The Stardance Trilogy (56 page)

“If you weren’t healthy when you got to Suit Camp, you are now,” Reb said. “Confirmed at Decontam and guaranteed.”

“What about pregnancy?”

“All methods of contraception are available at the Infirmary. But you have no reason to fear pregnancy. Where you are going, there is no possibility of any child ever wanting for anything, no such thing as an unhappy childhood or a bad parent. All children are raised by everyone.”

That took some thinking about. Finally someone said, “Are you…are you trying to say that all Stardancers spend their time screwing? That this Starmind is some kind of ongoing orgy?”

“In a physical sense, no. Stardancers only physically join when conception is desired. But in a mental and spiritual sense, your description is close to the truth. Telepathic communion cannot be described in words, nor understood until it is experienced—but it is generally agreed that lovemaking is one of the closest analogies in human experience. The most essential parts of lovemaking—liberation from the self, joining with others, being loved and touched and needed and cherished, gaining perspective on the universe by sharing viewpoint—are all a constant part of every Stardancer’s life. Regardless of whether he or she chooses to ejaculate or lubricate at any given moment. Leon, you have a question?”

“What’s zero-gee childbirth like?” asked the man addressed. “Gravity can be kind of handy there.”

“Not for the first nine months,” Glenn called out, and was applauded.

Reb smiled. “In Symbiosis, childbirth is easy and painless. The symbiote assists the process, and so does the child itself.”

Wow! In spite of myself, an idea came to me. I made the finger gesture for attention, and Reb recognized me with a nod. “Reb? How old is too old to birth in Symbiosis?”

“We don’t know yet. No woman has ever reached menopause while in Symbiosis. Those women who’ve entered Symbiosis after menopause resumed ovulating, and Stardancers as old as ninety-two have conceived and birthed successfully. Ask again in fifty years and we may have an answer for you.”

The class went on for quite some time, and a lot of people said a lot of things, but I don’t remember much after that. I spent the rest of class trying to grapple with the fact that a door I had thought closed forever was opening up again, that all of a sudden it wasn’t too late anymore to change my mind and have children. The thought was too enormous to grasp. I had known about this, intellectually, before I had ever left Earth—but somehow I had never let the implications sink in before.

Probably because I had not known anyone whose children I wanted to have…until now.

“Robert,” I said that night in afterglow, “how do you feel about you and me having a child?”

He blinked. “Are we?”

“Not yet. I’ve still got my implant. But I could have it taken out at the Infirmary in five minutes, and be pregnant in ten. What do you think?”

He had sense enough not to hesitate. “I think I would love to make a baby with you. But I also think it would be prudent to wait until after Graduation.”

“Huh. Maybe you’re right.”

“Are you absolutely a hundred percent sure you’re going to go through with Symbiosis? I’m not. And I wouldn’t want a decision either way to be forced on either one of us. If we both do Symbiosis, fine. If we both go back to Earth, fine. But wouldn’t it be awful if we started a child, and then—”

“I guess.” It would be least awful, perhaps, if I stayed in space and Robert went home: a husband/father must be much less essential in a telepathic family than in human society. But Robert had already had to walk away from one child in his life, and still felt grief over it.

And there was another horrid possibility. What if we conceived together—and then one of us was killed in training? It could happen. I didn’t think I could have survived what had happened to Ben that morning, for instance.

“Another month or so, maybe less, and we’ll know. Okay?”

“You’re right.” I was disappointed…but only a little. Morning sickness in a p-suit could be a serious disaster. There was plenty of time.

Without any actual discussion, Kirra started spending most of her time at Ben’s place, leaving our room for Robert and me. They gave the two of us a week to focus on each other and our new love without distraction. Then one day they came by and invited us to join them for drinks at Le Puis, and the four of us reformed and reintegrated our friendship again. Soon it stopped making any difference which room we used, or whether it was already occupied when we got there. Robert was a little more reticent than I about making love with Ben and Kirra present, at first, but he got over it. I could sense that one day, whether before or after Graduation, we four were all going to make love with each other. But there didn’t seem to be any hurry for that, either, and for the present I was just a little too greedy of Robert.

