goodbye to Feral. But he had been lying to himself.
'Gerald can go fuck himself,' Stephen Thomas said. 'I'll be damned if I'll leave you here.'
Feral's clothes had been ripped and cut away during the attempts to revive him. Livid bruises mottled his chest. Stephen Thomas found a clean sheet and wrapped it around Feral's body. The health center lay well up the side of Starfarer's end hill, where the gravity was very low. When Stephen Thomas picked Feral up,
his body felt absurdly light, as if death had taken away his substance. Stephen Thomas easily carried Feral's body to the hub of Starfarer. The gravity continued to diminish, till it was barely perceptible. He floated himself and his burden to the ferry station, boarded the capsule, and strapped Feral's body on the back platform.
He had not been to the wild side since the wild side's previous spring. Spring on the wild side was fall in the campus cylinder. Summer had passed in the wilderness, winter had passed on campus. A short trip would take him from campus spring into wild side autumn.
Infinity crossed the lawn in front of the chancellor's house. Three exterior ASes, silver slugs, sprawled like shiny boneless rhinoceroses in front of the building and guarded its front door. All the house's other doors, its windows, its balconies, had been covered with ugly, irregular slabs of overlapping rock foam. The secret tunnels leading from it had been plugged with rock foam.
The exterior ASes were the only mobile artificials left working. The chancellor had disrupted the campus by recalling the service machines.
He must have thought that would be a minor irritation compared to Arachne's crash; maybe he thought it would be the last straw for the expedition members.
But his petty irritation had backfired on him. He had not realized the silver slugs could work inside as well as outside-they could work almost anywhere-and had released them to finish repairing Starfarer's damaged hull.
The oversight had been his downfall, for once Stephen Thomas and J.D. traced the sabotage of Arachne to Blades, the silver slugs had driven the chancellor from the administration building, through the underground tunnels, and trapped him in his house. He was cut off from Arachne now. The computer had activated its immune system and destroyed Blades's neural node, and the silver slugs had cut the house's hard links.
Infinity wished Blades had been stopped before anyone died.
Blades could communicate by note. He could ask for anything he liked, and a silver slug would carry it to him. Anything but electronic communication, or company. The slugs guarded his door for the protection of the expedition, and for his own protection as well. They let no one pass in either direction.
Infinity approached the chancellor's house, crossing behind a rough sculpture of tumbled chunks of raw moon rock.
Like the manicured yard in front of the administration building, the green turf around the chancellor's house showed the scars of an angry, milling crowd. The tracks of the silver slugs gouged wide, shallow trenches in the earth.
Infinity paused at the edge of the swath of grass. All three silver slugs lay facing the same direction, an odd alignment.
Curious, cautious, he moved forward. One of the silver slugs, a lithoclast, reared up to sense him. The slugs knew him. He had called them in from repairing Starfarer's outer surface; he had set them to guarding Blades. But they would not let him into Blades's house, even if that was where he wanted to go.
The lithoclast subsided. Its bulk eased onto the ground and spread out, shimmering. It rested, waiting, its senses trained on the group of rocks. The smell of crushed grass, green and light, filled the air.
In a recess in the tumbled stone, lphigenie Dupre sat staring past the silver slugs at the open door of the chancellor's home. Infinity watched her uneasily, reluctant to disturb her solitude, but more reluctant to leave her here alone.
It was unusual to see her on Starfarer's inner surface. She preferred zero gravity, and stayed in the sailhouse or near the axis as much as she could. Arachne ordered her out of free-fall every so often. She complied, reluctantly.
Infinity had not been surprised to see Jenny Dupre
in the waiting room, when the Chi returned from Nerno's web. But he had been surprised when she joined the discussion group. He was more surprised to see her still here.
She leaned against the rock, her long, delicate hands lying with fingers outspread beside her. She wore her hair in narrow black braids caught up at the back of her head. They fell to her shoulders, the bright glass beads an uneven fringe. In weightlessness, the braids fanned out and the beads clicked together softly, constantly.
Infinity joined her and sat beside her, watching Blades's house. The chancellor remained out of sight. The slugs would let him come to the door, but no farther. He could not cross the threshold.
He had been nearly as reclusive before they penned him in.
'Something has to be done,' Iphigenie said abruptly.
The sailmaster hated the chancellor with cold outrage. She believed, with good reason, that he had tried to kill her. His attack on Arachne had caused the first system crash, which injured Iphigenie. His second attack had killed Feral.
Infinity considered her statement, careful not to answer too fast, too certainly.
'Isn't that enough?' He gestured to the foam-covered house with his chin. 'No,' she said. 'No. It isn't. He murdered Feral. He meant to kill me. He's dangerous.'
'Not anymore.'
'What if he gets back inside the web?'
'Arachne's immunized against him.'
'And the web was uncrashable!' lphigenie snorted in disgust, 'He's been talking to Gerald. And to the American senators. I saw them from the hill.' She gestured back toward the end of Starfarer's cylinder. 'But when I came down here, they went away.'
The two senators had been passengers on Esther's transport, heading home after a fact-finding tour of
Starfarer. They were along for the ride, now, and none too happy about it. 'What do you think we should do?' Infinity asked. Isolating Blades in his house had felt like a good compromise to him, when he had thought of it. At least it had stopped the riot lphigenie had tried to start, and no one else had been hurt.
'I think,' lphigenie said, 'that you don't want to know what I want to see. The best I can hope for, I suppose, is a trial.'
'We aren't exactly prepared to try anybody. Is anybody even a lawyer?' lphigenie shrugged.
Starfarer had left Earth orbit precipitously, six months early, without the long burn-in period the faculty and staff had planned. Maybe during the burnin, they would have had to handle antisocial, even criminal, behavior. Maybe then they would have been better prepared for it. But the glow of optimism and cooperative spirit led them to the tacit, naive assumption that every problem could be solved by talking about it, by the meetings they held to discuss other sorts of problems.
The faculty and staff had agreed to continue the deep space expedition, in defiance of orders from EarthSpace, at a meeting. They had held a meeting to decide whether to go after Europa and Androgeos.
'I'm worried about you,' Infinity said.
Jenny looked directly at him, gazing at him intently. Always before, until he broke up the mob she created, she had glanced at him briefly, dismissing him. People liked to pretend Starfarer had no hierarchy, but it did. And the hierarchy separated a millionaire solar sail designer from a gardener by quite a distance.
'You are remarkable,' she said.
He looked away, embarrassed. He did not like to stand out. He was not sure he wanted to know exactly what she meant. She probably did not mean what she said as a compliment.
'Feral shouldn't have died,' she said.
'Nobody should have died.'
'I mean-if anyone died, it should have been me. A sacrifice to Artemis, to the wind. Maybe that's why Blades directed his sabotage toward me.'
'A sacrifice?' Infinity said.
'Yes. My namesake escaped, but the gods always take their due, in the end-don't you know your mythology?'
'That isn't my mythology,' Infinity said.
'Oh,' Jenny said. 'No, I suppose not. I'm sorry.'
