Starmind

by Spider Robinson

  His very neutrality cued her that he was angry. It startled her. She precessed to face him again. "Is that relevant?"

  "It's closer than anything that's been said since I jaunted in here," he said. "Let's cut through all the bullshit about Stardancers and Fireflies and how happy the world is today. You have obviously decided to check out. For some reason you think I need to know that in advance. That means you have some role in mind for me. I'm curious to know what it is. Do you want me to stand by with the ceremonial sword in case you lose your nerve? Am I supposed to talk you out of it? Or just be your witness and hold your hand? Angel's advocate, enabler, or audience—I can go any way you like, Eva. I'm your friend and I'll try to give you whatever you need of me, but you've got to tell me the steps."

  She let go of her drink and reached toward him with her withered hands. He abandoned his own drink and took them in his own.

  "In a month," she said, "Reb Hawkins will be coming to the Shimizu. I want to talk with him one more time. Immediately after that I plan to go out the airlock." She gestured toward the window with her chin. "Out there. When I'm ready, my p-suit will kill me, painlessly and not abruptly. I want to die in space. As I die, I would like to watch you dance . . . if you're willing."

  He was speechless. He tried to free his hands, and she would not let him. He tried to tear his gaze from hers, and she would not allow that either. "Why me?" he said finally.

  "Dance is the only thing humans do that's only beautiful," she said. "It's the only thing we do that speaks even to Fireflies, as far as we can tell. I want to die watching a human being dance. A human, not a Stardancer. You're the best dancer I know. And you're my friend. I thought about not putting this on you until the last minute . . . but I thought you might want some time to choreograph your dance. I know how busy you'll be once your brother arrives."

  Globules of salt water began to grow from his eyes. Despite sixteen years in free-fall, she still found the sight of zero-gee tears simultaneously hilarious and moving. And contagious. He shook his head, and the droplets flew away. She blinked back her own, and waited.

  At last, with difficulty, he smiled. "I am honored, Eva," he said. He released her hands, plucked his bulb out of the air, and raised his arm in a toast. She reclaimed her own, and they emptied them together. She did not hesitate, spun and threw her bulb as hard as she could, directly at that absurdly expensive window. The bulb shattered musically.

  She had startled him. A cannon couldn't have broken that window—but still, what a gesture! He was game, though: his own bulb burst only a second or two after hers. When they had recovered from their throws, he bowed to her, a Buddhist gassho she suspected he must have learned from his grandmother. She returned it gravely. "Thank you," she said.

  There was nothing left to say. Or too much. After they had watched the tugbots chase and disassemble glass shards for a few moments, he cleared his throat and said, "I've got to see Ev Martin before dinner."

  She grinned. "Another argument for suicide. You're right, you wouldn't want to talk to him on a full stomach."

  "Not even on a stomach full of hundred-year-old whiskey," he agreed. "But it'll help. Thanks for it."

  She made a mental note to leave him the balance of the bottle in her will.

  He paused at the door. "Eva?"

  "Yes," she said, without turning.

  "Is it all right if I spend the next month trying to get you to change your mind?"

  "Yes," she said. "But don't be attached to succeeding, Jay. I've been thinking about this a long time."

  After a while she heard the door close and seal.

  6

  Toronto, Ontario

  4 December 2064

  There is no such thing as a slight flaw in a dance floor.

  And all floors have flaws. Anyone but a dancer would probably call them slight: certainly the manufacturers do. Nonetheless, each floor has its own invisible peculiarities, lurking in wait for dancers' feet. Even the floor of Toronto's famous Drummond Theatre. The company had gone through two complete rehearsals, undress and dress, without a hitch; it was in the final onstage warm-up class, a scant hour before curtain, that John DeMarco, who had been dreaming of and working toward this night for all his professional life, found the flaw with his name on it. It broke his ankle.

  At any other time it would have been a nuisance. The actual repair could be accomplished in less than ten minutes at the nearest hospital, after two hours of datawork and waiting in the emergency room. And once fixed, you'd be hopping around good as new . . . in a matter of mere hours. . . .

