by Spider
“Oh Christ, Rand, Eva isn’t any ordinary guest, you know that. Eva is Eva. Even Kate is afraid of her. As a matter of fact, I think Eva’s going to be there as a guest of Chen Ling Ho. Her and Reb Hawkins-roshi. Look, just trust me on this, okay? Tell Rhea and Colly not to discuss this, even with Duncan. After the Fat Five have left, they can brag all they want; by then security won’t matter anymore. Between you and me, I suspect the news will be all over Shimizu within five minutes after they dock—but I do not want any leaks traceable to us. I like this job. And I’d like to get back to it, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll tell them. Boot up Terpsichore and let’s see how the new idea is going to work.”
While Jay brought up the holographic choreography software, a collateral descendant of the original twentieth century Lifeforms program, and set up the parameters of Pribhara’s wretched piece, Rand checked in with Salieri.
“How’m I doing, Salieri?”
“Rhea and Colly are expecting you for dinner at 19 o’clock in the Hall of Lucullus, but they will understand if you are late. I will remind you at 18:45. If you elect to keep working, I will inform them, and remind you to stop work and eat at 21 o’clock, using extreme measures if necessary.”
“Excellent. Whenever I go home, remind me about that new window program just before I get to the door. Dismissed. Let me at that interface, Jay—see how you like this…”
Extreme measures proved necessary. By the time he got back to his suite, Colly was fast asleep, dreaming of angelfish making puffballs.
He was eager to show Rhea the surprise he had prepared. But she had a surprise of her own to show him first. “I was checking on…oh hell, what I was doing was snooping,” she said gleefully, tapping a keyboard. The file she wanted displayed on the nearest wall. “And I found this in Colly’s partition.” It was a text document. At first he took it for one of Rhea’s manuscripts, since it had been created with the same arcane, obsolete word-processing software she used. But then he saw the slug at the top of the file: “The Amazing Adventure, by Colly Porter.”
“It’s a short story,” she said, her delight obvious. “About a little girl who goes to space and defeats spies.”
He grinned. “Oh, that’s wonderful. And she didn’t say anything to you about it?”
“Not a hint. Wait, let me show you the best part…” She scrolled the document a page or two, found the place she wanted, and highlighted a portion of the text. It read: “But the truth was far from reality.”
His bark of laughter triggered hers, and then they tried to shush each other for fear of waking Colly, and broke up all over again. The sequence ended with them in a hug, looking at the screen together in fond appreciation. “Is it any good?” he asked.
“Hard to tell; she hasn’t finished it yet. But so far…for an eight-year-old…it’s terrific.”
“How long has she been working on it?”
She punched keys. “File created three days ago.”
He was impressed. “And she’s got, what, eight pages down? Jesus, that’s amazing.”
She nodded vigorously. “Damn right. Eight pages in three or four days is good output for me.” She frowned. “Could we have raised one of those freaks who actually enjoy writing?”
He gave a theatrical shudder. “Could have been worse. At least it isn’t heroin.”
“That’d be cheaper. Ah well, she’ll grow out of it. At her age I wanted to be a gymnast.”
“Sure, I know. But it’s still cute as hell. And you should still be flattered.”
She hugged him closer and nuzzled his ear. “You watch: in another year or two, she’ll be shaping. I’ll go snooping through her files, and a monster will appear and bite me on the ass.”
“And it’ll serve you right,” he said, nuzzling back. “Snooping. Despicable. You haven’t been snooping in my partition, have you?”
She snorted. “As if I could outhack you. Why, is there anything interesting in there?”
He smiled. “Never accuse your husband of having a boring diary. Salieri!”
“Yes, Maestro?”
“Run file ‘Home.’”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take a look out the window, love.” He pulled his head back slightly so he could watch her reaction. He was really proud of this idea, and had high hopes for it. He had set himself the question: my wife is suffering, and it’s my fault. What can a person of my special talents do about that? This was the answer he had come up with after three days of thought. Because it was just a rough first draft, the visual image took a few seconds to coalesce and firm up, pixel by pixel. But somehow he got the idea she guessed what it was nearly at once, the moment she heard the soundscape. She stiffened in his arms.
