by Spider
My own awareness of my family jumped a quantum level. I heard Norrey breathing, could see out her eyes, felt Tom’s sprained calf tug at me, felt Linda’s baby stir in my womb, watched us all and swore under Harry’s breath with him, raced down Raoul’s arm to his fingers and back into my own ears. I was a six-brained Snowflake, existing simultaneously in space and time and thought and music and dance and color and something I could not yet name, and all of these things strove toward harmony.
At no point was there any sensation of leaving or losing my self, my unique individual identity. It was right there in my body and brain where I had left it, could not be elsewhere, existed as before. It was as though a part of it had always existed independent of brain and body, as though my brain had always known this level but had been unable to record the information. Had we six been this close all along, all unawares, like six lonely blind men in the same volume of space? In a way I had always yearned to without knowing it, I touched my selves, and loved them.
We understood entirely that we were being shown this level by the aliens, that they had led us patiently up invisible psychic stairs to this new plane. If any energy detectable by Man had passed between them and us, Bill Cox would have been heating up his laser cannon and screaming for a report, but he was still on conference circuit with the diplomats, letting us dance without distraction.
But communication took place, on levels that even physical instruments could perceive. At first the aliens only echoed portions of our dance, to indicate an emotional or informational connotation they understood, and when they did so we knew without question that they had fully grasped whatever nuance we were trying to express. After a time they began more complex responses, began subtly altering the patterns they returned to us, offering variations on a theme, then counterstatements, alternate suggestions. Each time they did so we came to know them better, to grasp the rudiments of their “language” and hence their nature. They agreed with our concept of sphericity, politely disagreed with our concept of mortality, strongly agreed with the notions of pain and joy. When we knew enough “words” to construct a “sentence,” we did so.
We came these billion miles to shame you, and are ashamed.
The response was at once compassionate and merry. NONSENSE, they might have said, HOW WERE YOU TO KNOW?
Surely it was obvious that you were wiser than we.
NO, ONLY THAT WE KNEW MORE. IN POINT OF FACT, WE WERE CULPABLY CLUMSY AND OVEREAGER.
Overeager? we echoed interrogatively.
OUR NEED WAS GREAT. All fifty-four aliens suddenly plummeted toward the center of their sphere at varying rates, incredibly failing to collide there even once, saying as plain as day, ONLY RANDOM CHANCE PREVENTED UTTER RUIN.
The nature of the utter ruin eluded us, and we “said” as much. Our dead sister told us you needed to spawn, on a world like ours. Is this your wish: to come and live with humans?
Their response was the equivalent of cosmic laughter. It resolved finally into a single unmistakable “sentence”:
ON THE CONTRARY.
Our dance dissolved into confusion for a moment, then recovered.
We do not understand.
The aliens hesitated. Something like solicitude emanated from them, something like compassion.
WE CAN—WE MUST—EXPLAIN. BUT UNDERSTANDING WILL BE VERY STRESSFUL. COMPOSE YOURSELVES.
The component of our self that was Linda poured out a flood of maternal warmth, an envelope of calm; she had always been the best of us at prayer. Raoul now played only an om-like A-flat that was a warm, golden color. Tom’s driving will, Harry’s eternal strength, Norrey’s quiet acceptance, my own unfailing sense of humor, Linda’s infinite caring and Raoul’s dogged persistence all heterodyned to produce a kind of peace I had never known, a serene calm based on a sensation of completeness. All fear was gone, all doubt. This was meant to be.
This was meant to be, we danced. Let it be.
The echo was instantaneous, with a flavor of pleased, almost paternal approval.
NOW!
Their next sending was a relatively short dance, a relatively simple dance. We understood it at once, although it was utterly novel to us, grasped its fullest implications in a single frozen instant. The dance compressed every nanosecond of more than two billion years into a single concept, a single telepathic gestalt.
And that concept was really only the aliens’ name.
