The Stardance Trilogy (31 page)

“No,” Silverman cried. “No, I do
not
. None of this makes sense! So the red crap is a living spacesuit, a biologically tailored what you said, you give it carbon dioxide it gives you oxygen, you give it shit it gives you strawberry jam. Very lovely; you’ve just eliminated all your overhead except for fuel and leisure aids. Very nice fellows, these aliens. How does it make you inhuman? Does the crap take over your mind or what?”

“It has no ‘mind’ of its own,” Raoul told him. “Oh, it’s remarkably sophisticated for a plant, with awareness above the vegetable. There are some remarkably complex tropisms, but you couldn’t call it sentient. It sort of sets up partnership with the medulla, and rarely gets even as preconscious as a reflex. It just performs its function, in accordance with its biological programming.”

“What would make you inhuman then?”

My voice sounded funny, even to me. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t
know
. We would never die, Silverman. We would never again hunger or thirst, never need a place to dispose of our wastes. We would never again fear heat or cold, never fear vacuum, Silverman; we would never fear anything again. We would acquire instant and complete control of our autonomic nervous systems, gain access to the sensorium keyboard of the hypothalamus itself. We would attain symphysis, telepathic communion, become a single mind in six immortal bodies, endlessly dreaming and never asleep. Individually and together we would become no more like a human than a human is like a chimpanzee. I don’t mind telling you that all six of us used our diapers out there. I’m still a little scared.”

“But you are ready…” Chen said softly.

“Not yet,” Linda said for all of us. “But we will be soon. That much we know.”

“This telepathy business,” Silverman said tentatively. “This ‘single mind’ stuff—is that for sure?”

“Oh, it’s not dependent on the aliens,” Linda assured him. “They showed us how to find that plane—but the capacity was always there, in every human that ever lived. Every holy man that ever got enlightened came down off the mountain saying, ‘We’re all one’—and every damn time the people decided it must be a metaphor. The symbiote will help us
some
, but—”

“How does it help?” Silverman interrupted.

“Well, the distraction factor, mostly. I mean, most people have flashes of telepathic ability, but there are so many
distractions
. It’s worse for a planetdweller, of course, but even in the Studio we got hungry, we got thirsty and horny and bored and tired and sore and angry and afraid. ‘Being in our heads,’ we called it. The animal part of us impeding the progress of the angel. The symbiote frees you from all animal needs—you can experience them, at whim, but never again are you subject to their arbitrary command. The symbiote does act as a kind of mild amplifier of the telepathic ‘wave band,’ but it helps much more by improving the ‘signal-to-noise ratio’ at the point of origin.”

“What I mean,” Silverman said, “if God forbid
I
were to let this fungus infest me,
I
would become at least mildly telepathic? As well as immortal and beyond having to go to the bathroom?”

“No sir,” she said politely but firmly. “If you were
already
mildly telepathic before you entered symbiotic partnership, you would become significantly more so. If, at that time, you happened to be in the field of a fully functioning telepath, you would become exponentially more so.”

“But if I took, say, the average man in the street and put him in a symbiote suit—”

“—you’d get an average immortal who never needed to go to the bathroom and was more empathic than he used to be,” I finished.

“Empathy is sort of telepathy’s kid brother,” Linda said.

“More like its larval stage,” I corrected.

“But two average guys in symbiote suits wouldn’t necessarily be able to read each other’s minds?”

“Not unless they worked long and hard at learning how that’s done,” I told him, “which they would almost certainly do. It’s
lonely
in space.”

He fell silent, and there was a pause while the rest of them sorted out their opinions and emotions. It took a while.

I had things to sort out myself. I was still possessed of that same internal
certainty
that I had felt since I woke up in the Limousine, feeling that almost prescient sense of inevitability, but the cusp was approaching quickly now.
What if you should die, at this moment of moments
? whispered an animal voice from the back of my skull.

As I had at the moment I confronted the aliens, I felt totally alive.

“Mr. Armstead,” DeLaTorre said, shaking his head and frowning mightily, “it seems to me that you are saying that all human want is coming to an end?”

