The Stardance Trilogy (55 page)

Well,
I told myself,
if you didn’t want the djinn, you shouldn’t have rubbed the lamp. At least don’t waste her time…

“My friends Glenn Christie and Robert Chen are here with me. Glenn would like to talk to you, if you’re not too busy.”

“There is time. Greetings, Glenn and Robert.”

Robert said hello and made a low
gassho
bow to empty air. Glenn said, “Hello, Jinsei; Glenn here. I’m sorry to bother you.”

Voices can smile. I know because hers did. “You do not, cousin. How may I help you?”

“Well, I…” Glenn frowned and gathered her thoughts. “I guess I’m having trouble believing that I won’t miss Earth after Symbiosis. I’ve been trying to say goodbye to it since I got here—and today I went EVA for the first time, and all I could think of was the places on Earth that I have loved. Jinsei-
sama
, don’t you ever miss…your old home?”

“Do you ever miss your mother’s womb?” Jinsei asked.

Glenn blinked, and did not reply.

“Of course you do,” Jinsei went on, “especially when you are very tired. And a fine sweet pain it is. I did too, when I was human. But I do not miss my mother’s womb anymore. I can be there, whenever I want. I have access to
all
my memories, back to the moment my brain formed in the fifth month of my gestation. You cannot remember the events of one second ago as vividly as I remember every instant I have lived—I and all my brother and sister Stardancers. I can be anywhere any of us has ever been, do anything any of us has ever done. For the memories of fetal life alone, I would trade a dozen Earths.”

Somehow even after meeting Harry Stein I had subconsciously expected that a Stardancer in conversation would be sort of dreamy and…well, spacey, like someone massively stoned. She sounded as alert and mindful as Reb.

“‘Every instant…’ Even the painful ones?” Glenn asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Don’t they hurt?”

“Oh, yes. Beautifully.”

Glenn looked confused.

“I think what you are asking,” Jinsei said gently, “is whether a Stardancer ever regrets Symbiosis.”

“Uh…yes. Yes, that’s just what I’m asking.”

“No, Glenn. Not one. Not so far.”

That extraordinary assertion hung there in the air for a moment. A life without regret? No, these Stardancers were not human.

Glenn was frowning. “What about the catatonics?” she asked.

“They’re not Stardancers,” Robert pointed out.

“They have not enough awareness to regret,” Jinsei said. “When they are healed, they no longer regret…or perhaps it is the other way around. And the fraction who die renounce regret forever, along with all other possible experiences.”

There was a short silence. Finally Glenn nodded slowly. “I think I see. Thank you, Jinsei. You have comforted me.”

“I am glad, Glenn.”

“Jinsei-
sama
?” Robert said.

“Yes, Robert?”

“Can a Stardancer lie?”

I thought the question rude, opened my mouth to say so…and found that I wanted to hear the answer. It was a question that had never occurred to me before.

Jinsei found it amusing. “Can you think of any answer I could make that would be meaningful?”

Robert blinked in surprise, and then chuckled ruefully. “No, I guess not. I don’t even now why I asked that. I know the answer, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Thank you,” she said, and he looked relieved. “Forgive me: I find that I am needed; is there anything else I can do for you three?”

We said no and thanked her, and she was gone.

Glenn jaunted near and offered a hug. I accepted without hesitation. Her p-suit was cool on my bare flesh, but not unpleasantly so. “Thank you, Morgan, very much. I’d never have had the nerve to do that.”

“Glad to. It seemed like it was called for. Are you okay now?”

“Yes, I think I am. I need to sit kûkanzen some more, but I think I’ll be able to go back out there tomorrow—thanks to you and Robert. Good night.”

To my mild surprise, she hugged Robert too. “Thank you for lending me some of your courage,” she said, and left.

Robert and I looked at each other and smiled.

“Where were we?” I said.

“About to make some memories so good that we’ll relive them every day for the next two hundred years,” he said.

We certainly did our best. After a while reality turned all warm and runny, and when I was tracking again I noticed idly that Kirra and Ben were in the room now too. But there was no need to restart my brain: they were busy, just like we were. I don’t think Robert even noticed. Good concentration, that man.

