166 vonda N. Mdntyre
Feral tasted the curry. "You're right, it isn't hot enough. Steve, would you pass the chili sauce?"
"Please don't call me Steve," Stephen Thomas said.
Feral looked up, surprised by the sudden change in tone of Stephen Thomas's voice.
"Stephen Thomas has this phobia about nicknames," Satoshi said.
Stephen Thomas scowled at Satoshi. "Do I have to let everybody call me anything they want? Maybe I should make up a nickname for Feral? In the North American style. Perrie.
Or the Japanese style, Feral-chan. Maybe the Russian style, Ferushkababushka.''
"Dammit, Stephen Thomas!"
Feral started to laugh. "It's okay, Satoshi," he said. "I can do without the Russian style, but I kind of like 'Feral-chan.' Stephen Thomas, I apologize. I won't try to change your name again. After all, if you've got three first names, it only makes sense to use at least two of them."
Stephen Thomas scowled, unwilling to be placated. "I don't have any first names," he said. "They're all last names."
"Will you accept my apology anyway? And pass the chili sauce?"
Stephen Thomas tossed the jar across the table. Saloshi winced and grabbed for it, but Feral caught it easily.
"You're really acting like an adolescent." Satoshi said to
Stephen Thomas. "And I wish you'd quit."
"I thought I was performing a public service." Stephen Thomas said. "That's one of the problems with this cam-pus—no kids live here."
Victoria went straight to her office. She had some more ideas about the cosmic string problem. Four different displays, each working on a separate manipulation, hovered in the corner. She glanced at them, though it was too soon to expect results.
One had stopped.
"I'll be damned!" Victoria said.
Her "a-hah!" equation had produced a solution. Already.
The quickest one yet, by several orders of magnitude. If it was correct- She looked it over. She felt like a bottle of Ste-
STARFARERS 16 7
phen Thomas's champagne, with the strange invigorated lightness that the joy of discovery always gave her. The solution felt right, as the problem had fell right when she chose it to work on.
"I'll be damned," she said again. And then she thought. if I hadn't had to go back to earth. I would have finished the algorithm a couple of weeks ago. We would have had plenty of time for Iphigenie to recalculate the orbit for the cosmic string encounter. We could have substituted this approach to the string for the first one we chose.
The approach promised a faster, more direct route to their destination. And it hinted at a safer and more usable way home from Tau Ceti, but Victoria could not yet prove that.
Nevertheless, she was outrageously pleased with her success.
Victoria collected the arrival coordinates and set the return calculations going. At the same time she packaged up the string solution.
As she was about to tell Arachne to send the information to EarthSpace for archiving, she thought better of it.
Then she did something that abashed her. But she did it anyway.
She made a hard copy of the solution and slipped the crys-
't( talline module into the pocket of her cutoffs and took the
results out of the web altogether.
* Stephen Thomas sat sipping his coffee until Feral and Vic
* toria and Satoshi had left the house. He hated it when Satoshi
* got so annoyed about trivial things like laundry, and then
* would not even admit he was mad.
%• All three members of the family had begun to deal with
1*- the grief of losing their eldest partner, but that did not resolve
* the problem of being without a manager. The strain was
-K showing as plainly as the holes in Satoshi's robe. Stephen J'' Thomas knew what needed to be done, but he did not know
*- how to make Satoshi and Victoria admit that (hey needed a
manager. He had even tried to figure out how to make the *' family finances stretch to hiring someone. It might have been
* possible back on earth; it might even have been possible on
* ' Starfarer if they were not buying the house. As things stood, 3, that solution was out of the question.
Jl,' Maybe Victoria, having finally begun to accept Merit's
168 Vonda N. Mclntyre
death, was also beginning to accept the need for other changes. She had, after all, started the connection with Feral.
She made no objection when Stephen Thomas invited him to stay. Stephen Thomas found Feral attractive, and he believed Victoria did, too, though he could not be certain she had admitted it to herself. And then there was the interesting fact that fora houseguest. Feral was making himself spectacularly useful.
I probably shouldn't have snapped at him about calling me "Steve," Stephen Thomas thought.
He finished his coffee. In no hurry, he left his bike on the porch and walked on over to the genetics department. He enjoyed watching the changes in the landscape he passed every day. When he first arrived, the naked earth-colored hillocks sent off rivulets of eroded mud with every rain shower. Puddles on the path turned red or yellow or blue with clay or white with sand: stark pure colors unleavened by organic content. Slowly the grasses and succulents, the bushes and bamboo, sprouted into pale green lace covering the new land.
The erosion slowed; now it had nearly stopped, and the vegetation covered the ground as if it had always been here. In many spots the gardeners had planted sapling trees, species either naturally fast-maturing or genetically altered to grow at enhanced speed. The primary colors of the soil had begun to dull into fertile shades of brown as the plants and the bacteria and the earthworms worked them.
According to Infinity Mendez, most of the wild cylinder would be permitted to grow and change by normal processes of succession, until in a hundred or five hundred years it would contain mature climax forests of several climates. The plan presented difficulties—never mind that no one expected Slarfarer's first expedition to last more than a few years; the starship itself should be essentially immortal. But many types of forest required periodic fires to maintain their health, and that of course could not be permitted within the confines, however large, of a starship. Other methods, mechanical and bacterial and labor-intensive human work, would have to substitute. Some of them had only been tried briefly and experimentally. This both troubled Stephen Thomas and excited his appreciation of the unknown.
He strolled through the stand of smoke bamboo growing STARFARERS 16 9
above the genetics department and walked down the outdoor ramp to the main level. As he headed for his lab, he brought his current project to the front of his perceptions and immersed himself in it.
He passed the conference room, the first door after the entrance, so engrossed in his thoughts that he was five paces past it before he noticed the yelling. He stopped and went back.
"Wretched fucking government plots—" Anger and profanity sounded particularly odd in the beautiful faint accent Professor Thanthavong retained from her childhood in Southeast Asia.
Gerald Hemminge replied in a cool voice. "I came all the way across campus to give you this news in person. I didn't expect to be abused for my courtesy."
"But it's outrageous!" Thanthavong exclaimed, unrelenting- "How did you expect me to react?"
"Oh, come now, it's simply your Congress on one of its toots. They haven't passed their budget, or appropriations bill, or somesuch. Then all you Americans rush about pretending that the government is packing up and going home. American congressional shenanigans give the rest of us enormous entertainment."