by Spider
Rhea looked at him, surprised and a little impressed by his insight. “I think I see what you mean,” she said.
He flushed and went on. “With total control of her brain and body, reality can mean whatever she wants it to mean. She can experience the touch of someone half a light year away, feel it on her skin. Or feel the touch of someone long dead…as long as someone in the Starmind holds the memory of how it feels to be touched by that person. Not one coffee molecule has ever passed her lips her whole life long, but she’s probably tasted better coffee than you or I ever will.”
“I’m doing it now! ‘Bean around the Solar System…’” Buchi let the song parody trail off after a few more hummed bars.
“But with reality that slippery…” Rhea began.
Duncan interrupted. “…how do they make sure they don’t lose track of the one you and I believe in? What do they do for a reality check, you mean?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”
“We are many,” Buchi said. “And we are one. E pluribus unum. Alone/All-one. Consensus reality is very important to us. If we ever lost it, we would come apart. It is the same with your own neurons. We put about as much effort into it as they do. And about as often, we fire randomly—we make things up, we vacation in realities of our own fashioning, singly or in groups. The universe is always there when we return. It is not a problem.”
“Now there,” Rhea said triumphantly, “is my problem. As I started to say before, I can live with the fact that I have trouble grasping your explanations of why assorted aspects of being a Stardancer aren’t problems for you. What’s driving me crazy is that you just…don’t seem to have any problems!
“None of the ones I envisioned. None of them has even triggered mention of any problem you do have. I’m a writer: to me a character is his or her problems; if they don’t have any, they’re no use to me, I’ve got nothing to work with, no way to motivate them. I guess what I’m asking is, don’t you people—you Stardancers—have any problems? I know you never get hungry or thirsty or cold or lonely or lost or have to go to the bathroom at an inappropriate time. But Jesus, Buchi—isn’t there anything you fear? Or miss? Or yearn for? Or regret? Is there anything you lust after? Or mourn?”
“Must your characters always be driven by the lash?”
Rhea thought about it. “Pretty much, yes. That’s what the audience wants to see. How someone like itself reacts under the lash. Because it helps the reader guess and deal with how she would react under the same pressure. The rule of thumb is, the sharper the lash—the tougher the antinomy—the better the story. For us humans, life is suffering, just as the Buddhists say. Is that really not true for you?”
The answer was almost a full minute in coming. It was the first time Rhea could remember Buchi hesitating even slightly in responding. Two or three times she began to speak, but each time decided to wait for an answer.
“The Starmind suffers,” Buchi said at last, “as sharply, as deeply, as keenly, as you yourself. But in different ways…for different reasons…and I cannot explain them to you. No terrestrial language contains words that will convey the necessary concepts: you do not have the concepts. Every human language contains the implicit assumption that individual minds have bone walls around them. It would be much easier for me to convey color to a blind man.”
Rhea was frustrated…but if there was anything her work had prepared her to believe, it was that some things simply could not be put into words. “What are you all doing?”
“What are you asking?”
“What is the Starmind doing? Are you doing anything? Did those Fireflies have any purpose in creating your kind? Are you all working toward something together…or just floating around like the red blobs in a lava lamp, marveling at the Solar System and unscrewing the inscrutable?”
“You know hundreds of things we do. I can download a summary list to your AI if you wish. It runs about a terabyte.”
“Then I’ve seen most of it. Well, scanned it.” Even that was an absurd claim. “All right, I’ve scanned the superindex, tiptoed through some of the subindices, and jumped in at random here and there a few hundred places. And one thing I noticed.”
“Yes?”
“Most of the things you do come down, in the long run, to helping us. Helping humans. Helping Terra. Some of it benefits us directly, like nanotechnology, and some it just seems to happen to work out to our benefit way down the line, like that Belt-map hobby of yours that kept us from getting clobbered by Lucifer’s Hammer in ’32. Even the ‘pure-science’ researches you’re engaged in always seem to benefit us more than they benefit you, when the dust settles.”
“Can we ignore suffering at our own heart, at our roots? We may not be of humanity…but we are from humanity.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m just asking: is that what you Stardancers do for problems? Borrow ours?” She had an image of the human race as endearingly dopey pets, who could be relied upon to produce fascinating but trivial problems, supply life’s necessary irritant. “If some cosmic disaster wiped us all out…would the Starmind go crazy from boredom? Or would you still have things to do?”
Another pause. This one was only ten seconds or so. “We would still have a nearly infinite number of things to do. And again, I despair of finding words that will successfully hint at their nature.” Another five seconds. “One subset may perhaps be intelligibly outlined, at least. You are aware, are you not, that the Starmind is not alone in the Universe?”
“Huh? Sure. So what?” It was a classic insoluble problem. Within a few years of its initial formation, the Starmind had reported to humanity that it was receiving telepathic broadcasts from numberless other Starminds throughout the Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds—a potential source of inconceivable wealth in any terms. But it came in all at once, at the same “volume,” from all quarters—and none of it appeared to be in any known or decipherable language or concept-system. The Starmind did not even know how to say, “Quiet, please—one at a time!” The best it had managed, according to all reports, was to learn to ignore the useless infinity of treasure, as a geiger counter suppresses its “awareness” of normal background radiation. “What good does that do you if you can’t communicate with anybody?” Rhea asked. “You can’t, right?” She knew the answer—but from books and media accounts, and knew how much that was worth.
