She might as well have stayed on earth. Only two things prevented her from demanding that Infinity Mendez take her back to the transport. The first was that she felt so tired. The second was that though the starship would fly into the darkness and disappear, it had a good chance of returning. Back home. entering the darkness forever was a possibility she had to face every time she worked up the nerve to leave her apartment.
'I didn't mean nobody would talk to you. Sure they wilt.
90 vonda N. Mclntyre
I meant nobody would bother you if you didn't want to be bothered.'
Floris turned away from the window and huddled on the seat. When she applied to the program, it had all sounded wonderful. A house of her own, and people to talk to anytime she wished, and no worry about being sent away. Instead, here she was in an unfurnished concrete apartment, with only two neighbors, both foreigners, both so famous they .would probably not even deign to speak to her, and one of them a hermit.
And both of them, she suddenly realized, elderly.
She tried to remain calm.
'You've brought me here and put me in an old people's home,' she said.
'What? No, I didn't, I mean, there isn't any such thing on Starfarer.'
'I don*t believe you. My children wanted me to go to an old people's home. I can't. I'll die.'
Floris pushed herself to her feet and crossed the slippery mats.
'I don't want to live here anymore,' she said, and walked out into the valley.
The net bag full of presents bounced gently against Victoria's side, and the muscles ofSatoshi's back moved smoothly beneath her hand. As she walked beside him toward their house, she slid her fingers under the black tank top that
showed his shoulders to such good advantage. The heat of his skin made her shiver. He tightened his arm around her waist. Victoria covered his hand with her free hand, and laced her fingers between him.
Everything around her felt and looked and smelled and sounded sharp and clear and vivid, as if happiness had intensified all her perceptions, as if she possessed more than the normal number of senses. For tonight, she would put aside both her desire for some uninterrupted work time, and her worries about the expedition.
The low round hills had gone gray in the shadowless twilight. The sun tubes dimmed nearly to darkness as Victoria and Satoshi turned off the main path and strolled up the gentle slope toward the house. Hills formed the interior topography
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of both the campus cylinder and the wild cylinder. Hills increased the sense of privacy as well as the usable surface area, but they made Victoria feel closed in. Despite her years in Vancouver, she had spent much of her childhood in and around Winnipeg. She always expected to be able to see long distances to the horizon. Starfarer had no horizon.
Dwarf fruit trees lined the approach to the house. Because of her trip, Victoria had missed the peak of Slarfarer's first real spring. The cherry blossoms had already fallen. The petals lay in pink and white drifts across the path.
The hillside that covered Victoria's house stretched one long low ridge in a semicircle to form a courtyard in front of the main windows. Victoria and Satoshi rounded the tip of the ridge. They were home.
Victoria stopped. Scattered patches of flowers covered the inner slope of the ridge. In the fading light, the blue-gray foliage lost most of its color, but the petals glowed a brilliant, luminous white.
'They bloomed!'
Satoshi smiled. 'I thought you'd be pleased.'
When Victoria left for earth, the pinks she had planted had been nothing but hard gray buds. Now they spotted the slope with color and spiced the air with their scent.
Victoria bent down, cupped one of the pinks between her hands, and breathed its carnation fragrance. She left it unplucked, though there must be a thousand flowers on the hillside, white ones, pink ones, white with bright red veining.
When they spread and grew together, they would cover the bank with dusty-blue ensiform leaves.
The house was still dark—Stephen Thomas must not be home yet. As Victoria and Satoshi approached, the inside lights came on, casting bright patches across the courtyard.
French windows formed the entire exterior wall of the house.
They were, as usual, wide open- Only Stephen Thomas insisted on using the front door, which he had chosen. It was solid and opaque, a tall rock-foam slab with a rounded top.
Stephen Thomas was an unregenerate fan ofJ. R. R. Tolkien. Victoria liked to tease him that he was far too tall to live in a hobbit-house. He must be of elven stock. Sometimes she wondered.
The British countryside had influenced Victoria, too. The 92 Vonda N. Mclntyre
grass on the roof grew so long that it drooped, and occasionally Victoria trimmed the edges to resemble the thatched roof of an ancient Devon cottage. The thick shaggy grass made the house look as if it had eyebrows.
Victoria and Satoshi stepped through the open French windows. As Victoria kicked off her shoes, she noticed the contraption of glass and metal tubes that hunkered on the floor.
'I give up,' Victoria said. 'What is it?'
'It's a still. Stephen Thomas was going to find someplace else to put it. I guess he didn't get around to it.'
'What's it/or?'
'He says that when his vines are established, and after he learns to make wine, he'll be able to distill brandy.'
'What happened to the champagne he was going to make?'
Satoshi chuckled.
They circumnavigated the still.
The main room was plainly furnished. Woven mats covered the solar-fired tiles on the floor; the furniture was of rattan and bamboo. Alzena promised that soon a few trees could be harvested, but for now everyone who wanted furniture made of organic materials had to make do with members of the grass family, fast-growing annuals.
Victoria wanted a rug, but in order to get one she might have to persuade Alzena to approve growing a couple of sheep—it was probably too late to import any from the O'Neilk—then raise them and learn to shear and spin and weave the wool herself. Victoria barely had time for her garden, not to mention the problem of persuading Alzena that sheep would not denude the hillsides. As indeed they might:
one more factor Victoria would have to research if she proposed the project.
Victoria signaled the interior illumination to dim. As the last sunlight faded and the sun tubes began reflecting starlight, the wall of windows and the skylights filled the room with a soft silver illumination.
'Stephen Thomas?'
No one answered.
'He better come home soon,' Victoria said. She let the
carrying net slip from her shoulder to the floor, and flung herself onto the folded futon they used for a couch.
STARFARERS 93
Satoshi joined her. Their shoulders touched, and their thighs. Satoshi's kiss left his taste on Victoria's lips.
Victoria heard Stephen Thomas's voice, low and light and cheerful, unmistakable even at a distance. A second voice replied.
Stephen Thomas strode up the path and opened the front door. Kicking off his thongs, he took two long strides and flung himself onto the couch beside his partners.
'Let's go to bed and screw like weasels,' he said.
Feral Korzybski, carrying a net bag, followed him into the house.
Completely unembarrassed, Stephen Thomas kissed Victoria and Satoshi and sprawled on the lounge beside them, one arm around Satoshi's shoulders, fingertips brushing the back of Victoria's neck. Of the members of the partnership, he was—at least in public—the most physically demonstrative.
'Uh, hello, Feral,' Victoria said. 'Was the guesthouse full?'