Outside the window were Cape Cod Bay and Provincetown. The view from Rhea’s upstairs turret writing-room window, back home. Bay to the left, stone dike sticking its tongue out at the horizon; P-Town in the center, the Heritage Museum’s spire rising above the jumble of rooftops; and off to the right, the Pilgrim Monument. It was early evening there; a crescent moon was just rising over the water.
“That’s not a simulation,” he said quickly. “It’s live, and real-time. Well, three-second switching delay.” Somewhere a dog yapped. “See? That’s the Codhina’s rotten little Peke.”
Something told him to shut up now. He studied her face. It was as though a gifted actress had been asked to do the audition of her lifetime in fifteen seconds. Every expression of which her features were capable passed across it in rapid succession. The only sounds were distant waves, winter winds, a few gulls, a passing car with a bad gyro and, over all, the sound of Rhea’s deep breathing.
And when she finally settled on a reaction—silent, bitter tears—he only got to see it for a second before she left the suite at high speed.
Nice work. He breathed deeply himself for a minute. Then he jaunted to the window and gazed hard at Provincetown for a measureless time. Finally he shut down the display. “Salieri, let me speak to Rhea.”
“She is not accepting calls, sir.”
“Where is she?”
“Privacy seal, sir.”
He nodded. He knew a couple of ways around that…but he decided he had already done enough stupid things for one day. If Rhea had wanted him to find her, she wouldn’t have taken the trouble to invoke privacy seal.
He was too tired to deal with this much misery, and could not diminish or share it, so he took his work to bed with him, and fell asleep on the back of a cloud, winds whistling past his ears.
9
The Ring
Saturn
THE STARDANCER WAS UNPLUGGED FROM THE STARMIND, thinking with only her own brain. The vast System-wide flow of telepathic information from the millions of Stardancers who made up the Starmind passed through her, but she did not pay any conscious attention to it, and sent nothing back out into the matrix.
A year ago, something she still did not fully understand had told her that she needed to be still and meditate. She had been engaged in the form of meditation that worked best for her—dancing—continuously ever since. This sort of unplugging was not unusual; at any given time, as many as several thousand Stardancers might be out of rapport, dropping in or out of the matrix as suited them, and as they could be spared from ongoing tasks. Having accepted the alien gift of Symbiosis, they were all untroubled by the need to eat, drink or sleep, and were impervious to fatigue. Furthermore they were effectively immortal, or at least very long-lived, which tended to produce a meditative state of mind.
To an observer unfamiliar with Symbiosis, she might have seemed to resemble a human being in an old-fashioned, bulky red pressure suit—without air tanks or thrusters or transparent hood. But she was not human, anymore, and the red covering was literally a part of her; the organic Symbiote with which she had merged forty-four years earlier. Designed by the enigmatic alien Fireflies to be the perfect complement to the human metabolism, Symbiote protected against cold and vacuum, turned waste products into
fuel, could be spun out at will into an effective solar sail…and conferred telepathy with all others in Symbiosis.
It also required sunlight, of course, like all living things. She was now orbiting Saturn, almost as far as she could get from Sol without artificial life-support in the form of a photon source. But she did not feel cold…any more than she had felt hot when, decades earlier, she had traveled to the other extreme end of her range, the orbit of Mercury.
She had selected an orbit high enough above Saturn’s mighty Ring to free her from concerns about navigational safety in that endless river of rock. Her visual field was perhaps the most beautiful the Solar System had to offer, so beautiful that she had almost ceased to see it. And even her harshest critic—herself—could not have said that her presence there detracted from the view, for she had been a gifted dancer even before she had entered Symbiosis. A tape of the past year’s dancing would have fetched a high price on Earth. But this was hers and hers alone. As her body flung itself energetically through the near-vacuum, her mind was utterly still; she had long since reached that much-sought state in which one is not even thinking about not thinking. She was pure awareness, fully present yet leaving no trace.