“Oh no,” I said hastily. “I’m very sorry if we accidentally implied that. The symbiote cannot live in a terrestrial environment. Anything like that kind of gravity and atmosphere would kill it. No, the symbiote will not bring Heaven to Earth.
Nothing
can. Mohammed must go to the mountain—and many will refuse.”

“Perhaps,” Chen suggested delicately, “terrestrial scientists might be able to genetically modify the aliens’ gift?”

“No,” Harry said flatly. “There is no
way
you can give symphonies and sunsets to a fetus that insists on staying in the womb. That cloud of symbiote over Titan is every person’s birthright—but first they gotta earn it, by consenting to be born.”

“And to do that,” Raoul agreed, “they have to cut loose of Earth forever.”

“There is an appealing symmetry to the concept,” Chen said thoughtfully.

“Hell, yes,” Raoul said. “We should have expected something like it. The whole business of adaptation to free fall being possible but irreversible…look, at the moment of your birth, a very heavy miracle happened, in a single instant. One minute you were essentially a fish, with a fish’s two-valved circulatory system, parasitic on the womb. Then, all at once, a switch slammed shut. Zippo-bang, you were a mammal, just like that. Four-valved heart, self-contained—
you made a major, irreversible physiological leap, into a new plane of evolution
. It was accompanied by pain, trauma, and a flood of data from senses you hadn’t known you possessed. Nearly at once a whole bunch of infinitely more advanced beings in the same predicament began trying to teach you how to communicate. ‘Appealing’? The fucking symmetry is overwhelming!
Now
do you begin to understand why we screamed? We’re in the very midst of the same process—and all babies scream.”

“I don’t understand,” Dmirov complained. “You would be able to live naked in space—but how could you
go
anywhere?”

“Light pressure?” Chen suggested.

“The symbiote can deploy itself as a light sail,” I agreed, “but there are other forces we will use to carry us where we want to go.”

“Gravity gradients?”

“No. Nothing you could detect or measure.”

“Preposterous,” Dmirov snorted.

“How did the aliens get here?” I asked gently, and she reddened.

“The thing that makes it so difficult for me to credit your story,” Chen said, “is the improbability factor. So much of your coming here was random chance.”

“Dr. Chen,” I cut him off, “are you familiar with the proverb that says there is a destiny which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will?”

“But any of a thousand things might have conspired to prevent any of this from occurring.”

“Fifty-four things conspired to make it all occur. Superthings. Or did you think that the aliens just happened to appear in this system at the time that Shara Drummond began working at Skyfac? That they just happened to jump to Saturn when she returned to Skyfac to dance? That they just happened to appear outside Skyfac at the moment that Shara was about to return to Earth forever, a failure? Or that this whole trip to Saturn just happened to be feasible in the first place? Me, I wonder what they were doing out Neptune way, that first time they appeared.” I considered it. “I’ll have to go see.”

“You don’t understand,” Chen said urgently, and then controlled himself. “It is not generally known, but six years ago our planet was nearly destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Chance and good fortune saved us—there were no aliens in our skies then.”

Harry spoke up. “Know what a pregnant rabbit does if conditions aren’t favorable for birth? Reabsorbs the fetuses into the womb. Just reverses the process, recycles the ingredients and tries again when conditions are better.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Have you ever heard of Atlantis?”

Chen’s face went the color of meerschaum, and everyone else gaped or gasped.

“It comes in cycles,” I said, “like labor pains building to a peak. They come as close together as four or five thousand years—the Pyramids were built that far back—and as far apart as twenty thousand.”

“Sometimes they get pretty rough,” Harry added. “There used to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

“Bojemoi,”
Dmirov breathed. “The Asteroid Belt…”

“And Venus is handy in case
we
screw up altogether,” I agreed, “reducing atmosphere all ready to go, just seed with algae and wait.
God
, they must be patient.”

