Usually bad luck, he said to himself.
It felt good to be alone. He looked forward to reclaiming his hermit status, now that the controversy was over and Starfarer was safe in the hands of people who would use it for its true calling.
Infinity ducked through the hole in the front door of the administration building. The door had not yet been repaired. When Chancellor Blades locked himself inside, the silver slugs, the lithoclasts that dissolved rock, had munched their way through the wood-finished rock foam.
The trail of the slugs led through the wide foyer and up the curving stairs to Blades's office. They had eaten through his door, and herded him through the underground tunnels to his house.
But the ASes and the mobile Als would not be on the upper floors. The only place big enough for them all was the basement.
Infinity went through the building to the back stairs. The halls were cold and deserted.
"Lights on," he said, and the stairwell brimmed with light.
In the basement, hundreds of small robots hunkered together in a random pattern, motionless and silent, like paralyzed hands and blinded eyes. Infinity blew out his breath in relief. The chancellor could have destroyed all the mobiles while he was locked in with them. They were sturdy, but they were not designed to stand up to deliberate abuse.
But as Infinity moved between several squatty housekeepers, a carrier, and a plumber, he felt like he was walking among dead things. The usual faint electronic sound and electromechanical smell had vanished.
Infinity sat on his heels beside a housekeeper. Out of habit, he tried to touch it through his link to Arachne. He got no response. After a moment of fumbling, he found the power switch. It was off. He turned it on. No one ever turned household robots off. No one noticed household robots enough to think of turning them on and off. The ASes went about their business and plugged themselves in to recharge when they had nothing else to do. They were practically invisible.
This housekeeper had nearly a full charge, yet Infinity could not get it to respond.
When he tried the housekeeper's self-test, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No motion, no signal to Arachne. Not even any error messages.
Infinity stood up.
This was bad.
Griffith paused outside General Cherenkov's front door. He had never been to the cosmonaut's house; he had never been invited. He knocked, and waited.
No answer.
Griffith had been sitting with the general during J.D. Sauvage's discussion. He could not figure out where Nikolai Petrovich could have disappeared to. Griffith was trained to keep an eye on people.
He knocked again. His impatience got the better of his shallow courtesy.
He moved across the balcony that fronted Kolya's house, in the third story of the hillside. He looked through the floor to ceiling windows, cupping his hands around his face to shield his eyes from the reflected glare of the sun tubes.
The front of the house was deserted. The floor plan of Kolya's house was probably the same as Floris
Brown's. Three front rooms with a wall of windows, a back hallway, a bathroom, and storage space. The two houses probably were alike, since Brown's was on the first level of this stepped back triplex arrangement. Like most houses on Starfarer, it was built within a hill. Griffith had been inside Brown's house, during her welcoming party, and he had taken the opportunity to snoop. He had been through a couple of deserted houses, too.
Griffith waited; still, Kolya did not appear.
Griffith returned to the front door, hesitated, and reconsidered. He had been good at his job. Good enough to be wary of a man who had been a guerrilla fighter. Or a terrorist, according to the government that had put a price on his head.
Griffith did not expect Kolya's house to be boobytrapped. Kolya lived in space because he wanted peace. He had told Griffith that he was the only human being who was safer on the deep space expedition than on Earth. The Mideast Sweep was still very much in power in Kolya's homeland, and it had a long memory.
Griffith did not expect to encounter traps. But he did expect Kolya to leave ways of detecting intruders. He did not want to risk his fragile new friendship with the man who had been his hero all his life.
If we are friends, Griffith thought bitterly. Some kind of weird friend. He talks to me. He advises me. He asks for my opinion. Then threatens to kill me because of it. Then he apologizes. And then he disappears.
At least he admitted I was right.
Fuck it, Griffith thought. Why do you keep trying to make friends with these people? Most of them still believe you crashed the web. Even though they know Blades was responsible. None of them care that you sacrificed your career and your marriage for their expedition. They don't care that you'll be the first one in jail when-if-we ever get back to Earth.
He turned away from Kolya's deserted and probably unlocked home-no one, except Griffith, locked doors on campus-and headed down the long curving flight of stairs.
As he passed Floris Brown's apartment, a dapplegray miniature horse squealed and kicked up its heels and galloped away from Brown's front porch. The yearling filly raced across the open field and past the herd, alerting and exciting them. The whole bunch of them burst into a run, tangled manes and tails flying and bobbing like dreadlocks.
Floris Brown sat in the shadows of her deep porch, bits of carrot bright against the black of her knee-length tunic. She blinked at him like an aged, prehistoric lizard, her eyes beady within their rim of dark eye makeup. Fox, one of the graduate students, sat at Brown's feet and leaned companionably against her leg.
"You always frighten things," Floris Brown said to Griffith, her voice accusatory. "You frighten people and you frighten creatures. Why didn't you go home?"
He almost said, Because I was trying to figure out a way to keep you disorganized anarchists from getting blown out of the sky.
Instead, he said nothing, but turned away and strode stiffly back toward the guest house.
If he had told her what he had tried to do, she would not believe him anyway.
These people, Griffith thought, are driving me crazy.
Infinity left the administration building and hurried along a path that spiraled around the interior of Starfarer. The anomalies he kept seeing in the growth patterns of the plants added to his distress. A lot of the flowers had been bred for long-lasting blooms: the snow irises and the crocuses lasted well into spring; the daffodils came up so early that back on Earth, the threat of snow would not have passed. On Starfarer, it seldom snowed more than an artistic sprinkle.
He had gotten used to the long bloomings, when Starfarer was half finished, during its muddy first spring.
But other plants had other rhythms, and many of these were disarranged. Crossing a warm microclimate, he entered a grove of orange trees. They were heavy
with fruit. Though the cafeteria was empty of fresh food, in the absence of the ASes, no one had thought to pick any oranges. Infinity smelled not just the sharpness of the oranges, but the heavy sweetness of a profusion of orange buds and blossoms.
The orange trees looked healthy, but their burst of blossoms worried Infinity. Plants under stress reacted like this, with an extravagance of reproduction.
Honeybees harvested the pollen, and more dead bees lay on the ground. Farther along the path, in a cooler microclimate, Infinity passed through a field of spinach that had already begun to bolt.
He was worried for a lot of reasons when he reached the edge of the tumbled patch of ground where the genetics department had been. Lithoclasts crawled through the broken building, dissolving the shattered walls, eating them away. The place had been disinfected. Everything that could be salvaged had been brought out. A great deal of work had been lost, not only experiments in progress but some of the back-up embryonic tissue meant to support Starfarer's biological diversity.