He was not at his best in the morning.
Everything did not always go exactly as planned on Star-farer. The campus was rough and new, the equipment at the shakedown stage. But the kitchen nook was hardly leading-edge technology. It should have had his coffee ready for him. Instead, the pot stood on the counter, half full of cold, malodorous dregs. He poured it out and started over.
Stephen Thomas strolled into the main room, put his arms around Satoshi from behind, and rested his chin on Satoshi's shoulder. His long blond hair tickled Satoshi's neck.
'Good morning.'
'Did you drink my coffee?'
'Huh? I drank some last night when I got in, why?'
'Dammit—!' Satoshi woke up enough to be irritated.
'You could have left it the way you found it.'
'*! didn't think of it. It was late and I was tired.'
'It's early and I'm still asleep!'
'God, all right, I'm sorry. I'll make you some.'
'It's done now.' Satoshi took the cup to the table and sat in a patch of sunlight by the sliding windows. He deliberately ignored the contortion of glass tubing.
For the thousandth or the millionth time, he missed Merit. STARFARERS 21
Times like these reminded him of before the accident, when the everyday details of the partnership ran smoothly, practically unnoticeably, under Merry's management. It was weird how something as inconsequential as a cup of coffee could bring back the grief. He hunched his shoulders and sipped
the bitter coffee and tried to put the feelings away.
Satoshi loved Stephen Thomas, of course, but living with him the past couple of weeks had not been easy. Satoshi could ftot figure out why his youngest partner's idiosyncrasies and occasional blithe self-centeredness bothered him more with Victoria away.
'You're mad at me,' Stephen Thomas said.
Satoshi took a gulp of coffee. 'No, I'm not. Yes, I am. I don't know. It's early and I'm still tired and I just wanted some coffee.'
'I offered to make you some.'
'You give strangers more respect than you give the people you sleep with.'
Stephen Thomas laughed and kissed him. 'I respect you in the morning. Except maybe right after you wake up.' He left Satoshi sitting in the sunlight, returned to the kitchen nook, and started opening drawers and cupboards looking for something for breakfast.
Satoshi made allowances for Stephen Thomas. He thought of Victoria as the strongest one in the partnership, and of himself as the calmest in a crisis, and of their younger partner as the most flighty. But only Stephen Thomas had kept his center after the accident. Satoshi doubted the partnership would have survived without him.
He wished he could get coffee to taste right. Starfarer was not yet self-sufficient for food; half of what they used they had to import, not from earth, but from the O'Neill colonies. Maybe coffee plants could grow properly only on earth, the way some types of vegetables and fruit grew properly only in certain places. Like Walla Walla onions. No amount of research or experiment ever reproduced that sort of biological synergy.
Satoshi found it some comfort to suspect the existence of unknowable secrets, like perfect coffee. Walla Walla onions, and his younger partner's lab equipment.
He would be glad when Victoria got home. It seemed like
22 vonda N. Mdntyre
forever since they had talked. Before she left they had all agreed to communicate via the web, which was relatively cheap, rather than by voice link from Starfarer to earth, which was expensive. What with the eagle eye being kept on campus expenses, everyone was on their best behavior about keeping personal calls on their own accounts.
She'll be back soon, Satoshi reminded himself. She'll'even be back in time for the solar sail's first full test.
Stephen Thomas returned from the kitchen nook carrying a bowl of white rice with a raw egg on top, a plate of pickles, and a cup of milky tea. He knew better than to offer any of it to Satoshi.
'I miss her, too,' he said.
'Yeah,' Satoshi said, then, 'Dammit, I wish you wouldn't do that. h bothers me, and it drives Victoria crazy.'
Stephen Thomas laughed. 'You guys act like I was reading your minds. I don't read minds—'
'Of course not, but you do answer questions before people ask them, and you comment on things people haven't even said yet.'
'—I read auras.'
Satoshi groaned. He wished Stephen Thomas would stop this silly joke, even if he believed it, because it did nothing either for his credibility or for that of the alien contact team. Stephen Thomas was unusually sensitive to other people's moods and feelings—when he wanted to be. That, Satoshi believed. But he did not believe Stephen Thomas could see something nonexistent.
'Let's splurge and call her.' Stephen Thomas said.
Satoshi sipped his coffee, tempted.
'Come on,' Stephen Thomas said. 'She's on the transport, it won't cost that much.'
'Okay.'
They connected with Arachne.
Because the hypertext link was on, as usual, the web boxed recent references to Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. The screen refreshed, adding a new article about the banquet that British Columbia's premier had hosted in Victoria's honor. Curious, Satoshi brought it up to read.
'Oh, my god,' he said.
'What?'
STARFARERS 2 3
'Look.'
'Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: 'No.'
'Last night, British Columbia's premier hosted Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, the Canadian physicist-astronaut who heads the deep space expedition's alien contact team, at a formal dinner. This is Fraser MacKenzie 's last trip to earth before Starfarer departs for an alien star system, overcoming relativity's limits on speed and achieving superluminal transition energy via the 'cosmic string' that has moved within range of our solar system during the past decades.''
'Cosmic string' and 'superluminal transition energy'
were highlighted, indicating that the reader could obtain fuller
explanations of the terms through the hyper. Satoshi and Stephen Thomas continued reading the main body of the article.
'After dinner, Fraser MacKenzie conversed informally with the premier and others about the expedition. The first question put to her concerned the U. S. proposal that Starfarer be converted into a mini-0 'Neilt colony, to help relieve earth's population pressure. Eraser MacKenzie acquitted the starship 's cause well, pointing out that the 0 'Neill colonies were constructed not as population valves, but as bases which would create and supply the necessities: food, water, air, and shelter from the vacuum, in order to permit human beings to live in space without draining earth's resources.
' 'Starfarer,' Fraser MacKenzie stated, 'is much smaller than the existing O'Neills, neither of which have made any difference whatever in the population of earth, nor were ever intended to.' She also explained cogently why the starship had to be large enough to sustain its own ecosystem. 'Sending the expedition out in a traditional ship would be extremely costly,' she explained. 'The starship was created out of leftover lunar material from the 0 'Neills. By living within a functional ecosystem, we can plan to be self-sufficient. Madame Premier, we hope to return within a year or two, but the truth is that we have no idea how long we might be gone.
We don't know what we 're going to find or how far we 're going to have to go to find it. If we set out with
