Victoria glanced sideways at him.
He grinned. "You've heard that one before, huh?"
"It's about the first oldest joke."
"I love your accent," Feral said.
"What accent?" Victoria said.
"You say 'oot' and *aboot' instead of 'out' and 'about.' "
"I don't have an accent," she said. "It's all you Americans who talk funny. Parlez.-vous franfais?"
"Huh?" Feral said.
"Un pen, " J.D. said.
"You do?" Victoria said to J.D., surprised. "I don't remember it from your vita—"
"It isn't academic French," J.D. said. "I picked it up the last few months. Most of the divers speak it."
They reached the bottom of the hill, and joined Stephen Thomas. On solid ground he was at ease. and he moved with grace and certainty. As Victoria and Satoshi came off the hill, Stephen Thomas kissed Victoria intensely, and drew Satoshi into the embrace. J.D. envied them a bit, and she felt glad for them, and a tittle embarrassed.
"I'll see you all tomorrow," she said. She started away. STARFARERS 75
"J.D.," Victoria said, "do you know where you're going?"
"Um, no, but I'm sure Arachne will get me to where I'm supposed to stay.''
"Don't be silly. We'll show you, and get you settled."
Victoria and Satoshi went with J.D., while Stephen Thomas set off with Feral to show him to the guesthouse.
Thick, weedy grass and flowers covered much of the land
of the campus. At first J.D- could not figure out why it looked
so familiar to her, until she realized that the ecosystem of
Starfarer, planned as a natural succession, reproduced the first growth in a forest after a big fire. Of course the campus lacked the black tumble of half-burned trees, snags, uprooted trunks.
They followed a small stream. J.D- tried to trace its course along the inside of the cylinder, but soon lost it among hedgerows. Above, on the other side of the cylinder, a network of silver streams patterned the raw ground and sprouting grass.
The interior radius of one end of Starfarer's cylinder was slightly shorter than that of the other end. The resulting slope formed a gentle gradient of artificial gravity that caused the streams to flow from this end of the cylinder to the other.
They erupted at the base of the hill and flowed in spirals around the interior of the campus. Every so often a stream spread out into a clear lake, or a bog or swamp thick with water hyacinths and other cleansing plants. At the far end of the cylinder lay a salt marsh, the main buffer of the ecosystem, Evaporation and transpiration and rain recycled some of the water, and some flowed underground through pumps and desalinizers, back to its starting point.
At first Victoria and Satoshi followed a resilient rock-foam path, but after a few hundred meters Victoria turned down a dirt trail that had been worn into the grass.
"Do you have deer on campus?" J.D. asked.
"Not in this cylinder. These are people trails. If one gets awfully popular, we foam it."
J.D. looked around curiously. Along the length of the cylinder she could see clearly only a few hundred meters, because windbreaks of saplings or bushes separated the fields.
She stopped short. "What's that?"
Several dog-sized animals bobbed toward her through the 76 vonda N. Mcintyre
high grass of the next field. Back on the island, a pack of half-wild dogs ran free, far more dangerous than any wolf pack or coyote band.
"That's the horse herd," Satoshi said.
"Horse herd'"
Their tiny hooves tattooed the damp ground, the thick grass. Five miniature horses skidded to a stop in front of J.D., whinnying in high-pitched voices, snorting at each other. A pinto no taller than J.D-'s knee squealed and kicked out at a bay that crowded too close. They whuffled expectantly around her feet.
Victoria reached down and scratched one behind the ears.
"I'm fresh out of carrots," she said. "Satoshi, have you got anything for them?"
He dug around in the side cargo pocket of his pants, underneath a crumpled map printout, and found a few peanuts.
He opened them, rubbing the shells to powder between his fingers before letting them fall to the ground. The miniature horses crowded closer. Satoshi gave J.D. the peanuts. The horses lipped them softly from her hands. They nuzzled the backs of her knees, her ankles, and her shoes.
** I didn't know horses liked peanuts," J.D. said.
"They might prefer apples," Satoshi said, "but the trees aren't established yet. Next year we may get some fruit.
Sugar's still fairly expensive up here, since we haven't started processing it. Lots of carrots, but peanuts are easier to carry. Drier."
Victoria chuckled. "He left a carrot in his pocket once, for I don't know how long. The laundry sent it back."
"It wasn't that bad," Satoshi said to J.D. He shrugged.
"It was more or less fossilized before anybody found it."
"Why are they here?"
"The minis, you mean, not the carrots?"
"People do better with pets around," Victoria said. "And they keep the grass from getting completely overgrown."
"I see," J.D. said. "The mini-horses are easier to keep track of than cats or dogs or hamsters—and easier on the ecosystem, too, I suppose." She sat on her heels and rubbed the soft muzzle of a seven-hand Appaloosa.
"Right. Alzena—Alzena Dadkhah, she's the chief ecolo-gist—is trying to get some birds established. A lot of people
STARFARERS 77
would like to have dogs or cats—I'd like to have my cat. But I can see her point about predators. And domestic rodents are too adaptable. According to Alzena, once you've got them, you've got them everywhere. So far we haven't had any rats, but it could happen. Then there's the waste problem."
"Sorry, little one, that's the end of the peanuts," J.D. said to the Appaloosa. "I see the point about waste. Herbivore waste isn't quite as unattractive as carnivore waste."
"Easier to compost, too," Satoshi said.
J.D. patted the Appaloosa one last time- She straightened up. The mini tossed its head, looking for another handout. It was a cute little animal.
Something about it made J.D. uncomfortable, and that was exactly the problem: it was cute. In being bred down from magnificence, the horses had been made trivial, converted from strong, powerful animals to lapdogs.
She clapped her hands sharply. The minis snorted and started and galloped away. They scattered, galloping and bucking, and re-formed their herd a hundred meters across the field.
J.D. saw her new house for the first time. She had known the houses formed part of the topography, built into hillsides with one wall of windows. But she had not expected hers to be beautiful.
"I love it," J.D. said. "It looks organic, somehow. But why do it like this? Not to conserve energy, surely." While Starfarer still flew within the solar system, the sun would provide all the power it could possibly use. Once it clamped itself to the universe's web of cosmic string, the problem would be to keep from being overwhelmed by the energy flux.
"Not here and now," Victoria said. "But we can't know all the conditions we'll face after we leave. The basic reason is aesthetic and ecological. The more plants on the surface, the less ground we cover with buildings and pathways and so forth, the more stable and resilient the ecosystem will be.
The plants keep the air fresher, they soak up the runoff from rain—"
J.D. glanced up. Starfarer was large enough to have its own weather patterns, including rain. Two different systems of clouds drifted over the land on the other side of the cylinder.
Victoria pointed at the most distant cloud system. "That far-overhead system will be near-overhead in half a rotation.
The ecosystems analysts encourage rain in the cylinders—it's easier and cheaper than air-conditioning. Smells better, too."
"No thunder and lightning, though. I'm sure," J.D. said