by Spider
“Why not? What could the two species possibly compete for?”
“Nothing at all. And everything. That’s the point. Here below we scurry about like blind rats in a two-dimensional maze, hungry and thirsty and horny and terrified and alone, fighting like rats for food and power and breeding room and a chance to live before we die. And right over our heads, at the literal top of the hierarchy, there fly the angels, free of everything that plagues us, needing nothing, fearing nothing, looking down with fond amusement at our ape antics. Of course I hate them. Who would not?”
“For God’s sake, this planet would have gone to pieces years ago if it weren’t for—”
“And that too is the point. It would be bad enough if they kept themselves aloof, ignored us in our misery—but how can we not resent their monstrous charity? How long can the human race stand playing the role of the idiot nephew who must be cared for by his betters, the welfare client who has nothing conceivable to offer his benefactors in return? The racial psychic damage which that awareness causes is half the reason the world is so close to hysteria, so angry and self-destructive.”
“So you want to exterminate the hand that feeds you.”
“It may come to that,” he agreed. “Sometimes I think that it might be enough to drive them from human space, to force them far above or below the ecliptic or out beyond Mars where we don’t have to keep seeing them and interacting with them, take their damned Promised Land off somewhere where we don’t have to look at it every day, right overhead, just out of reach.”
“But it’s not out of reach—”
“Oh shit, it is too! If all the Chinese in the world lined up at Suit Camps, how long would it take the last one to pass Top Step? Assuming a sufficient mass of Symbiote could be brought to orbit without pulling Luna out of its track.”
“If the world wanted to, it could build more Suit Camps.”
“And it doesn’t. Most of us know in our guts that Stardancers are just plain inhuman. They’re alien. They’re like ants. They’re a hive-mind. They’re our enemy, and they’ll be a damned hard one to beat.”
“But why do they have to be enemies?”
“Morgan, think, won’t you? Think about that hive-mind. That ‘Starmind.’ I know they breed like hamsters up there, but even after twenty years of it, well over half the minds that make up what they call the Starmind started out as human beings, on Earth, yes?”
“Exactly. They’re our brothers and sisters, or at least our cousins.”
“And how many million years old would you say is the human lust for power? For control? For dominance?”
“But there’s none of that in the Starmind.”
“Exactly. What can ‘power’ mean to a member of a telepathic commune? What is there to control? By what means can dominance be asserted? Mental machinery that has served men for countless generations is useless.” He leaned forward and locked eyes with me. “But I ask you to consider this: that a telepathic group consciousness implies a group subconscious too. Submerged in that Starmind are the instincts of thousands of killer apes, the genetic heritage of the most successful predator ever evolved. Maybe competition and aggression aren’t inherited, maybe they’re not instinct but learned behaviour transmitted to each new generation—maybe the Stardancers born in space, who’ve never known want or fear or envy, are gentle creatures, without the Mark of Cain. But the majority of the Starmind comes from a long line of cutthroats. Human beings weren’t built for Utopia, no matter what weird things may happen to their metabolisms. They know the only thing they could possibly need to fear, must fear, is us, is the rage and envy of the irrational human beings they have to share the Solar System with. They know a clash is inevitable one day, and they’re doing their best to see that they’ll win it. By creating a planet full of helpless welfare dependents. By showering us with gifts that lead us to a place where we need their gifts to survive. They’ve read their Sun Tzu. Don’t you see, they’re killing us with kindness!”
I closed my eyes briefly. I remembered one of my old dance-circle acquaintances, an intellectual snob, a sort of Alexander Woolcott/H.L. Mencken/Oscar Wilde wanna-be, saying, when he heard I was about to go to Top Step, “Stardancers? A society with no corruption, no hypocrisy, no neurosis and total respect for art—and worst of all, they’re willing to let me join? How could I not despise them?” And I had laughed with the others, but privately thought he was a cripple, seeking approval of his deformity.
