by Spider
“I’m not scared,” she said in my ear. “I ought to be scared, but I’m not. Not at all. But oh, I’d be scared if I were going into this without you!”
I tried to reply and could not, so I hugged tighter.
And then we left to meet the others.
Living in Siegfried had been rather like living below-decks in a luxury liner. The shuttlecraft was more like a bus, or a plane. Rows of seats with barely enough room to maneuver above them, a big airlock aft, a smaller one in the forward wall, windows on either side, engines in the rear. But from the outside it would have appeared that the bus or plane had rammed a stupendous bubble. The bow of the craft was a transparent sphere about twenty meters in diameter, the observation globe from which the team of diplomats would observe our performance. There was extremely little hardware to spoil the view. The computer itself was in Siegfried and the actual terminal was small; the five video monitors were little bigger, and the Limousine’s own guidance systems were controlled by another lobe of the same computer. There would be no bad seats.
There had, inevitably, been scores of last-minute messages from Earth, but not even the diplomats had paid any attention to them. Nor was there much conversation on the trip. Everyone’s mind was on the coming encounter, and our Master Plan, insofar as we could be said to have one, had been finalized long since.
We had spent a year studying computer analyses of both sides of the Stardance, and we believed we had gotten enough out of them to prechoreograph an opening statement in four movements. About an hour’s worth of dance, sort of a Mandarin’s Greeting. By the end of that time we would either have established telepathic rapport or not. If so we would turn the phone over to the diplomats. They would pass their consensus through DeLaTorre, and we would communicate their words to the aliens as best we could. If, for some reason, consensus could not be reached, then we would dance that too. If we could not establish rapport, we would watch the aliens’ reply to our opening statement and we and the computer would try to agree on a translation. The diplomats would then frame their reply, the computer would feed us choreographic notation, and we’d try it that way. If we got no results by the end of nine hours—two air changes—we’d call it a day, take the Limo back home to Siegfried and try again tomorrow. If we got good or promising results, we had enough air cans to stay out for a week—and the Die was stocked with food, water and a stripped-down toilet.
Mostly we all expected to play it by ear. Our ignorance was so total that anything would be a breakthrough, and we all knew it.
There was only one video screen in the passenger compartment, and Cox’s face filled it throughout the short journey. He kept us posted on the aliens’ status, which was static. At last deceleration ended, and we sank briefly to our seats as the Limousine turned end over end to present the bubble to the aliens, and then we were just finally there, at the crossroads. The diplomats unstrapped and went forward to the bubble’s airlock; the Stardancers went aft to the big one. The one that had the EXIT light over it.
We hung there together a moment, by unspoken consent, and looked around at each other. No one had a moving, Casablanca-ending speech to deliver, no wise-cracks or last sentiments to exchange. The last year had forged us into a family; we were already beginning to be mutually telepathic after a fashion. We were beyond words. We were ready.
What we did, actually, we smiled big idiotic smiles and joined hands in a snowflake around the airlock.
Then Harry and Raoul let go on either end, kissed each other, seated their hoods, and entered the airlock to go build our set. There was room for four in the airlock; Tom and Linda squeezed in with them. They would deploy the Die and wait for us.
As the door slid closed behind them, Norrey and I shared our own final kiss.
“No words,” I said, and she nodded slightly.
“Mr. Armstead?” from behind me.
“Yes, Dr. Chen?”
He was half in his airlock, alone. Without facial or vocal expression he said, “Blow a gasket.”
I smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
And we entered the lock.
There is a kind of familiarity beyond déjà vu, a recall greater than total. It comes on like scales falling from your eyes. Say you haven’t taken LSD in a long while, but you sincerely believe that you remember what the experience was like. Then you drop again, and as it comes on you simply say, “Ah yes—reality,” and smile indulgently at your foolish shadow memories. Or (if you’re too young to remember acid), you discover real true love, at the moment you are making love with your partner and realize that all of your life together is a single, continuous, ongoing act of lovemaking, in the course of which you happen to occasionally disengage bodies altogether for hours at a time. It is not something to which you return—it is something you suddenly find that you have never really left.
I felt it now as I saw the aliens again.
Red fireflies. Like glowing coals without the coals inside, whirling in something less substantial than a bubble, more immense than Siegfried. Ceaselessly whirling, in ceaselessly shifting patterns that drew the eye like the dance of the cobra.
All at once it seemed to me that the whole of my life was the moments I had spent in the presence of these beings—that the intervals between those moments, even the endless hours studying the tapes of the aliens and trying to understand them, had been unreal shadows already fading from my memory. I had always known the aliens. I would always know them, and they me. We went back about a billion years together. Like coming home from school to Mom and Dad, who are unchanging and eternal. Hey, I wanted to tell them, I’ve stopped believing I’m a cripple, as a kid might proudly announce he’s passed a difficult Chem test…
I shook my head savagely, and snapped out of it. Looking away helped. Everything about the setting said that something more than confused dreams had occurred since our last meeting. Just past the aliens mighty Saturn shone yellow and brown, ringed with coruscating fire. The Sun behind my back provided only one percent of the illumination it shone on Terra—but the difference was not discernible: the terrestrial eye habitually filters out 99% of available light. (It suddenly struck me, the coincidence that this meeting place the aliens had chosen happened to be precisely as far away from the Sun as a human eye could go and still see properly.)
We were “above” the Ring. It defied description.
To my “right,” Titan was smaller than Luna (under a third of a degree), but clearly visible, nearly three-quarters full from our perspective. Where the terminator faced Saturn the dull red color softened to the hue of a blood-orange, from the reflected Saturnlight. The great moon still looked smoky, like a baleful eye on our proceedings.