Another extensive stunned silence. They believed now, all of them, or were beginning to. Therefore they had to rearrange literally everything they had ever known, recast all of existence in the light of this new information and try to determine just who, in relation to this confusion, they themselves might be. They were advanced in years for this kind of uprooting, their beliefs and opinions deeply ingrained by time; that they were able to accept the information and think at all said clearly that every one of them possessed a strong and flexible mind. Wertheimer had chosen well; none of them cracked, rejected the truth and went catatonic as we had. Of course, they were not out in free space, thinking seriously of removing their p-suits. But then, they had pressures
we
lacked: they represented a planet.

“Your intention, then,” Silverman said slowly, “is to do this thing?”

Six voice chorused, “Yes.”

“At once,” I added.

“Are you are sure that all you have told us is true, that the aliens have told no lies, held out nothing?” Ever so casually he had been separating himself from the other diplomats.

“We’re certain,” I said, tensing my thighs again.

“But where will you go?” DeLaTorre cried. “What will you
do
?”

“What all newborns do. We’ll examine our nursery. The Solar System.”

Silverman kicked off suddenly, jaunting to the empty fourth wall. “I’m very sorry,” he said mournfully. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”

There was a small Beretta in his hand.

There was a calculator in his other hand. At least, it looked like one. All at once I knew better, and feared it more than the gun.

“This,” he said, confirming my guess, “is a short-range transmitter. If anyone approaches me suddenly, I will use it to trigger radio-controlled explosives, which I placed during the trip here. They will cripple the ship’s computer.”

“Sheldon,” DeLaTorre cried, “are you mad? The computer oversees
life support
.”

“I would rather not use this,” Silverman said calmly. “But I am utterly determined that the information we have heard will be the exclusive possession of the United States of America—or of no one.”

I watched diplomats and soldiers carefully for signs of suicidal bravery, and relaxed slightly. None of them was the kind of fool who jumps a gunman; their common expression was intense disgust. Disgust at Silverman’s treachery, and disgust at themselves for not having expected it. I looked most closely at Chen Ten Li, who
had
expected it and had promised to kill Silverman with his hands—but he was totally relaxed, a gentle, mocking smile beginning at the corners of his lips. Interesting.

“Mr. Silverman,” Susan Pha Song said, “you have not thought this thing through.”

“Colonel,” he said ironically, “I have had the better part of a year in which to do little else.”

“Nevertheless, you have overlooked something,” she insisted.

“Pray enlighten me.”

“If we were all to rush you now,” she said evenly, “you might shoot perhaps two or three of us before you were overwhelmed. If we do not, you will certainly kill us all. Or had you planned to hold a gun on us for two years?”

“If you rush me,” Silverman promised, “I will kill the computer, and you will all die anyway.”

“So either we die and you return to Earth with your secret, or we die and you do not.” She put a hand on the wall on either side of her.

“Wrong,” Silverman said hurriedly. “I do not intend to kill you all. I don’t have to. I will leave you all in this room. My pressure suit just so happens to be in the next room—I will put it on and instruct the computer to evacuate all the compartments adjacent to this one. I will of course have disabled your own terminal here. Air pressure and the safety interlocks will prevent you from opening a door to vacuum: a foolproof prison. And so long as I detect no attempts to escape on the phone, I will continue to permit food, air and water systems to operate in here. I have the necessary program tapes to bring us back to Earth, where you will all be treated as prisoners of war under international conventions.”

“What war?”

“The one that just started and ended. Have you heard? America won.”

“Sheldon, Sheldon,” DeLaTorre insisted, “what can you hope to accomplish by this insane expedient?”

“Are you kidding?” Silverman snorted. “The biggest component of capital investment in space exploitation is life support. This moon full of fungus is a free ticket to the whole Solar System—with immortality thrown in! And the United States is going to have it, that I promise you.” He turned to Li and Dmirov and said, with utter sincerity, the most incredible sentence I have ever heard in my life: “I am not going to allow you to export your godless way of life to the stars.”

Chen actually laughed out loud, and I joined him.

“One of those Canuck socialists, eh, Armstead?” Silverman snarled.