contact specialist. J.D. Sauvage and her profession fascinated him. He thought that if he were younger, if he had a different background, he might have tried to go into her field himself.
Since yesterday, he said to himself, you've added a party and a lunch date to your socializing. Soon your reputation as a hermit will be ruined.
Do you even remember how to make piroshki?
J.D. enjoyed working at night; she enjoyed the solitude and the long uninterrupted hours of quiet thought. She might have to change her schedule around, though, in order to spend time with the rest of the alien contact team. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas kept awfully normal hours.
She liked them all, which surprised her a bit. She liked Victoria in particular. The team leader sparked off ideas like phosphorescent waves. Satoshi was quieter, but what he said usually counted. As for Stephen Thomas . . .
She decided not to think about Stephen Thomas for a while.
She stayed awake for a long time after the party, reading, gazing out into the dark courtyard- Once she got up and rearranged the new woven mats on her floor. For all their homemade roughness, they made her happy, and a little scared.
The gifts represented a welcome that made her believe she had found a place where she might be at home. This disturbed her, because she had always believed that being an alien contact specialist meant remaining an outsider in her own culture—not just the culture of her country, but the culture of humanity as a whole.
J.D. took Kolya Cherenkov's note from her pocket and smoothed it out. He had given her, as Victoria said, a unique gift. She did not understand why he had given it to her, but she knew it was not to be trifled with or abused. In some ways, his was the welcome that meant the most to her.
Before she finally went to sleep, she checked her mail: the usual tsunami of junk, most of which she filtered out without even scanning; scientific journals; magazines of experimental fiction (interior landscapes, mostly; deliberately, stolidly human, but every now and again a story she could savor, save, and think about); no personal mail. Nothing from Zev. She
16 0 Vonda N. Mctntyre
scanned the news summary, lingering just perceptibly over the Pacific Northwest.
The divers, as usual, received no mention.
Victoria propped herself on her elbow next to Satoshi, who lay in the middle of his bed with Stephen Thomas on his other side. Stephen Thomas lay fiat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed on his chest.
'Do you think J.D. had a good time?' Victoria asked Satoshi.
'She seemed to.'
'I wasn't about to say anything in front of her, but I'm so mad at the chancellor I could spit—he came early, he left early, he was too rude to stay and welcome her to campus'
Gerald was there—did he even speak to her?' She tried to remember seeing the assistant chancellor anywhere near J.D.
'I don't think so,' Satoshi said. 'We can't take this stuff personally, Victoria. It's all politics.'
'They mean it personally and I take it personally, politics or not.'
They heard a noise from the front of the house, sharp and loud, quickly stilled. Victoria sat up.
'What was that?' She started to rise. 'Oh—Feral coming in.' They listened as he tiptoed down the hall to the end room.
Concerned by Stephen Thomas's uncharacteristic silence,
Victoria glanced over at him. The crystal lay dull and black in the hollow of his throat. He had taken off his sexy emerald jewelry, but he had not replaced the regular gold stud.
'The hole in your ear is going to close up,' Victoria said.
He shrugged.
Victoria slid out of bed and went into Stephen Thomas's room. His jewelry hung in a tangle on a rock-foam stand that someone in the materials lab had made for him. The gold stud was nowhere she could see it, so she picked out a little platinum ring and returned to Satoshi's bedroom. She stepped over both her partners, sat cross- legged beside Stephen Thomas, and smoothed his hair away from his ear. In the darkness, she had trouble finding the hole to put the earring in.
'Ouch, shit, that hurt!'
STARFARERS 161
Victoria leaned down and kissed his ear. 'Better?'
'Give it here, I'll put it in.' He took the earring from her and put it on. Victoria lay down beside him and put one hand on his hip.
'I'm glad to know you can still talk,' Satoshi said.
'You've been awfully quiet since we left the party.'
'You remember that conversation we had with Florrie?'
Stephen Thomas asked.
Victoria said nothing, wishing Stephen Thomas had not reminded her about talking with Ms. Brown.
'You hit it off pretty well with her, didn't you?' Satoshi said.
'Yeah, I did. I like her. I thought she'd be reactionary, but she's more open-minded than half the people up here.'
'You just like her because she approves of our sleeping arrangements,' Victoria said.
'That doesn't hurt. And you don't have to be careful of every word you say to her. But she goes off at a different angle, sometimes.'
'What do you mean?' Satoshi said.
'What she said about Griffith.'
'He was on the transport,' Victoria said. 'But I hardly ever saw him. I almost forgot about him.'
'He's weird. When Florrie said he was a narc—after she told me what a narc was—I tried to shrug it off.' Stephen Thomas shifted uneasily. 'But I think we ought to pay attention to her intuition.'
'Oh, no, not another aura reader!' Victoria flopped forward and hid her face in Stephen Thomas's pillow.
'I don't know whether she is or not, but / looked at him. Dammit, that guy doesn't have an aura.'
'Wouldn't that mean he's dead?' Satoshi asked.
'I don't know what it means,' Stephen Thomas said.
'Since he obviously isn't dead.'
Victoria raised herself from the pillows and propped her chin on her fists. 'Maybe they've been improving robot technology in secret—'
'Laugh if you want. He said he's with the GAO—that may be worse than being a narc. I think he's trouble. Even if he's just an ordinary government accountant.'
162 vonda N. Mclntyre
'There's not much we can do about him that I can see.'
'There's got to be something.' Stephen Thomas lay back and stared at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest, as if he intended to try to think of something right now, and stay where he was until he succeeded.
The solar sail drew Starfarer beyond the orbit of the moon.
During its construction, the starship held steady in the li-bration point leading the moon. With the sail deployed, Star-
farer accelerated out of its placid orbit. Each imperceptible increment of velocity widened and altered its path.
•y Because the starship took longer to circle the earth in its
wider orbit, the moon began to catch up to it. Soon it would
II I
pass beneath Starfarer, and the ship would use the lunar passage to tilt its course into a new plane.
•i- As the orbit increased in complexity, the logistics of trans
* '' port to Starfarer would become more difficult and more expensive.
In the middle of Starfarer's night, Iphigenie DuPre set in
motion the interactions of gravity and magnetic field and so-
11 lar wind to tilt the starship out of the plane of the lunar orbit. *' The angle would grow steeper and the
