The Stardance Trilogy (33 page)

“And what of your grandchildren, Chen Ten Li?”

His tortured eyes focused on me and widened. Norrey reached behind her with both arms, and surrendered control of them. Harry, who was our best shot, used her right arm to throw the Frisbee that yanked Chen’s right hand away from the terminal in uncontrollable pain reflex. Raoul, who was left-handed, used her left arm to throw the Frisbee that ruined the laser and smashed it out of the crook of Chen’s left arm. Both missiles arrived before he knew they had been launched; even as they struck, Tom had kicked Song’s corpse between Linda and the line of fire in case of a miss, and Norrey had grabbed two more Frisbees on the same chance. And I was already halfway to Chen myself: I was intuitively sure that he knew one of the ways to suicide barehanded.

It was over in less than a second of realtime. To the eyes of DeLaTorre and Dmirov we must have seemed to…
flicker
and then reappear in new relative positions, like a frightened school of fish. Chen was crying out in pain and rage and shame, and I was holding him in a four-limbed hammerlock, conspicuously not hurting him. Harry was waiting for the ricocheting Frisbees, retrieving them lazily; Raoul was by the computer, wiping Chen’s program.

The dance was finished. And correctly this time: no blood had been spilled. We knew with a guiltless regret that if we had yielded to rapport more freely the first time, Song would not be dead and Bill wounded. We had been afraid, then, yielded only tentatively and too late. Now the last trace of fear was gone; our hearts were sure. We were ready to be responsible.

“Dr. Chen,” I said formally, “do I have your parole?”

He stiffened in my grip, and then relaxed totally. “Yes,” he said, his voice gone empty. I released him, and was stunned by how
old
he looked. His calendar age was fifty-six.

“Sir,” I said urgently, trying to hold him with my eyes, “your fears are groundless. Your pain is needless.
Listen to me
: you are
not
a useless by-product of
Homo caelestis
. You are not a failed gamete. You are one of the people who personally held our planet Earth together, with your bare hands, until it could birth the next stage. Does that rob your life of meaning, diminish your dignity? You are one of the few living statesmen who can help ease Earth through the coming transition—do you lack the self-confidence, or the courage? You helped open up space, and you have grandchildren—didn’t you mean for them to have the stars? Would you deny them now? Will you listen to what
we
think will happen? Can happen? Must happen?”

Chen shook his head like a twitching cat, absently massaging his right arm. “I will listen.”

“In the first place, stop tripping over analogies and metaphors. You’re not a failed gamete, or anything of the kind,
unless you choose to be
. The whole human race can be
Homo caelestis
if it wants to. Many of ’em won’t, but the choice is theirs. And yours.”

“But the vast majority of us cannot perceive spherically,” Chen shouted.

I smiled. “Doctor, when one of my failed students left for Earth he said to me, ‘I couldn’t learn to see the way you do if I tried for a hundred years.’”

“Exactly. I have been in free space, and I agree.”

“Suppose you had
two
hundred years?”

“Eh?”

“Suppose you entered symbiosis, right now. You’d have to have a tailored environment of right angles to stay sane, at first. But
you’d be immortal
. With absolutely nothing better to do, could you not unlearn your gravitic bias in time?”

“There’s more,” Linda said. “Children born in free space will think spherically from infancy. They won’t have to unlearn a lifetime of essentially false, purely local information about how reality works. Li, in free fall you are not too old to sire more children. You can learn with them, telepathically—and inherit the stars together!”

“All mankind,” I went on, “all that wants to, can begin preparing at once, by moving to Trojan-point O’Neill Colonies and entering symbiosis. The colonization of space can begin with this generation.”

“But how is such a migration to be financed?” he cried.

“Li, Li,” Linda said, as one explaining to a child, “the human race is
rich
, as of now. The total resources of the System are now available to all, for free. Why haven’t L-5 colonies gotten off the ground, or the asteroid mining that would support them? Silverman said it ten minutes ago: The biggest single component of expense has always been life support, and elaborate attempts to prevent the crew from adapting to free fall by simulating gravity. If all you need is a set of right angles that will last for a few centuries, you can build cities out of aluminum foil, haul enormous quantities of symbiote from Titan to Terra.”

