admire you,' he whispered. 'I thought you'd want this to happen.'
'No,' Cherenkov said gently. 'There's too much blood already, on the land I came from. Blood is too expensive to use as fertilizer.'
Griffith glanced back at him. Cherenkov smiled, but it was a strained and shaky smile, and after a moment it vanished.
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'But freedom—'
Cherenkov made a noise of pure despair. 'You cannot get freedom by shedding more blood in my country! You can only get more blood!'
'Then what should we do?'
'I told you. You should do nothing.' He took Griffith by the shoulders. 'Your meddling helped create the problem in the first place. So did our own. We cannot pretend otherwise. We cannot continue to meddle, as if we never did any damage.' His fingers tightened, as if he wanted to shake Griffith hard. Instead, he let him go. 'I am wrong, of course. You can still do that.'
Griffith felt as if he had plunged into an icy sea. He shook from the inside out, with a deep, cold tremble. He knew that if he tried to speak, he would be breathless.
'You have always done that,' Kolya said. 'You probably always will do that.'
He walked away.
Cherenkov departed. Everyone understood the effort it had taken for the cosmonaut to speak. Beside Victoria, Stephen Thomas sat slumped with his elbows on his knees, no longer sprawling relaxed and cheerful on the amphitheater bench.
He had watched Kolya closely, and Victoria recognized the intensely focused expression: Stephen Thomas sought his aura. Though Victoria did not believe in auras, she knew that Stephen Thomas could be pretematurally sensitive to other
people's feelings, that he could imagine and experience Kolya's grief and desperation.
Victoria felt the chill of frightening truth: what happened to the expedition, to Slarfarer, would affect far more than the people on board.
She searched the meeting for Iphigenie DuPre- She found her. The sailmaker was watching her. Iphigenie inclined her head slowly, carefully, down, then up.
'Crimson Ng.' The small, compact artist leaned forward and gestured toward Victoria. Red river-valley clay was ground permanently into the knuckles of her delicate hands. 'What did you mean when you said we ought to go on as if nothing had happened? How far do you think we should take it?*'
STARFARERS 217
Victoria spoke carefully, deliberately. 'I think,' she said, 'that we should take it as far as it can go.'
She imagined that she could feel the stream of tension and excitement, anger and fear, coalescing into a powerful tide of resolution.
'We now have even more reason to continue the expedition as if nothing had happened.'
'That's easy to say, Victoria, but it's hardly a plan of action. How do you propose to continue if we're put under martial law and under guard? We're risking that already just by meeting.'
'We were already at risk of that. We mustn't let it happen.'
'Have you joined Satoshi and Infinity in wanting to fight?'
'I never said I wanted to fight,' Satoshi said. 'I said I was afraid we might have no alternative.'
'Satoshi is right,' Infinity said. 'We'll have no choice, and what we want doesn't matter.'
' 'We do have a choice,' Victoria said. 'We can choose not to be here if they try to take over.'
'Great. So, we abandon ship? How is that going to—'
Crimson cut her words short. 'That isn't what you mean, is it?'
'No. I mean move Starfarer. Use a different approach to the cosmic string. A much closer one. One that takes us to transition tomorrow night.'
J.D. gasped-
The meeting's order slipped abruptly into chaos.
Despite the confusion, Victoria felt the meeting flow in the direction she had chosen. She felt opinions and decisions gather together like the individual streams of a watershed, from a state of unfocused, chaotic indecision and rage, toward a cohesive opinion flowing like a river.
She waited until her voice could be heard.
'The expedition members must agree to the change,' she said. 'There will be time—not much, but enough— for anyone who wants to return to earth to leave by the last transport.'
'We aren't fully provisioned,' Thanthavong said. 'Half our equipment hasn't arrived—'
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'And half our faculty and staff has left! I can't help it. If we want the expedition to exist, this is our only chance.'
'We'd be trying to outrun a—a cheetah with an elephant.'
'The elephant has a big head start,' Victoria said drily, keeping up her bravado. The others were less successful; their response was a feeble, frightened laugh.
'Christ on a mongoose, Victoria,' Stephen Thomas said.
'You want to steal the starship.'
Stephen Thomas's comment, thoughtless and casual, threw Victoria off center and broke her influence. The gathering's flow toward agreement, toward decision, splashed up against a dam of doubt and fear.
'I can't believe you said that,' Satoshi muttered.
'Steal it!' Victoria said. 'That's ridiculous.'
'But I think it's a great idea!' Stephen Thomas said. 'I'll vote for it.'
No one else spoke. Victoria stood alone in the silence.
Stephen Thomas and Satoshi stood up beside her. J.D. remained in her place, fidgeting. She looked at Victoria, stricken, then plunged to her feet. Victoria took her hand and held it.
They waited.
Scientists, researchers, modem middle-class people, had no experience with taking such risks. Intellectual risks, yes, sometimes; even risks to the reputation, if the subject was large enough, the potential great enough. But this kind of risk . . .
'You're asking us to become lawbreakers,' said a senior member of the geology department. 'Renegades.'
'We did that just by coming into the amphitheater tonight,' Satoshi said drily.
'I'm suggesting that we change the schedule,' Victoria said. 'We've always left the possibility open.'
'Don't downplay the seriousness of what you suggest,'
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220 vonda N. Mdntyre
Thanthavong said sharply. 'If we adopt your plan, we'll be going against powerful forces—'
'I thought you agreed with me!'
'I do. But we cannot go into this light-hearted or lightheaded. Everyone who chooses to go should know the consequences. Everyone who isn't sure should leave the expedition.'
'Wait a minute,' Crimson said. 'You're talking as if we've already agreed to this—we haven't! And it sounds like if we do ... we can never come home.'
'We'd have to face the consequences when we did come back,' Victoria said.
'You're asking us to give up our families, our friends ... '
'Crimson, those risks aren't new. They have nothing to do with the question we have to decide right now.'
'Hey,' Stephen Thomas said, 'if we come back at all,
we'll bring enough with us for the politicians to overlook our
misbehavior.'
'Victoria herself said we might not find anything''
'What do I have to do to live that down?' Victoria said, an edge in her voice. 'I wasn't trying to predict the