“No, we cannot,” Buchi agreed. “But that may not always be so.”
“You think the problem might actually be solvable?” Duncan said excitedly.
“Our seed has been awake for less than seven decades,” Buchi said. “There are yet far fewer of us Stardancers than there are neurons in even the most limited brain. Yet our numbers grow—and the Starmind grows wiser every nanosecond. It is certain that we live longer than you, and we do not waste a third of our lives in stupor and another third working at life-support. We have time. Time has us. We use tools you cannot understand to build tools you cannot conceive to solve problems we ourselves cannot name. It is not a thing to trouble yourself over.”
“Do you know anything at all about where it’s all going?” Rhea asked. “That you can explain?”
“Yes. Wonderful things are going to happen.”
Rhea blinked. “But what?”
The silence went on until she realized no answer would be forthcoming. “When?” she tried then.
That answer came at once, startling her.
“Soon.”
“How soon?” she blurted.
Again, silent seconds ticked by.
“Within my lifetime?” she tried.
“I cannot be certain, but I believe so.”
“Will you be able to explain these things to us humans when they happen?”
“When they happen, you will know.”
“And you can’t give me any idea what it will be like?”
More silence.
“Why doesn’t anybody else know about this?” Rhea said irritably. “I’ve read—scanned—everything
I could get my hands on about you Stardancers. This is the first hint I’ve heard that the galactic signal-to-noise problem might be susceptible of solution. Is it a secret, or what?”
“Would I have burdened you with a secret without warning you? The reason you have not heard of this before is that you are the first to have asked about this in many decades, the first since we began to be sure of it ourselves.”
“Really?” Rhea asked. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Rhea, answer me two questions. First, regarding the Fireflies, who made us: is there any characteristic commonly associated with the term ‘gods’ that they lack?”
Rhea thought hard. Apparently omniscient, apparently omnipotent, apparently benevolent but absolutely unknowable…long gone and not expected back soon…“No,” she admitted. “Wait: two. They seem to have no desire at all to be worshipped…and they haven’t instructed anyone to kill anyone else in their name.”
“You anticipate my second question: do you know of any religion on or off Terra which worships them?”
It startled her. “Why, no. There are cults who worship you…at least one large one. And up until forty-odd years ago there was a small one trying to kill you. But I don’t know of any Firefly-worshippers, now that you mention it.”
“Rhea, humanity can just barely live with the mere memory of the Fireflies. They are too vast to think about. From the human point of view, the best thing about them is that they were in the vicinity of Terra for a matter of hours, at the orbit of Saturn for a matter of months, and left promising my father not to return for a matter of centuries. We Stardancers are tolerated, for all our alienness, because we were once and still partially are human. Beneath my Symbiote are flesh and blood, born of woman. But of all the things we are asked—and we are asked many things by many humans—we are rarely asked about the Fireflies…and almost never about other Starminds, circling other stars. Your governments and philosophers were overjoyed to learn that the galactic surround is incomprehensible to us, and have been happy to tiptoe around the sleeping dragon ever since.”
“If that’s true, I’m pretty disgusted with my own species,” Rhea said.
“You need not be. Think of it from a historical perspective. After two millions of years of slaughter, humanity has just learned how to live with itself in peace, and has done so for a time measured in mere years. Can you reasonably expect it to be prepared to deal with a galaxy of unknown strangers? So quickly? I can tell you that we the Starmind tremble at the thought of the Fireflies returning—and we could at least talk with them if they did. Why should you not ‘pretend it never happened’? It seems to me a healthy psychological adjustment for your race at this time.”
Rhea started to reply, but Duncan interrupted her again. “Excuse me, Buchi—I want to backtrack a second. Did you say when the Fireflies left, they made a promise to ‘your father’?”
“Yes.”
That had caught Rhea’s ear too. “Who is your father, Buchi?” she asked.
“Charlie Armstead.”
Rhea’s eyes widened. “And your mother?” she managed to ask.
“Norrey Drummond.”
She heard a singing in her ears, like a Provincetown mosquito. The second and third Stardancers who had ever lived, founders of Stardancers Incorporated, as famous throughout even the human race as Shara Drummond herself! “My God! I never dreamed—”
“Me either,” Duncan said in awed tones. “You never told me that, Booch.”
“You never asked. What’s your father’s name, and why haven’t you told me?”
“It’s ‘Walter.’ But you’re right. His name only comes up if someone finds my name funny and I have to explain the story.”
“I saw the humor in your name the moment you told it to me,” Buchi said. “But I assumed you were tired of explaining its origin, so I did not comment.”
“And bless you,” he said. “It’s just that I keep forgetting you folks don’t use last names to indicate either paternal or maternal descent.”
