by Spider
“What exactly do you mean by ‘destroy’?” a woman named Nicole asked. I thought: what a dumb question.
Reb brightened. “A good question.”
“I think so,” Nicole agreed. “I know the odds of failure—I passed the exam like everybody. One percent of those who enter Symbiosis suffer what they called ‘catastrophic mental trauma.’ But I don’t know what that means. I mean, they explained it to me back dirtside—but I need somebody to explain the explanation. Can somebody’s mind really…well, collapse, from having forty thousand other minds suddenly crash in on it?”
There was nervous laughter.
Reb did not smile. “Sometimes,” he said.
The laughter died.
“Those forty thousand minds do not all come crashing in at once…but the significance of their existence does. Some minds find that intolerable.”
“What happens to them?” Nicole asked.
“What happens when a star implodes?” Reb replied.
“Depends on how massive it is,” someone said.
Reb nodded. “It is much the same with a panicked ego. Whether it can survive telepathic union depends on how massive it is.”
“How do you mean?”
“Think of a mind which has never loved,” Reb said. “It knows that it is the center of the Universe, the only thing that is truly real, that matters. Then its body swallows some mysterious red gunk, and WHACK! Suddenly it knows better. The walls of its skull drop away; for the first time ever, it is naked. Observed…no, more; touched…in its most intimate chinks and crannies by forty thousand strangers. Mind sees Starmind, and knows its own true smallness. By all accounts it is a terrifying realization.”
This was exactly what I had been trying to imagine for weeks. Could I live with that much truth? Did I have the courage to be that naked? To let that big audience come swarming over the stage?
“Now sometimes an ego is so entrenched in itself that it refuses to yield the floor, will not love nor be loved. It rejects what it perceives—incorrectly—as a threat to its identity. Mad with fear, it seeks escape, and there is nowhere to go but inward. It implodes like a collapsing star, literally an ego deflating. Most often it shrinks down to a small hard dense core, like a neuron star. Invisible. Invulnerable. It must hurt terribly. Such catatonics can sometimes be saved, healed. With time. With skill. Many wise and compassionate minds work nonstop to do so; so far they have a discouraging success rate.”
He had our total attention.
“But once in a long while, an imploding star is so massive, it collapses past the point where it can exist. It leaves our Universe, becomes a black hole. Similarly, if an ego is massive enough, it may react to telepathic union by collapsing past the point where it can sustain itself. It suicides rather than surrender. It simply…goes away. The flame blows out. You could say it dies. What is left is a very long-lived humanoid with the mind of a plant or a starfish. These few are placed in stable orbits, and they are. . .” He paused. “Uh, ‘cherished’ is closer than ‘mourned,’ I think. By the rest of the Starmind.”
“What’s the ratio of deaths to comas?” Nicole asked.
“About one to a hundred. Roughly the same as the overall ratio of failures to successes.”
You could hear gears grinding as she tried to work out the arithmetic. Several seconds passed. “So out of every thousand people who eat red—”
“Out of every ten thousand who attempt Symbiosis, ninety-nine will go into stasis, and one will die,” he told her. “Approximately. In fact there have been eight deaths, and five hundred and eighty-seven catatonics, of whom fifty-three have been healed so far…and an additional six have died.”
There was a glutinous silence in the room.
Not that many of us, or even any of us, were surprised. Nicole may have been the only person in the room to whom these figures were news. I certainly knew them; it seemed to me that anyone who had come this far without knowing them was an idiot. But they were sobering statistics just the same.
And, it was just dawning on me for the first time that the Starmind, as Reb called it, the telepathic community I was proposing to join, did not discriminate against people I considered idiots. I was dismayed by how dismayed that made me. Me, an intellectual snob? Apparently.
“Look on the bright side,” Reb said. “You are five hundred times more likely to die during training, before you ever get to Symbiosis. Die completely, soul and body, in some EVA accident. And you’re two hundred times more likely to suffer serious mental breakdown and be sent dirtside.”
Now, there were some grim figures. Out of every hypothetical standard class of one hundred, an average of five died before ever attempting Symbiosis…and two went seriously nuts from brooding about it. I’d read about one class, back in the early days of Top Step, where nearly half had died, most of them in a single ghastly accident.