Yumiko died the next day.

For the second day in a row, she failed to check her air supply—and this time Sulke did not remind us before opening the Solarium window. An hour later Yumiko failed to respond to a direction. It’s hard to see how one could run out of air without noticing something is wrong…but if Yumiko ever did realize she had a problem, she was too polite to bring it up. They say lifeguards in Japan have to be terribly alert, because drowners there can be too self-effacing to disturb everyone’s
wa
by calling for help. When she was missed, it was too late.

(Reb flashed to her side, diagnosed her problem, threw her empty tanks into deep space and replaced them with his own, headed for home on what air he had in his suit, squeezing her chest energetically enough to crack ribs as he went—to no avail. When they got her out of the suit she was irretrievably brain dead.)

Sulke would not cancel the rest of the class, and insisted on taking us all out again in the afternoon. She was so clearly controlling anger that I knew she must be feeling horrid guilt—and she did not deserve it, in my opinion: there comes a time when the teacher must stop wiping the students’ noses. She had
told
us yesterday,
space does not forgive
. But she could not forgive herself, either.

Reb conducted the funeral service that night. Little Yumiko had been a follower of
Ryobu Shinto,
or Two-aspect Shinto, an attempt to reconcile Shinto with Buddhism which had recently been revived in Japan after more than a thousand years of dormancy; apparently they used the Buddhist funeral rites. There were prayers offered in all the other holy places in Top Step as well; sadly, those pages were well thumbed in all the hymnals.

Robert and I attended none of these observances. We held one of our own, in my room, saying goodbye to Yumiko and consoling ourselves in the only real way there is, the oldest one of all. I’m pretty sure Kirra and Ben were doing the same thing down the hall…and doubtless others were too. Sudden death seems to call for the ultimate affirmation of life. Sharing it brought Robert and me closer together; all smallest reservations gone, I gave my heart to him, opened to him as though he were my Symbiote, and he flowed into me.

As I was trying to fall asleep, I kept thinking that I had barely known Yumiko. Sure, she had been shy—but if I had made the effort, gotten to know her, she could have lived forever as real as real in my brain once I became Symbiotic. I hoped her roommate Soon Li had made the effort.

This is merely a series of events. Their only correlation is that they all occurred within the same time-frame.

—Boeing official,
after eleven passengers were sucked out of an airliner,
Boeing’s eighth public relations disaster within a year

T
HE NEXT MORNING
’
S
EVA was also eventful. Nobody died, but the near miss was spectacular.

We had progressed in proficiency to the point where Sulke would have half a dozen of us at a time unsnap our umbilicals and practice thruster use without constraint—six being the most she and Reb were confident of being able to supervise at one time. Learning precise thruster control was
not
easy, and several times Reb and Sulke had to rescue someone who’d blundered into something they couldn’t figure out how to undo. Sulke tended to hair-trigger reflexes; she was determined not to lose any more students. But Reb’s gentle good humor counterbalanced her and kept it being fun.

Raise your hands as if in surrender, palms forward. Your thrusters are now pointing in the same direction you’re facing. Put your arms down at your sides with your thumbs against your thighs, and the thrust is in the opposite direction. By torquing your forearms you can aim in almost any direction or combination of directions. Your ankle-thrusters, however, face in only one direction, “down,” and have only the one axis of motion. From those postulates all the equations of free-space jaunting are derived—and they’re complicated and often counterintuitive.

It took, believe me, a lot of courage to let go of that umbilical and hang alone and unsupported in space. I managed to do it, and to get through my short stint without disgracing myself or alarming Sulke, but my heart was pounding when I reconnected myself to my tether. Ben and Kirra were in the next group, and I watched with interest, knowing that they would do this well.

They did it beautifully, well enough to draw spontaneous applause. (Clapping your hands in a p-suit is a waste of energy. You applaud by making approving sounds.
Softly,
as dozens of people are sharing the same radio circuit.) What they did was more calisthenics than dance, but the consummate grace and skill with which they did it made it dance. Ben especially had pin-point control, using the tiniest bursts of gas to start himself moving and stop himself again when he was where he wanted to be. When they had run through the sequence of exercises, he and Kirra improvised a phrase similar to a square dance do-see-do, jetting toward each other and pivoting in slow motion around each other’s crooked elbow. As they separated again, Ben suddenly went into a violent high-speed spin, spraying yellow gas like a Catherine Wheel. It was lovely, and we started to applaud…and then suddenly it was ugly, asymmetrical and uncontrolled. The applause died away and we could clearly hear him say, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong?”
Kirra cried, beating Sulke to it by a hair.