  The ugly sound had riveted the attention of all. It took only minutes to establish that the nearest hospital was half an hour away in the best of times, and that everyone in the company seemed to have run out of painblock at once. So had John, of course. Dancers started to drift away to call hospitals and search dressing rooms and find the driver; the AD, watching her company scattering to the four winds an hour before curtain, bellowed them into stasis and bent over John's recumbent form. "Is there any hope at all?" she asked.

  It was clearly a break, not just a sprain. John shook his head, and started to apologize.

  She waved it away. "Then you'll have to live with it for a while. I can't spare anyone here: I have to recast the whole performance in forty-five minutes, and everyone I can see I need. We'll put you in dressing room two. Jacques! Harry!"

  The pain was exquisite, almost nauseating. "No! Wait! Put me in the audience. If I can't be in it, I'm gonna see the run-through."

  She nodded to Harry and Jacques. "Do it."

  Harry, the stage manager, gave him a jacket to put over his warm-up clothes, promised to try and find him some painblock and a ride as soon as possible, and left him front-row center. Not an ideal seat, but convenient. One of the dancers who could be spared momentarily brought him an improvised pack of ice from the concession in the lobby. He concentrated on the frenzied activity onstage to distract himself from his pain.

  Shortly after he decided Anna was fucking the whole thing up, he noticed that the pain was gone. Utterly.

  He yelped, in astonishment and something like fright. Anna glared at him from the stage. "Harry, take him back-stage—"

  "No," he said. "Sorry. I'm fine; won't happen again."

  She went back to her work. He bent and looked at his ankle. No question, that was a broken ankle, all right. The swelling was already so advanced that he knew it was badly broken. Now why in hell didn't it hurt?

  The swelling began to visibly reduce.

  He yelped again. Anna turned and came to the edge of the stage. "John, I'm sorry, but—"

  "Look at my foot!"

  She blinked.

  "God dammit, come down here and look at my fucking foot!"

  The dancers followed her. They gathered around and watched his ankle heal itself. After a few murmurs and gasps, no one said a word. In minutes, the ankle looked just like its mate. John flexed it slowly, listening for grating sounds, and then extended it with the same care. Then he circled it, one way and then the other, and started to laugh. Soon everyone was laughing, even Anna. He got to his feet, took a few cautious steps—then took a running start and sprang up on stage. He did a combination on his way to his place for the first piece. "Come on, boss," he said, still laughing. " `Time's a-wastin'!" It was one of her catch-phrases; the company dissolved into hysterics.

  Anna let that go on for a good five seconds. From then on they were so busy that it wasn't until midway through the triumphant fourth curtain call that John had time to wonder about it all.

  He never did figure it out. He had to be told. But he didn't mind.

  PART THREE

  7

  Logan Airport

  Boston, Massachusetts

  5 December 2064

  Rhea felt as if she were on a conveyor belt, sliding ever closer toward the butcher's blade.

  Logan Aerospaceport was used to celebrity press conferences; a soundproof room had been found for Rand
, Rhea, Colly and the cronkites and riveras representing the planetary, national and local-birthplace media pools. Cambots swarmed like blackflies, recording the scene from at least eight directions. Once in a long while, one of them would decide the ambient light was insufficient, and turn into a white firefly for a moment or two.

  Tough new laws had finally succeeded in taming the media: all four cronkites, and even the riveras, were scrupulously polite. Nonetheless they managed to annoy Rhea—by putting seventy percent of their questions to Rand. In the half-dozen previous press conferences they'd had together, the percentages had usually been reversed. It embarrassed her to be annoyed by that, but she couldn't help it. At least she was able to keep him from noticing . . . though she wasn't so sure about the cambots.

  Colly lapped it up. And put on a performance that would have made a child holostar blush. That annoyed Rhea too.