I felt a sense of unreality, a Through-the-Looking-Glass feeling. In my wildest fantasies of this moment, it had gone much like this, with Robert calmly, rationally explaining why he had blown our friends to plasma. Why is he telling me all this? Surely to God he does not expect that I will nod and say, Damn, you’re right, I hadn’t thought it through, Kirra and Ben just got in the line of fire, guess you can’t make an interplanetary omelet without breaking some eggs, what can I do to help fight the menace of gods who have the nerve to be benevolent?
I met his eyes again. “So you acted selflessly. For the good of humanity.”
He didn’t even shrug. “Of course not. Am I a Stardancer? I acted out of intelligent self-interest, like any sane human.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “If our plans bear fruit, the least of the prizes to be won will be my father’s return from exile to unchallenged power over China.”
“So you put death in Kirra’s sweet mouth.” I slid the Gyrojet from the handbag. My thumb caressed the safety catch. Four darts. One for him, one for me, two surplus.
“Morgan, listen to me: for the first time in human history, total planetary domination is a genuine possibility—and it’s only the first step in the forging of a System-wide empire. The tools are nearly at hand! How many lives, how many betrayals is that worth?”
His eyes were boring into mine. “I have a gun aimed at your belly, Chen Po Chang,” I said softly. I hadn’t meant to warn him.
“I know,” he said just as quietly. “But you’re not ready to use it yet.”
“No. No, I’m not. First I want to know why you’re telling me such weighty secrets. Do you think you can persuade me to join you?”
He hesitated before answering. “No. I wish I could. But you’re a romantic. Because Stardancers look like angels, they must be angels. There’s not enough greed in you for your own good.” He looked bleak. “Oh, but I wish I could!”
“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. A woman at an adjacent table looked round; I lowered my voice again. “What the hell do you care? One day you’ll be Emperor of the Galaxy and you can have the hottest concubines your precious race can produce. I’m a broken down forty-six-year-old has-been dancer you screwed for a few weeks once on assignment.”
This was why I wasn’t ready to shoot him yet. Or at least part of it. I needed to know what, if anything, I had been to him.
For the first time his iron control cracked. Pain showed in his eyes. He looked down at the table. “Screwing you was good cover. You were my target’s roommate. Falling in love with you was stupid. So I was stupid.” He finished his Irish coffee in a single gulp. “I was horrified at how hard it was to leave you. That terrorist bombing was the perfect excuse to cut out, just when I needed it…and it took me half an hour to make up my mind to take advantage of it. I knew there was no way I could take you with me—but it killed me to leave you behind. When I heard your voice on the phone, realized you were here on Earth again, there was a whole five or ten seconds there when I…when I…”
“When you got a hard on, wondering how I am in a gravity field. But now you know I know you for what you are, and how I feel about your cause. So I repeat: why are you admitting everything and telling me your secrets? You have a gun on me too, is that it?”
He shook his head. “I’m unarmed. And no one else will try to kill you. That much influence I have.” He ran a hand nervously through his hair, brushing it back from his eyes, a gesture he’d never had in free fall. “I guess I’m telling you…because I have to. Because I wante
d you to know.”
“Pardon me,” a kindly voice said.
A large heavily bearded stranger in a charcoal grey suit was standing at my side, hearty and jovial and avuncular. If they ever remade Miracle on 34th Street with an all-Asian cast, he’d be a finalist for the role of Kris Kringle. “I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing you…but are you Morgan McLeod, the dancer?”
I had danced in San Francisco hundreds of times, had actually achieved more fame here than in Vancouver, where I was “only a local.” “Yes, but I’m afraid this isn’t a good—”
“I won’t disturb you. But please—would you?” He held out a scrap of paper and a pen. “Your work with Morris meant a lot to me.”
