by Spider
Then everyone but Shara met at the center for a flashing quicksilver quintet, tumbling over one another like kittens in a basket; the music was all tumbling five-note ninth chords.
Finally all six danced together as a single organism, making strange, indescribable geometrical figures in three dimensions. As they danced, the lens filled out, became a sphere, which slowly contracted in on them, thickening and darkening as it came. Before long there was only a nearly opaque glowing red ball of Symbiote, flexing and shifting in time to the racing music. It quivered, trembled—
—then burst apart, becoming six separate Stardancers flying in different directions like a firework detonation. Their thrusters protruded through their individual coatings of Symbiote now, and they used them to put themselves into graceful wide loops, so that they returned to their starting point, missed colliding by inches, and then arced out again. Each had a different-coloured thruster exhaust; comet-tails of red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple attended them as they flew, leaving the afterimage of a multicoloured Christmas ribbon against the star-spangled blackness. The music swelled and soared with them as they danced, spilling trills in all directions to match their thruster spray. Eventually they all came together again in a tight formation like exhibition aircraft, and took turns passing each other back and forth from hand to hand.
There was joy in their dance, and hope, and endless energy, and manifest love for one another; from time to time one or another of them would laugh for sheer pleasure. I found that I was smiling unconsciously as I watched their dance unfold. I sneaked a look at Kirra and Ben; they were smiling too.
There was a short movement in which they were performing a kind of kinesthetic pun, moving mentally as well as physically, passing their selves from one host body to another. I don’t know how many others caught it, but I clearly saw Shara Drummond’s essence change bodies several times. Once or twice I spotted Yakovskaya or McGillicuddy transmigrating too. I think that for a time, the bodies’ original owners were present and dancing as well.
Then Shara was stationary, spinning slowly around her vertical axis, apart from the other five as they continued to interact, watching how their dance changed in her absence; then in a reversed reprise of their solo-to-group progression. Tom dropped out, then Linda, then Charlie, then Norrey. Quintet, quartet, trio, pair, finally Yakovskaya was soloing within a pentagon of stationary spinning companions, and then he too stopped dancing and went into a spin. The music had decayed too, to a single voice, a cello, and the theme it was quoting was not Shara’s signature motif this time, but Kirra’s Song of Polar Orbit.
By some means I didn’t and don’t understand, all six of them began to move relative to one another, around their common center, as though they were jointly orbiting some invisible mini black hole. The orbits tightened inexorably, until they darted like the Firefly aliens themselves, like electrons dancing in mad attendance on some invisible nucleus. Hands met and joined just as the Song of Polar Orbit reached its coda; again they were a six-personed snowflake. Thrusters sprayed coloured fire and smoke, and they became a living, madly spinning Catherine Wheel.
The thrusters went dark, and they were a scarlet pinwheel.
Their Symbiotes merged, and they were a disc again.
A hole appeared in the center, making the disc look for all the world like an old-fashioned phonograph record (all right, I’m dating myself) spinning on a turntable, seen from above. My parents used to own an album like that, red and translucent, a novelty gimmick. The hole enlarged, so that the disc looked like a 45 RPM single; paradoxically its spin slowed rather than speeded up.
Suddenly the disc exuded some of its mass into the hole in the center, where a globe of red Symbiote grew like a pearl forming within an oyster. It moved away from the disc, coming toward us with infinite slowness. Toward Kirra and Ben. As it did so, the disc broke up into six Stardancers again, and they all braked violently to an instant stop, sudden total motionlessness. The music broke like a wave on a shore and faded to silence, the lights went out.
After several seconds of silence, there was wild applause.
Oh, I know I haven’t conveyed it; dance can’t be described. Look it up for yourself, it’s on the Net. Not a major work by any means, but a moving and lyrical piece, just right for a wedding feast and Graduation. I was terribly pleased on Kirra and Ben’s account.
They thanked me lavishly for the gift, and thanked all twelve of the dancers individually. “That was bloody marvelous,” Kirra said. “Morgan, really, it was special!” She was grinning, but her p-suit hood was full of tear-tendrils.
