The Stardance Trilogy (30 page)

By God, not one of the four would yield. Knowing it was foolish they all kept talking at once. They simply couldn’t help themselves.

“S
HUT UP
!” Bill’s voice blasted from the phone speaker, overriding the cacophony. They shut up and turned to look at his image. “Charlie,” he went on urgently, searching my face in his own screen,
“are you still human?”

I knew what he was asking. Had the aliens somehow taken me over telepathically? Was I still my own master, or did an aggressive hive-mind live in my skull, working my switches and pulleys? We had discussed the possibility earnestly on the trip out, and I knew that if my answer didn’t convince him he would blast us out of space without hesitation. The least of his firepower would vaporize the Limousine instantly.

I grinned. “Only for the last two or three years, Bill. Before that I was semipure bastard.”

Later he would be relieved; he was
busy
. “Do I burn them?”

“
Negative
. Hold your fire! Bill, hear me good: If you shot them, and they ever found out about it, they might just take offense. I know you’ve got a Planet Cracker; forget it:
from here they can turn out the Sun
.”

He went pale, and the diplomats held shocked silence, turning with effort to gape at me. “We’re nearly home,” I went on firmly. “Conference in the exercise room as soon as we’re all recovered, call it a couple of hours from now. All hands. We’ll answer all your questions then—but until then you’ll just have to wait. We’ve had a hell of a shock; we need time to recover.” Norrey was beginning to stir beside me, and Linda was looking about clear-eyed; Tom was shaking his head with great care from side to side. “Now I’ve got my wife and a pregnant lady to worry about. Get us home and get us to our rooms and we’ll see you in two hours.”

Bill didn’t like it a little bit, but he cleared the screen and got us home. The diplomats, even Dmirov and Silverman, were silent, a little in awe of us.

By the time we were docked everyone had recovered except Harry and Raoul, who slumbered on together. We towed them to their room, washed them gently, strapped them into their hammock so they wouldn’t drift against the air grille and drown in carbon dioxide, and dimmed the lights. They held each other automatically in their sleep, breathing to the same rhythm. We left Raoul’s Musicmaster by the door, in case he might ever want it for something, and swam out.

Then the four of us went back to our respective rooms, showered, and made love for two hours.

The exercise room was the only one in
Siegfried
with enough cubic to contain the entire ship’s complement comfortably. We could all have squeezed into the dining room; we often did for dinner. But it was cramped, and I did not want close quarters. The exercise room was a cube perhaps thirty meters on a side. One wall was studded with various rigs and harnesses for whole-body workout in free fall. Retaining racks on another held duckpins, Frisbees, hula hoops, and handballs. Two opposing walls were trampolines. It offered elbow room, visibility, and marvelous maneuverability.

And it was the only room in the ship arranged with no particular local vertical.

The diplomats, of course, arbitrarily selected one, taping velcro strips to the bare handball wall so that the opposed trampolines were their “ceiling” and “floor.” We Stardancers aligned ourselves against the far wall, among the exercise rigs, holding on to them with a hand or foot rather than velcroing ourselves to the wall between them. Bill and Col. Song took the wall to our left.

“Let’s begin,” I said as soon as we had all settled ourselves.

“First, Mr. Armstrong,” Silverman said aggrievedly, “I would like to protest the high-handed manner in which you have withheld information from this body to suit your convenience.”

“Sheldon,” DeLaTorre began wearily.

“No sir,” Silverman cut him off, “I vigorously protest. Are we children, to be kept twiddling our thumbs for two hours? Are all the people of Earth insignificant, that they should wait in suspense for three and a quarter hours while these—
artists
have an orgy?”

“Sounds like you’ve been twiddling volume controls,” Tom said cheerily. “You know, Silverman, I knew you were listening the whole time. I didn’t mind. I knew how much it must be bugging you.”

His face turned bright red, unusual in free fall; his feet must be just as red.

“No,” Linda said judiciously, “I rather think he was monitoring Raoul and Harry’s room.”

He went paler than he had started and his pupils contracted with hatred. Bullseye.

“All right, can it,” Bill rapped. “You too, Mr. Ambassador. Snipe on your own time—as you say, all Terra is waiting.”

