Despite his name, he looked quite domesticated. Victoria regarded him. He was not at all the way she would have imagined from his name and his articles. He had curly red-brown hair cut all the same length. In weightlessness it fluffed out around his head. His eyes were a gentle brown. His chin was round, his lips mobile and expressive.
"It wasn't exactly an interview, and I think I've said as much as I need to ... or want to." Victoria smiled to take the sting out of turning him down. "I mean .-. . I said what I meant. If I start explaining myself, it would sound like weaseling."
"When I interview somebody," he said,, "they only sound like they're weaseling if they really are weaseling."
"I don't have anything more to say right now. Maybe the opportunity will come up while you're visiting Starfarer, eh?
I'm sure you'll find most people happy to talk to you."
Feral Korzybski wrote about the space program. He had resisted jumping on the new U.S. president's anti-tech band-
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wagon. As far as Victoria knew, all his articles appeared in public-access, not in sponsored news or feature information services.
"I really would like to talk to both of you about the alien contact team."
"Have you been in space before?" Victoria said, changing the subject without much subtlety.
"No, first trip. First time I could afford it."
"You've got a sponsor, then. Congratulations."
"Sponsors are nothing but unfilled censors!" he said with startling vehemence. "When you read sponsored stuff, you're paying extra for the privilege of reading work that's been gutted to make it acceptable. If I can't make my name as an independent, I don't want to do it at all."
"How'd you get up here?"
"By saving for a ticket, like any other tourist."
"But tourists can't come onto Starfarer anymore. We're too close to final maneuvers." "That took a lot of persuasion and a lot of calling in obligations. Including a few nobody owed me yet." He looked away, obviously embarrassed by the admission of any flaw in his independence.
'*If I can help you find your way around," Victoria said,
"I'd be glad to."
He smiled shyly from beneath his heavy eyebrows. "I'd appreciate that. A lot. Will you talk to me off the record? 'Deep background,' we call it in the trade."
"Of course I'll talk to you," Victoria said. "I just like to be warned when somebody's about to start quoting me. All right?"
"Sure. What do you think about the Senate bill to transform Starfarer into a military base with remote sensing capabilities?"
"You don't ease into anything, do you?"
"No," he said cheerfully. "The argument is that we need more information about the Mideast Sweep, and more defenses against it."
"I understand the argument, but the proposal has already damaged the expedition. You know about the recalls. I'm sure."
38 vonda N. Mcfntyre
He nodded. "It's last century's space station all over again."
"That's right. We lost a couple of decades' worth of original research and intercultural cooperation right there. Now, as soon as we start to recover, as soon as there's hope for peaceful applications, your country is making the same damned mistake. You contributed more than half the funding and more than half the personnel, so your president thinks he can get away with this bullying."
"He's not my president. I didn't vote for him."
Victoria quirked her lips in a sardonic smile. "Nobody did, it seems like. Nevertheless, he is your president and he is bullying us. He's violating several treaties. Unfortunately, your country is still sufficiently powerful that you can tell everybody else to take a high dive if we don't like your plans."
"What about the Mideast Sweep?"
"What about it?"
"Don't you want to keep an eye on them?"
"JProm here? You con do remote sensing from very high orbits, but why would you want to? You might as well use the moon. You don't need something the size of Starfarer for spying. You don't even need it for a military base powerful enough to blow the whole world to a cinder. Starfarer as a military base—even as a suspected military base—becomes vulnerable. 1 hope it won't come to that. Look, Feral, your country is trying to make itself so powerful that it's becoming paralyzed. When you rely solely on your weapons, you lose the art of compromise that created the U.S. in the first place. Soon your only choice will be between staying in the comer you've backed into, doing nothing ... or blasting the whole building down."
"Do you think we can talk the Mideast Sweep around to a reasonable position?''
Victoria had no fondness for the Mideast Sweep. To begin with, there was the sexual and racial discrimination they practiced. If she lived under its domination she would subsist at a level so low that it would barely count as human.
"I don't know how much can be achieved with talk. But I hope—1 have to believe—that the United States is a country
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too ethical to destroy a whole population because it lives under the control of an antagonistic hierarchy."
"Does everybody else on the crew agree with you?"
Victoria chuckled. "Getting everybody to agree on anything is one of our biggest problems. One thing we do agree on, though, is that we aren't 'crew.' "
"What, then?"
^Starfarer isn't a military ship—not yet, anyway, and not ever if most of us on board have anything to say about it. It's only a ship in the sense that it can move under its own power. There's a hierarchy of sorts, but it isn't based on a military structure. There's faculty and staff and technical support. It's more like a university. Or a university town. Most of the decisions about how things are run, we try to decide by consensus."
"That sounds awkward," Feral said.
"Only if you hate five-hour meetings," Victoria said, straight-faced.
"Don't you have to be able to react fast out here? If there's an emergency and there's nobody to give the order to do something about it, doesn't that put everyone at risk?"
^Starfarer has redundancies of its redundancies. With most emergencies you have plenty of time. As for the others . . . everyone who lives there takes an orientation course that includes possible emergencies and what to do about them- You have to pass it if you expect to stay. That's how fast you'd have to react to an acute emergency—you wouldn't have time to call some general and ask for permission."
"What about sabotage?"
"There's much more reason to sabotage a military instal-
lation than a civilian one. And a lot more explosive-type stuff sitting around to use to sabotage it with." Victoria laughed. "Besides, in a group run by consensus, all a saboteur would have to do is come to meetings and block every proposal.
That wouldn't stop us cold, but it would slow everything down and drain a lot of energy." She sighed. "Sometimes I think we already have a few saboteurs aboard."
"How would you respond to an attack?"
"We have no response to attack. We're unarmed. We had to fight to remain unarmed, but it's an important part of the philosophy of the mission."
4 0 Vonda N. Mcintyre
"I meant response to an attack from earth, or on earth. If you were armed—suppose somebody attacked the U.S. or Canada. What could you do?"
"Not much. Even if we were armed, Slarfarer's in a lousy strategic orbit. It's too far from earth to be of use as a defensive or offensive outpost. Any of the O'Neill colonies would be more effective. And nobody is talking about making them into military bases."
"Yet," Feral said.
"Yeah," Victoria said. "Yet."
"You're pretty emphatic about Slarfarer in relation to solving earth's problems. Or not solving them."