"Sure," Infinity said. He put the brush beside the shells and stones and left her alone.
He walked home across the darkened campus, thinking about the strange day. Once he heard a noise: he stopped short and spun toward it, expecting to see Griffith gazing expressionlessly at him half-hidden by shadows.
The miniature horse herd's miniature stallion scamped the ground with its miniature hoof, snorted at him, and reared and whinnied. A moment later the whole herd galloped away into the darkness, making a noise like rain. Infinity smiled. When he got home, he took a blanket into his own garden, to sleep in the reflected starlight.
Griffith returned to the guesthouse in the dark, knowing he could walk safely anywhere and anytime up here, yet unable to shake off a practiced tension. His aggressive swagger let potential assailants know he was no easy target. Here he tried to tone it down, for it did not fit the character of Griffith of
GAO. On the other hand, he was not willing to be accosted even for the sake of his assignment.
He had complied with the rules of campus—of all the orbital habitations—to the extent of going unarmed. Even Griffith of GAO would never do that in the city. Being unarmed made him uncomfortable, and he wished he had at least tried to circumvent the laws.
He went to bed in his silent room. Lying on the thin hard futon, he listened. He heard nothing, no sign of the other guest, only the evening breeze brushing through the open windows.
Cherenkov had talked to him.
Griffith's thoughts kept returning to the question of how to persuade the cosmonaut to continue talking to him, to continue answering his questions. Griffith's mission to Starfarer seemed inconsequential in comparison to his need to leam everything he could about Nikolai Cherenkov. Today was the first time in a long time that he had felt the drive to know
158 vonda N. Mclntyre
everything about anything or anyone. At the party, Griffith had felt as if he wore his nerves outside his skin, sensitive to every stimulus that passed. He gathered everything in: observations ofCherenkov and information about the rest of the faculty and staff of the expedition as welt, the kind of indiscriminate data that would collect in the back of his mind, work like fermenting beer, and help him discover a way to complete his mission. But after Cherenkov left, the party bored him, the interactions between the people bored him;
their negative opinions about the new administration bored him.
The agreement he had made with Cherenkov must not stop him. As Griffith lay in bed, he let the prospect of the quest excite him. It pushed away the depression that had settled when he could no longer keep Cherenkov in sight. It recharged him.
In the darkness, he drafted a quick memo to his superiors.
Before he ever came here he had tried to tell them that directly co-opting the personnel would be hopeless. Now he could demonstrate it. The hope had been a foolish one to begin with. The crew of Smrfarer, the faculty and staff, as they referred to themselves, would all have to be recalled in one way or another. Then the starship could be converted.
Griffith encrypted his message, sent it back to earth, and fell asleep- He dreamed all night.
Kolya wanted to go outside again, but he knew that
Arachne, fussing over his radiation exposure, would go so far
as to call out human help to persuade him to stay inside.
Since he recognized his desire as a selfish one, he refrained from indulging in it. The only result would be that someone would be fetched, probably out of a warm bed. to come and talk to him.
He feared he had made a tactical error in conversing with Marion Griffith. The intensity of the officer's questions troubled him. He should have seen the problem coming when the fellow waited in the access tunnels for him. Even before that. Kolya tried to excuse himself on the grounds of having been spared the more obvious forms of hero worship during the past few years.
The person he looked forward to talking to was the alien STARFARERS 15 9
contact specialist. J.D. Sauvage and her profession fascinated him. He thought that if he were younger, if he had a different background, he might have tried to go into her field himself.
Since yesterday, he said to himself, you've added a party and a lunch date to your socializing. Soon your reputation as a hermit will be ruined.
Do you even remember how to make piroshki?
J.D. enjoyed working at night; she enjoyed the solitude and the long uninterrupted hours of quiet thought. She might have to change her schedule around, though, in order to spend time with the rest of the alien contact team. Victoria and Satoshi and Stephen Thomas kept awfully normal hours.
She liked them all, which surprised her a bit. She liked Victoria in particular. The team leader sparked off ideas like phosphorescent waves. Satoshi was quieter, but what he said usually counted. As for Stephen Thomas . . .
She decided not to think about Stephen Thomas for a while.
She stayed awake for a long time after the party, reading, gazing out into the dark courtyard- Once she got up and rearranged the new woven mats on her floor. For all their homemade roughness, they made her happy, and a little scared.
The gifts represented a welcome that made her believe she had found a place where she might be at home. This disturbed her, because she had always believed that being an alien contact specialist meant remaining an outsider in her own culture—not just the culture of her country, but the culture of humanity as a whole.
J.D. took Kolya Cherenkov's note from her pocket and smoothed it out. He had given her, as Victoria said, a unique gift. She did not understand why he had given it to her, but she knew it was not to be trifled with or abused. In some ways, his was the welcome that meant the most to her.
Before she finally went to sleep, she checked her maiclass="underline" the usual tsunami of junk, most of which she filtered out without even scanning; scientific journals; magazines of experimental fiction (interior landscapes, mostly; deliberately, stolidly human, but every now and again a story she could savor, save, and think about); no personal mail. Nothing from Zev. She
16 0 Vonda N. Mctntyre
scanned the news summary, lingering just perceptibly over the Pacific Northwest.
The divers, as usual, received no mention.
Victoria propped herself on her elbow next to Satoshi, who lay in the middle of his bed with Stephen Thomas on his other side. Stephen Thomas lay fiat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed on his chest.
"Do you think J.D. had a good time?" Victoria asked Satoshi.
"She seemed to."
"I wasn't about to say anything in front of her, but I'm so mad at the chancellor I could spit—he came early, he left early, he was too rude to stay and welcome her to campus'
Gerald was there—did he even speak to her?" She tried to remember seeing the assistant chancellor anywhere near J.D.
"I don't think so," Satoshi said. "We can't take this stuff personally, Victoria. It's all politics."
"They mean it personally and I take it personally, politics or not."
They heard a noise from the front of the house, sharp and loud, quickly stilled. Victoria sat up.
"What was that?" She started to rise. "Oh—Feral coming in." They listened as he tiptoed down the hall to the end room.
Concerned by Stephen Thomas's uncharacteristic silence,
Victoria glanced over at him. The crystal lay dull and black in the hollow of his throat. He had taken off his sexy emerald jewelry, but he had not replaced the regular gold stud.
"The hole in your ear is going to close up," Victoria said.
He shrugged.
Victoria slid out of bed and went into Stephen Thomas's room. His jewelry hung in a tangle on a rock-foam stand that someone in the materials lab had made for him. The gold stud was nowhere she could see it, so she picked out a little platinum ring and returned to Satoshi's bedroom. She stepped over both her partners, sat cross-legged beside Stephen Thomas, and smoothed his hair away from his ear. In the darkness, she had trouble finding the hole to put the earring in.