The Stardance Trilogy (29 page)

“Mr. Armstead,” Silverman growled, “I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that for once the world actually
is
waiting for you. Can we get on with the show?”

I just smiled. We all smiled. Bill started to say something, so I cut him off. “Certainly, Mr. Ambassador. At once.” We dissolved the snowflake, and I jetted to the Die’s external Master Board. “Program locked and…
running
, lights
up
, cameras
hot
, hold four three two
curtain!
”

Like a single being, we took our stage.

Feet first, hands high and blasting, we plunged down on the firefly swarm.

Raoul’s stage marks pulsed gently with the color analog of the incredible piece he called
Shara’s Blues
. Its opening bars are entirely in deep bass register; they translated as all the shades of blue there are, a visual pun. Somehow the incredible splendor of color about us—Saturn, Ring, aliens, Titan, lasers, camera lights, Die, Limousine like a soft red flashlight, and two other moons I didn’t know—all only seemed to emphasize the intolerable blackness of the empty space that framed it, the immensity of the sea of black ink through which we all swam, planets and people alike. The literally cosmic perspective it provided was welcome, calming.
What are man or firefly that Thou shouldst be mindful of them?

It was not detachment. Quite the opposite: I had never before felt so alive. For the first time in years I was aware of my p-suit clinging to my skin, aware of the breathing in my earphones, aware of the smell of my own body and of canned air, aware of the catheter and telemetry contacts and the faint sound of my hair rustling against the inside of my hood. I was perceiving totally, functioning at full capacity, exhilarated and a little scared. I was completely happy.

The music swelled suddenly. The far-flung grid pulsed with color.

We poured on full thrust, all four of us in a tight formation, so that we seemed to fall upon the alien swarm from a great height. They grew beneath our feet with breath-taking rapidity, but we were more than three klicks away when I gave the standby command. We stiffened our bodies, oriented and triggered heel thrusters together on command, opening out like a Blue Angels flower into four great loops. We let them close into circles, one of us spiraling about each of the “compass points” of the alien sphere, bracketing it with bodies. After three full circles we broke out in unison and met at the same point where we had split apart, slowing as we arrived and making a four-way acrobat’s catch. Hard jetting brought us to a halt; we whirled in space and faced the aliens; pinwheeled apart into a square fifty meters on a side and waited.

Here I am again, fireflies,
I thought.
I have hated you for a long time. I would be done with hating you, however that may be.

Lasers turned us red, blue, yellow and aching green, and Raoul had abandoned known music for new; his spiderlike fingers wove patterns undreamed an hour before, stitching space with color and our ears with sound. Melancholy his melody, minor its wrestling two chords, with a throbbing undercurrent of dysharmonic bass like a migraine about to happen. It was as though he were pouring pain into a vessel whose cubic capacity might be inadequate.

With that for frame and all space for backdrop, we danced. The mechanical structure of that dance, the “steps” and their interrelation, are forever unknowable to you, and I won’t try to describe them. It began slowly, tentatively; as Shara had, we began by defining terms. And so we ourselves gave the choreography less than half our attention.

Perhaps a third. A part of our minds was busy framing computer themes in artistic terms, but an equally large part was straining for any signs of feedback from the aliens, reaching out with eyes ears skin mind for any kind of response, sensitizing to any conceivable touch. And with as large a part of our minds, we felt for each other, strove to connect our awareness across meters of black vacuum, to see as the aliens saw, through many eyes at once.

