The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  Reb didn’t seem to notice. “I am going to try to teach all of you…specifically, how to enter Titanian Symbiosis without suffering unnecessary pain. Along the way, I will teach you any other lessons I can that you request of me, and from time to time I will offer to teach you other things I think you need to know…but in this latter category you are always privileged to overrule me.”

  “If that’s true,” the New Yorker said, “I’m actually impressed.”

  I was becoming irritated with the heckling—but Reb was not. “In free fall,” he said, “raising one’s hand for attention does not work well. Would you help me select some other gesture we all can use, Jo?”

  Jo, the New Yorker, was so surprised by the question that she thought about it. “How ’bout this?”

  Is there a proper name for the four-fingered vee she made? My parents were Star Trek fans, so I think of it as the Spock Hello.

  He smiled. “Excellent! Unambiguous…and just difficult enough to perform that one has a moment to reconsider how necessary it really is to pre-empt the group’s attention. Thank you, Jo.” He demonstrated it for those who could not see Jo. “Is there anyone who can’t make this gesture?”

  Several of us found it awkward, but no one found it impossible. I was less interested in my manual dexterity than in his social dexterity. Hecklers heckle because they need everyone in the room to know how clever they are. He had given her a chance to make that point, reproved her so gently that she probably never noticed, and I knew he would have no further trouble from her that day. By persuading her not to be his enemy, he had defeated her. I smiled…and saw him notice me doing so. He did not smile back—but I seemed to see an impish twinkle for a moment in his eye.

  I like spiritual teachers with an impish twinkle. In fact, I don’t think I like any other kind.

  “If any of you happen to be Buddhist, I am an Abbot in the Soto sect. I trace my dharma lineage through Shunryu Suzuki, and will be happy to do dokusan with any who wish it in the evenings, after dinner.”

  I don’t know how to convey the significance of Reb’s dharma lineage to a non-Soto-Buddhist. Perhaps the rough equivalent might be a Christian monk who had been ordained by one of the Twelve Apostles. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi was one of the greatest Japanese Zen masters to come to America, way back in the middle of the twentieth century—founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the famous Tassajara monastery near Carmel.

  “But this is not a class in Zen,” he went on, “and you need not have any interest in Buddha or his Eightfold Path. What we’re going to attempt to do in this class is to discuss spirituality without mentioning religion. The former can often be discussed by reasonable people without anger; the latter almost never can.”

  Glenn made the Spock Hello; he returned it, to mean she had the floor. “What is ‘spirituality without religion,’ sir?”

  “Please call me ‘Reb,’ Glenn. It is the thing people had, before they invented religion, which caused them to gape at sunsets, to sing while alone, or to smile at other people’s babies. And other things which defy rational explanation, but are basic to humanity.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “By happy coincidence, practically the next thing in the syllabus is an example of what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to take a short field trip in just a few minutes, to see something spiritual. Can you wait, Glenn?”

  “Of course, Reb.”

  “Good. Now: one of the main things we need to do is to begin dismantling the patterns in which you think. Some of you may think that you’ve never given much thought to spirituality—but in fact you’ve thought too much about it, in patterns and terms that were only locally useful. Space adds dimensions unavailable to any terrestrial. It’s time you started getting used to the fact that you live in space now. So I’d like you all to unship all those bungee cords, and pass them to me.”

  I began to see what he was driving at. The cords, to which we were all loosely clinging, imposed a strictly arbitrary local vertical, the same one Reb had been using since I’d entered. But as we followed his instruction, “up” and “down” went away…and he began (without any visible muscular effort) to tumble slowly and gracefully in space. His face was always toward us, but seldom “upright,” and as some of us unconsciously tried to match his spin—and failed—there was suddenly no consensus as to which way was up. We had to stop trying to decide. Soon we were all every which way, save that we all at least tried to face Reb. I found it oddly unsettling to pay attention to someone who was spinning like a Ferris wheel—which was his point.

