The Stardance Trilogy (65 page)

“Irish coffee helps,” I said. “It’s great for reconciling you to gravity: it’s got up and down built into it. The booze calms you down and then the coffee wakes you up.”
Small talk, small talk—

“Small talk,” he said.

I nodded. “What do you say—stick to small talk until we’ve eaten?”

He nodded back. “Sounds sensible.” The waiter arrived, and Robert ordered Irish coffee, “like the lady.” The waiter nodded gravely, turned away—then stopped outside Robert’s field of vision, pointed at him, and gave me an exaggerated thumbs up.
Keep this one.
When he returned a few moments later with the coffee, he stopped behind Robert again, pointed at the coffee and fanned himself:
this
glass had whiskey in it, in good measure. I slipped him another wink when Robert wasn’t looking. I hoped Robert was going to tip him well, since I couldn’t. Robert ordered something to eat and I said I’d have the same and he twinkled away, delighted at his role in my little intrigue.

“So you just got into town? Where are you staying?”

I’d anticipated the question, and had decided there was no reason to lie. I told him the correct name of my hotel. It didn’t seem to matter; I need never go back there again. He nodded and said it was a good place, and I agreed.

Whatever it was we had ordered arrived. As we ate we kept jousting with our eyes, making contact and then finding reasons to look away, busying ourselves with the food. I felt like I was drowning in quicksand. No, in slowsand. But there was no hurrying things. I didn’t want him to have any busy little distractions available when I started asking pointed questions.

Which led to:
what
pointed questions? I had been thinking about this moment for something like two weeks now, and I still did not know how to play it. Should I go right for the jugular, tell him everything I knew and all I had guessed, and demand a response? Or keep what I knew to myself, give him to understand that I wanted to resume our relationship, and see what he said about that? That could lead in short order to a bedroom, and what would I do then?

Or should I indicate ambiguous feelings, which would allow me to prolong our contact without having to go to bed with him? The problem with that one was, it made it easy for him to get rid of me if he didn’t want to be under close scrutiny. No, the smart thing to do was feign passion and try to get as far inside his guard as I could. Feigning passion is natural for a performer. I could always plead gee-fatigue when things got intense.

But as I watched him eat, watched his slender fingers move, I knew I just could not go through with it. Perhaps it was exactly what he had been doing to me, all those passionate days and nights back in Top Step. But I could not do it to him.

The plates were empty. The second round of Irish coffees arrived. Mine was again denatured. The waiter winked at me for a change.

Well, then? Charge right in or dance around it as long as possible? Cowardice and caution both said to stall.
Crazy to risk everything on one roll of the dice. Lots of misdirection first, then slip it in under his guard while he’s trying to figure out how to get into your pants.

“Chen Po Chang?” I said suddenly.

“Yes, Morgan?”

And there it was.

“It was on your tongue, wasn’t it?”
That’s it, baffle him with misdirection.

“Yes.”

“Which one got it? Ben, or Kirra?”

“Kirra.”

I nodded. “I just wondered. You knew they’d both be meeting the Harvest Crew.” Under the table, I slid my hand into my handbag. Just the one question left, now. “Why?”

He seemed to think about it, as if for the first time. He started to answer twice, and changed his mind each time. Finally he said, “For my species.”

“For your species.” I seemed to be having trouble with my voice. “And what species would that be? Insect, or reptile?”

“Homo sapiens,”
he said calmly. “It’s us or them. Us or
Homo caelestis
. The universe isn’t big enough for both of us.”

“Why
not?
What could the two species possibly compete for?”

“Nothing at all. And everything. That’s the point. Here below we scurry about like blind rats in a two-dimensional maze, hungry and thirsty and horny and terrified and alone, fighting like rats for food and power and breeding room and a chance to live before we die. And right over our heads, at the literal top of the hierarchy, there fly the angels, free of everything that plagues us, needing nothing, fearing nothing, looking down with fond amusement at our ape antics. Of course I hate them. Who would not?”

“For God’s sake, this planet would have gone to pieces years ago if it weren’t for—”

“And that too is the point. It would be bad enough if they kept themselves aloof, ignored us in our misery—but how can we not resent their monstrous charity? How long can the human race stand playing the role of the idiot nephew who must be cared for by his betters, the welfare client who has nothing conceivable to offer his benefactors in return? The racial psychic damage which that awareness causes is half the reason the world is so close to hysteria, so angry and self-destructive.”

