"If a hungry shark came along, I think I would not mind putting off parenthood a few more weeks in order to withdraw myself." Zev grinned.
"What about women?"
"Women who are divers leam to ovulate, and do so only when they choose someone to conceive with."
"How did we get off on this subject?"
Zev looked hurt. "You expressed interest."
"I guess so. But I'm a lot more interested in how we ended up being here."
"That does not interest me anymore. I am interested in how to get out."
"Me, too."
"Excuse me a moment," Zev said. "I must tell my mother where I am." His eyelids flickered.
"Wait!" Chandra grabbed him and shook him roughly before he could hook into the web.
He opened his eyes again. "What is wrong?"
"The web's probably being monitored!"
"Oh. I did not know that was allowed."
"Maybe not, not usually, but I bet they're doing it."
"Lykos will be worried."
"She'll be a lot more worried if they catch you!"
"That is true," Zev said.
Kolya came in from outside, drugged with dizziness and wonder. The path of stars lay before him, a web passing across his image of reality. The vision would remain for a while; then, as it faded, he would be drawn to the stars again.
He opened the fastenings of his spacesuit-
He had watched the sail unfurl. He hated it. It cut off a significant portion of the sky. But he loved it, too, because
STARFARERS 13 5
every increment of time added another increment of velocity to the ship's speed, pulling it toward the stars. Soon—
"General Cherenkov? Is everything all right?"
Kolya started violently and stumbled in the awkward halfremoved suit. Marion Griffith lunged forward, caught him, and held him on his feet.
"Bojemoi, " Kolya said, "don't you know it's dangerous to startle a—someone with a background like mine? Have you been waiting all this time?"
"Yessir. My apologies, sir, I didn't mean to scare you. I thought you saw me ... and then I couldn't tell."
"Several hours outside will affect the vision- Why are you still here?"
"I wanted to talk to you, and since you said I couldn't go outside, I decided to wait."
"If I reward your preposterous devotion, will I encourage its continuation?"
"I don't understand what you mean, sir."
"I mean that I like my privacy. I have not made that sufficiently clear to you. What do you want?"
"Only to hear what it was like in the early days, in space.
When you didn't have all this. When it was tough, and dangerous. About the years when you went back to earth. And about coming back up here, when you knew you'd never be able to leave again."
"I believe that the expedition will be both tough and dangerous. More than we can conceive. As for the rest—all that is in the archives. I sat for the cameras answering questions for ... far too long."
"I know," Griffith said. "I saw you. I watched the tapes.
But it isn't all, there's nothing about the years when you disappeared. And it isn't the same as hearing it straight, being able to ask questions ... "
"The years when I ... disappeared ... are not fit stories for civilized people. Are you civilized, Marion?"
"I ... I think so."
"I'm going to walk back to my house," Kolya said. "If you wish, you may walk with me, and I will answer what questions I choose. In return you must promise not to trouble me again."
136 Vonda N. Mclntyre Griffith hesitated.
"It is that, or nothing," Kolya said.
"All right," Griffith said. "Deal."
Victoria returned to campus feeling a little drunk, more from excitement than from champagne.
"That was something, wasn't it?" She giggled.
"It was," J.D. said. "It was. I guess . . . we're really on our way."
"We are." Victoria turned down the path toward Physics Hill. "Come on, I want to show you your office."
"I don't really need an office," J.D. said. "I've never had one—1 won't know what to do with it."
"First rule of academic life," Victoria said. "Never turn down the perks."
They reached a long low barrow with strips of windows that squinted out along the bushy slopes. The hallway behind the offices was cool and dank, a tunnel lined with gray rock foam. On the left, doors opened into offices. Someone had made an attempt to brighten the hallway with photos of particle interactions, abstract art of lines and curves and colli-
sions, and fractal movies.
"Nobody needs offices anymore," Victoria said. "But if we did all our communicating through Arachne, we'd never get out of bed. Here's my office." She opened a door. Few of the doors in the main cylinder of Starfarer opened automatically. The simpler things were, the less there would be to fix, light-years out in interstellar space.
"We're old-fashioned here in Physics Hill," she said. "We even have a conference room, down at the end of the hall. I know lots of people who claim they can do conferences by link, but I like being face-to-face."
J.D. followed Victoria into her office- The entire exterior wall was a window, open from waist height to ceiling. The hillside dropped away steeply, ten meters to the ground below. Victoria's desk was an extruded slab of rock foam; the chair was bamboo and rattan.
A display hovered in the comer. Victoria glanced at it. Numbers and symbols crept across it, a new one every few seconds.
STARFARERS 13 7
"Still working," Victoria said.
"What is it?"
"Cosmic string calculations. For navigating, once we reach transition energy. It's ferociously complicated to figure out where you're going once you grab a piece of cosmic string, and even harder to figure out a reasonable way back.''
"But those calculations are already done. Aren't they?"
"The set for our first trip, sure. But I've been spending a lot of time working out better methods of doing the calculations."
"How long before it's finished?"
"Don't know. No way to tell. This is a new symbolic manipulation routine. Solving cylindrical stress-energy tensors is tough. This one's been running for two weeks already, but that's nothing. The shortest solution so far took fifty-three days."
She watched the display for a few seconds, then blew out her breath and turned away. "I never let Arachne send this stuff straight into my head- It's hypnotic."
Suddenly she stared at the display again. "Except . . ."
She fell silent for so long that J.D. grew concerned.
"Victoria?" she said softly.
"What? Oh, sorry." She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. "I have an idea. I think it might speed things up some more. Solve the problem more elegantly ..."
"Go ahead and work on it. The office can wait."
She was tempted. "No, it's okay—your office will only take a minute."
Victoria led J.D. to her office, two doors down, and tried to open it. It remained closed.
"It's supposed to have been cleared by now," she said.
"Maybe it's fixed on me. Open my office, please,
Arachne," J.D. said. She echoed the request over her link. Nothing happened- Then she remembered it was a simple mechanical door. She tried the door handle. Nothing happened.
"I'll be damned," Victoria said. She described a query path to J.D., who followed it into Arachne's web.
The bursar had not yet assigned her any office space. Nor had the chancellor accepted her appointment as alien contact specialist.
138 Vonda N. Mclntyre
"This is outrageous," Victoria said. "It's my decision to invite you onto the team. Accepting your appointment is nothing but a formality'"
"The rules must have changed," J.D. said.
"A lot of things are changing around here."
"This is scary. Victoria."
"It's ridiculous, that's what it is. Damn! Come on, you can use Nakamura's office till we get things straightened out. I know I have access to it."