“Just my version of chocolate chip ice cream from Chile,” I said, grinning back at her. Though it marks a much happier occasion than your gift did. Dammit, I was leaking saline worms too.
“We’re deeply honoured,” Ben said. “Our GraduWedding has become part of dance history. Or almost. Get ready, spice, here it comes!”
Their blob of Symbiote was nearly upon them, a bead of God’s blood.
“I’ll sing at your Graduation, Morgan,” Kirra promised me hastily. “Wait an’ see if I don’t! Goodbye—see you soon—cheerio, all! Let’s go meet it, Benjy: one, two, three…”
They jaunted forward together, hit the Symbiote dead center, passed inside it. They stripped quickly, took the communications gear from their p-suits and hung it around their necks, pushed the suits clear of the Symbiote and joined hands. It contracted in upon them and around and through them, and they were two Stardancers, convulsing with their first shock of telepathic onslaught but still holding hands. Their combined shout of exaltation was picked up by their throat mikes and hurled to the stars.
Then they were silent and adrift, marinating in Symbiosis.
The dancers had already begun tiptoeing away on scarlet butterfly wings of lightsail. The show was over.
Reb took my arm, and we all headed back to Top Step.
They phoned me up five or six days later. They were well on their way out to meet the Harvest Crew returning with new Symbiote from Titan, about a day from rendezvous. It was an odd conversation. They both sounded as though they were very drunk or very stoned. Ben commented giddily that space now looked to him just like a newspaper. Black and white and red all over. They both assured me that Symbiosis was glorious, wonderful, not to be missed, but were quite unable to describe it in any more detail than that, at least in words. They did say they had two new senses, as expected, but could not describe or explain them any better than the instructors back at Suit Camp had. Kirra sang me part of a work in progress. The Song of Symbiosis, and made me promise to send a copy of it to Yarra and the Yirlandji people for her. It was terribly beautiful but very strange, haunting and confounding, hinting at things that even music can’t carry. She said she was collaborating on a Song with Raoul (whom she would be physically meeting in only a few more hours), but did not sing any of it for me. I told them my dance was about two-thirds finished, and they both exhorted me to hurry up and complete it so I could come join them. I assured them I was going as fast as I could, especially since I no longer had any close friends inboard to take up my free time. Kirra, pausing to consult some mathematician I didn’t know, worked out that they would in all likelihood be back with the fresh Symbiote just in time for my Graduation. We agreed to meet then, and I was very pleased to know they would be present for my own last breath.
I was hard at work on the piece the next day, had just solved a tricky and hard-to-describe esthetic problem in the third movement, when Teena said, “Morgan, Reb Hawkins needs to speak to you as soon as possible.”
“Put him on,” I said, brushing sweat from my back, and she did. I can’t reproduce the dialogue and won’t try. He told me the news, and I’m sure he did it as compassionately as it could have been done.
Shortly after Ben and Kirra had made rendezvous with the returning Harvest Crew, there had been an unexplained catastrophic explosion, cataclysmic enough to disrupt the entire mass of new Symbiote and kill t
he entire Crew. Raoul Brindle, Ben, Kirra, more than a dozen others, all were dead.
Black and white and red all over.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We die, and we do not die.
—Shunryu Suzuki-roshi,
ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND
THE NEWS ROCKED the Solar System, stunned humans and Stardancers alike.
Credit for the explosion was formally claimed, not by the Gabriel Jihad, but by a much older terrorist group, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. They too were rumored to have ties to the Umayyad Caliphate, though they were based in Trinidad rather than Medina, black Muslims rather than brown. It didn’t seem to make much difference. There was so much outcry and mutual vituperation at the UN that they were forced to suspend all operations of the General Assembly for a week. That didn’t seem to make much difference, either, at least not to those humans in space.
Just how the Jamaat had managed to pull off the bombing, they did not say. Of all the questions the incident raised, that one seemed to me to matter least of all.