“So you want to exterminate the hand that feeds you.”

“It may come to that,” he agreed. “Sometimes I think that it might be enough to drive them from human space, to force them far above or below the ecliptic or out beyond Mars where we don’t have to keep seeing them and interacting with them, take their damned Promised Land off somewhere where we don’t have to look at it every day, right overhead, just out of reach.”

“But it’s
not
out of reach—”

“Oh shit, it is too! If all the Chinese in the world lined up at Suit Camps, how long would it take the last one to pass Top Step? Assuming a sufficient mass of Symbiote could be brought to orbit without pulling Luna out of its track.”

“If the world wanted to, it could build more Suit Camps.”

“And it doesn’t. Most of us know in our guts that Stardancers are just plain inhuman. They’re
alien
. They’re like ants. They’re a hive-mind. They’re our enemy, and they’ll be a damned hard one to beat.”

“But why do they have to be
enemies
?”

“Morgan,
think
, won’t you? Think about that hive-mind. That ‘Starmind.’ I know they breed like hamsters up there, but even after twenty years of it, well over half the minds that make up what they call the Starmind started out as human beings, on Earth, yes?”

“Exactly. They’re our brothers and sisters, or at least our cousins.”

“And how many million years old would you say is the human lust for power? For control? For dominance?”

“But there’s none of that in the Starmind.”

“Exactly. What can ‘power’ mean to a member of a telepathic commune? What is there to control? By what means can dominance be asserted? Mental machinery that has served men for countless generations is useless.” He leaned forward and locked eyes with me. “But I ask you to consider this: that a telepathic group consciousness implies a group
subconscious
too. Submerged in that Starmind are the instincts of thousands of killer apes, the genetic heritage of the most successful predator ever evolved. Maybe competition and aggression aren’t inherited, maybe they’re not instinct but learned behaviour transmitted to each new generation—maybe the Stardancers born in space, who’ve never known want or fear or envy, are gentle creatures, without the Mark of Cain. But the majority of the Starmind comes from a long line of cutthroats. Human beings weren’t built for Utopia, no matter what weird things may happen to their metabolisms. They know the only thing they could possibly need to fear, must fear, is us, is the rage and envy of the irrational human beings they have to share the Solar System with. They know a clash is inevitable one day, and they’re doing their best to see that they’ll win it. By creating a planet full of helpless welfare dependents. By showering us with gifts that lead us to a place where we need their gifts to survive. They’ve read their Sun Tzu. Don’t you see, they’re killing us with kindness!”

I closed my eyes briefly. I remembered one of my old dance-circle acquaintances, an intellectual snob, a sort of Alexander Woolcott/H.L. Mencken/Oscar Wilde wanna-be, saying, when he heard I was about to go to Top Step, “Stardancers? A society with no corruption, no hypocrisy, no neurosis and total respect for art—and worst of all, they’re willing to let me join? How could I
not
despise them?” And I had laughed with the others, but privately thought he was a cripple, seeking approval of his deformity.

I felt a sense of unreality, a Through-the-Looking-Glass feeling. In my wildest fantasies of this moment, it had gone much like this, with Robert calmly, rationally explaining why he had blown our friends to plasma.
Why is he telling me all this? Surely to God he does not expect that I will nod and say, Damn, you’re right, I hadn’t thought it through, Kirra and Ben just got in the line of fire, guess you can’t make an interplanetary omelet without breaking some eggs, what can I do to help fight the menace of gods who have the nerve to be benevolent?

I met his eyes again. “So you acted selflessly. For the good of humanity.”

He didn’t even shrug. “Of course not. Am I a Stardancer? I acted out of intelligent self-interest, like any sane human.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “If our plans bear fruit, the
least
of the prizes to be won will be my father’s return from exile to unchallenged power over China.”

“So you put death in Kirra’s sweet mouth.” I slid the Gyrojet from the handbag. My thumb caressed the safety catch. Four darts. One for him, one for me, two surplus.