Terror smashed the Snowflake into six discrete shards. I was alone in my skull in empty space, with a thin film of plastic between me and my death, naked and terribly afraid. I clutched wildly for nonexistent support. Before me, much too close before me, the aliens buzzed like bees. As I watched, they began to gather at the center, forming first a pinhole, then a knothole and then a porthole in the wall of Hell, a single shimmering red coal that raved with furious energy. Its brilliance dwarfed even the Sun; my hood began to polarize automatically.
The barely visible balloon that contained the molten nucleus began to weep red smoke, which spiraled gracefully out to form a kind of Ring. I knew it at once, what it was and what it was for, and I threw back my head and screamed, triggering all thrusters in blind escape reflex.
Five screams echoed mine.
I fainted.
Chapter 4
I was lying on my back with my knees raised, and I was much too heavy—almost twenty kilos. My ribs were struggling to inflate my chest. I had had a bad dream…
The voices came from above like an old tube amp warming up, intermittent and distorted at first, resolving at last into a kind of clarity. They were near, but they had the trebleless, faraway characteristic of low pressure—and they too were finding the pseudogravity a strain.
“For the last time, tovarisch: speak to us. Why are your colleagues all catatonic? How do you continue to function? What in Lenin’s Name happened out there?”
“Let him be, Ludmilla. He cannot hear you.”
“I will have an answer!”
“Will you have him shot? If so, by whom? The man is a hero. If you continue to harass him, I will make full note of it, in our group report and in my own. Let him be.” Chen Ten Li’s voice was quite composed, exquisitely detached until that last blazing command. It startled me into opening my eyes, which I had been avoiding since I first became aware of the voices.
We were in the Limousine. All ten of us, four Space Command suits and six brightly colored Stardancers, a quorum of bowling pins strapped by twos into a vertical alley. Norrey and I were in the last or bottom row. We were obviously returning to Siegfried at full burn, making a good quarter gee. I turned my head at once to Norrey beside me. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully; the stars through the window behind her told me that we had already passed turnover and were decelerating.
I had been out a long time.
Somehow everything had gotten sorted out in my sleep. By definition, I guess: my subconscious had kept me under until I was ready to cope and no longer. A part of my mind boiled in turmoil, but I could encompass that part now and hold it in perspective. The majority of my mind was calm. Nearly all questions were answered now, and the fear dwindled to something that could be borne. I knew for certain that Norrey was all right, that all of us would be all right in time. Not direct knowledge; the telepathic bond was broken. But I knew my family. Our lives were irrevocably changed; into what, we knew not yet—but we would find out together.
At least two more crises would come in rapid succession now, and we would share these fortunes.
Immediate needs first.
“Harry,” I called out, “you did a good job. Let go now.”
He turned his big crewcut head and looked down past his headrest at me from two rows up. He smiled beatifically. “I almost lost his music box,” he said confidentially. “It got away from me when the weight came on.” At once he rolled his head up and was asleep, snoring deeply.
I smiled indulgently at myself. I should have expected it, should have known that it would be Harry, gr
eat-shouldered great-hearted Harry who would be the strongest of us all, Harry the construction engineer who would prove to have infinite load-bearing capacity. His shoulders had been equal to his heart’s need, and his breaking strain was still unknown. He would waken in an hour or so like a giant refreshed.
The diplomats had been yelping at me since I spoke to Harry; now I put my attention on them. “One at a time, please.”
By God, not one of the four would yield. Knowing it was foolish they all kept talking at once. They simply couldn’t help themselves.
“SHUT UP!” Bill’s voice blasted from the phone speaker, overriding the cacophony. They shut up and turned to look at his image. “Charlie,” he went on urgently, searching my face in his own screen, “are you still human?”
I knew what he was asking. Had the aliens somehow taken me over telepathically? Was I still my own master, or did an aggressive hive-mind live in my skull, working my switches and pulleys? We had discussed the possibility earnestly on the trip out, and I knew that if my answer didn’t convince him he would blast us out of space without hesitation. The least of his firepower would vaporize the Limousine instantly.