“Imagine a telepathic construction gang,” Harry said, “who never have to eat or rest.”

“Imagine an explosion of art and music,” Raoul said, “raining down on Earth from the heavens, drawing every heart that ever yearned for the stars.”

“Imagine an Earth,” Tom said, “filled with only those who want to be there.”

“And imagine your children-to-be,” Norrey said. “The first children in all history to be raised free of the bitter intergenerational resentments that arise from a child’s utter dependence on his parents. In space, children and parents will relate at eyelevel, in every sense. Perhaps they need not be natural enemies after all.”

“But you are not human!” Chen Ten Li cried. “Why should you give us all this time and energy? What is Man, that you should be mindful of him?”

“Li,” Linda said compassionately, “were we not born of man and woman? Does not the child remember the womb, and yearn for it all his life? Do you not honor your mother, although you may never be part of her again? We would preserve and cherish the Earth, our womb, that it may remain alive and fruitful and bear multiple births to its capacity.”

“That is our only defense,” I said quietly, “against the immense loneliness of being even
Homo caelestis
in empty space. Six minds isn’t enough—when we have six billion united in undisturbed thought, then, perhaps, we will learn some things. All mankind is our genetic heritage.”

“Besides,” Raoul added cheerfully, “what’s a few centuries of our time?
We’re in no hurry
.”

“Li,” I went on, “to be human is to stand between ape and angel. To be angel, as are my family and I, is to float between man and the gods,
partaking fully of both
. Without gravity or a local vertical there can be no false concept of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’: how could we act other than ethically? Immortal, needing nothing, how could we be evil?”

“As a species,” Tom picked up, “we naturally will deal only through the United Nations. Dr. Chen, believe me: we’ve studied this on something faster than computer-time. There is no way for our plans to be subverted, for the symbiote to be hijacked. All the evil men and women on Earth will not stop us, and the days of evil are numbered.”

“But,” I finished, “we need the help and cooperation of you and every man like you, on the globe or off it. Are you up to it, Chen Ten Li?”

He drifted freely, in the partial crouch of complete relaxation, his face slack with thought and his eyes rolled up into his head. At long last his pupils reappeared, and life returned to his features. He met my eyes, and a gentle slight smile tugged at his mouth.

“You remind me greatly,” he said, “of a
man
I once knew, named Charles Armstead.”

“Dr. Chen,” I said, feeling tension drain away, “Li my friend, I
am
that man. I am also something else, and you have rightly deduced that I am maintaining my six discrete conversational
personas
only as a courtesy to you, in the same way that I adapt my bodies to your local vertical. It demonstrates clearly that telepathic communion does not involve what you would call ego loss.” Shifting
persona
as I spoke, so that each of us uttered a single word, I/we said:

“I’m”

“more”

“than”

“human”

“not”

“less.”

“Very well,” Li said, shaking his head. “Together we will bring the millennium to our weary planet.”

“I am with you,” DeLaTorre said simply.

“I too,” Dmirov said.

“Let’s get Bill and Col. Song’s body to sickbay,” six voices said.

And an hour later we six departed for the Starseeders’ location. We didn’t bother with the shuttlecraft, this time. Our suit thrusters held enough for a one-way trip…

Saturn burned ocher and brown against an aching blackness so vast it was barely interrupted by the cold light of a billion billion suns.

We danced as we jetted through that blackness, almost without thinking about it. We were leaving human life behind, and we danced our leaving of it. Essentially each of us created our own
Stardance
, and the great empty cosmic hall rang with Raoul’s last symphony. Each dance was individual and self-complete; each happened to mesh with the other three and with the music, in a kind of second-level statement; and although all of these were conceived without any perceived constraints of time or distance, Harry’s overawareness saw to it that all five works of art happened to end, together, before the aliens. It was always Harry who made us meet our deadlines.

None of this was taped. Unlike Shara’s
Stardance
, this was not meant to be witnessed. It was meant to be shared, to be danced.