“Both left thrusters jammed full open.” I could see now that he was beating his right fist into his left palm, trying to free up the jammed controls, but it wasn’t working. He gave it up and flailed wildly for a moment, moving through space like a leaf in a storm.

“Here I come!” Kirra cried.

“No!” Sulke roared.

“No—stay clear!” Ben agreed. “I’m rogue, it’s too dangerous. Besides, I think maybe I…” Suddenly he came out of his tumble and his attitude stabilized. His left wrist was cocked over his head, balancing the ankle thrust; he was vectoring slowly away from us, but at least he was no longer a pinwheel. “There.”

Kirra had reached him by then, having ignored both warnings. “What should I do, love?” she asked him, decelerating to match his vector, doing it perfectly.

“Dock with me upside down.” She did, locking her arms behind his knees, being careful not to kick him in the face. “Can you find the snap-release for that ankle-thruster?”

“Right.”

“Okay, on the count of three, hit it—and be sure you’re not in the way of it when it lets go! One, two,
three!
” He disengaged his fuming wrist thruster at the same instant she released the other one. She and Ben wobbled briefly as the two renegade thrusters blasted off for opposite ends of the galaxy; then they used their remaining six thrusters to recover. By then Sulke had arrived, swearing prodigiously in low German. The three of them jaunted back to us together hand in hand, and Sulke snapped their tethers back on herself.

It was over too quickly for me to have time to be terrified for them—no more than twenty seconds from start to finish.

Sulke finished cursing and paused for breath. “You two—” she began, and took another breath. Reb started to say something, but she overrode him. “—are EVA rated. As far as I’m concerned, you can graduate yourselves whenever you’re ready.”

Ben and Kirra looked at each other. “There’s still a lot you can teach us,” Kirra said.

“Maybe so,” Sulke said, “and I’ll be happy to if you want—but you’ve both got what it takes to survive EVA. Hell, I couldn’t have recovered that fast.”

“That’s just my trick specs,” Ben said. “It’s easier getting out of a spin if you can see everything at once: you don’t have those long gaps when no useful information is coming in.”

“That makes sense. But Kirra was just as quick.”

“I had a secret weapon too,” Kirra said. “I’m in love with the bastard.”

We all broke up. Tension release.

“What the hell went wrong, exactly?” Sulke asked. “Did the palm-switches physically freeze closed?”

“No,” Ben said. “The controls worked fine…they just stopped controlling anything. If I had to guess—and I do, the damn things are halfway to Luna by now—I’d say a passing cosmic ray fried the chip.”

“Possible,” Sulke agreed reluctantly. “Or it could have been a passing piece of space junk, the odds are about the same. Damn bad luck. The rest of you spaceworms take heed.
Anything
can happen out here. Stay on your toes. Okay, next group—”

Ben and Kirra were even merrier than usual at lunch. But I noticed that they slipped away early, and got to afternoon class late.

“My best advice to you all,” Reb said about five minutes after they arrived, flushed and smiling, “would be to make love as much as you conveniently can during the next three weeks.”

The whole room
rippled
. There was a murmur made of giggles and gasps and exclamations and one clear, “I heard
that
,” which provoked more giggles.

“I’m completely serious,” Reb said. “I can think of no better rehearsal for telepathy than making love. If you’re a strict monosexual, now would be an excellent time to try to conquer your prejudice.
There are no sexual taboos in Top Step, because there are none in the Starmind
. You are preparing to enter a telepathic community, and in a telepathic community, you are naked to
everyone
. Sexual taboos won’t work there. Even more important, they’re unnecessary there—humans need taboos precisely because humans are not telepathic.”

The room was now in maximum turmoil, as physical touching took on sudden significance. “But what about disease?” someone called.