Vonda McIntyre - Starfarers

Nervous and excited and rushed and lale, J. D. Sauvage hurried down the corridor of the terminal. The satchel carrying her personal allowance thumped against her hip. The other passengers had already begun to board the spaceplane.

"J.D. '"

Victoria Fraser MacKenzie strode toward her. J. D. was aware of the attention of the other people in the waiting area, surely recognizing Victoria, perhaps also wondering who the heavy-set, sunburned newcomer might be. Victoria was the sort of person one noticed. Though she was small and compact, she had a powerful presence. Everything about her was intense:

her energy, her eyes, the black of her hair, her passionate defense of the deep space expedition. She had been much in the news lately.

She extended her hand. J.D. took it. The contrast of Victoria's hand, dark and smooth, the nails well groomed, to her own, the skin roughened by exposure to wind and sea. the nails pared down as short as they could get, made J.D. wish she had had more time to prepare for this trip.

"I'm glad to see you," Victoria said.

"Were you afraid I'd changed my mind again?"

"No. Not once you agreed. J. D. . . . I know how important your research is to you. But the expedition is unique.

The orcas will still be here when we get back. The divers, too."

1 hope so, J.D. thought, but she did not say it aloud.

"Come on," Victoria said. "We'd better hurry."

2 vonda N. Mcintyre

They walked into the entry tunnel and joined the end of the line.

"This is your first trip up. eh?" Victoria said. "Is there anything you want to know thai they didn't cover at the orientation?"

"Urn ... I missed the orientation."

"You missed it?"

"I was down at cargo. It took longer than I expected."

"Was there a problem?"

"They didn't want to load my equipment."

"Whyever not?"

"Because it didn't look like equipment to them. They tried to redefine it as personal and make me take only what I could fit in my allowance."

"What kind of equipment is it?"

"Information, mostly."

"Why didn't you put it on the web? Arachne can always give it back to you."

"Most of it is books, and most of the books I have aren't in any databases."

"You could have had them scanned."

"Some of them are unique, though, and they get so beat up when you send them out for scanning. I didn't have time to do it myself."

"What kind of books are you talking about?"

"Old ones. You won't understand until you see them." ,

"How many did you bring?"

"Three hundred fifty-seven kilos."

"Good lord."

"That isn't really very much, when you're talking about books."

"And it isn't half what any experimental physicist would bring. As for a geneticist—" Victoria laughed. "Considering all the stuff Stephen Thomas brought, you'd think he was single-handedly in charge of diversity and cloning."

"Is he?"

"No, that's his boss. Professor Thanthavong."

"I'm really looking forward to meeting her," J.D. said.

"Do you think I'll get a chance to?"

"Sure. She's not standoffish at all. The more you can forget she's famous, the better you'll get along with her, eh? Any-

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way, Stephen Thomas still does some bioelectronics. though that's pretty much been taken over by the developers. He's branched out into theories of non-nucleic-acid inheritance. Exogenetics. One of our celebrated 'nonexistent' disciplines. The equipment he needs is pretty standard lab stuff, but when he came up, he brought a lot of extraneous things."

"How did he talk it all through cargo?"

Victoria made a strange little motion of her shoulders, a gesture of amused disbelief. J.D. wondered why she did not simply shake her head. Maybe it had something to do with her being Canadian. J.D. had studied a number of different cultures, but had never looked past the superficial resemblance of Canadian culture to the majority culture of the U:S. She decided not to admit that to Victoria.

"If you ask Arachne for the definition of 'charm,' " Victoria said. "it gives you back a picture of Stephen Thomas Gregory."

J.D. followed Victoria to their places. Victoria helped her transfer her allowance into a string bag, then showed her how to strap in against the upright lounge. It held her in a position with her hips and knees slightly flexed.

"Where are the controls for this thing?" J.D. looked for the way to turn the lounge into a chair. "How do you sit down?"

"You don't," Victoria said. "It takes a lot of energy to keep your body in a sitting position in microgravity. It's much easier to lie nearly flat. Or stand, depending on how you look at it."

J.D. thought about how it would feel to sit and stand and lie stretched out in space, comparing it to her diving experience.

"Okay," she said. "I see. That makes sense." She grasped the armrests. Fright tinged her excitement, not unpleasantly.

Her fingers trembled. Victoria noticed her nervousness and patted her hand. The sound patterns changed as the space-plane readied itself for takeoff. J.D. would have sworn that like a bird or a dolphin she could fee! the increase in the magnetic field, the shift and slide of it as il oriented itself to thrust the spaceplane down the long rails. Of course that was absurd.

Victoria finished transferring her own allowanc from the 4 Vonda N. Mclntyre

carrier to the compartment. She had several acceleration-resistant packages, but most of her allowance consisted'of fancy clothes, similar to what she was wearing.

"Victoria," J.D. said hesitantly, "do people dress, um, more formally on board then they would back here?"

Victoria was wearing an embroidered shirt and wide suede trousers caught at her ankles with feathered ties.

"Hmm?" Victoria closed the compartment and gave J.D.'s satchel to the artificial stupid waiting to take them off the plane. Getting out of earth's gravity well was too expensive to spend the acceleration on suitcases. The AS buzzed away,

"I couldn't help but notice what you're wearing. I didn't bring anything like that, if that's what's called for on the ship."

Victoria glanced at her, then chuckled. J.D. shifted uncomfortably. She had thrown away most of her beat-up old clothes, and ordered new ones that she packed without trying on. She had not had time even to consider buying anything formal.

"I'm not laughing at you," Victoria said quickly. "Just imagining going to the lab in this outfit. We're pretty casual on campus. But sometimes I get tired of casual. I always fill up the extra comers of my personal allowance with silly clothes- You can get necessities back home. It's the things you can do without that you start to miss."

"I see," J.D. said, relieved-

"Don't worry, you'll fit right in. There's no dress code, and the environment is moderate. Too moderate, I think. We don't have weather, we have climate. I wouldn't mind some snow, or a thunderstorm. Satoshi thinks it's too cold, but he's spoiled—he grew up in Hawaii."

Victoria leaned against her couch and fastened the straps.

"I'm ready," she said. "So let's get going."

"I should tell you something," J.D. said.

"Oh?"

The careful neutrality in Victoria's tone told J.D. that her own original decision—to turn down the invitation to join Siarfarer's alien contact department—had had an effect mat would take time to overcome.

"I resigned from the Department of State," J.D. said.

"And turned back my grant."

"Did you? I'm glad. I'm sorry I snapped at you about STARFARERS 5

having such close ties to your government. But these days you never know when they might slap 'classified' all over your research." Suddenly Victoria grinned. "Though if you were still an ambassador, that would put you higher on the protocol list than the chancellor, eh?"