Since she had once been a human being, there was a very primitive part of her mind which was never still for long, and in that part something like daydreaming took place from time to time. Sometimes it reached out across the immensity that engulfed her and touched the similar places in the minds of her most beloved ones, as if to reassure itself that they still existed and that all was well with them. As it went down the list, brushing against each mind, her dance unconsciously changed so as to express them and her relationship with them. Thus an occasionally recurring series of motifs ran through the dance: a sort of kinetic giggle that was her youngest child Gemma, followed by the syncopated, slightly off-rhythm movements that represented Olney Dvorak, the Stardancer she had conceived Gemma with…and so on, down to her eldest, forty-three-year-old Lashi, and his human father—
—it was at that point that her back spasmed and she screamed.
Any telepathic scream is strident and shocking enough; when it comes from one who has been in deep meditation for a year, every Stardancer in the Solar System flinches. And comes running to see what is wrong and what must be done about it. At once, the Starmind enfolded her like a womb, probing gently to learn the nature of her hurt.
But even she did not know.
The only clue was the word she had screamed: the name of her first co-parent. I just touched him, she told the others, and suddenly I knew something was wrong. Everything is wrong.
He was in the hookup, of course, and as baffled as she was. He reported that as far as he knew, nothing specific was wrong. He was in a region of great potential danger, but he had been there for half a century now. He was presently engaged in a delicate and complex task, with elements of almost inconceivable danger in it, but as far as he could tell it was shaping correctly.
Since there was absolutely no explanation for her terror, she could not shake it off. Unreasonable fears are the hardest to conquer. She wanted to scan and analyze every second of his memories of the last several weeks at least, looking for clues to the danger, but since he was not a full-fledged Stardancer she could not probe as deeply as she wanted. Their son Lashi joined her, and they probed together.
The results were still ambiguous.
So Lashi turned his attention to his mother. When did you first become aware that something was wrong?
When I screamed.
But how long before that could something have gone wrong? When was the last time you had monitored Father?
She thought about it. Yesterday, I think. And everything was fine then.
And we know what has changed in the last twenty-four hours. So we know where the danger lies.
Lashi’s father said, But why are they any more dangerous to me today than they were yesterday?
I don’t care, she wanted to say. Can’t you get out of there? But she could not ask that, because she already knew the answer.
I don’t know, she said instead. But dammit, you be careful!
You know I will, Rain, he replied.
PART FOUR
10
The Shimizu Hotel
7 January 2064
BY THE TIME JAY AND HIS BROTHER HAD FINISHED a room-service dinner and separated for the night, it was 21:45. Jay tried to call Eva, but her phone was not even accepting messages. He and Rand had accomplished so much work that he decided to celebrate. He jaunted to Jake’s, in the Deluxe Tier, one of the livelier of the Shimizu’s twenty-one taverns—and one of only three in which off-duty employees were welcome. There he found some friends, and settled down to matching orbits with them.
He liked Jake’s; he had become a semiregular there since Ethan left him for an earthworm. The management frowned on spilled blood or broken bones, but was tolerant of merriment short of that point. It was a great place to hear extravagant lies. One red-faced old man, for instance, a wildcat asteroid miner named Wang Bin who had come to the Shimizu to drink up a lucky strike, insisted on telling the whole room about a “white Stardancer” he claimed to have seen on his last trip out. “Damn near ran into him, no beacon or anything, spotted him by eyeball. Just like any other Stardancer, but white as a slug. Didn’t even have the manners to acknowledge my hail.” And a groundhog dancer from Terra who had joined Jay’s table told them all a whopper about a broken ankle that had healed itself just in time for a curtain.