Then there was the drop-out rate to be considered. An average of twelve in every class changed their minds and went home—often at the last minute. Another five balked: when three months were up, they decided not to decide. The Foundation would let you hang around Top Step as long as you wanted…if you were willing to work for your air, and had a job skill they needed at the time. After eleven more months—if you were still alive—your body was permanently, irrevocably adapted to zero gee: you had to either sign on with the Foundation permanently—if they would have you—or else become part of the permanent-transient population of spacers, like Sulke. Or, of course, get off the dime and eat Symbiote.
“But if you survive long enough to attempt Symbiosis,” Reb went on, “your chances of success are much higher than those of, say a pregnant woman to birth successfully. The kind of mind that will collapse when exposed to telepathy tends not to come here to Top Step at all. Either it never applies, or we filter it out in the preselection stage, or it drops out during Suit Camp.”
“So why go through two or three months of preparation?” Nicole asked. “I read that some people have become Stardancers without it.”
“Because experience has shown it eases the transition,” Reb said patiently. “At best, Symbiosis is painful…one Stardancer likened it to a turtle having its shell ripped away…but those who have had the training agree it helps enormously. If you can learn to live without the false distinctions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ you probably can learn to live with the equally false distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘not-me.’”
“So why so much free time, why aren’t we working all the time?” Nicole wanted to know.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nicole!” Glenn blurted. By this time I was so annoyed with Nicole’s broken-record questioning myself that I grunted in agreement.
Reb looked at me. “You cannot think Nicole’s question is foolish, Morgan. You asked it yourself a minute ago.”
You blush easier in free fall, and more spectacularly.
“But it is foolish, nonetheless,” he went on gently. “You are working all the time, Nicole. Everyone is, everyone everywhere. You can’t help but keep working. Didn’t you know that?”
She looked confused.
“Nicole, I could have uncommon intuition and insight, and spend every minute of the next two months in your company, and still I would not know a tenth as much as you do about what you need to learn now, and what is the best way for you to learn it. Even Fat Humphrey’s kind of ‘telepathy’ doesn’t go that deep. That’s why we try to make sure you’ll have lots of so-called ‘free’ time here, to work on it without being distracted. There isn’t a lot of time left before you will have to make a big decision, and we don’t want your schooling to get in the way of your education.”
“But what are we supposed to do with all this free time?”
“You will know,” Reb told her. “You will know.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the ordinary man attains knowledge
He is a sage;
When the sage attains understanding
He is an ordinary man.
—Zen
koan
I CERTAINLY KNEW what to do with my time. Each night Robert tutored me for an hour, then I spent the rest of the evening dancing in private until I couldn’t move anymore. I hadn’t worked so hard in years. But my back and knees continued to hold up, thanks to free fall…and as the days turned into weeks, I began to get somewhere. By the end of the second week I could do a fair imitation of Liberation, and I could quote sections of Mass Is a Verb. More important, I was making some progress on a new piece of my own. Choreography had never been my strong suit—but there was something about zero gee that made it come easier. I still wasn’t ready to show anything to an audience, but I was content to be making progress, however slow it might be. I had thought, for an endless time, that I was finished as a dancer. It was like a miracle, like being reborn, to get another chance; there was no hurry. I luxuriated in each painful minute.
Ben and Kirra knew what to do with their time too—and I don’t just mean making love. Ben did not fully acquire all the fundamentals of jaunting in two days—much less the fine points—but he did become the star pupil in our shift, and under his tutelage Kirra too became something of prodigy. They progressed just as fast in morning class, learning less tangible skills like spherical thinking, spatial orientation and conscious control of their own metabolisms and mental states. By the third week Reb admitted that they were good enough to start EVA instruction right away…but the system wasn’t set up to allow it, and they stayed behind with the rest of us dummies, serving as assistant instructors in Sulke’s class. (And, at Reb’s insistence, getting paid for doing so. They both donated their unwanted salaries to the Distressed Spacer’s Fund, which made Sulke happy.)
