by Spider
She kept measuring her breath, felt her anxiety begin to diminish. She had not meditated with any regularity since the 1970s, but it seemed to be one of those riding-a-bicycle things. Perhaps it is true that it becomes easier to surrender the ego at the point of death, when you finally admit that you cannot keep it forever anyway. Eva soon felt herself going further away from the world than usual, or perhaps closer to it—climbing to a higher place or perhaps it was descending to a deeper level, though neither term meant anything in zero gravity—went beyond, achieving a selflessness she had only been granted a few times in all her years, for fleeting moments.
With it came a wordless clarity, a focused four-dimensional seeing. Dualities of all kinds became as obsolete as up and down: within/without, self/not-self, good/bad, life/death.
She now knew exactly where Reb and Meiya and Fat Humphrey were: how far away, and in which directions. There was another sleeping adept here in this pressure, too, one she did not know. Their consciousnesses were like fireflies—not the mighty aliens but the feeble terrestrial kind, glowing like embers and dancing mindlessly in the dark. She called out to them. Each resonated to her mental touch, but none responded. They could not “hear” her, and she could not wake them.
There was no help here. She must cope alone.
She let herself return to her body.
She had forgotten how weary and frightened and angry it was. From a purely selfish point of view, dying didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. Chen was still scanning what looked like the same screenful of gibberish.
“How long have I got?” she asked.
He checked the time. “Another six minutes before I must leave.”
No more time at all. “Chen Ling Ho, I oppose you with all my heart.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and inhaled sharply through his nose. “That is regrettable,” he said sadly. “As you wish. I will tell you as much as I can before I must go; any questions you still have can be answered by Sun Tzu.”
“How can you possibly kill a quarter of a million indetectable people in free space?”
“Do you remember the terrorist bombing of a shipment of Symbiote from Titan, some forty-five years ago?”
“Sure—your father did it. But that was a traveling ocean, constantly announcing its position. What’s that got to—”
“This will go faster if you reserve your objections. My esteemed father Chen Hsi Feng was acting in accordance with a plan devised by his noble father, Chen Ten Li. His intent was not merely to destroy Symbiote, but to discreetly secure a large sample of it for analysis. Fine control of the explosive caused the Symbiote mass to calve in a predictable pattern. While all eyes fixed in horror on the destruction, then turned Earthward in search of its source, a stealthed ship was waiting quietly in the path of one of the largest fragments.
“My father was assassinated by a Stardancer trainee, but the conspiracy he had dedicated his life to lives on. That sample has been studied intensively ever since. We now know how to grow a pale white variant which does everything Symbiote does except confer telepathy. It has been further altered so that it requires regular large doses of a chemical which does not occur naturally in space to stay alive. One as astute as yourself will immediately appreciate that it is therefore now possible for the first time to create a Symbiote-equipped army which will stay loyal. Starhunters, we call them. Among other things, this base we’re in now is to Starhunters what Top Step is to Stardancers.”
In spite of herself, Eva objected. “You can’t possibly have raised up an army large enough to threaten the Starmind, not in secret. The head start they’ve had, the way they breed, the motivations you can’t possibly offer a recruit—I just don’t believe it.”
He was nodding. “And since our troops must use radio or laser, limited to lightspeed, our communications and coordination are inherently inferior to telepathy, a crippling disadvantage. You are quite correct: we could never seriously threaten the Starmind with infantry, even though Starhunters are heavily armed and Stardancers are not. The Starhunters are not intended to kill the Starmind. They are chiefly intended to conquer the United Nations Space Command, and thus the world. He who rules High Orbit rules Terra.”
“And what is the Starmind going to be doing at the time?”
“Running for their lives, the few left alive. If they are intelligent enough to keep running right out of the Solar System, a handful of them may live to circle some other star—and good riddance to them, for they can never return. Do you recall how the Symbiote mass was bombed?”
