'Sorry, little one, that's the end of the peanuts,' J.D. said to the Appaloosa. 'I see the point about waste. Herbivore waste isn't quite as unattractive as carnivore waste.'
'Easier to compost, too,' Satoshi said.
J.D. patted the Appaloosa one last time- She straightened up. The mini tossed its head, looking for another handout. It was a cute little animal.
Something about it made J.D. uncomfortable, and that was exactly the problem: it was cute. In being bred down from magnificence, the horses had been made trivial, converted from strong, powerful animals to lapdogs.
She clapped her hands sharply. The minis snorted and started and galloped away. They scattered, galloping and bucking, and re-formed their herd a hundred meters across the field.
J.D. saw her new house for the first time. She had known the houses formed part of the topography, built into hillsides with one wall of windows. But she had not expected hers to be beautiful.
'I love it,' J.D. said. 'It looks organic, somehow. But why do it like this? Not to conserve energy, surely.' While Starfarer still flew within the solar system, the sun would provide all the power it could possibly use. Once it clamped itself to the universe's web of cosmic string, the problem would be to keep from being overwhelmed by the energy flux.
'Not here and now,' Victoria said. 'But we can't know all the conditions we'll face after we leave. The basic reason is aesthetic and ecological. The more plants on the surface, the less ground we cover with buildings and pathways and so forth, the more stable and resilient the ecosystem will be.
The plants keep the air fresher, they soak up the runoff from rain—'
J.D. glanced up. Starfarer was large enough to have its own weather patterns, including rain. Two different systems of clouds drifted over the land on the other side of the cylinder.
Victoria pointed at the most distant cloud system. 'That far-overhead system will be near-overhead in half a rotation.
The ecosystems analysts encourage rain in the cylinders—it's easier and cheaper than air-conditioning. Smells better, too.'
'No thunder and lightning, though. I'm sure,' J.D. said
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wistfully. That would be too risky, both because of all the electronics within Starfarer, and because of the amount of energy even a small lightning bolt can let loose.
'No, you're right.' Victoria laughed. 'That, they discourage.'
'It's the one thing I missed in the Pacific Northwest,' J.D. said. 'There was lots of rain, but hardly ever any thunder.'
She hesitated. She wanted to ask so many questions about Starfarer and the alien contact department. But she would have time. 'I'll see you tomorrow, right?'
'First thing,' Satoshi said.
'We'll come and get you and go watch the solar sail test.'
They bid each other good night. J.D. watched Victoria and Satoshi walk away, hand in hand.
Griffith glanced back at earth one last time before leaving the transport. This was his first trip into space. He had known, intellectually, how far he would be from the planet, but the distance struck him emotionally only when he could hold out his hands and cup the world between them.
At this distance, it would take the very best surveillance equipment—perhaps even the next generation of surveillance equipment—to get fine detail from earth- The starship would have to move to a lower orbit.
Griffith hated waste. Starfarer should never have been built this far out to begin with. A great deal of time and money and reaction mass had gone into its construction. Even though most of its mass came from cheap lunar material, O'Neill colony leftovers, it had required a significant number of earth-to-orbit payloads.
Griffith moved into the starship, hand over hand along the grips. He was getting the hang of zero-g navigation, but he envied people with the experience to move naturally and gracefully.
He left the docking gate and entered the main body of Starfarer. He stopped at the center of the slope where he could look out into the cylinder.
Where earth had been too small to believe, the cylinder was far too large. He was amazed and appalled by the amount of space. From where he held himself, the end of the cylinder appeared to slope up to meet the walls of the cylinder, the
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living space of Starfarer. He knew, though, that when he started to travel along one of the numerous paths leading away from the gate, the apparent gravity would increase. He would perceive himself climbing down to the floor.
Disorientation dizzied him. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. Keeping his gaze away from the weird slope and the enormous cylinder, he found the path leading to the proper section. He drew himself onto it and gripped the rail.
Lower on the slope, the artificial gravity held him on the stairs. He released his death grip on the railing. Other people on the path at the level he had reached were leaping up and down the slope like gazelles, like moon- walkers, ignoring the switchbacks, but Griffith moved slowly and steadily and cautiously. He felt dizzy. He supposed it was a psychosomatic reaction that resulted from his knowing that the cylinder was spinning, for he was below the level at which his inner ear ought to be able to detect the spin. The dizziness bothered him, for he was not much given to psychosomatic reactions.
He made some quick calculations about the population density of the starship. Though he knew he had done the calculations correctly—he made a policy of exercising his mind in this way, so as not to become too dependent on outside da-tabases—the number struck him as so absurdly low that he sent out a line to the web and had it check his arithmetic. It was accurate. Then his amazement at the size of the cylin-der—and there were two of them, one completely uninhabited, designed and intended to remain that way—changed to resentment and envy. The people who lived here had all the space in the world . . .
He laughed, a quick sarcastic bark. Back in the world, there was arable land, there was useless land, there were restricted wildernesses, and there were cities. Not much space remained for stretching out. The spoiled academics who lived up here had no idea how fortunate they were. Or, more likely, they knew perfectly well. No doubt they had planned it this way.
They had better enjoy their luxury while it lasted. Soon everything would change.
The path forked. He let Arachne guide him to the proper track. Below him, on the slope, the pathways branched and
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branched again, like a river splitting and spreading its fingers across a delta. Otherwise the pathways that had begun so close together, in the center of the cylinder cap, would end at great distances from each other. By following the correct branch, Griffith could reach the proper longitude of the cylinder.
No one had come to meet him, which was as he had planned. He preferred being left to himself. He would observe in anonymity and make his recommendations without any fuss.
The departure of several of the associate nations could only help in the conversion he planned. It could be made to look as if they were grasping at a convenient excuse and cutting their losses, finding the starship project to be too big, too expensive for their budgets. And, who knew? That might even be true.
A few associates might hold out, but the change had begun and it could not be stopped. At this point, objecting to the use of the starship as a military base came close to treason. Unfortunately, it would not look good to arrest half the faculty and staff of the expedition even if Griffith found evidence against them. Never mind. Arrests would be unnecessary. By the time he finished his work, the scientists would give up and go home.
Griffith knew there must be people on board who disagreed with the majority view, but who feared to speak up against it. He hoped to discover them.
He took a mental glance at a map of the campus transmitted by the web. His perception of the transmission made it overlap his sight, like the tactical display on the window of a fighter jet. Most people had to close their eyes to receive visually oriented information from the web.
The map led him to the guesthouse. He climbed the path and walked under the hill and through the open