I grinned. “Only for the last two or three years, Bill. Before that I was semipure bastard.”
Later he would be relieved; he was busy. “Do I burn them?”
“Negative. Hold your fire! Bill, hear me good: If you shot them, and they ever found out about it, they might just take offense. I know you’ve got a Planet Cracker; forget it: from here they can turn out the Sun.”
He went pale, and the diplomats held shocked silence, turning with effort to gape at me. “We’re nearly home,” I went on firmly. “Conference in the exercise room as soon as we’re all recovered, call it a couple of hours from now. All hands. We’ll answer all your questions then—but until then you’ll just have to wait. We’ve had a hell of a shock; we need time to recover.” Norrey was beginning to stir beside me, and Linda was looking about clear-eyed; Tom was shaking his head with great care from side to side. “Now I’ve got my wife and a pregnant lady to worry about. Get us home and get us to our rooms and we’ll see you in two hours.”
Bill didn’t like it a little bit, but he cleared the screen and got us home. The diplomats, even Dmirov and Silverman, were silent, a little in awe of us.
By the time we were docked everyone had recovered except Harry and Raoul, who slumbered on together. We towed them to their room, washed them gently, strapped them into their hammock so they wouldn’t drift against the air grille and drown in carbon dioxide, and dimmed the lights. They held each other automatically in their sleep, breathing to the same rhythm. We left Raoul’s Musicmaster by the door, in case he might ever want it for something, and swam out.
Then the four of us went back to our respective rooms, showered, and made love for two hours.
The exercise room was the only one in Siegfried with enough cubic to contain the entire ship’s complement comfortably. We could all have squeezed into the dining room; we often did for dinner. But it was cramped, and I did not want close quarters. The exercise room was a cube perhaps thirty meters on a side. One wall was studded with various rigs and harnesses for whole-body workout in free fall. Retaining racks on another held duckpins, Frisbees, hula hoops, and handballs. Two opposing walls were trampolines. It offered elbow room, visibility, and marvelous maneuverability.
And it was the only room in the ship arranged with no particular local vertical.
The diplomats, of course, arbitrarily selected one, taping velcro strips to the bare handball wall so that the opposed trampolines were their “ceiling” and “floor.” We Stardancers aligned ourselves against the far wall, among the exercise rigs, holding on to them with a hand or foot rather than velcroing ourselves to the wall between them. Bill and Col. Song took the wall to our left.
“Let’s begin,” I said as soon as we had all settled ourselves.
“First, Mr. Armstrong,” Silverman said aggrievedly, “I would like to protest the high-handed manner in which you have withheld information from this body to suit your convenience.”
“Sheldon,” DeLaTorre began wearily.
“No sir,” Silverman cut him off, “I vigorously protest. Are we children, to be kept twiddling our thumbs for two hours? Are all the people of Earth insignificant, that they should wait in suspense for three and a quarter hours while these—artists have an orgy?”
“Sounds like you’ve been twiddling volume controls,” Tom said cheerily. “You know, Silverman, I knew you were listening the whole time. I didn’t mind. I knew how much it must be bugging you.”
His face turned bright red, unusual in free fall; his feet must be just as red.
“No,” Linda said judiciously, “I rather think he was monitoring Raoul and Harry’s room.”
He went paler than he had started and his pupils contracted with hatred. Bullseye.
“All right, can it,” Bill rapped. “You too, Mr. Ambassador. Snipe on your own time—as you say, all Terra is waiting.”
“Yes, Sheldon,” DeLaTorre said forcefully. “Let Mr. Armstead speak.”
He nodded, white-lipped. “So speak.”
I relaxed my grip on an exercise bike and spread my arms. “First tell me what happened from your perspective. What did you see and hear?”