“Morgan, listen to me: for the first time in human history, total planetary domination is a genuine possibility—and it’s only the first step in the forging of a System-wide empire. The tools are nearly at hand! How many lives, how many betrayals is that worth?”

His eyes were boring into mine. “I have a gun aimed at your belly, Chen Po Chang,” I said softly. I hadn’t meant to warn him.

“I know,” he said just as quietly. “But you’re not ready to use it yet.”

“No. No, I’m not. First I want to know why you’re telling me such weighty secrets. Do you think you can persuade me to join you?”

He hesitated before answering. “No. I wish I could. But you’re a romantic. Because Stardancers look like angels, they must be angels. There’s not enough greed in you for your own good.” He looked bleak. “Oh, but I wish I could!”

“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. A woman at an adjacent table looked round; I lowered my voice again. “What the hell do you care? One day you’ll be Emperor of the Galaxy and you can have the hottest concubines your precious race can produce. I’m a broken down forty-six-year-old has-been dancer you screwed for a few weeks once on assignment.”

This was why I wasn’t ready to shoot him yet. Or at least part of it. I needed to know what, if anything, I had been to him.

For the first time his iron control cracked. Pain showed in his eyes. He looked down at the table. “Screwing you was good cover. You were my target’s roommate. Falling in love with you was stupid. So I was stupid.” He finished his Irish coffee in a single gulp. “I was horrified at how hard it was to leave you. That terrorist bombing was the perfect excuse to cut out, just when I needed it…and it took me half an hour to make up my mind to take advantage of it. I knew there was no way I could take you with me—but it killed me to leave you behind. When I heard your voice on the phone, realized you were here on Earth again, there was a whole five or ten seconds there when I…when I…”

“When you got a hard on, wondering how I am in a gravity field. But now you know I know you for what you are, and how I feel about your cause. So I repeat: why are you admitting everything and telling me your secrets? You have a gun on me too, is that it?”

He shook his head. “I’m unarmed. And no one else will try to kill you. That much influence I have.” He ran a hand nervously through his hair, brushing it back from his eyes, a gesture he’d never had in free fall. “I guess I’m telling you…because I have to. Because I wanted you to know.”

“Pardon me,” a kindly voice said.

A large heavily bearded stranger in a charcoal grey suit was standing at my side, hearty and jovial and avuncular. If they ever remade
Miracle on 34th Street
with an all-Asian cast, he’d be a finalist for the role of Kris Kringle. “I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing you…but are you Morgan McLeod, the dancer?”

I had danced in San Francisco hundreds of times, had actually achieved more fame here than in Vancouver, where I was “only a local.” “Yes, but I’m afraid this isn’t a good—”

“I won’t disturb you. But please—would you?” He held out a scrap of paper and a pen. “Your work with Morris meant a lot to me.”

The quickest way to get rid of him was to indulge him. I left the Gyrojet on my lap, concealed by the handbag, and signed the stupid autograph. As I handed it back, he took my hand, bent to kiss it—and just as he did so, he turned my hand over, so that instead of kissing the back of it, his full warm moist lips pressed my palm. I felt his tongue flicker momentarily between them. It was an odd, vaguely erotic thing for a man his age to do, with an escort sitting right there across from me. I retrieved my hand hastily. “Thank you very much; you’re very kind. Please excuse us.”

“Of course, Ms. McLeod. Thank you. I have always loved your work.” He turned away.

I turned back to Robert. No, to Po Chang. “All right,” I tried to say to him, “Now I know. Now what?”

It came out, “All eyes down the put go, legs. Blower?”

I blinked and tried again. “Didn’t dog core stable imagine? Both pressure.”

A zipper appeared under his Adam’s apple. It peeled down to his diaphragm, splitting his sternum and spreading his ribs, exposing his pink wet chest cavity. A tiny Negro in a clown suit was clinging desperately to the top of his heart, fighting to stay aboard as it beat and surged beneath him. As I watched, fascinated, he managed to get to his feet and wedge himself into equilibrium between the lungs. He opened a door in the left lung and showed me something awful inside. I turned away in shame. The stranger was still standing there, but he stood ten meters tall now on rippling rainbow legs. His beard was made of worms. I knew he wanted to see me dance, but there wasn’t enough room on the table and the damned local vertical kept changing and there weren’t enough pens.