replays. When she moved the bone, Chandra could see the muscles, the skin, the soft sleek pelt of the animal in Crimson's imagination.
The remains of dinner littered the mosaic table. Chandra had also imported a supply of exotic food; she had been afraid that the meals on board Starfarer would be pedestrian. She had been right. And now, the campus was in such disarray that the central cafeteria could not produce even pedestrian meals.
'Did you get enough dinner?' she asked Crimson.
'I sure did. It was great.'
One of the displays repeated J.D.'s first meeting with the squidmoth. Chandra sprawled naked on her leather couch. She could take in her surroundings with her whole body, if she chose, but there was absolutely no point in recording J.D.'s experience secondhand.
Chandra felt jealous of J.D.: not simply envious, wishing to have the experience herself, but flat out jealous.
I should have been there instead of her, Chandra thought. Holographic recordings. Big deal.
Visual and audio recordings could never convey exactly what J.D. had experienced, the way a sensory artist could.
I should have been there, Chandra said to herself. I can see and feel and taste and hear and smell everything, and everybody could experience it again, through me.
No one else on board resented the alien contact specialist's position. They were all perfectly happy to back her up, to support her, to be good obedient members of the team.
Fine for them. Chandra always worked alone.
She had barely recorded a thing since coming on board Starfarer, since giving her life up to this pastoral, small-town campus. Starfarer was as boring as a village back home, despite being a stone cylinder four light-years