Even falling in love couldn’t distract me completely from dance. After our first few days together, I resumed working for a few hours every evening. Sometimes Robert watched and helped; sometimes he stayed back in the room and designed support structures for asteroid mining colonies, or wrote letters to his son in Minneapolis. I slowly began to evolve a piece of choreography, which I took to calling
Do the Next Thing
.

Kirra too made progress in her art. In the middle of the week, while we were all outside in class, she sang her second song for us, the Song of Polar Orbit. I had to get my p-suit radio overhauled that night—the applause overloaded it—and so did others. Raoul Brindle phoned more congratulations and repeated his invitation to Kirra. Within a few days, Teena reported that the recording had been downloaded by over eighty percent of the spacer community, and that audience response was one hundred percent positive. Kirra told me privately that she was tickled to death; she had never before received so much approval from non-Aboriginals and whitefellas for her singing. And according to her Earthside mentor Yarra, the Yirlandji people were equally pleased. Ben, for his part, was fiercely proud of her.

On Sunday afternoon the four of us took a field trip together, to watch a Third-Monther enter Symbiosis. I cleared it with Reb; he had no objection. “As long as Ben and Kirra and Robert are along, you can’t get into too much trouble. They’re pretty much spacers already. But you be sure to stay close to them,” he cautioned with a smile. I smiled back and agreed that we could probably manage that.

We left, not via the Solarium, but by a smaller personnel airlock closer to the docking end of Top Step. It was about big enough to hold three comfortably, but we left in pairs, as couples, holding hands.

The Symbiote mass floated in a slightly higher orbit than Top Step, because Top Step routinely exhausted gases that, over a long period of time, could have damaged or killed it. I can’t explain the maneuvering we had to do to get there without using graphics prefaced by a boring lecture on orbital ballistics; just take my word for it that, counterintuitive as it might seem, to reach something ahead of you and in a higher orbit, you
decelerate
. Never mind: with Ben astrogating, we got there. It took a long lazy time, since we didn’t have a whole lot of thruster pressure to waste on a hurried trip.

My parents used to have an antique lava lamp, which they loved to leave on for hours at a time. The Symbiote mass looked remarkably like a single globule of its contents: a liquid blob of softly glowing red stuff, that flexed and flowed like an amoeba. Years ago there had been so much of it that you could see it with the naked eye from Top Step. So many Stardancers had graduated since then that the remaining mass was not much bigger than an oil tanker. (That was why the Harvest Crew was fetching more from Titan.) But it was hard to tell size by eye, without other nearby objects of known size to give perspective—a common problem in space.

As we got nearer, we picked out such objects: half a dozen Stardancers, their solar sails retracted. We came to a stop relative to the Symbiote mass, and saw perhaps a dozen p-suited humans approaching it from a slightly different angle than us. One of them had to be Bronwyn Small, the prospective graduate, and the rest her friends come to wish her well. By prior agreement, we maintained radio silence on the channel they were using, so as not to intrude. We had secured Bronwyn’s permission to be present, through Teena, but there can be few moments in anyone’s life as personal as Symbiosis.

The p-suited figures made rendezvous with the six Stardancers. We approached, but stopped about a kilometer or so distant.

I guess I had been expecting some sort of ceremony, the speechmaking with which humans customarily mark important events. There was none. Bronwyn said short goodbyes to her friends, hugged each of them, and then turned toward the nearest of the Stardancers and said, “I’m ready.”

“Yes, you are,” the Stardancer agreed, and I recognized the voice: it was Jinsei Kagami. She did nothing that I could see—but all at once the Symbiote extended a pseudopod that separated from the main mass, exactly the way the blob in a lava lamp will calve little globular chunks of itself. The shimmering crimson fragment homed in on Bronwyn somehow, stopped next to her, and expanded into a bubble about four meters in radius, becoming translucent, almost transparent.

Without another word, Bronwyn jaunted straight into the bubble and entered it bodily. Within it, she could be seen to unseal her p-suit and remove it. She removed its communications gear, hung it around her neck, and then pushed the suit gently against the wall of the bubble that contained her. The Symbiote allowed the suit to emerge, sealed again behind it, and at once began to contract.

