." Her voice trailed off as she considered, then she brought herself back abruptly. "We're lucky someone is looking past the boundaries of their responsibilities," she said to Infinity.
"I suppose so." Gerald stared at the dead artificials again, but the dark corners drew his gaze. He caught his breath, but covered the reaction with a cough. "Can you repair the artificials? Or must we turn Starfarer into a primitive hunting tribe?" He glanced at Infinity. "No offense."
"What?" Infinity kept himself from laughing. What could he say? That his mother's people had been agriculturalists for thousands of years? That the hunting tribes had been a lot of things, none of them "primitive"? That he would truly like to see Gerald in the wild cylinder, trying to play pukka sahib with the shy, rare deer?
They would all be much better off gathering than hunting. A large proportion of the plants growing within Starfarer were edible. He wondered if Gerald had noticed that.
Infinity settled for a shrug. "I'd prefer hunting and gathering to cultivating rice by hand," he said.
The other half of Infinity's heritage was legally Brazilian and ethnically Japanese, but Gerald obviously had no idea what Infinity was talking about. He gave Infinity a blank look.
"Can you repair the artificials?" he said again to Thanthavong. He was sweating.
He doesn't like it down here, Infinity thought. He doesn't like it down here at all.
"Theoretically, of course I know how to regrow the brains," Thanthavong said. "But the technical aspects . . . Obviously, Infinity is correct. We shall have to free resources to repair these creatures. If Arachne's memories of their training are whole, the problem may not be too difficult. If the architecture has to be redesigned from scratch . . ." She lifted her hands, palms up, in a gesture of resignation.
Once more, Gerald glanced around the dark basement. The shadowy artificials surrounded them like a ghostly band of supplicants. Gerald hunched his shoulders.
"I shall have to research the best way to go about the repair," Gerald said. "If you'll excuse me." He hurried up the stairs and disappeared.
"We'd be in a pretty mess," Thanthavong said to Infinity, "if you hadn't noticed this."
"Somebody would have."
"I wonder. We're so wrapped up in what J.D. experienced. . . . Would we all of a sudden look around and see it was too late?"
What she had said to him she had meant as a compliment. But she made him wonder if he had badly overstepped his bounds, and she made him wonder if she thought he was uninterested in Nemo and the alien ship-nest.
He wondered if aristocrats always had that kind of effect. . . .
"Your mother is Japanese?" she said.
"My father."
"How did you come to be named Mendez?"
"My whole name's Infinity Kenjiro Yanagihara y Mendoza. But Mendez is easier for people to remember, and it's the original spelling. From before my mother emigrated."
"Why do you use your mother's name?"
He shrugged. "It's less confusing. I don't look very Japanese. In Brazil it didn't matter, there are a lot of us mongrels around. Most folks knew me as Kenny Yanagihara."
"Did your father grow rice?"
"No, ma'am," Infinity said. "He's . . . he's a lot of
things, but not a farmer. Ronin is more like it. He doesn't grow rice. His family probably never grew rice."
"My father did," Thanthavong said. "In Cambodia. A hundred years ago. With a water buffalo."
She brushed her fingertips across the carapace of the artificial, a touch of sorrow or farewell, and walked toward the stairs.
Infinity followed her out, nonplused by her comment. A hundred years ago? With a water buffalo?
He was not sure of her age, but he knew she was old. Eighty, maybe.
Her father could have been a rice farmer, in Cambodia. A hundred years ago. With a water buffalo.
Carrying the shovel, Stephen Thomas headed home. He had not meant to stay so long, and he wondered how things were going in the genetics department. He checked with Arachne, but found no messages from his students or from his boss.
Involved with Arachne, he stumbled on the rough trail. He dropped the link and put his attention to negotiating the path. He had forgotten how quickly darkness fell in late autumn on board Starfarer. Back in the campus cylinder, where it was spring, the twilights as well as the days were growing longer.
He could not get lost: the sun tube reflected starlight at night, and Arachne could always guide him back to the access if the sky clouded over. As it was doing now. The clouds were thicker and darker than any Stephen Thomas had ever seen here. The temperature had fallen rapidly.
He kept going, following the trail in the darkness as best he could. He touched Arachne now and then to be sure he was headed in the right direction, but he could not stay in constant contact with the computer. He had to keep most of his attention on the trail.
The rain began, a few scattered drops that patted against the dry leaves of the young trees. A rumble of sound rolled over the land.
Thunder.
Stephen Thomas looked along the length of the wild cylinder, amazed to see lightning flicker across the clouds. A break in the sky cover exposed the sun tube, bright with stars, and the far-overhead clouds.
Lightning spiraled down the length of the wild side.
As thunder rumbled around him, Stephen Thomas cursed the lightning, the rain, and Arachne. The trail led up a small hill. He stopped, looking for a way around the base. He had no intention of becoming a human lightning rod. He asked for directions to an access hatch, so he could find shelter underground, but received no reply. The storm cut him off from the web, isolating him from any help. The wind rose, whipping fallen leaves past his ankles. The raindrops hit the ground, coated themselves with dust, bounced back and splashed his legs, and turned into mud. His sore feet slid around in his wet sandals.
The clouds opened. Rain crashed down: the huge, heavy drops fell so fast the air felt like solid water.
A bolt of lightning blasted the earth nearby. The air reeked of ozone, broken cedar, smoke. The rain sizzled and hissed against flames; the fire died with a stench of wet ashes.
Rivulets coursed down the hillside and coalesced into a stream. Stephen Thomas followed the rippling water, looking for shelter. He was soaking wet, and cold, his long hair plastered against his face and straggling down his neck. He wiped rainwater from his eyes.
A lightning flash illuminated the land around him. His eyes and his mind retained a high-contrast picture. The stream was leading him into a gully: he was about to trade being a target of the lightning for being the prey of a wall of water. Even a diver might not survive a flash flood. He dropped the shovel and climbed the rough slope to higher ground, scrabbling up the rock, cursing, scraping his hands on stones.
Out of the reach of the gathering flood, he hunkered
under a scraggle of prickly scotch broom. It gave some protection from the wind, but none at all from the rain. The crisp colorful fallen leaves had turned to a slick, sopping brown mat.
The rain stopped as it had begun: a deluge abruptly changing to a scatter of droplets, then nothing. Stephen Thomas looked up. The clouds had rained themselves away, and the stars bloomed brightly all along the sun-tube.
Rushing brown water washed through the gully below him.
When Stephen Thomas stood up, the scotch broom swept him with another shower. He swore at it, looked around to get his bearings, and picked his way along the edge of the gully toward the trail, The electrical interference with his link had disappeared, for all the difference it made now. He did send a general, irritated note to Arachne about the weather. Arachne noted that the fire danger had ended.