was carrying plain rocks out of the gravity well, no telling what Distler would do with that.'
Satoshi chuckled. 'These aren't just plain rocks.' He held one in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. Victoria recognized it as the one she had kept in her pocket all the way back home; rubbing it had given it a slightly darker color.
Victoria found herself in a mood more suitable for the end of Christmas morning: glad her partners liked what she had brought for them, but sorry that the occasion had ended.
They spent a few minutes tidying up, giving the dirty dishes to the house AS, then left to meet J.D. and go out to the sailhouse to watch the solar sail's first full deployment.
As Victoria left the house, she saw Satoshi's porcelain bowl in the center of the table. The gnarled sea-worn stones lay artlessly, precisely placed within its smooth white concavity. Victoria gazed at the stones, at the bowl. The arrangement's effect was calming, yet it was also arousing, and in a definitely sexual way. Victoria wondered how Satoshi had managed that.
Griffith woke at the silent arrival of an AS with his breakfast from the communal kitchen. He had slept as he always slept, soundly but responsive to his surroundings, waking once just before dawn when a bird startled him by singing outside his window.
Only one of the other guests had slept in the guesthouse.
The other had yet to make an appearance; Griffith would have heard if anyone had come in during the night. No one had taken any notice of Griffith, and his things remained undisturbed.
He wolfed his breakfast, hungry after two days in zero-STARFARERS 109
gravity. Leaving by way of the emergency exit rather than the front door, he set off to continue his exploration.
Griffith had read all the plans, all the speculations, all the reports. He knew why Starfarer resembled a habitat instead of a vehicle. He understood the reasons for its size. He even understood the benefits of designing it to be aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, both his irritation and his envy increased as he strode along paths that led through what for him was, even in its raw and unfinished form, a paradise. He had no chance at all of living in a similar environment back on earth. He did occasionally work with—more accurately, for—people who were extremely wealthy or extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. They owned places like this. But regular scientists, regular administrators, regular government employees, lived in the city and liked it. They figured out ways to like it, because they had no choice.
People who had lived here would never consider going back to the crowds and noise and pollution of earth. Not willingly. Back on earth, Griffith had been skeptical of the suggestion that the personnel of the starship intended to take it away and never bring it back, either turning it into a generation ship and living on it permanently, or seeking a new, unspoiled planet to take over. That suggestion smacked too baldly of conspiracy theories for Griffith. Now, though, he found the idea more reasonable to contemplate.
The contemplation made his analysis easier.
He looked up.
The sun tubes dazzled him. He blinked and held out his hand to block off the most intense part of the light. To either side of the mirrors, the cylinder arched overhead, curving all the way around him to meet itself at his feet.
He had seen such views looking down from a mountain, during brief training exercises outside the city. Looking up for a view was disorienting. A multiple helix of streams flowed from one end of the campus to the other. Here and there the streams flowed beneath the green-tipped branches of a newly planted strip of trees, or widened and vanished into a bog of lilies and other water-cleansing plants; cr widened into silver-blue lakes or marshlands. A wind-surfer skimmed across one of the lakes. The brightly colored sail caught the morning breeze. Small gardens formed square or
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irregular patches of more intense green in the midst of intermittent blobs of ground cover.
It would all be very pretty when the plants finished growing together over the naked soil. But it was unnecessary. Machines could clean the water and the air nearly as well as the plants could. Well enough for human use. A ship a fraction this size could store years and years' worth of supplies. Griffith found the claim of the necessity of agriculture to be questionable at best. Wind-surfing was a quaint way of getting exercise, but treadmills and exercise bikes were far more efficient in terms of the space required, not to mention the time. If the scientists had intended to set out on a proper
expedition they would have designed a proper ship.
Griffith tried to imagine what the cylinder would look like when all the plants reached their full growth. As yet the intensely green new grass remained thin and tender, brown earth showing between the blades. Other ground cover lay in patches, not yet grown together, and most of the trees were saplings, branchy and brown. Some of the vegetation in the wild cylinder, according to the reports, had been transported from the O'Neills, but most came from single-celt clones engendered on board Starfarer. It was far too expensive to import bedding plants or trees all the way from earth. The cell banks of Starfarer boasted something like a million different kinds of plants and animals. Griffith thought it extravagance and waste.
He kept walking, following a faint, muddy path worn through new grass. They should at least pave their paths. He saw practically no one. Half the people working on Starfarer had been called back by their governments in protest over the changes the United States was proposing in Starfarer's mission.
Griffith had drafted most of the changes.
Now that he was here, he could see even more possibilities.
If he had to, he would accede gracefully to the objection that the cylinder was too large to use as a military base. He would turn the objection to his advantage. The body of the cylinder was a treasury of raw materials, minerals, metal ore, even ice from deposits of water that had never thawed since the moon's formation. Starfarer could be mined and re-created.
He would rather see it used as an observation platform and
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staging area. That way its size would be useful. It could be as radical a training ground as Santa Fe, the radiation-ruined city. Griffith had spent a lot of time there, wearing radiation protection, inventing and testing strategies against urban terrorism and tactical weaponry. He imagined working up here under similar conditions. It would be easy to evacuate the air from the cylinders. A spacesuit could hardly be more cumbersome than radiation garb.
He did not see any problem in taking over the starship.
Now that Distler had won the election, Griffith's political backing was secure. MacKenzie's ill-considered comments could only speed things along.
When he first started studying the starship, he could not believe it was unarmed, that its naive philosophy allowed it-required it'—to vanish into the unknown without weapons.
Getting weapons on board was Griffith's next priority.
Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas walked over to J.D.'s house. Victoria wished she had invited her to breakfast. She would have, if she had known that Feral would be around.
None of the paths on board Starfarer, even the paved ones,
had been designed for three people walking abreast. In this the starship was much like Terrestrial towns. Saioshi was in the middle, so Victoria and Stephen Thomas alternated walking on the verge. Knee-high bushes sprinkled dew against Victoria's legs.
'Hello!'
They paused at the edge of J.D.'s yard. She appeared in the open doorway and beckoned them inside.
'Good morning.'
'How did you sleep?'
'Just fine. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get used to a new place, but this feels like home.'
They followed her into the main room. Her boxes of books stood in stacks; books from opened boxes stood in stacks. J.D. had set several of the packing boxes together to form makeshift shelves. Starfarer's houses contained few bookshelves, since everyone used the web or temporary hard copy.
'This will have to do till I can get something more substantial. What do I do to requisition some boards?'
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