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ment of small spots that she took to be human beings.

"There's lots of open space, but plenty of people live around here. Some of them have, you know, left, but they'll be back. We're almost there."

She pushed herself to her feet.

They walked through a wide, shallow valley that cut diagonally across the cylinder floor. A creek ran through its center, bubbling over jagged cracked stones to a confluence with a larger stream. Bushes grew in ragged scatters. Straight bare vertical branches crowded together along the creek bank.

"Pretty, huh?" Infinity said.

"It's half-finished. Like everything else I've seen."

He nodded. "Yeah. That's true. You should've seen it before the ground cover sprouted. Mud. What a mess. When the lilacs grow some more, it'll be solid green over there. They've already got buds. And look at the willows. See the pink and red and yellow at the tips? That's where they're growing."

Floris tried to find comfort in the faint haze of color that tipped the bare willow twigs, but the ragged landscape depressed her.

"How do you know so much?" She did not mean her tone to be so sharp.

"I planted most of it," Infinity said mildly. "There's not much call for station builders anymore, but I didn't want to

88 vonda N. Mclneyre

go back to the O'NeiHs. I like working outdoors. So I transferred to gardening."

She barely heard him. The far curve of the cylinder loomed overhead, and the bright reflected sunlight dazzled her. She wanted to get inside, beneath a roof. She wanted to rest.

"Do you even have roofs here?" she said. Her voice was faint.

"Sure," Infinity said. "How else would we keep t,he rain off?" He stopped. "And here's your roof itself."

Fforis stared, appalled. "They promised me a house," she said. She felt near tears.

It looked like pictures she had seen of ancient pueblos, abandoned for centuries. This one had been abandoned so long that even the climate had changed, and the clean dry rock was covered over with dirt and moss and growing things.

It was full of windows and doors and pathways and stairs.

She knew she would have trouble getting around in it.

"Here you are," he said. He opened a sliding window and led her inside.

"I don't want to live in a cave," she said. "They promised me a house."

"This is a house. What's wrong with it? It's as good as anybody's got, and better than most. The chancellor lives down the path a way."

He led her across a treacherous carpeting of slippery woven grass mats to a stone window seat. She sat, gratefully.

"All these mats are gifts," Infinity said. "People on campus made them for you. There's a welcome party for you tomorrow night."

The underground apartment felt dank and cold. Floris shivered.

Hearing footsteps, she glanced up. A tall figure strode past her outer doorway and vanished.

Infinity stared out the window.

"You know who that was?" Awe took his low voice down another half octave.

"I have no idea," Floris said.

"It was Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov. He lives here, but I've only seen him a couple of times. You know, the Russian—"

"I remember."

STARFARERS 8 9

Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov had defected when the Mideast Sweep recalled the Russian cosmonauts. Now tie lived permanently in space. He was nearly FIoris's age, and very famous. He could not return to earth because the Sweep had convicted him of treason, in absentia, and sentenced him to death.

"He lives here? In my house?"

"No, sure not. The way it works, it's easier to put together a bunch of houses at a time, then put a hill over top of them. You're in kind of a triplex arrangement, and Cherenkov has the one highest up."

"Who lives in the third part of the triplex?"

"Thanthavong. The geneticist."

Floris frowned. The strange name sounded familiar, but she could not place it.

"They say she came up here because she couldn't gel any work done back on earth. She was too famous, and the publicity just kept going on year after year."

"Publicity about what?"

"The anti-virus. She invented it- Before I was even bom, but don't you remember?"

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Vonda%20N%20McIntyre%20-%20Starfarers.txt "Oh. Yes."

"Ms. Brown—"

"Floris. Florrie."

"—I'm sure they won't bother you. I've been planting here for weeks and this is the first time I've seen Cherenkov. Than-thavong leaves for her lab at dawn and hardly ever comes back before dark. I bet you won't see Thanthavong any more than you see Cherenkov. '

"But I want to se6 people! That's why I came up here! Do you think I want to be all alone? *'

She might as well have stayed on earth. Only two things prevented her from demanding that Infinity Mendez take her back to the transport. The first was that she felt so tired. The second was that though the starship would fly into the darkness and disappear, it had a good chance of returning. Back home. entering the darkness forever was a possibility she had to face every time she worked up the nerve to leave her apartment.

"I didn't mean nobody would talk to you. Sure they wilt.

90 vonda N. Mclntyre

I meant nobody would bother you if you didn't want to be bothered."

Floris turned away from the window and huddled on the seat. When she applied to the program, it had all sounded wonderful. A house of her own, and people to talk to anytime she wished, and no worry about being sent away. Instead, here she was in an unfurnished concrete apartment, with only two neighbors, both foreigners, both so famous they .would probably not even deign to speak to her, and one of them a hermit.

And both of them, she suddenly realized, elderly.

She tried to remain calm.

"You've brought me here and put me in an old people's home," she said.

"What? No, I didn't, I mean, there isn't any such thing on Starfarer."

"I don*t believe you. My children wanted me to go to an old people's home. I can't. I'll die."

Floris pushed herself to her feet and crossed the slippery mats.

"I don't want to live here anymore," she said, and walked out into the valley.

The net bag full of presents bounced gently against Victoria's side, and the muscles ofSatoshi's back moved smoothly beneath her hand. As she walked beside him toward their house, she slid her fingers under the black tank top that

showed his shoulders to such good advantage. The heat of his skin made her shiver. He tightened his arm around her waist. Victoria covered his hand with her free hand, and laced her fingers between him.

Everything around her felt and looked and smelled and sounded sharp and clear and vivid, as if happiness had intensified all her perceptions, as if she possessed more than the normal number of senses. For tonight, she would put aside both her desire for some uninterrupted work time, and her worries about the expedition.

The low round hills had gone gray in the shadowless twilight. The sun tubes dimmed nearly to darkness as Victoria and Satoshi turned off the main path and strolled up the gentle slope toward the house. Hills formed the interior topography

STARFARERS 91

of both the campus cylinder and the wild cylinder. Hills increased the sense of privacy as well as the usable surface area, but they made Victoria feel closed in. Despite her years in Vancouver, she had spent much of her childhood in and around Winnipeg. She always expected to be able to see long distances to the horizon. Starfarer had no horizon.

Dwarf fruit trees lined the approach to the house. Because of her trip, Victoria had missed the peak of Slarfarer's first real spring. The cherry blossoms had already fallen. The petals lay in pink and white drifts across the path.

The hillside that covered Victoria's house stretched one long low ridge in a semicircle to form a courtyard in front of the main windows. Victoria and Satoshi rounded the tip of the ridge. They were home.