Starmind. Part 24

"And we the Starmind will be waiting for you. To show you your new world. Your new home. You will be one with us, and we with you,h.o.m.o caelestisforever."

A vast soundless sound filled the world. Rhea heard it inside her head, as if on headphones. It was music, and she even recognized it: something Rand played all the time, something by Brindle whose name she could not recall. But to her tortured imagination it seemed like the Trump of Doom that Christians believed would signal the Rapture. She found that she was clutching Colly to her fiercely, keening without words. The words that raced through her mind were, she knew, probably shared by millions; indeed, they might have been the final thought of most of the humans who had ever died:Not yet! I wasn't done yet!

It was a protest the universe had never heeded yet. As she drew in a breath to scream it aloud, Colly spoke against her breast. "Don't worry, Mom," she said. "I didn't want to come out either, remember?"

Rhea remembered. Colly had been born three weeks overdue. She had stayed stubbornly in the womb .

. . until a pitocin drip induced labor, and forced her out. And Colly had come to like this world.

"It's okay," Colly insisted. "We're gonna go see Daddy now."

She kept her deathgrip on Colly's shoulders, but pulled back so she could see her face. Colly was smiling. "Can you feel it?" she asked.

With a thrill of something like horror, Rhea felt her weight leaving her. She tried to hang on to it, but could not. Within a minute it was gone completely. Her sinuses began to fill, and she felt her face reddening as blood redistributed itself evenly throughout her body. She felt mild dizziness too. It was just like climbing to orbit in a shuttle-except that the rest of the world around her continued to observe the law of gravity.

Shara Drummond's message began repeating.

Colly picked up an uneaten apple, held it out, and let go. Rhea's body-awareness told her that she was in zero gee, so persuasively that it was jarring to see the apple fall normally. Colly giggled.

Suddenly she squirmed out of Rhea's grasp, a trick she had perfected at age five. Rhea cried out, but it was too late: Colly had already unfolded her legs from beneath her . . . causing her to rise into the air.

Without thinking, Rhea sprang after her and caught her like a tackler, hugging the child to her. They found themselves about six or seven meters in the air, sinking with the gentle slowness of a feather beneath the weight of their clothes. This high in the air, Shara's repeating message was almost inaudible.

Others around them were airborne too.A convention of Nijinskis, she thought wildly as she drifted down.Oh, Jay would love this! And Rand . . .

"I wish Dad and Uncle Jay could see this," she said aloud.

Colly was grinning, exhilarated. "Just pay attention," she said. "We can give them an instant replay later."

They landed gently on sand, a few meters west of their takeoff point. With s.p.a.ce-trained instincts and Trancer skill, both let their legs absorb the energy of landing, so they did not bounce away again. For a moment they bobbed there together, poised at the very membrane between earth and sky. They could hear Shara's voice clearly again, now that they were close to the earth-and many competing sounds too. Some people were screaming, some were laughing, some were yelling contradictory advice; some were flailing helplessly in the air, trying vainly to swim back to earth. And some were finding out how high they could jump. Out on the sea she could see people leaping higher than their masts, moving lazily in the air, like drowners in reverse.

"Let's Trance, Mom," Colly said. "We can do it for real, now."

Rhea had a sudden vivid memory of Manuel Brava, the night she had trance-danced for the first time.

Be ready,he had said.It's gonna be good.

And this was the Hour of his Remembrance . . . Somewhere in Rhea's heart, something gave way. Without regret, she closed the book that was her life .

. . and began a new one. "All right, Colly." She released her embrace. "Take my hand, though, okay?"

"Sure," Colly said. "Here we go!"

They leaped together.

A few minutes later, Rhea admitted to herself that she was having fun. More fun than she had had in a long time. It was a little like trampolining or bungee-jumping in ultraslow motion. It was very much like dreams she had been having all her life. It was, in literal reality, what Trancing had always felt like, except that the moments of breathless exhilaration were not fleeting and transient.

Some others around her were also moving in the characteristic flowing movements of trance-dance, now; she and Colly were not the only Trancers here. Out on the sea, some people were walking on water, with exaggerated steps; she could just hear them laughing.