  I noticed something else. He had positioned himself roughly at the center of the wall behind him—and the majority of us, myself included, had unconsciously oriented ourselves, not only “vertical” with respect to him…but “below” him as well. He was the teacher, so most of us wanted to “look up to him.” Several of the exceptions looked like people who’d pointedly if subconsciously fought that impulse. (Robert was one of them.) Now the “upper” portion of the room was starting to fill up, as we redistributed ourselves more…well, more equally. Which again, I guess, was his point.

  “That’s more like it,” he said approvingly as he stowed the bungee cords in a locker. “When you’ve been in free fall a while longer, you’ll find the sight of a roomful of people aligned like magnets amusing—because in this environment it is.”

  An uneasy chuckle passed around the room.

  “It’s possible,” he went on, continuing to rotate, “for a normal terrestrial to enter Symbiosis without permanent psychic damage; it has happened. But any spacer will find it enormously easier. Now for that field trip.”

  He reached behind himself without looking, caught the hatch handle on the first try, pivoted on it while activating it, and lobbed himself out of the room. His other hand beckoned us to follow.

  We left the room smoothly and graciously, with no jostling for position or unnecessary speech. This man was having an effect on us.

  We proceeded as a group down winding, roughly contoured corridors of Top Step. The image that came to my mind, unbidden, was of a horde of corpuscles swimming single file through some sinuous blood vessel. Whoever it belonged to needed to cut down on her cholesterol.

  I glanced back past my feet, saw that Robert had managed to take up position immediately behind me. He smiled at me. My mental image of our group changed, from corpuscles to spermatozoa. I looked firmly forward again and tried to keep my attention on spirituality—and on not jaunting my skull into the foot of Kirra in front of me.

  In a few minutes we had reached our destination. To enter, we had to go through an airlock, big enough for ten people at once—but it was open at both ends: there was pressure beyond it. I wondered what the airlock was for, then. As I passed through it I heard a succession of gasps from those exiting before me; despite this foreknowledge, as I cleared the inner hatch, I gasped too. It was not the largest cubic in Top Step—not even the largest I’d seen so far; you could have fit maybe three of it in that big cavern where I’d met Teena the talking computer—but its largest wall was transparent, and on the other side of it was infinity.

  We were at Top Step’s very skin, gazing at naked space, at vacuum and stars. At the place where all of us hoped to live, one day soon…

  From this close up, it did not look like terribly attractive real estate. Completely unfurnished. Drafty. No amenities. Ambiguous property lines, unclear title. Big. Scary…

  How weird, that I was getting my first naked-eye view of space after more than twenty-four hours in space. Those stars were bright, sharp, merciless, horribly far away. It was hard to get my breath.

  I wished Earth were in frame; it would have been less scary. This cubic seemed to be on the far side of Top Step. I wondered if there were a similar cubic on the other side, for folks who liked to look at the Old Home. Or did all of Top Step turn its collective back to Terra?

  The last of us entered the room behind me and found a space to fl
oat in. We all gaped out the huge window together in silence.

  Something drifted slowly into view, about ten meters beyond the window. A sculpture of a man, made of cherry Jell-O, waving a baton…

  A Stardancer!

  A real, live, breathing Stardancer. (No, unbreathing, of course…Stardancers must have some internal process analogous to breathing, but they do not need to work their lungs.) A Homo caelestis, a former human being in Titanian Symbiosis: covered, within and without, by the Symbiote, the crimson life-form that grows in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and is the perfect complement to the human metabolism. A native inhabitant of interplanetary space.

  Except for the four-centimeter-thick coating of red Symbiote, he was naked. He would never need clothes again. Or, for that matter, air or food or water or a bathroom or shelter. Just sunshine and occasional trace elements. He was at home in space.

  Of course we’d seen Stardancers before; we’d all come here to become Stardancers. We’d seen them hundreds of times…on film, on video, on holo. But none of us had ever actually been this close to one before. Stardancer and Symbiote mate for life, and the Symbiote cannot survive normal terrestrial atmosphere, pressure, moisture or gravity. Stardancers sometimes lived on Luna for short periods, and it was said that one had once survived on Mars for a matter of days…but no Stardancer would ever walk the Earth.