The dancer was attractive, close enough to his age and well built—but as Jay thought about making an approach, he realized he still wasn’t ready. The memory of Ethan was still too clear. A few abortive experiments had reconfirmed for him that casual sex is best with oneself—certainly simpler.
A sense of duty made Jay leave sooner than he wanted to. As soon as he got back to his room, he tried Eva again. Considering the late hour, he did not expect to reach her; he hoped to leave a message requesting an appointment for a chat tomorrow. But the face that appeared onscreen was not Jeeves. Instead he saw a bald and beardless man who had done nothing to disguise the fact that he was well over ninety years old, dressed in black loose-fitting tunic and trousers.
“Hi, Reb,” Jay said after a moment of surprise. “I heard you were coming over. How are things in Top Step?”
Reb Hawkins bent forward in the Buddhist gassho bow, then smiled warmly. “Hello, Jay. It’s good to see you again. Things are well in Top Step, I’m happy to say. How is it with you these days?”
It had been a long day; Jay was too tired for tact. “To be honest, Reb, I’m consumed with curiosity. Is Eva still up?”
“She’s gone to bed, but she told me to expect your call. Why don’t you come over for a cup? We haven’t talked in a while. Or are you too tired? I know you’ve been working hard on the new piece.”
Jay was torn. His brain hurt. But he did want to know why his old friend had decided not to die after all, and it was not the sort of question that could be dealt with over the phone. “I’m on my way.”
Hawkins-roshi was something of a legend in space. He was a Zen Buddhist monk, and the oldest continuous resident of Top Step, the Earth-orbiting asteroid where human beings came to enter Symbiosis. For over forty years, until his retirement, he had helped hundreds of thousands of postulants make that profound transition, from Homo sapiens to Homo caelestis, with minimal psychological and spiritual trauma. A cronkite had once referred to him as the Modest Midwife to the Starmind. During those four decades, he had also made regular visits to most of the other human habitations in High Earth Orbit, including the Shimizu, dispensing spiritual sustenance and friendship to Buddhists and nonBuddhists alike. He and Eva were old and close friends, had known each other since they’d been groundhogs. Jay had met Reb through her.
Almost the moment Eva’s door had dilated behind Jay, he was glad he had come. He had forgotten how soothing Reb’s presence could be. It was not merely his obvious years;
Jay was pretty sure Reb had had the same effect on people when he was a teenager. He simply had an almost tangible aura around him, projected a zone of serenity, of clarity, of acceptance. There is a quality dancers call “presence,” and Jay was very good at achieving it onstage. Therefore he knew how amazing it was for Reb to have it all the time, every day. Presumably Hawkins-roshi had an automatic pilot, like everybody else…but he never seemed to use it. He would surely have long since been abbot of his own monastery somewhere down on Earth by now, if he had not found a career more important to him in space; helping human beings become something more.
“How long are you here for?” Jay asked him. “Can that big rock get along without you?”
Reb smiled. “Top Step can get along just fine without me. I’m retired, remember? It’s Meiya’s headache these days. I’ll be here for a week, or until Eva throws me out, whichever comes first. I can use the vacation.”
“I’m glad. I’d like to have a long talk with you sometime.”
Reb nodded. “But not tonight. You’re exhausted. You don’t want any tea, do you? I’ll make this as quick as I can. You want to know why Eva has changed her mind.”
Jay nodded gratefully. “She told you she’d confided in me, then.”
Reb nodded. “We talked for a long time. About suffering, and what it is for. About friendship, and what that is for. About what she has done since she came here to space, and what she might do yet. About samsara. In the end I was able to persuade her that to end one’s life when one is not in mortal pain or fear is a kind of arrogance.”
Jay stared. He had said much the same thing to Eva, in one form or another, at least a dozen times in the last month. “But Eva is arrogant,” he blurted out.
Reb said nothing.
It came to Jay that perhaps Reb was just better than he was at teaching people about arrogance. Come to think of it, he was doing it now…