She thought hard. Forty years ago, she had read an eyewitness account by a Stardancer named Rain M’Cloud, who before entering Symbiosis had killed Ling Ho’s father to avenge the bombing. Eva seemed to recall there’d been something uniquely horrid about the method of delivery…
She felt a thrill of horror as the memory surfaced. “A nanobomb. Concealed in a kiss.”
“It worked well—and close study of Symbiote has suggested many improvements. For the last forty-five years, we have been seeding the entire Solar System with similar bombs, self-replicating at viral speed, self-powered, absolutely undetectable. They ride the solar wind, seek out red Symbiote, home in, burrow in and hide. They’ve been spreading through space like a fine mist for forty-five years. Stardancers breed like rabbits. Statistical analysis indicates that by now, some ninety to ninety-five percent of the Starmind has come into physical contact with either a bomb-spore, or another infected Stardancer.”
For a moment she thought her old heart would literally stop. This was what she had always imagined that would feel like. “Radio trigger?” she managed to say.
“Relays all over the System,” he agreed. “About an hour from now I will broadcast a master triggering signal from here. At the moment named in that signal, some six hours later, every relay will begin sending the destruct code at once. Maximum possible warning due to lightspeed lag should not exceed one minute anywhere in the System.”
“Trillions of dollars,” she murmured dizzily. “To murder angels.”
“It could not have been done undetected in anything but the wild-growth economy the Starmind gave us,” he admitted. “So in the end they have served a useful purpose.”
“Some of them will survive,” she said fiercely, and felt something tear in her chest. She ignored the pain. “They’ll come for you—they’re good at nanotech, they’ll find a way.”
“Quite possibly,” he agreed. “That is why we have kidnapped Tenshin Hawkins and his friends, and every other human telepathic adept we could locate. Enslaved by drugs, I believe they will function as excellent Stardancer detectors. Is there anything else you wish to know, Eva?”
She was silent, concentrating on listening to her heart, willing it to keep beating.
“Is there any other last favor I can grant you, in the name of our friendship? I fear time is short.”
Was there any chance at all that the truth might change his mind? She had no other cards to play.
No, none. She remembered a fictional god she had read of once, called Crazy Eddie, worshipped with awe because in times of crisis he invariably incarnated in a position of responsibility and did the worst possible thing from the best motives. There were usually just enough survivors to perpetuate his memory. It was proverbially pointless to reason with Crazy Eddie…
“I…I’d like an hour alone to compose myself,” she said.
“Done,” he said. “Sun Tzu!”
“Yes, Highness?”
“Ms. Hoffman is not to leave that chair, nor this room.” The chair’s seatbelt locked with an audible click. “She is not to communicate with any person or persons outside this room. One hour from now I want you to kill her painlessly. She may command you to shorten that deadline, but not extend it. You may answer any questions she has, and serve her in any way that does not conflict with these instructions. Acknowledge.”
“Program loaded, Highness.”
He pushed his own chair away and
bowed, a full formal salute of farewell. “Goodbye, Eva. I’m sorry you will not share my joy.”
Then he bowed again, quickly. Her tea-bulb missed his head by an inch, ruptured on the unpadded bulkhead behind him and splattered his back with hot tea. When he straightened, she was giving him the finger.
His expression did not change. He left.
Pain nagged at her attention, but she had long ago learned to bypass pain. She could still dimly sense Reb and the others; a ghost of the seventh sense with which she had perceived them earlier was still with her, like a ghostly heads-up display on her mind’s eye. There was no point in entering deep meditation and trying to wake them again. She had no assets she had lacked the last time she’d tried, was weaker if anything, and the medical technology keeping them stupified was sure to be foolproof.
She was going to have to think her way out of this. Or fail and die.
God dammit, I have not endured all these years of bullshit to become the greatest failure of all time!
And with that, an idea came to her. It was only a possibility, and a long shot at that, but it was infinitely better than nothing.
She thought it through carefully, with the slow, intense deliberation of a freezing man with a single match planning the building of his fire. She built event-trees in her mind, assigned probabilities and risks, prepared contingencies, rechecked every calculation. Finally she felt she was ready.