The quickest way to get rid of him was to indulge him. I left the Gyrojet on my lap, concealed by the handbag, and signed the stupid autograph. As I handed it back, he took my hand, bent to kiss it—and just as he did so, he turned my hand over, so that instead of kissing the back of it, his full warm moist lips pressed my palm. I felt his tongue flicker momentarily between them. It was an odd, vaguely erotic thing for a man his age to do, with an escort sitting right there across from me. I retrieved my hand hastily. “Thank you very much; you’re very kind. Please excuse us.”
“Of course, Ms. McLeod. Thank you. I have always loved your work.” He turned away.
I turned back to Robert. No, to Po Chang. “All right,” I tried to say to him, “Now I know. Now what?”
It came out, “All eyes down the put go, legs. Blower?”
I blinked and tried again. “Didn’t dog core stable imagine? Both pressure.”
A zipper appeared under his Adam’s apple. It peeled down to his diaphragm, splitting his sternum and spreading his ribs, exposing his pink wet chest cavity. A tiny Negro in a clown suit was clinging desperately to the top of his heart, fighting to stay aboard as it beat and surged beneath him. As I watched, fascinated, he managed to get to his feet and wedge himself into equilibrium between the lungs. He opened a door in the left lung and showed me something awful inside. I turned away in shame. The stranger was still standing there, but he stood ten meters tall now on rippling rainbow legs. His beard was made of worms. I knew he wanted to see me dance, but there wasn’t enough room on the table and the damned local vertical kept changing and there weren’t enough pens.
A little corner of my mind, way in the back, understood what was happening. I had forgotten that these people could kill with their kiss.
Chen Po Chang’s voice came from the far side of the universe, metallic and atonal. “The first one was just chemical. Call it truth serum. But the second one was a nanobandit.”
I reached for my lap, and it wasn’t where I had left it. Everything I found seemed to bend in the wrong directions; some of it felt wet and some of it was sticky to my questing fingers.
“Absorbed through the palm,” he was saying, “one heartbeat to the brain, another second to crack the blood-brain barrier, then it starts secreting.”
I had to find my lap—that was where I had left my gum! Gum? That wasn’t right. Gub? I couldn’t read my own goddamn handwriting. Where the hell was my fucking p-suit? Mist was closing in from all sides—
I beat at the mist, fought for control of my mind. I knew what I had to do. It was necessary to yell as loud and as clearly as possible, “Help me! I have been drugged and they’re going to take me out of here and kill me.” My old friend the waiter would then come and slap them both to death. My body was made of taffy, but I summoned all my will, directed all my desperate energy to making my mouth and tongue firm enough to function, obedient to my command.
“Productive marbles. Didn’t to bite wonder-log with it, the palaces. Curt! Curt!”
The waiter was back. There were four of him. “I’m very sorry, sir,” they all said slyly. “She had quite a few of those Irish coffees before you arrived. Maybe you’d better take her home. Can I call you a cab?”
“No, thank you,” Kris Kringle said. “We have a car outside. We’ll get her home.”
“Both of you? My.” Four eyebrows arched.
“Gunders,” I said, smiling to show I was in mortal danger. “S’ab.”
“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Robert/Po Chang said. His chest was closed up again now, but his face was melting. Never a dull moment with Chen Po Chang. It ran down his chest and formed an oily pool on the table. I tilted my head to see my reflection in it, and suddenly the local gravity changed. The spaceplane was taking evasive action. “Down” was that way. No, that way! No—
Lap dissolve.
Horrid dreams, that went on forever. My body was made of putty, which I twisted into the ugliest shapes I could devise. I butchered an infant, grew an enormous steel penis and raped a child, skinned and ate a living cat, burned a city, strangled a bird, poisoned a planet, masturbated with someone’s severed hand, stepped on a galaxy out of sheer malice, gutted God, gathered everything anywhere that had ever been good or beautiful and defecated on it. My laughter killed flowers, my gaze boiled steel, my touch made the Sun grow cold. I tortured my parents to death, brought them back to life and killed them again, and again, and again. I danced on Grandmother’s face with razor feet for days on end. Throughout all this, horrid little things with leathery wings at the edges of my peripheral vision watched and chittered and cheered me on. A snail kept oozing past, leaving a greasy trail, offering arch aphorisms in a language I could almost understand. My old shrink Alma appeared once, in a hockey uniform, and told me that my trouble was I kept everyone at arm’s length; I needed to open up and let someone love me. I vomited acid on her until she went away, and then cried carbonated tears.