And all around me my teammates were floating, staring, hypnotized.
Only Tom was showing signs of self-possession. Like me, he was renewing an old acquaintance; reaffirming strong memories takes less time than making new ones.
We knew them better, this time, even those who were facing them for the first time. At that last confrontation, only Shara had seemed able to understand them to any degree—no matter how hard I had watched them, then, understanding had eluded me. Now my mind was free of terror, my eyes unblinded by need, my heart at peace. I felt as Shara had felt, saw what she had seen, and agreed with her tentative evaluations.
“There’s a flavor of arrogance to them—conviction of superiority. Their dance is a challenging, a dare.”
“…biologists studying the antics of a strange, new species…”
“They want Earth.”
“…in orbits as carefully choreographed as those of electrons…”
“Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”
Cox’s voice broke through our reverie. “Siegfried to Stardancers. They’re the same ones, all right: the signatures match to 3 nines.”
We had planned for the possibility that these might have been a different group of aliens—say, policemen looking for the oth
ers, or possibly even the second batch of suckers to buy a Sol-System Tour on the strength of the brochure. Even low probabilities had been prepared for. As Bill spoke, he, the diplomats and the computer flushed several sheafs of contingency scenarios from their memory banks and confirmed Plan A in their minds.
But all of us Stardancers had known already, on sight.
“Roger, Siegfried,” I acknowledged. “I’m terrible on names, but I never forget a face. ‘That’s the man, officer.’”
“Initiate your program.”
“All right, let’s get set up. Harry, Raoul, deploy the set and monitor. Tom and Linda, deploy the Die—about twenty klicks thataway, okay? Norrey, give me a hand with camera placement, we’ll all meet at the Die in twenty minutes. Go.”
The set was minimal, mostly positional grid markers. Raoul had not taken long to decide that attempting flashy effects in the close vicinity of the Ring would be vain folly. His bank of tracking lasers was low-power, meant only as gobos to color-light us dancers vividly for the camera—and to see how the aliens would react to the presence of lasers, which was their real purpose. I thought it was a damned-fool stupid idea—like Pope Leo picking his teeth with a stiletto as he comes to dicker with Attila—and the whole company, Raoul included, agreed wholeheartedly. We all wanted to stick to conventional lights.
But if you’re going to win arguments with diplomats of that stature you’ve got to make some concessions.
The grid markers were color organs slaved to Raoul’s Musicmaster through a system Harry designed. If the aliens responded noticeably to color cues, Raoul would attempt to use his instrument to make visual music, augmenting our communication by making the spectrum dance with us. Just as the sonic range of the Musicmaster exceeded the audible on both ends, the spectral range of the color organs exceeded the visible. If the aliens’ language included these subtleties, we would have rich converse indeed. Even the ship’s computer might have to stretch itself.
The Musicmaster’s audio output would be in circuit with our radios, well below conversational level. We wanted to enhance the possibility of a kind of mutual telepathic resonance, and we were conditioned to Raoul’s music that way.
Norrey and I set up five cameras in an open cone facing the aliens, for a proscenium-stage effect, as opposed to the six-camera globe we customarily used at home for 360° coverage. Neither of us felt like traveling around “behind” the aliens to plant the last camera there. This would be the only dance we had ever done that would be shot from every angle except the one toward which it was aimed, recorded only “from backstage,” as it were.
To tell you the truth, it didn’t make that much difference. Artistically it wasn’t much of a dance. I wouldn’t have released it commercially. The reason’s obvious, really: it was never intended for humans.
That had been the real root of our struggle with the diplomats over the last year. They were committed to the belief that what would be understood best by the aliens was precise adherence to a series of computer-generated movements. We Stardancers unanimously believed that what the aliens had responded to in Shara had been not a series of movements but art. The artistic mind behind the movements, the amount of heart and soul that went into them—the very thing an over-rigid choreography destroys in space. If we accepted the diplomats’ belief-structure, we were only computer display models. If they had accepted our belief-structure, Dmirov and Silverman at least would have been forced to admit themselves forever deaf to alien speech—and Chen would never have been able to justify siding with us to his superiors.
The result was, of course, compromise that satisfied no one, with provisions to dump whichever scheme didn’t seem to be working, if consensus could be reached. That was another reason I had had to gamble our lives and our race’s fortune on the damned lasers in order to win control of the first movement. The balance would be biased slightly our way: Our very first “utterances” would be—something more than could be expressed mathematically and ballistically.
But even if we had had a totally free hand, our dance would surely have puzzled the hell out of anyone but another Homo caelestis. Or a computer.
I think Shara would have loved it.
At last all the pieces were in place, the stage was set, and we formed a snowflake around the Die.
“Watch your breathing, Charlie,” Norrey warned.
“Right you are, my love.” My lungs were taking orders from my hindbrain; it seemed to want me agitated. But I didn’t. I began forcing measure on my breaths, and soon we were all breathing in unison, in, hold, out, hold, striving to push the interval past five seconds. My agitation began to melt like summer wages, my peripheral vision expanded spherically, and I felt my family as though a literal charge of electricity passed from hand to p-suited hand, completing a circuit that tuned us to one another. We became like magnets joined around a monopole, aligned to an imaginary point at the center of our circle. It was an encouraging analogy—however you disperse such magnets in free fall, eventually they will come together again at the pole. We were family; we were one. Not just our shared membership in a hypothetical new genus: we knew each other backstage, a relationship like no other on Earth or off it.
“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 befor
e, 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, being 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.