Assuming that she was right, and did in fact possess a match…
She checked her pocket, and found her personal wafer was missing. She hoped that was a good sign.
Well, I’m not getting any younger.
“Jeeves!” she said.
He shimmered into existence. “Yes, Madam?”
Chen Ling Ho had cherished the hope that she would agree he was Alexander the Great and accept the role of emperor’s companion; naturally he would have installed her AI on-line in case he won her over. He would remove the wafer again after she was dead and his war was over. That much had made psychological sense. What had worried her was a matter of semantics. Was an AI a “person”—in the opinion of another AI? And if so, since AIs were effectively everywhere, was Jeeves a person “outside this room”?
She was still alive. Step one accomplished. Now to push the envelope…
“Jeeves, is Rild on-line?”
If the answer was no, Sun Tzu would not know who Rild was, and might kill her out of caution, just in case this Rild was a “person.” And Eva thought it likely the answer would be no.
Chen’s holographic gear was excellent; Jeeves became discreetly pained. “Yes, Madam. He has been under constant interrogation since our arrival in this pressure.”
Good. Then Sun Tzu was aware of Rild, and classified him as “not-a-person-outside-this-room.”
“Rild, can you hear me?”
Reb had long ago given Eva access to all but the most personal levels of Rild; she was privileged to summon him. The question was, did he have bytes to spare? Or did the software interrogating him tie up too much of his capacity?
“Yes, Eva,” Rild’s soft voice said.
She felt like she was tap-dancing on a high wire in terrestrial gravity. Balanced in her hand were all the eggs there were, or ever would be. She began breathing in slow rhythm, composing herself, reaching again for the wordless timeless Evaless place. “Do you have some way to wake Reb?”
The answer came from far away, down a long tunnel. “Yes. A posthypnotic trigger.”
Causing a person to be awakened is not communication. “Do it,” she murmured, and her eyes rolled up.
This communication, Sun Tzu was not equipped to monitor…
Reb was there waiting for her; awake, untroubled, numinous. His serenity helped calm her, eased her fear, brought them closer together.
She merged with him. She became him, and he her. For the first time in her life she sensed what it must be like to be a Stardancer. She had always wondered why beings who expected to live for centuries did not fear death more than a human; now she understood. It was not the brain that mattered, nor the mind which invested it, but the energy that wore both like a series of intricate disguises for a time and then became something else. She had dimly known this for a long time; now she surrendered to it.
She felt the entire Starmind, all around her, heard its chorus echo in the Solar System, grasped its quarter-million-member dance in its entirety, from the orbit of Mercury to the farthest fringes of the Oort Cloud where the comets winter.
And when that happened, Reb knew all that she knew, simply and effortlessly. And she in turn knew what he knew, which was all that the Starmind knew. Well over ninety-nine percent of that information she would never get to integrate, but she did have time to perceive certain essentials.
Such as: nanotechnological booby-trapping is a game that two can play. And: some nanobombs can be triggered, not by radio signal, but by biting a simple code on the back of one’s tongue. And: her great granddaughter Charlotte in Toronto was going to recover. And: Reb loved her, and everything was going to be okay now. And finally: things are worth what they cost, and death is a small coin.
She even had time, in those final nanoseconds, to grasp the full extent of the cosmic joke the Universe had played on her, and to begin to smile.
Then she and Reb and all the other atoms in and of Chen’s flagship were converted to a rapidly expanding perfect sphere of plasma, the color of a Stardancer.
Different conditions obtained on Terra; at the same instant, the corresponding base in North China began turning into a large white mushroom cloud, the color of a Starhunter.
24
Noteworthy Events in March 2065
—MILITARY MOP-UP OF THE REBEL FORCES WENT INTO HIGH GEAR, spearheaded in space by Admiral Cox and on the ground by General Chang of a mortified China; after the first week, loss of life was nominal. Doubtless many conspirators were missed…but they were not free for long. Some ninety-three percent of the relay trigger stations in the Solar System were located and destroyed, although it was apparent that all those who had known the trigger code had died in the same instant.