Peace came at last, when the last star in the Universe burned out and the blessed darkness fell all around, like warm black snow in summer.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blessed abodes,
Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods…
—Pope, Essay on Man
A SWITCH WAS thrown and I was awake. My mind was clear, and my body was its normal shape and consistency. There was an insistent ringing in my ears, but otherwise reality seemed real again. The leather-winged things were gone. I was very glad of that.
I was sitting in a chair. I was naked. My bearded Chinese uncle was looking at me from half a meter away, clinical curiosity on his face. “Can you hear me all right?” he asked.
Lie. “Yes,” I said. Okay, you can’t lie. More of that truth drug shit. Keep trying. Meanwhile, can you move?
“The neuroscrambler should have largely dismantled itself by now. How do you feel?”
Yes, but without precision. So don’t try any more now. “As if I were in free fall. Or wrapped in cotton.” It was true. I felt light as a feather. I seemed to be sitting in a chair, involuntarily I gripped it to keep from drifting away.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Yes.”
“You may ask them.”
“Is there a bomb in me?”
“No. A single detonation was both necessary and sufficient.”
“Why am I still alive?”
“I must know exactly what you know, and what you have done about it. You’ve already told me of the letter you left for your teacher, and I know your security code. But before I send an erasure command after the letter, I want to know exactly what it says.”
I started to recite the letter verbatim; after a few sentences he cut me off. “This will take forever. I have it: ask me any questions you still have about our activities. The gaps in your knowledge will define what you know. And you will have the comfort of dying with no unanswered questions, a rare blessing. It is safe enough: I know you are not wired in any way. What would you like to know?”
I tried prioritizing my questions, but couldn’t make them hold still. All over my body and brain, switches were hanging open, wires were
cut. My mental thumb was mashed down on the panic button, but somewhere between there and my adrenal glands a line was down. In fact, the whole limbic system seemed to be down; my emotions were nothing more than opinions, with no power to command my body. My heart wasn’t even pounding particularly hard. I picked a question at random, sent a yapping dog to cut it out of the herd, and stampeded it toward Uncle Santa.
“Are you Chen Hsi-Feng?”
Why do they say, the corners of his mouth turned up? They don’t, you know; they just get farther apart and grow parentheses. “Ah, excellent: you are not certain. Yes, I am Chen Hsi-Feng.”
“Where are we?” Now there was a stupid, irrelevant question. What the hell difference could it make? Pick a better one next time.
“In one of my homes. Near Carmel, if it matters to you.”
I had been in Carmel once, on my way somewhere else. Down the coast from San Francisco. Upper-class stronghold; high fences and killer dogs; Clint Eastwood had once been Sheriff there or something. Estates big enough and private enough to hold a massacre without disturbing the neighbors.
“How come you do your own hatchetwork? If I were you, I’d be about eight layers of subordinates away, playing golf in some public place.”
He shook his head. “Your grasp of tactics is thirty years out of date. Multilayer insulation was indeed useful in conspiracy or fraud for centuries: before a fallible lazy human investigator could work his way to the top of the chain he was likely to give up or be reassigned or retire or die. But then they started buying computers, and interconnecting them. Now every layer of intermediaries is merely another weak point, another thread the enemy may stumble across, and pull on to unravel the entire knot in a twinkling. I have many such chains of influence, whose sole purpose is to be found and keep investigators happy and harmlessly employed. Really important work I assign to the only person I know will not betray me. What else puzzles you?”
“Your ultimate aim. Do you plan to keep on blowing up Stardancers until they get annoyed and go away?”
