The Stardance Trilogy (97 page)

He sighed. “I do not envision that occurring, I’m afraid.”

She set her jaw. “Ling, quit dancing and spit it out. What’s going on?”

“You will recall the economic summit conference in the Shimizu last month?”

“Let me see…the one we almost got killed during, or am I thinking of some other one?”

He ignored the sarcasm. “We five have managed to repair our relationship…for the time being, at least…and are now about to destroy the Starmind and overthrow the United Nations.”

Eva Hoffman had known more than a few power-mad men and women in her lifetime, including some who were quite successful at it. Had any of them made such a statement, she would have laughed, or at least wanted to. From the lips of Chen Ling Ho the words were blood-curdling. No flip response was thinkable. “My God…,” she whispered, horror-struck.

“We hope to create the first rational planetary government,” Chen went on conversationally. “Rather along lines K’ung Fu-Tzu might have approved of, I think. But it scarcely matters. The point is that once the Starmind is annihilated, any mistakes humanity makes will be its own.”

REB! For God’s sake, WAKE UP!

Just the barest hint of response, like a man turning restlessly in a deep sleep.

“Ling, for the love of Christ, humanity can’t
make it
without the Starmind, not anymore, you know that!”

“Precisely why the Starmind must die. The riches it showers on us are like welfare checks: they demean, and degrade, and diminish us. Stardancer benevolence has already devolved us from wolves to sheep, from roaring killer apes to chattering monkeys, in three generations. This trend
must
be reversed, before the inevitable day comes when the Fireflies return. The transition will be painful—but we will make it by our own efforts, as free human beings, or die trying.”

“You really think you can kill every Stardancer in the Solar System?
How?
”

He frowned, and chose his words carefully. “Before I can answer that, Eva, I must ascertain your status. I have stated my intentions. Three options are open to you: you can be friend, foe or neutral.”

“Nice of you to offer the third choice,” she said.

“Yes, it is. But if you choose it, I cannot answer your question, or any other of a strategic or tactical nature. In that event I will sequester you here, in reasonable comfort but complete ignorance, and release you in your own custody when events have resolved. On the order of three months from now.”

She noticed that he did not say, “…on the
close
order of…” and grimaced. “I assume foes don’t get briefed either.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “If you tell me that you oppose me, I will answer any questions you have. You have been an intimate companion to me, Eva: I would wish your death to be as agreeable as possible.”

Reb, wake UP! Rise and shine! Dammit, you’re gonna wet the bed!

“I see. And if I claim friendship?”

“You get it,” he said simply. “After this is over, you can have the Shimizu for a gift if you like. It lies within my fief.”

“And you’ll take my word.”

“Eva, I know when you are lying.”

“How long do I have to think it over?”

“As long as you wish. But in ten minutes I must leave here to begin the attack, and I will be unable to return for at least twenty-four hours. If you wish to witness history as it is happening, at my side, you must choose to be my friend before I leave this room.” He swiveled his chair away from her and began scanning a readout of figures in no alphabet she knew, politely giving her space to think it through.

The trouble was, she thought, the canny little son of a bitch probably
would
know if she lied. That was bad, very bad, for she had to oppose him—
had to—
and dared not even hint why. After a hundred and sixteen weary years and countless flirtations, death had come for her at last, was a matter of minutes away. She was shocked by how much that realization hurt—but even a newfound fear of extinction was of less importance than the awful responsibility she
must
now discharge before she died.

Why me?
she thought—and smothered the thought savagely. That was exactly the kind of self-indulgence she could no longer afford. Instead she made her limbs relax, took control of her breathing, and forced herself to remember the words Reb had once told her.

“It’s state of mind more than anything else, Eva. Telepathic sensitivity is largely a matter of sweeping the trash out of the communications room. Try and remember what it was like when one of your babies cried in the night and woke you. There is no ‘you’ at such a moment, no ego, no identity, no fear, no viewpoint…only the need, and the feeling of it, and the will to serve it, to soothe the pain at all costs.”

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.