But it seemed to fascinate Sulke. “It just couldn’t possibly have been a missile,” she insisted angrily.
We were drinking together in Le Puis, heavily, a few days after the tragedy; I was still in something like a protracted state of shock, and cared not at all for the question, but found myself arguing automatically. “Why not?”
“It’s obvious. Peace missiles only aim down. ASATs only aim sideways, nothing shoots away from Earth except lasers and particle beams, and the biggest one there is would have to have been focused on the Symbiote for nearly an hour to burst it. But it was an instantaneous blam.”
“Anything with a power plant could be a big slow bomb.”
“Self-propelling hardware in space is very carefully monitored, for pretty obvious reasons. There just isn’t anything missing. And besides, if something had left its usual orbit and headed out of cislunar space, it would have been tracked by the Space Command. The screens prove no artifact ever approached the new Symbiote. The Chinese have got some scientific stuff vectoring around out in that general direction, but not within a hundred thousand klicks of the spot where the explosion took place, and they couldn’t have fired off anything big enough to make that big a bang without being seen.”
Janani Luwum, a huge First-Monther truckdriver from Uganda, was at the next table, near enough to eavesdrop, and wedged himself into the conversation. “I don’t understand the ambiguity. Wasn’t the new Symbiote itself being tracked?”
“Yes,” Sulke agreed, “but not very closely or carefully. It wasn’t doing anything interesting. They would have started paying more attention in a few days when deceleration began, but as things stand we have nothing better than automatic radar tracking at poor resolution.”
“Then you don’t know that there was no incoming missile: you only infer it.”
“From goddam good evidence,” she insisted. “Anything on a closing course would have triggered alarms. That aside, the Stardancers present would have noticed it coming, with that weird radar sense of theirs, and tapes of radio transmissions and reports from Stardancers who were in rapport at the time show no one was expecting trouble right up to the second it went off.”
“Christ,” Janani said, “I wonder what that must be like: being in telepathic rapport with someone while they’re blown to pieces.”
“I don’t know,” Sulke said with a shudder, “but I hear they have more than fifty new catatonics to try and heal.”
“Those were not the first Stardancers ever to die,” Janani’s lover Henning Fragerhøi pointed out.
“No, there’ve been half a dozen accidental deaths since the first Symbiosis,” Sulke said. “But never before have so many died, so suddenly, so savagely. No Stardancer was ever murdered before.”
“But how can you be sure it was murder?” Janani said. “You just finished proving there was no shot fired.”
“That’s right—but there was nothing along with them that could possibly have blown up like that. Nothing but Stardancers and Symbiote.”
“Well, then,” I said, tired of all the chattering, “it didn’t happen. That’s a relief. Thanks, Sulke. Can we get back to some serious drinking, now? Hey, Fat! Oh shit, I mean ‘Pål’. Hey, Pål, we need more balls over here.” We were able to get shitfaced in Le Puis because Fat Humphrey was not on duty; it was said that he’d been locked in his own quarters, drinking himself into a coma, since the disaster had happened. He had loved Kirra almost as much as I had. And he had been a personal friend of Raoul—had been there the day Raoul joined the newly formed Stardancers Incorporated, twenty years before. His relief bartender Pål Bøgeberg didn’t seem to much care if the customers got drunk enough to riot; he brought the balls of booze I ordered without protest.
“It fucking well happened, all right,” Sulke said. “But there’s only one fucking way in the System it could have happened.”
“Spontaneous combustion,” I said sourly, and sucked a great gulp of gin.
“Stalking horse,” she said, and squeezed a stream of gin at her own mouth, catching it with the panache of a longtime free fall lush.
“I don’t understand,” said Henning, for whom English was a second language. “‘Stocking hose’?”
“Stalking horse. A living mine. One of those Stardancers was boobytrapped. And since they were all telepathic, it had to have been done without their knowledge. Just how it was done, I can’t imagine. My best guess is some kind of very tiny dart carrying seed nanoreplicators. It penetrated somebody’s Symbiote without them noticing, somehow, and then the sneaky little nanoreps used that body’s own materials to construct a bomb. As soon as it was big enough, blooey!”