And something began to happen…

It began slowly, subtly, in imperceptible stages. After a year of study, I simply found myself understanding, and accepting the understanding without surprise or wonder. At first I thought the aliens had slowed their speed—but then I noted, again without wonder, that my pulse and everyone’s respiration had slowed an equal amount. I was on accelerated time, extracting the maximum of information from each second of life,
be
ing with the whole of my being. Experimentally I accelerated my time sense another increment, saw the aliens’ frenzy slow to a speed that anyone could encompass. I was aware that I could make time stop altogether, but I didn’t want to yet. I studied them at infinite leisure, and understanding grew. It was clear now that there was a tangible if invisible energy that held them in their tight mutual orbits, as electromagnetism holds electrons in their paths. But this energy boiled furiously at their will, and they surfed its currents like wood chips that magically never collided. They created a never-ending roller coaster before themselves. Slowly, slowly I began to realize that their energy was
more than
analogous to the energy that bound me to my family. What they were surfing on was their mutual awareness of each other, and of the Universe around them.

My own awareness of my family jumped a quantum level. I heard Norrey breathing, could see out her eyes, felt Tom’s sprained calf tug at me, felt Linda’s baby stir in my womb, watched us all and swore under Harry’s breath with him, raced down Raoul’s arm to his fingers and back into my own ears. I was a six-brained Snowflake, existing simultaneously in space and time and thought and music and dance and color and something I could not yet name, and all of these things strove toward harmony.

At no point was there any sensation of leaving or losing my
self
, my unique individual identity. It was right there in my body and brain where I had left it, could not be elsewhere, existed as before. It was as though a part of it had always existed independent of brain and body, as though my brain had always known this level but had been unable to
record
the information. Had we six been this close all along, all unawares, like six lonely blind men in the same volume of space? In a way I had always yearned to without knowing it, I touched my selves, and loved them.

We understood entirely that we were being shown this level by the aliens, that they had led us patiently up invisible psychic stairs to this new plane. If any energy detectable by Man had passed between them and us, Bill Cox would have been heating up his laser cannon and screaming for a report, but he was still on conference circuit with the diplomats, letting us dance without distraction.

But communication took place, on levels that even physical instruments could perceive. At first the aliens only echoed portions of our dance, to indicate an emotional or informational connotation they understood, and when they did so we
knew
without question that they had fully grasped whatever nuance we were trying to express. After a time they began more complex responses, began subtly altering the patterns they returned to us, offering variations on a theme, then counterstatements, alternate suggestions. Each time they did so we came to know them better, to grasp the rudiments of their “language” and hence their nature. They agreed with our concept of sphericity, politely disagreed with our concept of mortality, strongly agreed with the notions of pain and joy. When we knew enough “words” to construct a “sentence,” we did so.

We came these billion miles to shame you, and are ashamed.

The response was at once compassionate and merry.
NONSENSE
, they might have said,
HOW WERE YOU TO KNOW
?

Surely it was obvious that you were wiser than we.

NO, ONLY THAT WE KNEW MORE. IN POINT OF FACT, WE WERE CULPABLY CLUMSY AND OVEREAGER
.

Overeager?
we echoed interrogatively.

OUR NEED WAS GREAT
. All fifty-four aliens suddenly plummeted toward the center of their sphere at varying rates, incredibly failing to collide there even once, saying as plain as day,
ONLY RANDOM CHANCE PREVENTED UTTER RUIN
.

The nature of the utter ruin eluded us, and we “said” as much.
Our dead sister told us you needed to spawn, on a world like ours. Is this your wish: to come and live with humans?

Their response was the equivalent of cosmic laughter. It resolved finally into a single unmistakable “sentence”:

ON THE CONTRARY
.

Our dance dissolved into confusion for a moment, then recovered.

We do not understand.

The aliens hesitated. Something like solicitude emanated from them, something like compassion.

WE CAN—WE MUST—EXPLAIN. BUT UNDERSTANDING WILL BE VERY STRESSFUL. COMPOSE YOURSELVES
.

The component of our self that was Linda poured out a flood of maternal warmth, an envelope of calm; she had always been the best of us at prayer. Raoul now played only an
om
-like A-flat that was a warm, golden color. Tom’s driving will, Harry’s eternal strength, Norrey’s quiet acceptance, my own unfailing sense of humor, Linda’s infinite caring and Raoul’s dogged persistence all heterodyned to produce a kind of peace I had never known, a serene calm based on a sensation of completeness. All fear was gone, all doubt. This was meant to be.