  The Symbiote obscured details like eyes and expression, but it was clear that, back when he’d been a human being, he’d been a big, powerful man, heavily muscled…and very well hung, I couldn’t help but notice. He was cartwheeling in slow motion as he came into view, but when he reached the center of the vast window, he made a brief, complex gesture with his magic wand and came to a halt relative to us. From my perspective he was upside down; I tried to ignore it.

  With a small thrill, I recognized him, even under all that red Jell-O. I’d seen his picture often enough, his and all the other members of The Six. He was Harry Stein!

  The Harry Stein—designer/engineer of the first free fall dance studio—less than five meters away from me. Others began to recognize him too: a susurrant murmur of, “SteinHarrySteinthat’sHarryStein,” went round the room.

  Reb spoke at normal volume, startling us all. “Hello, Harry.”

  What happened then startled me even more. I suppose I should have been expecting it: I knew that Teena could project audio directly to my ear, like an invisible earphone—and a voice on two earphones sounds like it’s coming from inside your head. Nonetheless I twitched involuntarily when Harry Stein’s voice said, “Hi, Reb. Hi, everybody. My name is Harry,” right in my skull.

  What made it even stranger was that I happened to have been looking at his face when he spoke, and even under that faintly shimmering symbiote I was sure his lips had not moved. His suit radio was linked directly to the speech-center of his brain: the speech impulses were intercepted on their way to his useless vocal cords and sent directly. I’d studied all this in Space Camp, but it was something else again to experience it directly.

  “Hi, Harry,” several voices chorused raggedly.

  “Can’t stay long,” he said. “Got a big job in progress over to spinward. Just wanted to say hi. And so did I.” With that last sentence, there was an odd, inexpressible change in his voice. Not in pitch or tone or timbre—it was still Harry Stein’s voice—but it was not him speaking it. “Hello, everybody, this is Charlie Armstead speaking now.” Armstead himself! “I’m sorry I can’t be there to meet you all personally—as a matter of fact, I’m a few light-hours away as you hear this—but Harry’s letting me use his brain to greet you. I will be meeting you all when you graduate, of course—but so will the rest of the gang, all of us at once, and I couldn’t resist jumping the gun. Neither could I— Hi, everyone, Norrey Armstead, here.” Jesus! “I’m out here with Charlie, I guess you’re all a little confused right about now…but don’t let it worry you, okay? Just take your time and listen to what Reb tells you, and everything will be fine. Now I’ll hand you over to Raoul Brindle for a minute. Oh, before I go, I want to say a quick hello to Morgan McLeod—”

  I gulped and must have turned almost as red as Harry Stein.

  “—I’ve been a fan of yours for years. I loved your work with Monnaie Dance Group in Brussels, especially your solo in the premiere of Morris’s Dance for Changing Parts. I hope we can work together some day.”

  “Thank you,” I said automatically—but my voice came out a squeak. People were staring. Robert, Kirra and Ben were smiling.

  “Here’s Raoul, now. Howdy, gang! I’m on my way home from Titan with the Harvest Crew, riding herd on about a zillion tons of fresh Symbiote—but I wanted to pass on a personal greeting of my own, to Jacques LeClaire and to Kirra from Queensland; hi, guys! I hope you’ll both make some music for me one day; I’ve heard tapes of your work, and I’d love to jam with both of you when I get back. Or maybe you’ll graduate before then and come meet me halfway. I’ll hand you back to Harry now. So long…”

  I don’t think an Aboriginal can blush; Kirra must have been expressing her own embarrassment with body language. Fluently. And it was easy to pick out Jacques LeClaire in the crowd, too.

  “Well, like I said,” Harry went on, sounding like himself now—and don’t ask me to explain that. “Work to do. Deadline’s coming. I hope you’ll all be in my family soon. See you later.” He waved his thruster-baton negligently, and began drifting out of our field of view.

