military base—becomes vulnerable. 1 hope it won't come to that. Look, Feral, your country is trying to make itself so powerful that it's becoming paralyzed. When you rely solely on your weapons, you lose the art of compromise that created the U.S. in the first place. Soon your only choice will be between staying in the comer you've backed into, doing nothing ... or blasting the whole building down.'
'Do you think we can talk the Mideast Sweep around to a reasonable position?''
Victoria had no fondness for the Mideast Sweep. To begin with, there was the sexual and racial discrimination they practiced. If she lived under its domination she would subsist at a level so low that it would barely count as human.
'I don't know how much can be achieved with talk. But I hope—1 have to believe—that the United States is a country
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too ethical to destroy a whole population because it lives under the control of an antagonistic hierarchy.'
'Does everybody else on the crew agree with you?'
Victoria chuckled. 'Getting everybody to agree on anything is one of our biggest problems. One thing we do agree on, though, is that we aren't 'crew.' '
'What, then?'
^Starfarer isn't a military ship—not yet, anyway, and not ever if most of us on board have anything to say about it. It's only a ship in the sense that it can move under its own power. There's a hierarchy of sorts, but it isn't based on a military structure. There's faculty and staff and technical support. It's more like a university. Or a university town. Most of the decisions about how things are run, we try to decide by consensus.'
'That sounds awkward,' Feral said.
'Only if you hate five-hour meetings,' Victoria said, straight-faced.
'Don't you have to be able to react fast out here? If there's an emergency and there's nobody to give the order to do something about it, doesn't that put everyone at risk?'
^Starfarer has redundancies of its redundancies. With most emergencies you have plenty of time. As for the others . . . everyone who lives there takes an orientation course that includes possible emergencies and what to do about them- You have to pass it if you expect to stay. That's how fast you'd have to react to an acute emergency —you wouldn't have time to call some general and ask for permission.'
'What about sabotage?'
'There's much more reason to sabotage a military instal-
lation than a civilian one. And a lot more explosive-type stuff sitting around to use to sabotage it with.' Victoria laughed. 'Besides, in a group run by consensus, all a saboteur would have to do is come to meetings and block every proposal.
That wouldn't stop us cold, but it would slow everything down and drain a lot of energy.' She sighed. 'Sometimes I think we already have a few saboteurs aboard.'
'How would you respond to an attack?'
'We have no response to attack. We're unarmed. We had to fight to remain unarmed, but it's an important part of the philosophy of the mission.'
4 0 Vonda N. Mcintyre
'I meant response to an attack from earth, or on earth. If you were armed—suppose somebody attacked the U.S. or Canada. What could you do?'
'Not much. Even if we were armed, Slarfarer's in a lousy strategic orbit. It's too far from earth to be of use as a defensive or offensive outpost. Any of the O'Neill colonies would be more effective. And nobody is talking about making them into military bases.'
'Yet,' Feral said.
'Yeah,' Victoria said. 'Yet.'
'You're pretty emphatic about Slarfarer in relation to solving earth's problems. Or not solving them.'
Victoria frowned. 'I hoped you were on our side.'
'I'm not on anybody's side! It's my job to ask questions.'
'All right. People want the expedition to promise to go out and find easy, quick solutions. We can't.'
'Promise it, or do it?'
'Either- We already know how to solve a lot of our problems. Take food. I don't know the exact numbers—my partner Satoshi could tell you—but if we stopped the expansion of a couple of deserts for one year, we'd gain more arable land than ten Starfarers. If the U.S. hadn't opposed family planning in the 1990s—'
'There's not much we can do about that,' Feral said.
'After all.'
'But don't you see? We act in stupid and shortsighted ways and then we behave as if we didn't have any responsibility for those actions. Somehow that justifies our continuing to behave in the same shortsighted ways. Instead of trying to change, we hope it works better this time.'
'Do you see the expedition as a change?'
'Yes. I hope it is.'
'You use the word 'hope' a lot,' Feral said.
'I guess I do.'
'What do you hope for the expedition?'
'I'm the head of the alien contact department,' Victoria said. 'That should give you an idea of what I hope for.'
Nearby, a nondescript passenger listened to the unguarded conversation. Griffith, of the General Accounting Office, had hidden himself so deeply within his objectivity that he would not permit the comments of Victoria MacKenzie to anger him. He filed them away, along with the opinions of the journalist, for future reference and use.
He wished he had the observation room to himself, so he could look at the stars in silence and solitude. He envied the early space explorers, who had put their lives on the line. He wished he had been one of the Apollo astronauts. Not the ones who landed on the lunar surface: the one who remained in the capsule, orbiting all alone, completely cut off from every other human being, from every other life form, out of contact even by radio during the transit behind the moon.
But those times were long over. Nowadays, traveling into space meant a few minutes of discomforting acceleration and a few hours or days of weightlessness. He had already heard several people complaining about the trip: complaining of boredom' The journey from low earth orbit to Starfarer's li-bration point took too much time for them; they were bored and restless and a few even complained about the lack of gravity.
They've seen too many mo'ies, Griffith thought. They don't understand anything about the way things work. Why did they come up here? If they wanted earth-normal gravity, they should have stayed on earth. These are the people who think
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they know how to use space. Researchers. An old woman. A writer. An alien contact specialist, for God's sake!
In disgust, he left the observation room and floated through the cramped corridors of the transport. If he had anything to say about it, this would be the last transport taking civilian personnel to Starfarer.
He wished he had pulled some rank and seniority in order to demand a larger private compartment. But that would have been as suspicious as getting into an argument with MacKenzie and the journalist about the proper function of Star-farer. Griffith of the General Accounting Office could reasonably expect only the same sleeping closet as any regular passenger.
He made another circuit of the transport's corridors.
Though he tried returning to the observation room, all the conversations he heard angered him with the self- centered shortsightedness of their participants.
Having failed to tire himself, he sought out his cubicle,
wrapped himself in the restraint blanket, and made himself fall immediately asleep. He would keep himself asleep until the transport reached the starship.
J.D. sailed slowly through the corridor, trying to keep herself an even distance from alt four walls. In some