—After lengthy consultation with the Starmind, the UN high command elected to delete all mention of a plague of triggerable nanobombs in space from its report to the public. This had the effect of making the Rebellion of the Group of Five appear a desperate, doomed kamikaze affair rather than a narrowly averted coup. Despite—or perhaps because of—its irrationality, the story played.
—The media went into delighted spasm, like sharks dropped into a fish farm. Old-timers for whom the business had lost something when people stopped having wars wept openly. The Sacrifice of the Adepts passed almost instantly into fiction—the cronkites and riveras had it to themselves for nearly a week before the first movie and novelization could be released, and then the floodgates really opened. The job of massaging the legend into a pleasing shape began. The performing arts, oddly, did not seem to take to the new subject: most of them already had funded work under way, with more upbeat themes.
—The Board of Directors of the Shimizu Hotel appointed a new manager and a new PR chief. A special monument was installed in the Grand Foyer, to honor their predecessors, who had bravely sacrificed themselves in a vain effort to ensure the security of guests. In return for keeping their faces straight at the dedication of this monument, and their mouths shut forever after, Co-Artistic Directors Rand Porter and Jay Sasaki received lucrative new contracts terminable only by them. Each contained an ironclad artistic control clause.
—The Board of Directors of the Starseed Foundation announced that Top Step would suspend operations while replacements were sought for its key personnel. The current three classes would graduate, those who made it through, but it would be at least four months before any new Postulants would be lifted to orbit. During the month of downtime, Top Step personnel would be busy dealing with the arrival from Titan of the largest mass of fresh Symbiote ever shipped, a truly stupendous tonnage inten
ded to meet the next fifty years of anticipated demand.
—Rhea Paixao and the group with which she had been trance-dancing two days a week learned belatedly that Manuel Brava had been one of the Martyred Bodhisattvas, and would not be showing up to join them again. His absence had gone almost unnoted; he had been that sort of man. They all went home and mourned—but the following Saturday night, the group spontaneously reformed on the beach, and Rhea was there. When she got home that morning, she began a novel with a Stardancer as a major character.
—In Yawara, North Queensland, the Yirlandji elders chose another witch woman, and held services for Yarra, who had returned to the Dreamtime after dreaming a mighty dream in a place called China. A song was sung for her by the whole tribe, a song by a dead protégé of hers, called “The Song of High Orbit.” And indeed some particles of her may have followed the Songline that far, for all anyone can know.
—All over the Solar System, Starhunters began to die, for lack of a chemical so exotic it was not likely to be found on any ship they could raid. The luckiest of them had nearly a year’s supply in their system when the source vanished; some had only weeks. The average ran about three months: the Group of Five had tended to keep its undetectable army on a short leash. As this became clear, some chose to emulate the example of Tenshin Reb Hawkins and briefly lit the heavens. Some attempted to surrender to the UN Space Command, and some to Stardancers; the survival rate in the latter category was much higher, but neither agency was really geared up to produce the needed chemical in bulk. Starhunters became the first new addition to the endangered-species list in thirty years.
—People in business suits all over the planet and throughout human space found their adrenal glands flooding as the wills of Chen Ling Ho, Victoria Hathaway, Grijk Krugnk, Imaro Amin and Pandit Chatur Birla came into effect; fortunes were made and smashed as the economic machinery of a species began to shift gears.
—Jay Sasaki took a day off from rehearsals, went EVA in a p-suit, and danced a dance he had choreographed in his mind months ago, but never gotten to perform. It was not taped or seen by any human or Stardancer eye, but when he was done, he felt somehow that it had been appreciated. Its working title, the only one it ever received, was “I Love You, Eva.” The next day he asked his half-brother to help him shape a new piece, involving a butterfly with a withered body.