Robert was almost as adept when he arrived as Ben became, but seemed disinterested in teaching the group. He spent most of his free time, according to Ben, designing free fall structures on his computer terminal in his room. I rarely saw him in Le Puis. Occasionally I ran across him in Sol Three. He was always by himself. We would chat quietly, then part. Part of me had hoped that he’d take me off the hook by becoming involved with some other woman. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had; most of our fellow students seemed to be pairing up. He continued to tutor me every night, without pressing me for further intimacy. We remained aware of each other, slowly building a charge.
It had been a long time since a man had courted me with that kind of mixture of determination and patience. I liked it.
According to Teena, our class had one of the most painless, trouble-free Postulancies in the history of Top Step. Only three of us dropped out and went back to Earth during the first two weeks (all three for the most common of reasons: persistent inability to tolerate a nonlinear environment, to live without up and down). None of us got so crazy that we had to be sent home. None of us died, or sustained serious injuries. There were no incidents of violence, even on the level of a fistfight. Six of us got married—all at once, to each other. (Ben and Kirra were that kind of committed, but never bothered with any formal ceremony or celebration.) All of us formed friendships, which expanded in informal affinity groups, which somehow did not become exclusionary cliques. Dorothy Gerstenfeld logged an all-time record minimum of complaints and emergencies. As Reb said one day, smiling his Buddha smile, “Good fellowship seems to be metastasizing.” People who wanted them gravitated to temple or zendo or shrink or encounter group or whatever it took to ease their pain or enhance their mindfulness, and Le Puis became the first bar I’d ever seen that rarely seemed to have anything but happy drunks.
All this was in sorry contrast to the planet we orbited. From the great window in Sol Three, Earth looked peaceful, serene. But we all followed Earthside news, and knew just what an anthill in turmoil it really was. That was the month that China and Argentina were making war noises, and none of the other major players could figure out which side to back. For one three-day period we honestly thought they might start setting off Big Ones down there at any moment. Who really knew whether the UN-SDI net would actually work? One afternoon when I was meditating in Sol Three I mistook a sudden flare of reflected sunlight off Mar Chiquita, a huge Argentinian lake, for a nuke signature—just for an instant, but it was a scary instant.
I was surprised to find that political upheaval on Earth did not carry over to Top Step. We had several ethnic Chinese besides Robert in our class, and close to a hundred inboard altogether, as well as an equal number of Hispanophones and four actual Argentinians. (One of the three Suit Camps was located in Ecuador.) If there was ever so much as a harsh word exchanged among any of them, I didn’t hear about it—and any space habitat has a grapevine that verges on telepathy.
I did some reading, guided by Teena, and learned that from the very beginnings of space exploration, spacers have always tended to feel themselves literally above the petty political squabbles of the groundhogs below. Immigrants to a new country can continue to cling to their ethnic or national or religious identity for a generation or two, but immigrants to space quite often seem to leave theirs on the launchpad. And Stardancer-candidates have even less reason to get agitated about the doings of nations than most spacers. In a matter of weeks, we’d all be surrendering our passports.
As for myself, I’d never felt especially patriotic about being a Canadian. But then, that was a notorious characteristic of most Canadians. The only thing we were proud of was not being Americans.
We all followed Earth news…but even as the drama below us began to get dangerously interesting, it became less and less relevant to us. We spent less and less time watching Earth in Sol Three. We retained concern for the suffering of human beings—but for humans as a species: the labels and abstractions they used to separate themselves seemed more and more absurd.
We weren’t spacers yet. But we were no longer Terrans.
By the end of the third week, Reb and Sulke between them had brought us former groundhogs to the point where we could not only stand to be in the dark in zero gee, but could navigate reliably in darkness.
Do you have any idea how incredibly far that was?
One of the first humans ever to live in space, a member of the Skylab crew, woke one night to find that the light in his sleeping compartment had failed. That compartment compared with a coffin for roominess. He knew exactly where the switch for the emergency backup lighting was located. It took him nearly half an hour to find it, half an hour on the trembling verge of fullblown panic. And he was a hypertrained jock. The first time Reb doused the lights, for not more than a minute, the classroom rang with screams, and about a third of us ended up having to go change our clothes. In the total absence of either visual or kinesthetic cues, your hindbrain decides that the sensation of falling is literal truth, and you just come unstuck. All the rational thought in the world doesn’t help. You clutch the first wall or structure or person you encounter like a panicking drowner, and hang on for dear life, heart hammering. Five of us dropped out that night.