  Not a word was spoken until he was gone. Then someone tried for irony. “What, Shara Drummond was too busy to say hello?” Some of us giggled.

  “Yes,” Harry’s voice said, and the giggle trailed off. “Oh,” the joker said, chastened.

  There was another long silence. Then Kirra said softly, “Spirituality without religion—”

  There was a subdued murmur of agreement.

  “Lemme see if I’ve got this straight, Reb,” she said. “If I needed to talk to one of that mob—”

  “Just call them on the phone, like you would anyone else in space,” Reb agreed. “If you really need an instantaneous response, you can ask for a telepathic relay through some other Stardancer whose brain happens to be near Top Step—but bear in mind that you will almost certainly be distracting their attention from something else. Don’t do so frivolously. But if you don’t mind waiting for both ends of the conversation to crawl at lightspeed, by radio, you can chat any time with any Stardancer who’ll answer, anytime. Yes, Kirra.”

  “What was that Raoul said about a harvest crew?”

  “When Armstead and The Six originally came back from Titan after entering Symbiosis, they brought an enormous quantity of the Symbiote back with them, using the Siegfried to tow it. But that was about thirty years ago, and Top Step has graduated a lot of Stardancers since then. It’s becoming necessary to restock…so an expedition was sent out three or four years ago to mine more from Titan’s upper atmosphere. They’re on their way back right now, with gigatonnes of fresh Symbiote. Some of you in this class will be partaking of it. Yes, Jo?”

  Jo was using her Teacher-May-I gesture, I noticed. “Is there, like, a directory of their phone numbers, or what?”

  “You just say, ‘Teena, phone…’ and the name of the Stardancer you want, just like calling anyone else in Top Step. If there are no Stardancers nearby with attention to spare to relay for you, she’ll tell you, and ask if you want her to contact your party directly, by radio. Glenn, what’s bothering you?”

  Glenn did have a frown. “This business of telepathy being instantaneous. It just doesn’t seem natural.”

  “Where you come from, it is not especially natural, occurs rarely and often requires decades of training and practice. Where you are going, it is far more natural than that discarded old habit, breathing.”

  “But everything else in the universe is limited to lightspeed. Why should telepathy be different?”

  “Why should you ask that question?” Reb asked.

  Glenn fell silen
t…but her frown deepened.

  A thin professorial-looking man gestured for attention. “Yes, Vijay?” Reb said.

  “I think I understand Glenn’s dilemma. To be confronted with empirical proof that there is more to reality than the physical universe…how is one supposed to deal with that? It’s—”

  “—terrifying, yes. There might be a God lurking around out there, armed with thunderbolts, demanding insane proofs of love, inventing Purgatories and Hells. There are techniques for helping with that fear. You were taught some back at Suit Camp. Sitting correctly. Breathing correctly. I’ll teach others to you, and they’ll help a lot. But the only way to really beat that fear—or the other, perfectly reasonable fear many of you have, that you’ll lose your ego when you join the Starmind—is to keep on confronting it. If you retreat from it, suppress it, try to put it out of your mind, you make it harder for yourself.” He was looking at Glenn as he said that sentence, and she slowly nodded. Reb smiled. “All right, now we’re going to learn the first technique of Kûkan Zen. Namely, how to sit zazen…in zero gee.”

  “I thought you said, ‘without religion,’” Glenn complained.

  He looked surprised. “But Zen isn’t a religion—not in the usual sense, at least.”

  “It isn’t? I thought it was a sect of Buddhism. Buddhism’s a religion. It’s got monks and temples and doctrines and all of that.”

  Reb nodded. “But it has no dogmas, no articles of faith, no God. It has nothing to do with telling other people how they ought to behave. There has never been a Buddhist holy war…except intellectual war between differing schools of thought. You can be a Catholic Buddhist, a Muslim Buddhist, an atheist Buddhist. So although it may be religious, in the sense that it’s about what’s deepest in us, it’s not a religion.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It is simply an agreement to sit, and look into our actual nature.”

  The very first chapter of Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind concerns correct sitting posture: that should be a clue to how important he considered it.