“Yes, Sheldon,” DeLaTorre said forcefully. “Let Mr. Armstead speak.”

He nodded, white-lipped. “So speak.”

I relaxed my grip on an exercise bike and spread my arms. “First tell me what happened from your perspective. What did you see and hear?”

Chen took it, his features masklike, almost waxen. “You began your dance. The music became progressively stranger. Your dance began to deviate radically from the computer pattern, and you were apparently answered with other patterns of which the computer could make nothing. The speed of your movements increased drastically with time, to a rate I would not have believed if I had not witnessed it with my unaided eyes. The music increased in tempo accordingly. There were muffled grunts, exclamations, nothing intelligible. The aliens united to form a single entity in the center of their envelope, which began to emit quantities of what we are told is organic matter. You all screamed.

“We tried to raise you without success. Mr. Stein would not answer our calls, but he retrieved all five of you with extreme efficiency, lashed you together, and towed you all back to the shuttlecraft in one trip.”

I pictured the load that five of us, massing over three hundred kilos, must have been when the thrust came on, and acquired new respect for Harry’s arms and shoulders. Brute muscle was usually so superfluous in space—but another man’s muscles might have parted under that terrible strain.

“As soon as the airlock had cycled he brought you all inboard, strapped you in place, and said the single word ‘Go.’ Then he very carefully stowed Mr. Brindle’s musical instrument and—just sat down and stared at nothing. We were abandoning the task of communicating with him when you awoke.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me cover the high spots. First, as you must have guessed, we achieved rapport with the aliens.”

“And are they a threat to us?” Dmirov interrupted. “Did they harm you?”

“No. And no.”

“But you screamed, like ones sure to die. And Shara Drummond clearly stated before she died—”

“That the aliens were aggressive and arrogant, that they wanted Earth for a spawning ground, I know,” I agreed. “Translation error, subtle and in retrospect almost inevitable. Shara had only been in space a few months; she said herself she was getting about one concept in three.”

“What is the correct translation?” Chen asked.

“Earth is their spawning ground,” I said. “So is Titan. So are a lot of places, outside this system.”

“What do you mean?” Silverman barked.

“The aliens’ last sending was what kicked us over the deep end. It was stunningly simple, really, considering how much it explained. You could render it as a single word. All they really did was tell us their collective name.”

Dmirov scowled. “And that is?”

“Starseeder.”

Stunned silence at first. I think Chen was the first to begin to grasp it, and maybe Bill was nearly as fast.

“That’s their name,” I went on, “their occupation, the thing they do to be fulfilled. They farm stars. Their lifetime spans billions of years, and they spend them much as we do, trying to reproduce a good part of the time. They seed stars with organic life. They seeded
this
solar system, a long time ago.

“They are our race’s creator, and its remotest ancestor.”

“Ridiculous,” Silverman burst out. “They’re nothing like us,
in no way
are they like us.”

“In how many ways are you like an amoeba?” I asked. “Or a paramecium or a plant or a fish or an amphibian or any of your evolutionary forebears? The aliens are at least one or two and possibly three evolutionary stages beyond us. The wonder is that they can make themselves understood to us at all. I believe the next level beyond them has no physical existence in space or time.”

Silverman shut up. DeLaTorre and Song crossed themselves. Chen’s eyes were very wide.

“Picture the planet Earth as a single, stupendous womb,” I went on quietly, “fecund and perpetually pregnant. Ideally designed to host a maximum of organic life, commanded by a kind of super-DNA to constantly grow and shuffle progressively more complex life forms into literally billions of different combinations, in search of one complex enough to survive outside the womb, curious enough to try.

“I nearly had a brother once. He was born dead. He was three weeks past term by then; he had stayed in the womb past his birthing time, by God knows what subtle biological error. His waste products exceeded the ability of the placenta to absorb and carry them away; the placenta began to die, to decay around him, polluted by his wastes. His life support eroded away and he died. He very nearly killed my mother.

“Picture your race as a gestalt, a single organism with a subtle flaw in its genetic coding. An overstrong cell wall, so that at the moment when it is complex enough that it ought to have a united planetary consciousness, each separate cell continues to function most often as an individual. The thick cell wall impedes information exchange, allows the organism to form only the most rudimentary approximation of a central nervous system, a network that transmits only aches and pains and shared nightmares. The news and entertainment media.