  Which made her ask herself why she was so irritable. She realized what bothered her most of all was how much Rand was enjoying the attention and flattery. It scared her. This was going to be a hard thing to undo. It was feeling more and more like a done deal . . . and she still hadn't given her agreement to it. Rand knew that, but he wasn't acting like it. Oh, he told the reporters—and the world beyond them—the assignment was only temporary, just completing Pribhara's season: the story he'd worked out with Jay and that horrible-sounding Martin person. But when he said it, she heard in his voice the quiet certainty that the permanent job was his. She wasn't sure if the cambots were hearing that too, or if she was projecting it.

  She felt disconnected, surreal, moving against a tide of invisible molasses. This is a hell of a way to spend my last hour on Earth, she decided. "Time to go, darling," she said helpfully, as Rand finished a reply.

  "Just one more," the flaky-looking rivera from the planetary pool said. "Do you have any comment on the breaking story about outbreaks of rogue assemblers?"

  Rand looked startled. "I'm sorry, I've been too busy packing to monitor news. Nanoassemblers, you mean?"

  The rivera nodded. "There seems to be growing evidence over the last few days of random instances of . . . well, of anarchist nanotechnology, all around the globe. Spontaneous healings, spontaneous slum regenerations—sort of little miracles. There's no telling how many, since the tendency is to underreport miracles. Some say there may be some sort of . . . well . . ."

  "A conspiracy of rapturists?" Rhea said, thinking of an old story-idea she had never gotten around to developing.

  "Rapturists?" the woman from the New England pool pounced.

  "The opposite of a terrorist," Rhea said. "But what has this got to do with us?"

  The flaky one tried not to look like he knew he was stretching for a tie-in hook. "Well, you're going to space, where nanotechnology comes from. Are you, I don't know, at all afraid some . . . uh, `Rapturist' might decide to put laughing gas in your p-suit tanks?"

  To everyone's surprise, it was Colly who spoke up. "There hasn't been one of those stories in space so far," she said. They all stared.

  "It's true," she insisted. "Not one. I watch the news. Anyway, they haven't hurt anybody, have they?"

  No one replied.

  "Maybe not yet," Rand said. "But anarchy can get pretty scary even when it means well, honey. Maybe especially when it means well." He turned to the rivera. "But no, we're not worried at all. Everybody knows you're safer in space than you are on Earth: look at the stats. We really have to go now. Thank you all—"

  On the flight up, Rhea tuned her seatback screen to a news channel, in time to hear herself ask, " . . . a conspiracy of rapturists?" and then, in response to the rivera's prompting, define the term. A few moments later, Colly and Rand's exchange was quoted too.

  The piece in which the soundbite was featured might as well have been titled, "Nanotechnology—Threat or Menace?" It was about three times as long as the item she managed to find later on an arts channel, about Rand's return to the Shimizu.

  * * *

  She wanted the flight to be miserable. It was idyllic. No dropsickness in her family—none on the whole plane. No emergencies; minimal, gentle maneuvering; a perfect hop. Superb, pleasant service from human and robot alike. Even the food was excellent: real, microwave cooking rather than flashpak. The Shimizu did not permit clients to arrive unhappy, whether they wanted to or not. The hardest part of the flight was keeping Colly's seat belt buckled once the gravity went away.

  The approach was spectacular. The Shimizu looked like God's Christmas ornament, a vast gleaming globe. Its exterior was fractalized for maximum radiating surface, so it sparkled in the sunlight like a vast ball of crinkled aluminum foil. It was girdled by an equator of huge cooling and power-collecting vanes, brilliant silver on one side and space black on the other, that slowly rotated independently as the relative position of the sun changed. A thousand points of light—peoples' windows!—added to the illumination, randomly distributed, going on or off as tenants entered or left their rooms.

  The plane crept up on the hotel sideways, spinning slowly around its own axis to distribute the sun's heat, so there were no bad seats. Every time you decided you were there now, the damned thing got a little bigger; it seemed planet-sized by the time they actually reached the spaceport at the "north pole."

  After a textbook docking, all four doors opened the instant the seat-belt light went out, so that passengers need not stand in line to debark; customs formalities occurred electronically without any of them noticing. The dock itself was beautiful and impressive, its layout and decor operating somehow on the subconscious to make you feel you were home.