But it was witnessed. The Starseeders (aliens they were
not
) writhed in something analogous to applause as we hung before them, gasping for breath, savoring the feel of the last sweat we would ever know.

We were no longer afraid of them.

YOU HAVE MADE YOUR CHOICE
?

Yes.

IT WILL BE A FINE BIRTHING.

Raoul hurled his Musicmaster into deep space.
Let it begin without delay.

AT ONCE
:

There was an excitement in their dance, now, an elemental energy that somehow seemed to contain an element of humor, of suppressed mirth. They began a pattern that we had never seen before, yet seemed to
know
in some cellular fashion, a pattern that alternated between the simple and the complex, without ever resolving. The Harry part of our mind called it “the naming of pi,” and all of us raptly watched it unfold. It was the most hypnotic pattern ever dreamed, the dance of creation itself; the most essential expression of the Tao, and the stars themselves seemed to pay attention.

As we stared, transfixed, the semivisible sphere around the Starseeders began for the second time to weep bloody tears.

They coalesced into a thin crimson ring about the immense sphere, then contracted into six orbiting bubbles.

Without hesitation we each jetted to a bubble and plunged inside. Once we were in, we skinned out of our p-suits and flung them at the walls of our bubbles, which passed them out into space. Raoul added his glasses. Then the bubbles contracted around and into and through us.

Things happened on a thousand different levels, then, to all six of me; but it is Charlie Armstead who is telling you this. I felt something cool slide down my throat and up my nostrils, suppressed gag reflex with free-fall training, thought briefly of Chen Ten Li and the ancient Chinese legends of the edible gold that brings immortality—felt suddenly and forever a total awareness, knowledge, and control of my entire body and brain. In a frozen instant of timelessness I scanned my life’s accumulation of memories, savored them, transmitted them in a single sending to my family, and savored theirs. Simultaneously I was employing eyes that now registered a wider spectrum to see the universe in greater depth, and simultaneously I was playing the keys of my own internal sensorium, tasting crisp bacon and Norrey’s breast and the sweet taste of courage, smelling woodsmoke and Norrey’s loins and the sweet smell of caring, hearing Raoul’s music and Norrey’s voice and the sweet sound of silence. Almost absentmindedly I healed the damage to my hip, felt complete function return as if it had never been gone.

As to happenings on a group level, there is not much I can tell you that will mean anything. We made love, again almost absentmindedly, and we all felt together the yearnings toward life in Linda’s belly, felt the symbiote that shielded her body make the same perception and begin preparing its own mitosis. Quite consciously and deliberately, Norrey and I conceived a child of our own. These things were only incidentals, but what can I tell you of the essentials? On one major level we shared each other’s every memory and forgave each other the shameful parts and rejoiced in all the proud parts. On another major level we began what would become an ongoing lifespan symposium on the meaning of beauty. On another we began planning the last details of the migration of Man into space.

A significant part of us was pure-plant consciousness, a six-petaled flower basking mindlessly in the sunlight.

We were less than a kilometer from the Starseeders, and we had forgotten their very existence.

We were startled into full awareness of our surroundings as the Starseeders once again collapsed into a single molten ball of intolerable brilliance—and vanished without a good-bye or a final sending.

They will be back, perhaps in a mere few centuries of realtime, to see whether anybody feels ready to become a firefly.

In stunned surprise we hovered, and, our attention now focused on the external universe, saw what we had missed.

A crimson-winged angel was approaching us from the direction of Saturn’s great Ring. On twin spans of thin red lightsail, an impossible figure came nearer.

Hello, Norrey, Charlie
, the familiar voice said in our skulls.
Hi Tom, Harry. Linda and Raoul, I don’t know you yet, but you love my loved ones—hello.

Shara!
screamed six voiceless brains.

Sometimes fireflies pick up a hitchhiker.

But how—?

I was more like an incubator baby, actually, but they got me to Titan alive. That was my suit and tanks you saw burning up. They were desperate and overeager, just as they said. But you didn’t really think they were clumsy enough to waste me, did you? I’ve been waiting in the Ring for you to make your decision. I didn’t want to influence its outcome.