"-you okay?" Rand's voice said suddenly from her breast pocket. "Rhea! Colly! Can you hear me?

Dammit, are you okay?"

He sounded half out of his mind with worry. Rhea took the phone out of her pocket. "We're fine, darling. Hang on-I think we're coming for a visit."

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean? What's going on down there?"

"Didn't you hear Shara up there?"

"Yeah, but it didn't make much sense. She told us to go EVA, find some Symbiote, and take off our p-suits. But what about you? She said something crazy about immunity to gravity, and gold Symbiote."

"That's right. We're about . . . oh, I'd guess twenty meters above the ground right now. It looks like you win: Colly and I are coming to s.p.a.ce after all."

"Oh G.o.d-you'll freeze, before you can reach the Symbiote."

"I don't think so," she said. "It's warmer than it should be down here. I think that gold Symbiote is having some kind of lens effect. They've had a long time to think this through."

There was silence on the line. The first to fully absorb the news was Jay. He began to laugh with joy.

"Oh, Eva!" he cried, "What a glorious joke on you! Oh, howwonderful !"

"What do you mean, Jay?" Rhea asked.

"I get it now-I see it-I know why she wanted to die-and why she was dragging her feet-the stubborn old biddy was holding out formeaning . . . and she got it, bless her selfish heart-d.a.m.n, she got the prize-oh, I'll bet she died smiling-"

"I don't understand," Rhea said. "Rewind and start over-slower."

"I'll try. Look, at age one hundred, Eva was done with life. So she went into sixteen years of life review .. . and found nomeaning in anything she'd done. During a century of living as hard as she knew how, Eva convertedX cubic tonnes of food and water into excrement and offspring; she pushedY megabucks from one imaginary place to another; she experiencedZ increments of pleasure or pain; once done, she could find no real significance in any of it. So her last hope for meaning was her death: she spent sixteen years hoping, irrationally, to find a meaningful death, an opportunity to give up her lifefor something. That's why she kept postponing her suicide for so long-why, even after she gave up and made up her mind to die, she stalled long enough to let Reb arrive, and give her a convincing reason to wait just a little longer. The reason was: to live to see this historic day."

"It's a shame she missed it, then," Colly said.

"No, no that's the best part, don't you see?" Jay said. "It is a shame she didn't live to see it with her own eyes, sure. But I'm sure she got to see it through the Starmind's eyes before she died-and more important, she got something even better. She got what she'd wanted in the first place, what she'd already given up on when Reb told her about today: a meaningful death. Think about it: how many humans-how many creatures, in the wide universe-had ever been privileged to sacrifice their lives to savetwo intelligentspecies?"

Colly was the first to see it. "Wow, yeah," she said wonderingly. "If it hadn't been for her and Reb and the Adepts, all the Stardancers would have got killed, and there wouldn't be any of that gold simmy-oat up there waiting for us. All us people would have died today . . ."

"She got the most meaningful death there ever was," Rhea said. She giggled suddenly. "Every d.a.m.n time humanity goes through some kind of birthing, there seems to be an Eve around."

"Are yousure you're okay?" Rand asked. "You sound sort of giddy."

She laughed out loud. "Let's just say a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. We don't have to be apart anymore, baby. Not ever again. Hang in there-we'll be along directly."

"What should I do?" he cried, his voice agonized.

"What Shara said. And don't be afraid. I'm not. I was, but I'm not anymore. It's gonna begood."

"But-"

"Go ahead. I've got to hang up now, I don't want to miss this. We'll be there soon, love." She let go of the phone, and watched it fall away.

She and Colly were slowly moving away from the ocean, into the dunes. With each leap they came down farther to the west, for the earth went on without them all around them. They were sweating with exertion, now, and the sweat behaved the way it did in free-fall, as content to drip up as down. In her mind's eye Rhea saw the whole human race doing this. Hovering. Tottering on the brink. Trembling on the verge.

The ground was coming up again. You didn't even have to look: when you could hear Shara clearly again, it was time to prepare for your landing.

"Colly!" she cried. "Want to go for the big one?"

