The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  “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…

  SNYGAMY

  Chapter 1

  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 aware
ness, 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.

  The Snowflake that was me groped for “words.”

  You have made a good marriage, she said, you six.

  Marry us! We cried.

  I thought you’d never ask.

  And my sister swarmed into me and we are one.

  That is essentially the whole of this story.

  I—the Charlie Armstead component of “I”—began this work long ago, as an article for magazine and computer-fax sale. So much nonsense had been talked and written about Shara that I was angry, and determined to set the record straight. In that incarnation, this manuscript ended with Shara’s death.

  But when I was done, I no longer needed to publish the article. I found that I had written it only to clarify things in my own mind. I withheld it, and hung on to the manuscript with the vague idea of someday using it as a seed for my eventual memoirs (in the same spirit in which Harry had begun his Book: because someone had to and who else was there?). From time to time, over the next three years, I added to it with that purpose in mind, “novelizing” rather than “diarizing” to spare the trouble of altering the manuscript later. I spent a lot of the year of Siegfried’s outward flight in writing and revising the total, bringing the history up to the point where Chen Ten Li took his first space walk, a few weeks out of Saturn.

  All of the subsequent material has been written in a single half-day “sitting,” here at the Die’s computer terminal. I have been limited only by the physical speed at which the terminal’s heat-sensitive “keys” can disengage. As I write, other parts of me drift through eternity. We make love. We worship. We sing. We dance. Endlessly we are each other, yet are ourselves. I know it does not seem that this could be: that is why I have chosen to tell my story by completing Charlie’s memoirs (while Shara, approving, reads over my shoulder from a hundred klicks away). I want you to know that Charles Armstead has not been dissolved or diluted into something alien. In no sense have I died. I never will. It would be more accurate to say that I am Charlie Armstead to the seventh power. At long last I have managed to destroy the phone company, and great is my glee. I still choreograph dances with Norrey and Shara and the others, still swap abominable multilevel puns with Raoul (right now he’s singing an old ’40s love song, “I May Never Come Back to Earth Again”), still taste in my mind (where I always did) the smell of fine coffee, the bite of strong drink, the flavor of good grass. The distance between me and you is only time and changes. Once I was a bitter, twisted cripple, poisoning the air around me; now I know no evil because I know no fear.

  I have spent the minuscule fraction of energy to complete this manuscript because Bill Cox is preparing to blast for Terra (he’ll be back) and it must go now if ever.

  This news will not fit into any diplomat’s laser message, nor will even those extraordinary men and women be able to express it as I can.

  I am Charlie Armstead, and my message to you is: The stars can be even yours.

  This one’s for Charlie, Dorothy, Terri Luanna,

  and Smokey

  Acknowledgments

  We’d like to thank master roboticist Guy Immega for technical assistance in matters scientific, and Zoketsu Norman Fischer for technical assistance in matters of Zen. (Any mistakes, however, are ours, not theirs.) We also thank Dr. Oliver Robinow, Anya Coveney-Hughes, Herb Varley, David Myers, Evelyn Beheshti, Don H. DeBrandt, Greg McKinnon, Lynn Katay, all the members of Jeanne’s women’s group, and of course our patient and long-suffering agent, Eleanor Wood of the Spectrum Agency, for various kinds of aid and comfort without which we might never have finished this book. And we thank our editors, Susan Allison and Peter Heck.

  In addition to the sources cited in the Acknowledgments of our original Stardance novel, we drew upon Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck, Walkabout Woman by Michaela Roessner, How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space? by William R. Pogue, Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins, and Zen to Go by Jon Winokur, in completing this book. Further assistance was derived from Kenya AA and Kona Fancy coffee, Old Bushmills whiskey, and the music of Johnny Winter (who was playing guitar 20 meters away while Jeanne wrote the Prologue), Ray Charles, Frank Zappa, Harry Connick, Jr., Benjamin Jonah Wolfe, Davey Graham, Michael Hedges, “Spider” John Koerner, and Mr. Amos Garrett, as well as Co-Op Radio and all the other jazz and blues FM stations received in Vancouver.

  —Vancouver, B.C

  4 August 1990

  PROLOGUE

  When Buddha transmitted our practice to Maha Kashyapa he just picked up a flower with a smile. Only Maha Kashyapa understood what he meant. No one else there understood.

  We do not know if this is a historical event or not—but it means something…

  —Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

  ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND

  (italics added)

  I ALWAYS DANCED.

  Like all babies I was born kicking; I just never stopped. All during my childhood it was that way. In the 1980s Gambier Island had a permanent population of about sixty, which no more than doubled in the summer—but it sure had a lot of theatres, with proscenium stages. The garden, the livingroom, a certain clearing in the woods near Aunt Anya’s p
lace…I danced in them all, and most of all in my room with the door closed. Sometimes there was thunderous applause; sometimes I danced for no one but myself; sometimes for intimate friends who vanished at a knock on the door. I remember clearly the moment I first understood that dancing was what I was going to do with my life.

  Near sunset in late summer, 1985. Dinner and chores finished. My feet tickled. I told Dad where I was going, avoided Mom, and slipped out through the shed without banging the door. It was a kilometer and a half to the government wharf. The afternoon had been warm and wet—wet enough, I thought, to keep most of our neighbors indoors, and most boats at anchor. As I came over the last crest of the road and started down to the wharf, I saw I was right: I had the place to myself.

  I began to run down the hill, kicking off my shoes and tossing my jacket to the side of the road. At the far end of the wharf I slowed and carefully descended the swaying gangway to the big dock-float down at water level. I turned halfway down and scanned the shoreline one more time to be sure. No one in sight. I circled around the boathouse at the foot of the gangway. The boathouse cut off sight of the land; there was nothing but me and the sea and the islands in the distance, grey-green mountains rising from the water. The water was highlit with sparkles of colour from the sun setting behind me over the forest. A warm mist came and went, invisibly. Even dry clothes are a nuisance when you dance. My clothes went under the rowboat that lay turtle-backed against the boathouse. The float’s surface was rough enough for safe footing when wet, but soft enough for bare feet.

  I turned my back to the land and faced the sea. There are bigger theatres, but not on Earth. My parents were unreconstructed hippies, quasi-Buddhist; for their sake I bowed to the sea…then waved to it for my own: the sober, dignified wave a serious artist gives her expectant public when she is eleven years old. A passing gull gave my cue. Ladies and gentlemen, Rain McLeod! The music swelled. . .