But methodical disciplines of breath-control and muscle-control and self-hypnosis do help, and practice helps most of all. Once you get past the terror part, the disorientation diminishes quickly. We played orientation and navigation games. For instance: three of you crawl along the walls of the classroom in the dark, humming to each other, until your ears tell you that you’re all roughly equidistant in the spherical room; then you jaunt for where you think the center of the room is, and try to meet your mates there…ideally without cracking your skull or putting someone’s eye out. It was fun, once we all started getting good at it.
And it took us that last step toward being comfortable without even an imaginary local vertical. We lost our tendency to line up with whomever we were talking to or working with, and started living three-dimensionally without having to make a mental effort.
And that started to affect us all in subtle psychological ways, broadening us, opening us up, undoing other sorts of equally rigid preconceptions about the universe. Up/down may be the first dichotomy a baby perceives (even before self/notse
lf), the beginning of duality, or either/or, yes/no logic. Hierarchy depends on the words “high” and “low” having meaning. Floating free of gravity is just as exhilarating in space as it is in dreams, and constant exhilaration can help solve a lot of human problems. The therapeutic value of skydiving has long been known, and we never had to snap out of the reverie and pull our ripcords.
One by one, we became more pleasant people to be with than we had been back on terra firma. Glenn, for instance, lost a great deal of her dogmatism, became more flexible, started making friendships with people she had considered airheads back in Suit Camp. Eventually she even lost the frown that had seemed her natural expression.
Yes, it was our time of Leavetaking, of saying goodbye to our earthly lives, and yes, some of it was spent in solemn meditation in Solarium or zendo or chapel or temple. But the solemnity was balanced by an equal and opposite quantum of gaiety.
Dorothy Gerstenfeld had been right, back on that first day: zero gee tended to make us childlike again in significant ways. We were doing some of the same sort of metaprogramming that a small child does—redoing it, really, with different assumptions—and do you remember how much fun it was being a small child?
We had the kind of late-night bull sessions I hadn’t had with anyone since college, full of flat-out laughter and deep-down tears, like kids around an eternal campfire with all the grownups gone to bed.
There are so many games you can play in zero gee. Acrobatics; spherical handball, billiards, and tennis; monkey bars; tag…the list is endless. Even a moderately good frisbee thrower becomes a prodigy. You’d be astonished how many solid hours of entertainment you can get from a simple glass of water, coaxing it into loops and ropes and bubbles and lenses with the help of surface tension. A man named Jim Bullard devised a marvelous game involving a hollow ball within which a small quantity of mercury floated free, causing it to wobble unpredictably in flight; in gravity it would have just been a nuisance, but in zero gee it was an almost-alive antagonist. I used my Canadian background to invent one of my own: 3-D curling. The idea was to scale pucks so gently that air resistance caused them to come to rest in an imaginary sphere in the center of the room, while knocking away your opponent’s pucks. Your teammate tried to help by altering the puck’s trajectory inflight with a small compressed-air pen—with strictly limited air which had to last him the whole round. As in curling, it took forever to find out how good your shot was…and you all had to keep moving while you waited, since the room’s air-circulation had to be shut off. Robert and I teamed up at it and soon were beating all corners. Ben invented a three-dimensional version of baseball—but it was so complicated that he never managed to teach it to enough people to get a game going. With assistance from Teena, Kirra actually managed to locate a piece of genuine wood somewhere inboard (at a guess, I’d say there isn’t enough real wood in all of space to build a decent barn; even the legendary Shimizu Hotel uses a superb fake), and borrowed tools to work it from one of the construction gangs who daily burrowed ever deeper into the rock heart of Top Step. When she was done, she got permission from Chief Administrator Mgabi, and took her creation down to the Great Hall. A small crowd went along to watch. She tested the breeze, locked her feet under a handrail to steady herself, and threw the thing with considerable care and skill. That boomerang was still circling the Hall when she reached out and caught it three hours later. I wanted her to let it keep going, but she and I and the volunteers at the major tunnel mouths who kept passing pedestrians from jaunting out into the thing’s flight path all had to get to class.