"Sure," her daughter said. Rhea began undoing her clothing. Colly got the idea at once and skinned out of her own clothes. They let go, watched their clothes fall. This time, when they hit the earth and rebounded, they kept on rising.

They kept dancing for a while as they rose, but the view was simply too distracting to concentrate; after a time they stopped moving in s.p.a.ce and just gawked, letting the wind do with them as it would, turning end over end. The earth moved slowly and majestically beneath them. Soon Provincetown was below them. It was weird, inexpressibly weird, to see P-Town with hardly a soul on the streets. The beaches were full of hopping fleas, and the sky was starting to fill with naked people. It reminded Rhea of news footage of hot-air balloon regattas in the desert.

"Look," Colly said, pointing. "There's our old house."

Rhea saw it. For a moment it filled her heart, and called her back. Her beloved widow's walk. Below that, the tower room in which her unfinished novel waited, and below that the bedroom into which she had been born. Kicking and screaming.

"Goodbye," she said to it. "I'll never forget you."

"'Course not," Colly said. "Me either."

Suddenly they were rising faster, as though propelled by a great wind from below. It felt surprisingly like surfing vertically.

"Hang on," Rhea cried.

"Here we come, Daddy!" Colly called.

And they rose up forever, going for the gold.

EPILOGUE.

High Earth Orbit 22 July 2065.

It did not go totally smoothly, of course. Human beings were involved; at least some chaos and tragedy had to result.

But there never were more than the two choices: evolve or die. Perhaps it need not have been done as it was, by surprise. Perhaps humanity, forewarned and prepared, might have agreed to leave its ancestral womb forever, peacefully and without panic. The decision not to risk it was irrevocably made on the day the original Six entered Symbiosis and founded the Starmind, back at the turn of the millennium, back when half of the human race was hungry and poor, and pessimism was still the hallmark of intelligence. Once Charlie Armstead elected to leave Courage Day out of the report he sent back to humanity from Saturn in the historic t.i.tan Transmission, it was too late to turn back: the Starmind was committed to secrecy.

If you could somehow establish telepathic contact with a human fetus in its ninth month . . . would it be a kindness for you to tell it everything you know of the birth trauma to come? Would it benefit from the foreknowledge-or panic, jam the birth ca.n.a.l, and kill itself and its mother? After all, less than one percent of the race ever voluntarily chose to go to Top Step and become Stardancers. Being human is a hard habit to break. Shara Drummond, Charlie Armstead and their companions believed-all the Starmind still believes-that humanity might well have died rather than leave Earth, given the choice. So they did not give it the choice until the last possible instant . . . and spent sixty-five years secretly preparing it for that instant.

This cost the Starmind much ethical anguish over those years-and sharp tragedy at the eleventh hour-but right up until the Day of Courage, the overwhelming consensus of the ma.s.sed brains of the Starmind was that the stakes were just too high to permit any risks. One of the few concrete facts the Fireflies told the Starmind before they left us to work out our own destiny is thath.o.m.o sapiens is at least thethird sentient race to be raised up in this solar system.

The first sentient race ("sentient" defined as "capable of art") lived eons ago, on a planet some call Lucifer, whose shattered remains are now known as the Asteroid Belt.

The second such race appears to have been somewhat more advanced: they "merely" blew the atmosphere off the next closest planet to the sun, Mars. But they are just as dead.

We appear to have squeaked through to the finish line.

Had we too failed our most final of exams . . . well, there hangs Venus, within the habitable zone, its reducing atmosphere ready to collapse into a viable biosphere at a chemical nudge. . . .

Perhaps when I was a human fetus, I would have consented to be born. But I am glad, all things considered, that I wasn't consulted.

Volumes larger than this one could be-are being-written about the chaotic events of the hours and days that followed the Hour of Remembrance, the countless millions of varying human reactions to Shara Drummond's call.

No volume however large could describe what happened when over six billion minds entered telepathic symphysis in a single great cascading wave, nor will I try even to hint at it here. Suffice it to say that only the presence of a quarter of a million trained and prepared telepaths made it possible at all. Symbiosis is profoundly disorienting in its first onset, and some find it terrifying-Stardancer Postulants used to spend three months in Top Step preparing themselves for the transition. But human beings are tough, when they have to be, and we had to be.

