'What's for breakfast?' he said.
Feral dumped the filling into the omelet and folded it expertly. 'Let me see if I can remember everything I put in it.
The eggs were fresh—that surprised me.'
'We grow those here.'
'With or without chickens?'
'With.' Victoria laughed. 'We aren't that high-tech.'
'The mushrooms are reconstituted but the green onions and the tomatoes were fresh. I was hoping I could get micro-grav vegetables, but Arachne didn't offer them. I've seen them in magazines—perfectly round tomatoes, and spherical carrots, and beans in corkscrews—but I don't know anyone who can afford to cook with them.'
'We don't get any of those out here. The colonies export them all to earth. There are problems with growing plants in quantity in micrograv, so whatever you get is labor-intensive. Especially those corkscrew beans.'
'I can see where they would be. That's it—except for the cheese. The package said, 'Tillamook Heights.' '
'That's from a colony. The people who run one of the dairies there emigrated from someplace called Tillamook—'
'It's on the West Coast of the United States,' Stephen Thomas said to Victoria. 'A few hundred kilometers south of Vancouver.' He liked to tease her about her Canadian chauvinism, about the way she sometimes pretended to know less about the United States than she really did. He could get away with it.
'—and they wanted to name the dairy after their original place. But 'Tillamook East' or 'Tillamook South' didn't sound right, so: Tillamook Heights.'
'I like it.' Feral rubbed his upper lip and gazed blankly 102 vonda N. Mcintyre
at the omelet, filing the information away, thinking of how to use it in a story.
'Your omelet's about to bum,' Victoria said.
He snatched the pan off the single-burner stove.
'Damn!' He lifted the edge of the omelet. 'Just in time. Where's Satoshi?'
'Still asleep, probably.'
'Damn,' he said again. 'I thought you were all up. This is no good cold. I'll go get him.'
'Don't, if you value your life,' Stephen Thomas said.
'Trust me, he'd much rather eat your omelet cold than have you wake him up. You would, too.'
'All right,' Feral said, doubtful and disappointed.
The omelet tasted wonderful.
'The coffee's great,' Stephen Thomas said. 'What did you do to it?'
Victoria took his cup and tried a sip. It was much stronger than she was used to, but tasted less bitter, almost the way coffee smelled.
'I'll show you. It's not hard, but if you boil it you might as well throw it out and start over. That's what I did with what you had in the pot.'
Feral ate part of his omelet, occasionally glancing with some irritation at the warmer where he had left Satoshi's share.
'It isn't the same warmed over,' he said. He got up, poured coffee from the thermos into a mug, and disappeared down the corridor.
Victoria and Stephen Thomas looked at each other. Stephen Thomas shrugged.
'It's his hide,' he said.
Feral returned unscathed. He got the last quarter of the omelet out of the warmer and put it at Satoshi's place. A minute later Satoshi himself appeared, wearing Victoria's hapi coat, carrying the coffee cup, and apparently wide awake. He joined them at the table.
'Nice morning, isn't it?' He sipped his coffee. 'That's very good,' he said. He put it down and started eating his omelet.
Victoria watched him, amazed.
STARFARERS 103
'Do you want a job?' Stephen Thomas said to Feral.
'No, thanks. I'm self-employed.'
J.D. woke very early in the morning, too early, she thought, to call the other members of the alien contact team. Feeling restless, she went for a walk. She suspected that on board Starfarer she would have trouble getting enough exercise, here where she would have neither opportunity nor time to swim several hours each day.
A stream trickled past her house. She followed it. Soon a second stream joined it, and the combined watercourse cut down through the hill. J.D. found herself walking between sheer cliffs.
The cliff must be designed, J.D. thought. There had been no time for the stream to cut it. Starfarer's interior topography was carefully sculpted. Striped with stone colors, this sculpture looked like a water-eroded cliffside of sedimentary rock.
J.D. rounded a bend and stopped in surprise.
Beside the stream, someone scraped at the bank, probing with a slender trowel. A blanket lay on the ground, covered with bones.
'Hi, good morning,' J.D. said. 'What are you doing?'
The young digger glanced at her and stood up, stretching her back and her arms. She was small and slight, with a sweatband tied around her forehead. It rumpled her short straight black hair.
'Digging for fossils,' she said.
J.D. looked at her askance. 'It seems to me.' she said,
'that if you'd found fossils in lunar rock, the news would be all over the web by now.''
'Not digging to take them out,' she said. 'Digging to put them in.'
'You're making a fossil bed?'
'That's right.'
'Why?'
'Don't you think we deserve some prehistory, too?'
J.D. leaned over the blanket. The relics resembled the exoskeletons of huge insects more than any mammalian bones.
'Whose prehistory is this?' she asked.
'Whoever came before.'
'Whoever came before didn't look much like us.'
104 vonda N. Mdntyre 'Of course not.'
'What department are you in?'
'Archaeology.'
'But—' J.D. stopped. '1 think I'm being had.'
'I'm Crimson Ng. Art department.'
'J.D. Sauvage. Alien contact—'
'You're the new AC specialist! Welcome on board.' She stuck out her grubby hand. J.D. shook it.
'But why are you burying fossils of a different species?'
'I'm just one of those crazy artists,' Crimson said.
'Come on,' J.D. said.
Crimson opened up to J.D.'s interest.
'Every time the argument about evolution comes along again, I start wondering what would happen if it were true that god invented fossils to fool us with. What if god's got a sense of humor? If I were god, I'd plant a few fossils that wouldn't fit into the scheme, just for fun.'
'And that's what these are? Does that mean you're playing god?'
'Artists always play god,' Crimson said.
'Don't you believe in evolution?'
'That's a tough word, 'believe.' Believing, and knowing what the truth is—you're talking about two different things.
Human beings are perfectly capable of believing one thing metaphorically, and accepting evidence for a
