The Stardance Trilogy (52 page)

“Even for telepaths, touch has special meaning,” he said. “In one sense you’re right…but I’d like to shake your hand sooner, rather than later. It shouldn’t take you more than a few weeks.”

“It would make a lovely honeymoon trip, love,” Ben said. Under her influence he had lately been developing the ability to speak short sentences, and then stop. It was some of the strongest evidence I’d seen yet that Top Step could radically alter character.

She smiled suddenly. “Right, then. We’ll do it—singin’ all the way!”

The room rocked with cheers.

I could not completely suppress a twinge of envy. I wished I were coming along in my art as fast as she was in hers. But I was terribly happy for her.

The next day was Sunday. (I did mention that we used a six-day work week in Top Step, didn’t I?) I spent the whole morning working out with Robert, the whole afternoon rehearsing in my studio, and the whole evening drinking Irish coffee in Le Puis with Robert and Kirra and Ben. Fat Humphrey had solved the zero-gee Irish coffee problem with a custom drinking bulb: a large chamber for coffee and booze, and a smaller one full of whipped cream; you sucked the former through the latter. Micah juggled, and Jacques LeClaire put on a lovely impromptu performance on the house synth. To everyone’s surprise, Glenn jumped in and sang two numbers, very well, in a pure, controlled alto. She was roundly cheered, and blushed deeply. Then Kirra had to sing the Song of Top Step for those who hadn’t heard it. The applause was deafening. So many drinks were credited to her account that she never paid for another dram the whole time she was inboard. It was a memorable night.

Robert kissed me goodnight at my door, not pushing it. I sort of wished he had. But not enough to push it myself.

Monday we all came to class excited—some eager, some anxious. Today a new stage in our training began. We were all dressed in our p-suits, airtanks and all, and we certainly were a colourful bunch. As we entered the room, Reb gave each of us a quick, warm handclasp and a private smile. His p-suit was forest green. The room looked different: all Velcro had been stripped from the chamber; its spherical wall was smooth and shiny.

“As you know,” he said when we were assembled, “today we begin a week of EVA simulation. We’ve discussed and prepared for it. Some of you may experience disorientation, fear, perhaps even panic. This is normal and nothing to be self-conscious about. If you feel it’s becoming too much, say so and I’ll turn the walls off at once. It may help to take a visual fix, now, on those nearest you.”

I mapped myself in relation to Robert and Reb.

“Close your hoods, now.”

We did so, and there was a soft sighing as my suit air kicked in. It was the only sound: these p-suits had radios that filtered out breathing sounds automatically, and there was no chatter.

“Remember,” Reb’s voice said in my ear then, “please do not use your thrusters until I tell you to. Try to remain still. This is going to be startling enough without having a train wreck. Are you all ready? Teena, begin simulation.”

Top Step went away!

Suddenly we were all floating in raw, empty space. It didn’t matter that we were all expecting it: the transition was as shocking as a roller-coaster plunge. A flurry of involuntary motion went through the room, and my earphones buzzed with the sum of dozens of grunts, gasps, and assorted exclamations—including my own “Dear Christ!” I swallowed hard and clung to my fix on Robert and Reb. If they were all right, I was too.

“Remember your breathing!” Reb called.

Oh yes. Inhale,
slowly,
hold it for the same interval, exhale
completely,
hold,
feel
the breath, follow it, become it…three weeks of training kicked in and I began to calm down, to try and appreciate the incredible sight.

The illusion provided by the spherical holo wall of the classroom was terribly effective. Seeing space through the window of a Solarium is much different than actually being out
in
it, surrounded on all sides by infinity. Intellectually I knew it was an illusion, but it took my breath away just the same.