Even now, a month later, the integration process is still ongoing. It might not be too inaccurate to say thatthe new HyperStarmind has achieved consciousness, and is working-slowly!-toward awareness.

Despite the very best efforts of a quarter of a million linked minds planning for over half a century, a little more than two percent of humanity perished in the ma.s.s transcendence toh.o.m.o caelestis, most through stubbornness but some from sheer stupidity. No telepathic ent.i.ty can take lightly the deaths of so many millions of souls-especially needless deaths, on the very verge of immortality. But at least their surviving loved onesknow with utter certainty that everything possible was done to save them; there is mourning for them in the Starmind today, but no recrimination. Cells die whenever a baby is born; it is no one's fault. Balancing the sorrow to some extent is the joy of all those who love an autistic or r.e.t.a.r.ded or catatonic or mute person-for now they can communicate with their loved one on a level far deeper than words could ever have reached.

Approximately one half of one percent of humanity were unaffected by the telepathic tocsin from t.i.tan or the subsequent flood of antigravitons: genetic defectives whose DNA had sustained too many nonexpressing mutations over the millennia, whose introns were fatally damaged despite ma.s.sive redundancy in the coding. But nearly ninety percent of those eventually reached s.p.a.ce and joined the Starmind too . . . for there were suddenly s.p.a.cecraft to spare.

And a little over five percent of the human race flatly and stubbornly refused to go-improvising an astonishing variety of desperate methods to remain near the earth's surface, to remain only human. Within a month, however, their number had shrunk from five percent of the former total to about two.

The present population of Terra, then, consists of a little more than one hundred and sixty million people-on a planet with wealth and technology and room enough for six and a half billion. Most of them are wearing weights. You are one of them, or you would not be reading this. And the odds are that despite your new wealth and lebensraum you are lonely and/or hurt and/or angry and/or afraid.

You do not have to be any of those things. If you insist on staying on Earth, your life need not be hard: we will continue to beam down power, and programs for your nanoa.s.semblers, and other things you will need-or you can make your own way as your forebears did, if that pleases you.

But you do not have to stay.

The golden sky of Earth is blue once more-but there is plenty of red Symbiote in orbit. And even now, Terra holds more than enough resources to send you to join us. Even if you are one of the rare genetic unfortunates-and if you are, we have the resources to heal your introns, once you enter Symbiosis.

That is why I am writing this.

All you have to do is find a phone. Shara Drummond is accepting collect calls, and will tell you how to reach the nearest functioning s.p.a.cecraft. We're waiting for you.

Some of the oldest Chinese legends speak of a mysterious "edible gold," one taste of which confers immortality. It seems unlikely the ancient Chinese could have had any direct knowledge of the Fireflies or of Symbiote-it may simply be that, given enough time,any prophecy will eventually come true.

For millions of years, loneliness has cascaded down through the millennia, an ever-expanding wave of loneliness, powered by itself, by its own terrible self-creating hunger. Confined in bone boxes, we sought solace by rubbing our meat-mounts against one another, and so made more prisoners of bone and flesh to replace us and keep loneliness alive and expanding across the ages. Now loneliness is only an option, rather than a sentence. Your sentence has been commuted: you are released, not on, butupon, your own cognizance. The cell door is open at last: you can walk out any time you are ready. You have been ready since you were born.

And it is safe now. You can leave your cell without fear, without shame, without self-doubt. No matter what horrors you flatter yourself lie uniquely in your skull, no matter what unforgivable deficiencies you claim to yourself, you will find understanding and total acceptance in the Starmind. Everyone else did.

One of the nicest things about living in zero gravity is that it is no longer possible for one person to look down on any other. There is no rank, no cla.s.s, in the Starmind. There is no obsession, for there is no need for it. Yet paradoxically, somehow I can lookup to many of my fellow Stardancers-and lookinto any who consent. All of them, sooner or later.

To join us isnot to "lose your ego." It is to gain nine billion more. Love on that scale has never been imagined, in all the ages of the world. I tell you that it is better than youcan imagine.