We were too far away to see clearly, but I knew that the red stuff was enfolding her and entering her at every orifice, meeting itself within her, becoming part of her.

She cried out, a wordless shout of unbearable astonishment that made the cosmos ring, and then was silent. She seemed to shudder and stiffen, back arched, arms and legs trembling as if she were having a seizure. She began turning slowly end over end.

There was silence for perhaps a full minute.

Then Jinsei said to Bronwyn’s friends, “You may leave whenever you choose. Your friend will not be aware of her immediate surroundings again for at least another day…and it might be as much as one more day before you will be able to converse with her. She has a great deal to integrate.”

“Is she all right?” one of them asked, sounding dubious.

“‘All right’ is inadequate,” Jinsei said, with that smile in her voice. “‘Ecstatic’ is literally correct—and even that does not do it justice. Yes, she has achieved successful Symbiosis.”

Bronwyn’s friends expressed joy and relief at the news, and left as a group, talking quietly amongst themselves.

Ben gestured for our attention and pointed at his ear. We four all switched to a channel on which we could chatter privately.

“Not much of a show,” he said.

“I dunno,” Kirra said dreamily. “I thought it was lovely.”

“Me too,” I said. “I could almost feel it happening to her. That moment of merging.”

“So did I,” Ben said. “I don’t know, I guess I expected there to be more to it.”

“More what?”

“Ceremony. Speeches. Hollywood special effects. Fanfares of trumpets. Moving last words.”

“You men and your speechmaking,” I said. “All those things ought to happen too every time a sperm meets an egg…but they don’t.”

“And I thought those
were
moving last words,” Kirra said. “She said, ‘I’m ready.’ Can’t get much more movin’ than that.”

“You’re pretty quiet, darling,” I said to Robert. “What did you think?”

He was slow in answering. “I think I feel a little like Bronwyn: it’s going to take me at least a week to integrate everything well enough to talk about it.”

“Too right,” Kirra agreed. “I’ve had enough o’ words for a while. But I
could
use a little nonverbal communication. Come on, Benjamin, let’s go on home an’ root until sparrowfart.”

(If you ever spend time in Oz, don’t speak of rooting for your favorite team; “root” is their slang term for “fuck.” Whether this is a corruption of “rut,” or an indication that Aussies are fond of oral sex, I couldn’t say. And “sparrowfart” is slang for “dawn.”)

“That sounds like exactly what I’d like to do right now,” he said.

“Me too,” I agreed. “‘Ecstatic,’ she said. I could use some of that. How about you, darling?”

“‘I’m ready,’” he quoted simply.

The trip back to Top Step was as long as the trip out, but there was no further conversation along the way. When we got there we found that four could fit into that airlock at once if they didn’t mind squeezing. The route back to our quarters was one we had taken only once before, on the day of our arrival at Top Step—save that we bypassed Decontam. As we jaunted across the Great Hall, I felt again many of the same confused and confusing feelings I’d experienced on that first day, and hugged Robert tightly. He squeezed back.

Without any discussion, we all headed for my and Kirra’s room, and entered together. Pausing only to store our p-suits and dim the lights, we went to bed.

Actually, the euphemism is misleading: we didn’t use our sleepsacks. I did not want to be confined, needed to feel as free as a Stardancer, and it seemed Kirra did as well.

For over an hour I was almost completely unaware of Ben and Kirra, or anything else but Robert. We caromed off walls or furniture from time to time, but barely noticed that either. Then at some point the two drifting couples bumped into each other in the middle of the room, at a perpendicular so that we formed a cross. The small of my back was against Kirra’s; our sweat mingled. I sensed her flexing her legs and tightening her shoulders, and knew kinesthetically what she was going to do and matched it without thinking: we spun and flowed and traded places. Ben blinked and smiled and kissed me, and I kissed him back. The dance went on. Ben was sweet, bonier and hairier than Robert but just as tenderly attentive. Perhaps half an hour later, we all met again at the center of the universe and made a beast with four backs; awhile later I was back in Robert’s arms, and slept there until Teena told us it was time for dinner.