“There is no need to. We know our lineage, and each of the other’s—it need not be encoded in our names. We choose names purely for their meanings.”
The humming in Rhea’s ears was beginning to diminish. “What does your name mean, Buchi Tenmo?” Rhea asked.
“‘Dancing Wisdom Celestial Net,’” the Stardancer answered.
“That’s beautiful!” Duncan said…an instant before Rhea could. “I wish I had a name that good.” He turned to Rhea. “Or like yours. ‘Rhea’—‘earth’ or ‘mother,’ two of the most beautiful words there are. And ‘Paixao,’ just as beautiful: ‘passion.’”
The mosquitos resumed their attack on Rhea’s ears. She could feel the lobes turning red, offering blood. “What does your name mean?” she asked quickly, aware of the significance of his having looked up the meaning of her name, but unwilling to acknowledge it.
He made a face. “I got the booby-prize. ‘Duncan’ means ‘dark-skinned warrior’”—Rhea found herself thinking that he was dark-skinned even by Provincetown standards, though he certainly wasn’t muscled like a warrior…and forced herself to pay attention to what he was saying—“and ‘Iowa’…well, there’s the political district in the North American Federation, of course, the province or state or whatever…and at least one writer once confused that with Heaven. But actually it comes from ‘Ioakim’—apparently an official at someplace called Ellis Island made Greatest Grandad change it. It’s Russian Hebrew for ‘God will establish’…which I for one find wishful thinking.”
Rhea found that she wanted to change the subject from Duncan’s name, from Duncan, and suddenly remembered a question that had ghosted through her mind perhaps a dozen times over the course of her life. “The word ‘God’ makes me think of Fireflies again,” she said. “Buchi, there’s one more question I’ve always wondered about. Why did the Fireflies come when they did?”
“They came when it was time.”
“Yes—but why was it time? The generally accepted answer is that they came ‘at the dawn of space travel.’ But it was more like brunchtime. Humanity had been in space—had been established in space—for years when they showed up. We’d been to Luna decades before. Did it take them that long to notice? Or that long to arrive? If we could establish a time-duration for their journey, it might be a clue to where they came from.”
“Their arrival was instantaneous,” Buchi said flatly.
“Then what triggered it? Do you know?”
“The signing of a contract. An agreement between Skyfac Incorporated and Shara Drummond.”
Details from a history lesson came back dimly to Rhea. Sure enough, the way she remembered it, the Fireflies had first been sighted in the Solar System about two weeks before Shara Drummond left Earth to create the Stardance. They had flicked into existence around the orbits of Neptune and Pluto (at that time very close together), the outer limit of the System, and then moved in as far as the orbit of Saturn a couple of weeks later…
…the day Shara reached Skyfac! Where they stayed, until she was on the verge of being sent home again with her dream unfulfilled—then arrived just in time to force the performance of the Stardance…
“They came to us the moment that a human being came to space for the express purpose of creating art,” Buchi said.
The words seemed to echo in Rhea’s skull.
“How they knew of that, even the Starmind cannot yet imagine—but the fact is unmistakable.”
She felt as if her head were cracking. The insight was too immense and powerful to deal with—yet so obvious she could hardly believe no one had worked it out ages ago.
“Thank you, Buchi,” she said quickly. “You’ve been very gracious and helpful, we’ll talk again another time, I hope you’ll excuse me now but I need to get to my typewriter so I can—” She stopped babbling when she noticed that she had already switched off the window.
She turned from it, and there was Duncan.
At once
he turned away, which relieved and annoyed her at the same time, and jaunted across the room…but in seconds he was back, bearing a strange and uncouth object, waving it at her as he braked himself to a halt at her side. “I promised I’d show you this, Rhea,” he said.
It was his manner more than anything else which cued her. This had to be the new piece of vacuum sculpture he had mentioned. Resolving to find something polite to say about it, she began to scrutinize it for material to work with.
A timeless time later, she began to experience perceptual distortion, and slowly figured out the cause. Her eyes were beginning to grow tearbubbles…
What it was made of she could not guess. The subtleties of its composition process were a closed book to her. But what it looked like, to her, more than anything else she could think of, was a piece of driftwood she had once brought home from the Provincetown shore. It had a similar shape, twisted on itself, asymmetrically beautiful, and it had the stark bleached color and polished appearance of very old driftwood. Washed up on an alien shore…like herself.
“It’s very beautiful,” she said, and heard a husky note in her voice. She searched for polite small talk. “Does it…do your pieces have names?”
“It’s called ‘Driftglass,’” he said. His own voice was hoarse.
She flinched slightly. “It’s very lovely. It reminds me—”
“—of home, I know,” he said quickly. “It’s yours. I made it for you.”
The mosquitos at her ears had brought in chainsaws. “I…I really have to go,” she said. “I promised Rand—” She was already in motion, three of her four thrusters firing at max acceleration, past him before she could see his reaction.
“Sure, of course, good night,” she heard him say behind her as the door got out of her way, and as she came out of her turn and raced down the corridor, she was for a time very proud of herself. Until she noticed that she had Driftglass in her hand…