Earth was off to my left, turning lazily, Luna above my head, and the Sun was at my back. Top Step did not exist in this simulation, nor the Nanotech Safe Lab nor any of the other factories and modules that surrounded Top Step. All around me was eternal cold dark, and the ancient coals of a billion billion suns. For the first time in my life I began to get an emotional grasp of just how
far away
they were. In TV scifi the stars are just down the street. It suddenly came home to me just how preposterous was the notion that Man or Stardancer would ever reach them. Me, the whole human race, the whole Starmind: we were all brief, inconsequential flickers in this endless blackness—

The holo was so good that even the shadows were right. That is, the side of anyone that faced the Sun was brightly lit…and the other side seemed not to exist at all, unless it occulted some sunlit object behind it. In space there is no atmosphere to diffuse light and mitigate shadows. Of course there, in the room, there actually
was
air—we were breathing p-suit air only to maintain the simulation—but the holo corrected for that and fooled our eyes.

I had thought I was used to being in free fall. But I had never had this far to fall. In Top Step the longest you could possibly jaunt in a straight line before docking with something was about a hundred meters, in the Great Hall. But if someone were to give me a mischievous shove now, I would fall
for eternity…
or so my eyes tried to tell me, and my stomach believed them implicitly. I had no umbilical tether to catch me; in this simulation there was nothing closer than Terra to tether
to
.

Inhale, hold, exhale…

From Earth all you can see of the Milky Way is a streak in the sky like a washed-out rainbow. I could see the whole stupendous galactic lens edge on, bisecting the Universe. The starfield was so magnificent that for the first time in my life I understood how even some educated people could believe it ruled their destinies.

Reb said nothing further, let us soak in it. Someone was swearing, softly and steadily and devoutly, a female voice. Someone else was weeping, a male. Kirra was humming under her breath, quite unconsciously I think. All at once someone giggled, and then Jacques did too, and then others, and the very idea of giggling in space was so brave and silly that I had to laugh myself, and I think we might have gotten a group belly-laugh going if Nicole hadn’t picked just then to scream. That first split second of it before the radio’s automatic level control damped her volume went through my ears like a hot knife; involuntarily I started and went into a tumble. So did almost everyone else, and a train wreck began—

“Cut!” Reb told Teena calmly, and the illusion vanished at once.

We were back in our familiar classroom. The transition was just as wrenching as it had been in the other direction; we seemed to have been instantaneously teleported into the heart of Top Step. We floundered about like new chums, and gaped at each other. Reb flashed to Nicole’s side and held her until she stopped screaming and began to cry softly against his chest. He summoned her roommate with his eyes, and had Nicole conducted from the room, sobbing feebly.

I found that Robert was by my side, and that I was glad he was there, and indeed was clutching tightly to his strong arm. Somehow he mentally integrated up our separate masses and vectors and used his wrist and ankle thrusters to bring us to a dead stop together, in a spot where no one else was on a collision course.

“Wow!” he said hoarsely.

“It still gets to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘still’? I’ve been in space many times, yes—but that was my first time EVA. In simulation that good, I mean.”

It surprised me a little, I’d sort of assumed a space architect would have to go outdoors to check on details of a job in progress. But it warmed me toward Robert to find him as moved and shaken as I was by the experience.

He was kind and sensitive and patient and attentive, and very attractive, and he wanted me. What was I waiting for? I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. I just knew I wasn’t ready.

“Are you ready?” Reb called, making me jump involuntarily. “All right, let’s get back to the simulation.”

Class went on.

Nicole showed up at lunch, looking wan and pale. But she wasn’t at supper that night. She never came to classes again, and within two days she was back Earthside.

I visited her and said goodbye before she left. It was awkward.

We had EVA simulation in Sulke’s class too for the rest of that week—only her simulations included holographic “objects” we had to match vectors with, and for the last two days she installed a real set of monkey bars which we learned to use like zero-gee monkeys. (Part of our training consisted of watching holos of real monkeys bred in free fall. God, they’re fast! They make lousy pets, though: so far only cats and some dogs have ever learned to use a zero-gee litterbox reliably.)

Three more people had dropped out by the end of the week. Their egos were simply not strong enough to handle being dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer size of the Universe.

I asked Reb about that in class one day. “It just seems paradoxical. You need a strong ego to endure raw space—and we’re all here to lose our egos in the Starmind.”

“You are not here to lose your ego,” he corrected firmly. “You’re here to lose your irrational fear of
other
egos.”

“Irrational?” Glenn said.