Chen took it, his features masklike, almost waxen. “You began your dance. The music became progressively stranger. Your dance began to deviate radically from the computer pattern, and you were apparently answered with other patterns of which the computer could make nothing. The speed of your movements increased drastically with time, to a rate I would not have believed if I had not witnessed it with my unaided eyes. The music increased in tempo accordingly. There were muffled grunts, exclamations, nothing intelligible. The aliens united to form a single entity in the center of their envelope, which began to emit quantities of what we are told is organic matter. You all screamed.
“We tried to raise you without success. Mr. Stein would not answer our calls, but he retrieved all five of you with extreme efficiency, lashed you together, and towed you all back to the shuttlecraft in one trip.”
I pictured the load that five of us, massing over three hundred kilos, must have been when the thrust came on, and acquired new respect for Harry’s arms and shoulders. Brute muscle was usually so superfluous in space—but another man’s muscles might have parted under that terrible strain.
“As soon as the airlock had cycled he brought you all inboard, strapped you in place, and said the single word ‘Go.’ Then he very carefully stowed Mr. Brindle’s musical instrument and—just sat down and stared at nothing. We were abandoning the task of communicating with him when you awoke.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me cover the high spots. First, as you must have guessed, we achieved rapport with the aliens.”
“And are they a threat to us?” Dmirov interrupted. “Did they harm you?”
“No. And no.”
“But you screamed, like ones sure to die. And Shara Drummond clearly stated before she died—”
“That the aliens were aggressive and arrogant, that they wanted Earth for a spawning ground, I know,” I agreed. “Translation error, subtle and in retrospect almost inevitable. Shara had only been in space a few months; she said herself she was getting about one concept in three.”
“What is the correct translation?” Chen asked.
“Earth is their spawning ground,” I said. “So is Titan. So are a lot of places, outside this system.”
“What do you mean?” Silverman barked.
“The aliens’ last sending was what kicked us over the deep end. It was stunningly simple, really, considering how much it explained. You could render it as a single word. All they really did was tell us their collective name.”
Dmirov scowled. “And that is?”
“Starseeder.”
Stunned silence at first. I think Chen was the first to begin to grasp it, and maybe Bill was nearly as fast.
&
nbsp; “That’s their name,” I went on, “their occupation, the thing they do to be fulfilled. They farm stars. Their lifetime spans billions of years, and they spend them much as we do, trying to reproduce a good part of the time. They seed stars with organic life. They seeded this solar system, a long time ago.
“They are our race’s creator, and its remotest ancestor.”
“Ridiculous,” Silverman burst out. “They’re nothing like us, in no way are they like us.”
“In how many ways are you like an amoeba?” I asked. “Or a paramecium or a plant or a fish or an amphibian or any of your evolutionary forebears? The aliens are at least one or two and possibly three evolutionary stages beyond us. The wonder is that they can make themselves understood to us at all. I believe the next level beyond them has no physical existence in space or time.”
Silverman shut up. DeLaTorre and Song crossed themselves. Chen’s eyes were very wide.
“Picture the planet Earth as a single, stupendous womb,” I went on quietly, “fecund and perpetually pregnant. Ideally designed to host a maximum of organic life, commanded by a kind of super-DNA to constantly grow and shuffle progressively more complex life forms into literally billions of different combinations, in search of one complex enough to survive outside the womb, curious enough to try.
“I nearly had a brother once. He was born dead. He was three weeks past term by then; he had stayed in the womb past his birthing time, by God knows what subtle biological error. His waste products exceeded the ability of the placenta to absorb and carry them away; the placenta began to die, to decay around him, polluted by his wastes. His life support eroded away and he died. He very nearly killed my mother.
“Picture your race as a gestalt, a single organism with a subtle flaw in its genetic coding. An overstrong cell wall, so that at the moment when it is complex enough that it ought to have a united planetary consciousness, each separate cell continues to function most often as an individual. The thick cell wall impedes information exchange, allows the organism to form only the most rudimentary approximation of a central nervous system, a network that transmits only aches and pains and shared nightmares. The news and entertainment media.
