Victoria gave Stephen Thomas his second package. This one was as light as the first had been heavy. He untied the scarf that wrapped it. Victoria never wrapped his presents in paper, because wrapping paper was hard to come by in the starship and he always tore it.
She had brought him two of the loose silk shirts he liked.
The ones he had now he had worn almost to rags. He still wore them. He lifted the new turquoise one, and saw the bright red one beneath it.
"Victoria, these are incredible!" He put on the turquoise shirt. It intensified the clear blue of his eyes. He stroked the smooth fabric. "How does it look?"
"How do you think?" She put one hand on his shoulder and let her fingers slide down his back. The silk felt soft; his muscles, hard. He met her gaze and reached out, letting his arm match the curve of hers.
"It looks terrific, kid," Satoshi said. "Don't wear it into any dark bars—we'll have to wade in and rescue you."
They all laughed. Victoria wished it were evening; she wished they were sitting around the dinner table getting silly on champagne. She handed Satoshi his second present.
He unfolded the wrapping, smoothed it, set it aside, and opened the plain white box.
He pushed aside the cushioning and lifted out the white bowl. The sunlight touched it and turned the graceful round shape translucent. Satoshi caught his breath.
"It's absolutely beautiful."
"It rings," she said.
He tapped it with his fingernail. The porcelain gave off a soft, clear tone. Satoshi looked at her. The smile-lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled.
"Thank you."
"When I saw it . . ." Victoria said, "you know. if anyone had told me I'd be moved nearly to tears by a porcelain dish, I'd've told them they were nuts."
Last she gave him the stones she had picked up on the beach after her first meeting with J.D.
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"These . . . they aren't really anything, just something I found. I thought you might like them."
They were gnarled and smooth, like wind-blasted trees;
some had holes bored straight through them. A few carried holes bored partway through, with the shell of the creature that had made the hole left behind, stuck inside after it bored its way in, and grew. One stone was a mass of holes, till nothing was left but a lacework of edges.
"I kept hoping nobody would pick up my allowance and say, 'What have you got in here, rocks?' If I admitted I was carrying plain rocks out of the gravity well, no telling what Distler would do with that."
Satoshi chuckled. "These aren't just plain rocks." He held one in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. Victoria recognized it as the one she had kept in her pocket all the way back home; rubbing it had given it a slightly darker color.
Victoria found herself in a mood more suitable for the end of Christmas morning: glad her partners liked what she had brought for them, but sorry that the occasion had ended.
They spent a few minutes tidying up, giving the dirty dishes to the house AS, then left to meet J.D. and go out to the sailhouse to watch the solar sail's first full deployment.
As Victoria left the house, she saw Satoshi's porcelain bowl in the center of the table. The gnarled sea-worn stones lay artlessly, precisely placed within its smooth white concavity. Victoria gazed at the stones, at the bowl. The arrangement's effect was calming, yet it was also arousing, and in a definitely sexual way. Victoria wondered how Satoshi had managed that.
Griffith woke at the silent arrival of an AS with his breakfast from the communal kitchen. He had slept as he always slept, soundly but responsive to his surroundings, waking once just before dawn when a bird startled him by singing outside his window.
Only one of the other guests had slept in the guesthouse.
The other had yet to make an appearance; Griffith would have heard if anyone had come in during the night. No one had taken any notice of Griffith, and his things remained undisturbed.
He wolfed his breakfast, hungry after two days in zero-STARFARERS 109
gravity. Leaving by way of the emergency exit rather than the front door, he set off to continue his exploration.
Griffith had read all the plans, all the speculations, all the reports. He knew why Starfarer resembled a habitat instead of a vehicle. He understood the reasons for its size. He even understood the benefits of designing it to be aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, both his irritation and his envy increased as he strode along paths that led through what for him was, even in its raw and unfinished form, a paradise. He had no chance at all of living in a similar environment back on earth. He did occasionally work with—more accurately, for—people who were extremely wealthy or extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. They owned places like this. But regular scientists, regular administrators, regular government employees, lived in the city and liked it. They figured out ways to like it, because they had no choice.
People who had lived here would never consider going back to the crowds and noise and pollution of earth. Not willingly. Back on earth, Griffith had been skeptical of the suggestion that the personnel of the starship intended to take it away and never bring it back, either turning it into a generation ship and living on it permanently, or seeking a new, unspoiled planet to take over. That suggestion smacked too baldly of conspiracy theories for Griffith. Now, though, he found the idea more reasonable to contemplate.
The contemplation made his analysis easier.
He looked up.
The sun tubes dazzled him. He blinked and held out his hand to block off the most intense part of the light. To either side of the mirrors, the cylinder arched overhead, curving all the way around him to meet itself at his feet.
He had seen such views looking down from a mountain, during brief training exercises outside the city. Looking up for a view was disorienting. A multiple helix of streams flowed from one end of the campus to the other. Here and there the streams flowed beneath the green-tipped branches of a newly planted strip of trees, or widened and vanished into a bog of lilies and other water-cleansing plants; cr widened into silver-blue lakes or marshlands. A wind-surfer skimmed across one of the lakes. The brightly colored sail caught the morning breeze. Small gardens formed square or
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irregular patches of more intense green in the midst of intermittent blobs of ground cover.
It would all be very pretty when the plants finished growing together over the naked soil. But it was unnecessary. Machines could clean the water and the air nearly as well as the plants could. Well enough for human use. A ship a fraction this size could store years and years' worth of supplies. Griffith found the claim of the necessity of agriculture to be questionable at best. Wind-surfing was a quaint way of getting exercise, but treadmills and exercise bikes were far more efficient in terms of the space required, not to mention the time. If the scientists had intended to set out on a proper
expedition they would have designed a proper ship.
Griffith tried to imagine what the cylinder would look like when all the plants reached their full growth. As yet the intensely green new grass remained thin and tender, brown earth showing between the blades. Other ground cover lay in patches, not yet grown together, and most of the trees were saplings, branchy and brown. Some of the vegetation in the wild cylinder, according to the reports, had been transported from the O'Neills, but most came from single-celt clones engendered on board Starfarer. It was far too expensive to import bedding plants or trees all the way from earth. The cell banks of Starfarer boasted something like a million different kinds of plants and animals. Griffith thought it extravagance and waste.
He kept walking, following a faint, muddy path worn through new grass. They should at least pave their paths. He saw practically no one. Half the people working on Starfarer had been called back by their governments in protest over the changes the United States was proposing in Starfarer's mission.