“The organism is not hopelessly deformed. It trembles on the verge of birthing, yearns to live even as it feels itself dying. It may yet succeed. On the verge of extinction, Man gropes for the stars, and now less than a century after the first man left the surface of Earth in powered flight, we gather here in the orbit of Saturn to decide whether our race’s destiny should now be extended or cut short.

“Our womb is nearly filled with our poisonous by-products. The question before us is: Are we or are we not going to outgrow our neurotic dependence on planets—before it destroys us?”

“What is this crap,” Silverman snarled, “some more of your
Homo caelestis
horseshit? Is that your next evolutionary step? McGillicuddy was right, it’s a goddam evolutionary
dead end!
You couldn’t be self-supporting in fifty years from a standing start, the speed you recruit. If the Earth and Moon blew up tomorrow, God forbid, you would be dead within two or three years at the outside. You’re parasites on your evolutionary inferiors, Armstead, exiled parasites at that. You can’t live in your new environment without cell walls of steel and slashproof plastic, essential artifacts that are manufactured
only back there in the womb
.”

“I was wrong,” Tom said softly. “We’re not an evolutionary dead end. I couldn’t see the whole picture.”

“What did you miss?”
Silverman screamed.

“We have to change the analogy now,” Linda spoke up. “It starts to break down.” Her warm contralto was measured and soothing; I saw Silverman begin to relax as the magic worked on him. “Think of us now not as sextuplets, or even as a kind of six-personed fetus. Think of the Earth not as a uterus but as an ovary—and the six of us a single ovum. Together we carry
half
of the genes for a new kind of being.

“The most awesome and miraculous moment of all creation is the instant of syngamy, the instant at which two things come together to form so infinitely much more than the sum or even the product of their parts: the moment of conception. That is the crossroads, with phylogeny behind and ontogeny ahead, and that is the crossroads at which we are poised now.”

“What is the sperm cell for your ovum?” Chen asked. “The alien swarm, I presume?”

“Oh, no,” Norrey said. “They’re something more like the yin/yang, male/female overmind that produces the syngamy, in response to needs of its own. Change the analogy again: Think of them as the bees they so resemble, the pollinators of a gigantic monoclinous flower we call the Solar System. It is a true hermaphrodite, containing both pistil and stamen within itself. Call Earth the pistil, if you will, and we Stardancers are its combined ovule and stigma.”

“And the stamen?” Chen insisted. “The pollen?”

“The stamen is Titan,” Norrey said simply. “That red organic matter the aliens’ balloon gave off was some of its pollen.”

Another stunned silence.

“Can you explain its nature to us?” DeLaTorre asked at last. “I confess my incomprehension.”

Raoul spoke now, tugging his glasses out from the bridge of his nose and letting the elastic pull them back. “The stuff is essentially a kind of superplant itself. The aliens have been growing it in Titan’s upper atmosphere for millennia, staining the planetoid red. Upon contact with a human body, a kind of mutual interaction takes place that can’t be described. Energy from another…from another plane infuses both sides. Syngamy takes place, and perfect metabolism begins.”

“Perfect metabolism?”
DeLaTorre echoed uncertainly.

“The substance is a perfect symbiotic complement to the human organism.”

“But—but…but
how
—?”

“You wear it like a second skin, and you live naked in space,” he said flatly. “It enters the body at mouth and nostrils, spreads a million microtendrils throughout the system, emerges to rejoin itself at the anus. It covers you inside and out, becomes a part of you, in total metabolic balance.”

Chen Ten Li looked poleaxed. “A
perfect
symbiote…” he breathed.

“Right down to the trace elements,” Raoul agreed. “Planned that way a billion years ago. It is our Other Half.”

“How is it done?” he whispered.

“Just enter a cloud of the stuff and open your hood. The escaping air is their chemical cue: they home in, swim upstream and spawn. From the moment they first contact bare flesh until the point of total absorption and adsorption, complete synthesis, is maybe three seconds. About a second and a half in, you cease being human, forever.” He shivered. “Do you understand why we screamed?”