“On Earth it is perfectly rational,” Reb agreed. “On Earth, there are finite resources, and so underneath everything is competition for food and breeding rights. All humans have occasional flashes of higher consciousness, in which they see that cooperation is preferable to competition—but as long as the game
is
zero sum, competition is the rational choice for the long run every time. Read Hofstadter’s
Metamagical Themas,
the chapter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

“But what the Symbiote has done is to change the rules, utterly. A human in Symbiosis has nothing to compete
for
. Cooperation becomes more than rational and pleasant: it’s inevitable.”

“How long does it take to unlearn a lifetime’s habit of competition?” Glenn asked.

“An average of about three-tenths of a second,” Reb said. “It’s what your heart has always yearned for: to stop fighting and love your neighbor. Once you become telepathic you
know
, in your bones, without question, that it’s safe to do that now.”

Robert spoke up—unusually; he seldom drew attention to himself in Reb’s class. “Isn’t competition good for a species? What pressure is there on Stardancers to evolve? Or have they evolved as far as they can already?”

“Oh, no,” Reb said. “Charlie Armstead said once, ‘We are infants, and we hunger for maturity.’ Animals improve through natural selection only—the fit survive. Humans improve through natural selection, and because they want to. We did not evolve the science of medicine, we
built
it, painfully, over thousands of years, to preserve those natural selection would have culled. Stardancers improve because they want to, only. Their brave hope is that intelligence may just be able to do as well at evolution as random chance.”

Robert nodded. “I think I see. It took
millions
of years for chance to produce human sentience…and then it took that sentience
thousands
of years to produce civilization. Telepathic sentience, that didn’t have to fight for its living, might do comparable things in a lifetime.”

I signaled for the floor. “I have trouble imagining how a telepathic society evolves.”

Reb smiled. “So does the Starmind. Does it comfort you to know that our current knowledge suggests you’ll have at least two hundred years to think about it?”

I grinned back. “It helps.”

Robert signaled for attention again. “Reb, I’ve heard that a couple of Stardancers have died.”

“Accidental deaths, yes. A total of four, actually.”

“Well…how can a Stardancer die? I mean, each one’s consciousness is spread through more than forty-thousand different minds. So for a Stardancer, isn’t death really no more than having your childhood home burn down? Your self persists, doesn’t it, even if it can’t ever go home again?”

Reb looked sad. “I’m afraid not. It isn’t consciousness that diffuses through the Starmind, but the products of consciousness: thoughts and feelings. Consciousness itself is rooted in the brain, and when a brain is destroyed, that consciousness ends. Telepathy does not transcend death—the Starmind knows no more about what lies beyond death than any human does.”

Robert frowned. “But all the thoughts that brain ever had, remain on record, in the Starmind—and you’ve told us the Starmind’s memory is perfect. Wouldn’t it be possible, given every single thought a person’s mind ever had, to reconstruct it, and maintain it by time-sharing among forty-some thousand other brains?”

“It has been tried. Twice. It is the consensus of the Starmind that it never will be tried again.”

“Why not?”

“What results is something like a very good artificial intelligence package. It has a personality, mannerisms, quirks…but no
core
. It doesn’t produce
new
thoughts, or feel new feelings. Both such constructs asked to be terminated, and were.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand, no Stardancer has yet died of so-called natural causes, and individuals as old as a hundred and ten are as active and vigorous as you are. So I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“I won’t,” Robert agreed. “I just wondered.”

That Sunday there was a small celebration in the Café du Ciel, acknowledging our transition from Postulant to Novice. Phillipe Mgabi attended, the first time most of us had seen him since our arrival, but it was mostly Dorothy’s show. There were no speeches, scant ceremony. Mostly it was tea and conversation and good feelings. Some of us came forward and told of things we had thought or felt since our arrival, difficulties we had overcome. A new marriage was announced, and cheered. To my surprise, no gripes were aired. I think that had a lot to do with Phillipe Mgabi having been too busy to show his face for the past four weeks. I’d never seen such a smoothly running, well-organized
anything
before, and I knew how much hard work that kind of organization requires.