Victoria felt glad that her dark complexion hid the blush mat crept up her face. Stephen Thomas was only voicing the thought all three partners had. One of the things that first attracted Victoria to him was his ability to say exactly what he thought under most circumstances; and his ability to get himself out of the trouble that sometimes caused him- She reached up and touched his coo! slender fingers where they rested against the back of her neck.
'There's hardly anybody at the guesthouse,' Stephen
Thomas said. 'Feral checked in, but it's kind of creepy over
there. So I invited him to stay with us.'
Victoria looked at Stephen Thomas, surprised and unbelieving.
'I really appreciate the hospitality,' Feral said. 'I don't think I'd get a good feel for what it's like to live here if I had to stay in the hotel.'
'But—' Victoria stopped, not wanting to hurt Feral's feelings.
'Let me show you to the spare room,' Satoshi said quickly. He got up.
Sometimes his good manners were too good to be believed.
This was one of those times.
94 Vonda N. Mdntyre
He took Feral into the back hallway. Stephen Thomas followed.
Disgruntled, Victoria sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. After a moment she got up and went unwillingly down the hall.
The corridor was almost dark. Lit only by daylight or starlight shining through roof windows, it ran behind the main room and the bedrooms. The rough rock foam remained unfinished. No one had taken the time to pretty it up. She passed Satoshi's room and Stephen Thomas's room and her own room.
She hesitated outside the fourth bedroom, the room that should have been Merit's. Then she berated herself silently.
She would have an excuse for her feelings if anyone had ever used this room, if it had real memories in it. But the accident occurred before they ever even moved here. Overcoming her reluctance to go in, she followed her partners. Overcoming her reluctance to let a stranger use it would be more difficult.
The partnership used the room for nothing, not even storage. Victoria had seldom gone into it. The AS kept it spotless. It remained as impersonal as a hotel, with a futon folded in one comer and no other freestanding furniture, only the built-ins. Stephen Thomas stood just inside the door, suddenly uneasy, and Satoshi stood by the closed window, looking out into the front yard.
'We weren't expecting company,' Victoria said.
Feral tossed his duffel bag on the floor.
'No, this is great. I don't need much, and I promise not to gel in the way. This will really help. Isolation is no good for getting decent stories.'
J.D.'s house was very quiet. The thick rock-foam walls cushioned sound. Woven mats, gifts from co-workers as yet unmet, softened the floor. A futon lay in her bedroom. Victoria had apologized for the sparseness of the furnishings, but after the beach cabin this house of three rooms felt perfectly luxurious.
Still, a lot of work remained before her new place would feel like home.
She ought to try to sleep, but she was still wide awake. STARFARERS 95
The season on Starfarer was spring, and the days were lengthening. It lacked at least an hour till darkness.
Her equipment—her books—had not yet arrived from the transport. She could ask Arachne for something to read. Instead, she curied up on her futon and dug her notebook out of the net bag.
She worked for a while on her new novel. She tried to write a little every day, even when she was busy with other projects. Writing helped her to imagine what it could be like if . . . when, she told herself ... the expedition met other in-
telligent beings.
Her first novel had enjoyed less than magnificent success. Critics complained that it made them feel off balance and confused. Only a few had realized that it was supposed to make them feel off balance and confused; of those, all but one had objected to the experience. That one reviewer had done her the courtesy of assuming she had achieved exactly what she intended, and she valued the comments.
She knew that nothing she could imagine could approach the strangeness of the expedition's first contact with nonTerrestrial beings. She could not predict what would happen.
It was the sense of immersing herself in strangeness that she sought, knowing she would have to meet the reality with equanimity, and wing it from there.
Her library contained a number of novels and stories about first meetings of humanity and alien beings. Those she reread most, her favorites, embodied that sense of strangeness. But it troubled her considerably to find so many fictions ending in misjudgment, incomprehension, intolerance; in violence and disaster.
J.D.'s stories never ended like that.
She put the novel away, got up, and opened the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside lay a long, narrow terrace, bright green with a mixture of new grass and wildflowers-
Victoria had said she could do whatever she liked with the terrace—whatever she could find the time to do. J.D. recognized some of the meadow flowers from the wilderness, but she had never done any gardening. She had no idea where to start. She liked the big rock over at one edge. Barefoot, she walked across the delicate new grass and sat on the heat-polished stone. It had been blasted to slag sometime during
96 Vonda N. Mclntyre
the creation of Starfarer. The melted curves sank gently into the earth. The rock was warm from the heat of the day, but J.D. imagined it remained hot from the blast that had shattered it from its lunar matrix. She imagined heat continuing to radiate from it for eons.
The starship had no sunsets, only a long twilight. Darkness fell, softened by starlight shining on the overhead mirrors. Rectangles of light, other people's uncurtained windows and open doorways, lay scattered across the hillsides. The air quickly cooled, but J.D. remained in her garden, thinking about so suddenly finding herself a member of the alien contact department.
J.D. liked Victoria. She fell grateful that the expedition's original rejection of her application, and her brief rejection of their subsequent invitation, had not destroyed the possibility of friendship. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas she did not know well enough to assess.
J.D. shivered. She thought about kicking in the metabolic enhancer, but decided against it. The rush would remind her
of the sea and the whales, and the divers, and Zev.
She might as weil let the artificial gland atrophy. She would probably never need it again.
She rose and went inside.
The interior of her house was as cool as the terrace. She had not yet told Arachne her preferences for temperature and humidity and light level and background sounds. If she took off the outer doors and the curtains, as Victoria suggested, to open her house to the artificial outdoors, most of that programming would be superfluous. J.D. thought she would leave the doors and the curtains as they were. After the damp, cold mornings of the cabin, the idea of stepping out of bed onto a warm floor appealed to her.
Flicking her eyelids closed, she scanned the web for mail. Nothing important, nothing personal.
Nothing from Zev.
She could send him a message. But it would be easier for both of them if she left him alone. Best for all concerned if she and Zev never talked again. Her eyes bumed. She blinked hard.
She took off her clothes, crawled into bed, ordered the STARFARERS 97
lights off, ordered the curtains open, and lay on her futon gazing into the darkness.
A quick blink of light startled her. She thought it was a flaw in her vision until it happened again, and again. Short, cool, yellow flashes the size of a match head decorated her terrace.
They were fireflies. She had not seen one for a long time.
They did not exist on the West Coast. They were even becoming rare in the East, in their home territories, because of the size and effects of the enormous coastal cities. Here they must be part of the ecosystem.
The ecosystem fascinated her. If it contained fireflies, lightning bugs, did it contain other insects? She would
