A stream trickled past her house. She followed it. Soon a second stream joined it, and the combined watercourse cut down through the hill. J.D. found herself walking between sheer cliffs.
The cliff must be designed, J.D. thought. There had been no time for the stream to cut it. Starfarer's interior topography was carefully sculpted. Striped with stone colors, this sculpture looked like a water-eroded cliffside of sedimentary rock.
J.D. rounded a bend and stopped in surprise.
Beside the stream, someone scraped at the bank, probing with a slender trowel. A blanket lay on the ground, covered with bones.
"Hi, good morning," J.D. said. "What are you doing?"
The young digger glanced at her and stood up, stretching her back and her arms. She was small and slight, with a sweatband tied around her forehead. It rumpled her short straight black hair.
"Digging for fossils," she said.
J.D. looked at her askance. "It seems to me." she said,
"that if you'd found fossils in lunar rock, the news would be all over the web by now.''
"Not digging to take them out," she said. "Digging to put them in."
"You're making a fossil bed?"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"Don't you think we deserve some prehistory, too?"
J.D. leaned over the blanket. The relics resembled the exoskeletons of huge insects more than any mammalian bones.
"Whose prehistory is this?" she asked.
"Whoever came before."
"Whoever came before didn't look much like us."
104 vonda N. Mdntyre "Of course not."
"What department are you in?"
"Archaeology."
"But—" J.D. stopped. "1 think I'm being had."
"I'm Crimson Ng. Art department."
"J.D. Sauvage. Alien contact—"
"You're the new AC specialist! Welcome on board." She stuck out her grubby hand. J.D. shook it.
"But why are you burying fossils of a different species?"
"I'm just one of those crazy artists," Crimson said.
"Come on," J.D. said.
Crimson opened up to J.D.'s interest.
"Every time the argument about evolution comes along again, I start wondering what would happen if it were true that god invented fossils to fool us with. What if god's got a sense of humor? If I were god, I'd plant a few fossils that wouldn't fit into the scheme, just for fun."
"And that's what these are? Does that mean you're playing god?"
"Artists always play god," Crimson said.
"Don't you believe in evolution?"
"That's a tough word, 'believe.' Believing, and knowing what the truth is—you're talking about two different things.
Human beings are perfectly capable of believing one thing metaphorically, and accepting evidence for a completely different hypothesis. That's the simplest definition of faith that I know. It's the people who don't have any faith, who can't tell the difference between metaphor and reality, who want to force you to believe one thing only."
"I can't figure out who you're making fun of," J.D. said.
"That's the point," the artist said with perfect seriousness. "Everybody needs to be made fun of once in a while."
"Oh, I don't know," J.D. said. "I can get along without being made fun of for two or three days at a time without permanent damage."
Crimson glanced at her quizzically, then picked up one of the artifacts. The long and delicate claw nestled in her hand.
J.D. could imagine an intelligent being with those claws instead of hands, a being as dexterous and precise as any human.
"What happens if everybody forgets you've put these things STARFARERS 105
here," J.D. said, "and then somebody comes along and digs them up?"
"My god, that would be wonderful."
"What will people think?"
"Depends on who they are. And how smart they are. I'm trying to create a consistent prehistory, one that doesn't lead to us. Maybe future archaeologists will figure it out. Maybe they'll realize it's fiction. Maybe they won't. And maybe they'll think it was god playing a joke, and they'll laugh."
"And then they'll figure out that you made the bones."
"Oh, I don't think so," Crimson said. "I grew them very carefully. You shouldn't be able to tell them from real. And I cooked the isotopes, so the dating will be consistent." She grinned. "Got to get back to work."
She returned to her fossil bed.
J.D. watched her for a few minutes, then continued on beside the stream. She smiled to herself. She wished she could tell Zev and the whales about this. They would, she thought, find it very funny.
Though she was curious how J.D. had liked her first night on the starship, though she was eager to get out to the sailhouse for the first full test of Slarfarer's solar sail, and though she was anxious to get over to the physics department and get back to work, Victoria also wanted to give Satoshi and Stephen Thomas the presents she had brought from earth. But she wanted to do it when they were alone. As she was thinking up a polite way to ask Feral to leave for a while, Stephen
Thomas put one hand on the reporter's shoulder.
"Feral," he said, smiling, "thank you for breakfast. Why don't you go look around, and we'll see you in the sailhouse later."
"Huh? Oh. Okay." He drained his coffee cup. "I'd like to visit the alien contact department," he said to Victoria. "Would that be all right?"
"Sure. This afternoon."
"Thanks." He sauntered cheerfully out of the house.
"How do you get away with that?" Victoria asked.
Stephen Thomas looked at her quizzically. "Get away with what?"
106 vonda N. Mclntyre
"Never mind." She picked up the carrying net and opened it flat on the table.
"This is for the household," she said. She pulled out a package of smoked salmon.
"We should save this for sometime special," Satoshi said. "Maybe even after we leave."
One thing habitat designers had not figured out was a way to grow anadromous fish in a space colony. The salt marshes, so important to the ecosystem, could not support deep-water fish.
Victoria handed Stephen Thomas a rectangular gold box.
He took it carefully and hefted it gently.
"I know what this is," he said.
"I had my fingers crossed at lift-off," Victoria said. "It survived."
Stephen Thomas grinned, opened the box, and drew out a bottle of French champagne.
"Victoria, this is great, thank you."
She had known he would like it. And she knew why he liked it. Before Stephen Thomas joined the partnership, she had never drunk good champagne. By now she had tasted it several times. Saying that she had drunk it hardly seemed accurate, for each sip flowed over the tongue and vanished in a tickly barrage of minuscule bubbles.
"Something else for a special occasion," Stephen Thomas said. He was never stingy with his things. Whenever he managed to get good champagne to Starfarer, he shared it with his partners.
"I bought it in a fit of enlightened self-interest," Victoria said.
She handed Satoshi one of his presents. "Not quite on the same scale, but ... "
He smiled, carefully unfolding the tissue paper from the package of chili paste. Victoria and Stephen Thomas always brought back chili paste for him. Victoria could not stand the stuff herself. Sometimes she wondered if, in fifty years, Sa-toshi would confess that forty years before, he had developed a loathing for chili paste, but wanted to spare the feelings of his partners.
"We'll have to get something good to drink with it," he said.
STARFARERS 107
"Oh, no, not my champagne," their younger partner said.
"If you're going to blast your taste buds, you can do it with local beer."