This was meant to be,
we danced.
Let it be.

The echo was instantaneous, with a flavor of pleased, almost paternal approval.

NOW
!

Their next sending was a relatively short dance, a relatively simple dance. We understood it at once, although it was utterly novel to us, grasped its fullest implications in a single frozen instant. The dance compressed every nanosecond of more than two billion years into a single concept, a single telepathic gestalt.

And that concept was really only the aliens’ name.

Terror smashed the Snowflake into six discrete shards. I was alone in my skull in empty space, with a thin film of plastic between me and my death, naked and terribly afraid. I clutched wildly for nonexistent support. Before me, much too close before me, the aliens buzzed like bees. As I watched, they began to gather at the center, forming first a pinhole, then a knothole and then a porthole in the wall of Hell, a single shimmering red coal that raved with furious energy. Its brilliance dwarfed even the Sun; my hood began to polarize automatically.

The barely visible balloon that contained the molten nucleus began to weep red smoke, which spiraled gracefully out to form a kind of Ring. I knew it at once, what it was and what it was for, and I threw back my head and screamed, triggering all thrusters in blind escape reflex.

Five screams echoed mine.

I fainted.

I was lying on my back with my knees raised, and I was much too heavy—almost twenty kilos. My ribs were struggling to inflate my chest. I had had a bad dream…

The voices came from above like an old tube amp warming up, intermittent and distorted at first, resolving at last into a kind of clarity. They were near, but they had the trebleless, faraway characteristic of low pressure—and they too were finding the pseudogravity a strain.

“For the last time, tovarisch:
speak to us
. Why are your colleagues all catatonic? How do you continue to function?
What in Lenin’s Name happened out there?
”

“Let him be, Ludmilla. He cannot hear you.”

“I will have an answer!”

“Will you have him shot? If so, by whom? The man is a hero. If you continue to harass him, I will make full note of it, in our group report and in my own. Let
him
be.” Chen Ten Li’s voice was quite composed, exquisitely detached until that last blazing command. It startled me into opening my eyes, which I had been avoiding since I first became aware of the voices.

We were in the Limousine. All ten of us, four Space Command suits and six brightly colored Stardancers, a quorum of bowling pins strapped by twos into a vertical alley. Norrey and I were in the last or bottom row. We were obviously returning to
Siegfried
at full burn, making a good quarter gee. I turned my head at once to Norrey beside me. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully; the stars through the window behind her told me that we had already passed turnover and were decelerating.

I had been out a long time.

Somehow everything had gotten sorted out in my sleep. By definition, I guess: my subconscious had kept me under until I was ready to cope and no longer. A part of my mind boiled in turmoil, but I could encompass that part now and hold it in perspective. The majority of my mind was calm. Nearly all questions were answered now, and the fear dwindled to something that could be borne. I knew for certain that Norrey was all right, that all of us would be all right in time. Not direct knowledge; the telepathic bond was broken. But I knew my family. Our lives were irrevocably changed; into what, we knew not yet—but we would find out together.

At least two more crises would come in rapid succession now, and we would share these fortunes.

Immediate needs first.

“Harry,” I called out, “you did a good job. Let go now.”

He turned his big crewcut head and looked down past his headrest at me from two rows up. He smiled beatifically. “I almost lost his music box,” he said confidentially. “It got away from me when the weight came on.” At once he rolled his head up and was asleep, snoring deeply.

I smiled indulgently at myself. I should have expected it, should have known that it would be Harry, great-shouldered great-hearted Harry who would be the strongest of us all, Harry the construction engineer who would prove to have infinite load-bearing capacity. His shoulders had been equal to his heart’s need, and his breaking strain was still unknown. He would waken in an hour or so like a giant refreshed.

The diplomats had been yelping at me since I spoke to Harry; now I put my attention on them. “One at a time, please.”