Griffith had drafted most of the changes.
Now that he was here, he could see even more possibilities.
If he had to, he would accede gracefully to the objection that the cylinder was too large to use as a military base. He would turn the objection to his advantage. The body of the cylinder was a treasury of raw materials, minerals, metal ore, even ice from deposits of water that had never thawed since the moon's formation. Starfarer could be mined and re-created.
He would rather see it used as an observation platform and
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staging area. That way its size would be useful. It could be as radical a training ground as Santa Fe, the radiation-ruined city. Griffith had spent a lot of time there, wearing radiation protection, inventing and testing strategies against urban terrorism and tactical weaponry. He imagined working up here under similar conditions. It would be easy to evacuate the air from the cylinders. A spacesuit could hardly be more cumbersome than radiation garb.
He did not see any problem in taking over the starship.
Now that Distler had won the election, Griffith's political backing was secure. MacKenzie's ill-considered comments could only speed things along.
When he first started studying the starship, he could not believe it was unarmed, that its naive philosophy allowed it-required it'—to vanish into the unknown without weapons.
Getting weapons on board was Griffith's next priority.
Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas walked over to J.D.'s house. Victoria wished she had invited her to breakfast. She would have, if she had known that Feral would be around.
None of the paths on board Starfarer, even the paved ones,
had been designed for three people walking abreast. In this the starship was much like Terrestrial towns. Saioshi was in the middle, so Victoria and Stephen Thomas alternated walking on the verge. Knee-high bushes sprinkled dew against Victoria's legs.
"Hello!"
They paused at the edge of J.D.'s yard. She appeared in the open doorway and beckoned them inside.
"Good morning."
"How did you sleep?"
"Just fine. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get used to a new place, but this feels like home."
They followed her into the main room. Her boxes of books stood in stacks; books from opened boxes stood in stacks. J.D. had set several of the packing boxes together to form makeshift shelves. Starfarer's houses contained few bookshelves, since everyone used the web or temporary hard copy.
"This will have to do till I can get something more substantial. What do I do to requisition some boards?"
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"Plant a tree," Stephen Thomas said.
J.D. looked at him curiously.
"Wood is scarce," Victoria explained. "The trees are still growing. What you want is some slabs of rock foam."
Stephen Thomas picked up one of the old books, handling it gingerly, as if it would disintegrate in his hands. As it probably would.
"Why do you have all these?"
"For research. They give me ideas that I try to build on."
"Nothing a human being is going to think of is going to match a real first contact," Stephen Thomas said.
"No," J.D. said. "It's not. But the ideas are for mind-stretching, not script-writing."
She picked a book out of an open box. The cover painting looked like a peeled eyeball.
"Here's one," she said. "It's got a story in it called 'The Big Pat Boom,' by Damon Knight. Aliens visit earth and decide that cowpats are great art. They want to buy them and take them back home—to alien planets. So everybody on earth tries to comer the market in cowpats. What would you do?"
Victoria laughed. "What would I do with a cowpat? Yuck."
"What," Stephen Thomas asked plaintively, "is a cow-pat?"
Satoshi explained. Stephen Thomas snorted in disbelief.
"I can't even think how I'd move a cowpat," Victoria said.
"I haven't read the story in a long time," J.D. admitted.
"I forget the exact details. I think they let the cowpats dry before they try to move them."
"What did they do about the dung beetles and the maggots?" Satoshi asked.
"I don't know," J.D. said. "I didn't know about the dung beetles and the maggots."
"Your science fiction writer must have used some poetic license," Satoshi said.
"How did you get to be such an expert on cowpats?" Victoria asked.
"I'm a font of wisdom," Satoshi said, doing a subtle imitation of Stephen Thomas in his occasional pompous mode.
He grinned. "And I used to spend summers on Kauai herding cattle. I saw a lot of cowpats. Or steerpats, as it happens."
"Come on," J.D. said, "what would you do?"
STARFARERS 113
"I'd go looking for some different aliens," Stephen Thomas said.
"I guess I'd let them buy the cowpats," Satoshi said.
"I think we should try to get the cow farmers—"
"Ranchers," Satoshi said.
"Okay, ranchers—to give the aliens the cowpats as a gesture of friendship." Victoria chuckled. "Though I don't know how that would go over with the proponents of free trade."
"That's a good idea," J.D. said. "I hadn't thought of that alternative."
"The government would buy them and form a whole new bureaucracy to decide which aliens to give the shit to," Stephen Thomas said.
Everybody laughed.
"I'd nominate our new chancellor to be the minister of that department," Satoshi said.
J.D. glanced at him quickly, startled. Victoria found it interesting that the chancellor had earned Satoshi's dislike so quickly. Satoshi was notoriously slow to take offense.
"Here's one," J.D. said. "About some kids who smuggle a cat onto a space station."
"Don't show that one to Alzena," Victoria said. "She swore she'd draw and quarter anyone who smuggled a predator on board."
One of the makeshift shelves collapsed. J.D. tried to catch the books as they spilled out in a heap on the floor.
"Oh, this is hopeless," J.D. said. "But it's been so long since I had my books out. I was afraid they'd mildew at the cabin."
Satoshi picked up some of the fallen books and put them back in the box, setting it on its base rather than trying to use it as a shelf.
"I'll walk you through requisition," Victoria said. "The supply department can't be busy these days. . . . You can probably get some real shelves in a day or two."
"AH right. Thanks."
"No problem," Victoria said. "Come on, let's go watch the sail test!"
Infinity led Nikolai Petrovich Cherenkov toward the guesthouse, trying to explain the problem about Floris Brown. The
114 Vonda N. Mdntyre
trouble was, he felt so intimidated about talking to the cosmonaut that he kept getting tangled in his words.
' 'I took her to the guesthouse last night. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't just leave her in the garden. I sleep there sometimes, but you can't let an old person sit out all night in the dew. Do you know what I mean?"
"I do have some experience speaking English."
"I know that, I mean, I didn't mean—"
"I suppose you could not leave her to sit in the garden, but she might have come to her senses and moved back into her house if you had."
"She's pretty stubborn."
Infinity glanced sidelong at Nikolai Petrovich. This was the first time he had talked to the cosmonaut. Physically, Cherenkov was still vigorous. He had been tall for a cosmonaut, nearly two meters. The bone loss of years in space, in zero-g, had given him a pronounced stoop. His posture caused him to peer out at the world from beneath his brows. Exposure to sun and radiation had weathered his skin as severely as if he had spent his life in the desert. His dark brown hair was turning gray in discrete streaks. Gray striped his bushy eyebrows.