“More likely the Symbiote itself was injected somehow,” Janani said. “Enough matter there for a really big bomb, without the risk its host would notice it growing. Stardancers monitor their own bodies pretty closely, control even the unconscious systems and so forth: you’d think they’d notice a tumor large enough to explode with so much force.”
“Either could be true,” Sulke said. “There was a helluva lot of Symbiote, but it’s made up of the wrong chemicals to make a really powerful bomb easily, and you’d see discoloration as it formed. But I’ve read in spy thrillers that nanoreplicators could synthesize a very powerful explosive from the materials in an ordinary human body, without disturbing any essential function. It could be hidden in the one large part of the body a Stardancer never pays any attention to.”
“Where’s that?”
“The lungs. Plenty of room, and all the nerves to that area are switched off permanently at Symbiosis, to keep you from panicking when you stop breathing for good.”
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake,” I cried, horrified by the mental picture of death coalescing around someone’s living heart while they jaunted along oblivious.
“The only thing I don’t get is why whoever it was didn’t notice the injection. The seed would have to have mass enough to be perceptible, be at least as big as a pinhead—and Stardancers notice collisions with objects that big. They have to, they live in a world of micrometeorites.”
“If the subject is not changed in the next sentence spoken, I am going to squirt the rest of this gin in your eye,” I said, and held it up threateningly. Sulke was not an easy drunk to intimidate, but maybe there was something in my voice. Her next sentence was a non sequitur that started a different argument, about who was really behind the bombing. It wasn’t a true change of subject, but I let it go.
I don’t remember much of the rest of that night, and what I remember of the next day doesn’t bear repeating. I spent most of it in my sleepsack, moaning, with an icepack at the back of my neck—or rather, shuttling back and forth between there and the john. After an endless time of misery I decided I needed to sweat the pain out of me, and went to my studio.
There I found that my thoughts danced and whirled more than my body ever could.
Sick of this goddam piece. Sick of everything I can think
of. Not one close friend left anywhere in the Solar System. More than forty-three thousand new lovers waiting to marry me, but not one goddam friend. Reb’ll be on my back any time now; I’ve cut classes for three days straight. Probably not the only one. Fuck it, there’s nothing more they can teach me now that I need to know. Only thing holding me back is this goddam dance, and I wish I’d never started the frigging thing. Hadn’t been so busy and distracted with it, self-involved, I might have put together a stronger thing with Robert. Jesus, my back hurts. Been hurting quite a bit lately; snuck up on me. Old injury trying to make a comeback. Repair it myself once I eat the Big Red Jell-O. Unless somebody injects me with a teeny little bomb factory. Or already has. No, I’d have noticed. Or would I? Apparently somebody failed to notice it being done to them. How the hell could that be? How do you introduce something the size of a pinhead into someone’s body without them noticing? Slip it in their soup? Awful chancey—might leave the wrong few drops in the container. Aerosol spray? No, the victim might choke on the thing. Damn, that knee’s starting to twinge a bit too. Or am I imagining it? Oh, God damn it all. Everything, everything, everything falling apart at once. Friends gone, lover gone, never again the joyous invasion of my—
I cried out.
“Are you all right, Morgan?” Teena asked with concern.
“Absolutely wonderful,” I snarled.
She was sharp enough to detect pain in a human voice, but not subtle enough for sarcasm. “Sorry I disturbed you.”
“Privacy, Teena. Switch off. Butt out!”
“Yes, Morgan,” she said, and was gone, her monitors on me shut off until I called her again.
I tried to vomit, but there was nothing left in my system to expel. The new thought in my brain was so monstrous, so unthinkable, I wanted to spew it out of me like poison food, but I could find no way to do so even symbolically. I was suffused with horror. I curled up into a fetal ball, trembling violently.