  Then Rand muttered, "Oh no—that asshole."

  A large spider monkey with a head like a red sea anemone sprang at them out of nowhere. At the last possible moment he braked to a stop with smelly, poorly tuned thrusters and flung his arms around Colly. She looked wildly around to Rhea, her eyes asking permission to be terrified.

  "I could kiss you," the apparition said, and did so, on the forehead. Colly decided she didn't need permission; the man said "Eek" and let her go and clutched his groin.

  "Nice shot, dear," Rhea said, and interposed herself between them before Rand could. She was pleased to find that free-fall reflexes came back quickly to her; she still remembered how to jaunt. "Who or what are you?" she asked him.

  He forgot his aching testicles. "The guy who could cheerfully strangle you, Ms. Pash-o," he said cheerfully. "What ever possessed you to give them a bite like that, for God's sake? You blew my whole story right off the Net with that rapturist line, lady. Who asked you to improvise? If it hadn't been for this little genius here," he said, pointing to Colly, "it could have been a disaster." Forgetting that she had just kicked him, he reached out and tried to pat her head. "You just keep following your mama around, kid, and every time you see her open her mouth to a sniffer, you talk instead."

  Colly ducked until he gave up. "Rhea and Colly," Rand said through clenched teeth, "this is Evelyn Martin, Shimizu's publicity chief."

  "And people still come here?" Rhea asked. The man was strikingly ugly. His head looked like a large red Brillo pad with bat-ears and pop-eyes. She had not met him on her previous visit, but Rand had assured her Martin was an excrescence; she decided he had understated the case.

  Martin didn't seem to hear. "It's okay for you to talk like that now; I'll dub the audio later, give us all beautiful lines for the release. But I've got the top three cronkites in space waiting nearby to do the personal bit, so pee if you have to and we'll—"

  Jay arrived. "Rand and his family will be happy to meet with them later this evening," he said firmly, and embraced his brother. "Sorry I'm late, bro."

  Martin continued to talk rapidly while Jay greeted Rhea and Colly in turn, but they all ignored him. "Twenty-one hundred, Ev," Jay said as he led them from the hall. "They'll wait. Nobody ever turned down a free dinner at the Shimizu. Least of all a cronkite." Martin watched speechlessly as their luggage emerged from the plane and began to follow them
.

  * * *

  Rhea had known Jay since her courtship with his half-brother over a decade ago, had chatted with him for dozens of hours on the phone since. But since Jay had made the permanent move to space, around the time she and Rand got married, she had only been in his physical presence once, briefly, during Rand's previous residency. In one sense she knew him well already. But to know if you really like someone, you have to smell them. As they all relaxed over drinks in their suite—Rhea's new home!—she found herself remembering how much she really liked Jay.

  During a visit to the bathroom she took the occasion to summon Diaghilev, Jay's AI, and ask if there had been any recent news of Ethan. "Ethan who, Ms. Paixao?" was the reply, which was all the answer she needed. The relationship was irreparable. A shame; Rhea had liked Ethan, at least over the phone. "Is Jay seeing anyone?"

  There was an imperceptible hesitation while Diaghilev made sure she was cleared for that information. "No, ma'am. He dates occasionally, but has not dated anyone twice." She made a mental note to keep an eye open for a nice young man for Jay, and rejoined the others.

  The suite was considerably nicer than the one she'd had on her last short visit. It took her a while to note, and a little longer to believe, that the window was real. Earth was centered in the frame, the terminator just reaching what looked like a major blizzard over the northwest coast of North America. This was one of the more expensive suites in the hotel. She hunted for flaws, and cheered up a little when she noticed the furniture was all permanent. Excellent, and fully programmable, but it didn't go away when you were done with it.

  But everything else she could see was state of the art or better.

  She told herself sourly that the hotel had given them this suite to soften her up—that once Rand signed on for good, they'd be moved to somewhere inboard with the rest of the peons.