The Stardance Trilogy (78 page)

“Me too. She’ll be at the special, tomorrow night.”

“What special?”

The company was presently performing
Spatial Delivery,
the piece he and Jay had co-created during his earlier residency; it would be played three nights a week and Sunday matinees until the new piece replaced it a month from now. But this was the first Rand had heard of a special performance.

“Oh shit, I haven’t told you yet? Sorry; too many things on my mind. We’re doing a command performance. A private concert. In the same theater, of course, but the rest of the goats get told the show is cancelled. Only uips and a handful of peasant vips admitted.”

“‘Whips’?”

“Spelled
U
-I-P. Ultimately Important People.”

Rand prepared himself not to be impressed. “Like who?”

“Chen Ling Ho. Imaro Amin. Grijk Krugnk. Chatur Birla. And Victoria Hathaway. The Fat Five, I call ’em.”

It was hard to get air. “All of them? In the same room at the same time? They’re gonna see my—our—piece?”

“Yep. Kate Tokugawa’s been working on this visit for a month, in secret, and she wants all the trimmings. She authorized me to tell
you
, of course, but I plain forgot.”

“What the hell are five of the most powerful people on Earth all doing here at the same time?”

Jay shook his head. “My guess is, historians will just be getting really involved in arguing about that forty years from now. Probably no one will ever know. Those folks can edit reality. And they do not like people knowing what they’re doing. Especially before they’ve done it. Make damn sure you tell Rhea and Colly not to tell anyone about the special until all five are dirtside again.”

“Tell two women not to talk about the most exciting thing that’s happened to them in weeks. Yeah, that’ll work.”

Jay grabbed him by the upper arm. “Listen to me. This is serious. If the presence of those five guests becomes public knowledge, while they’re still here, you and I could both become unemployed real fast. If not worse. People have accidents in space.”

Rand shook his arm free. “And an ordinary hotel guest like Eva Hoffman is invited to this top-secret performance?”

“Oh Christ, Rand, Eva isn’t any ordinary guest, you know that. Eva is Eva. Even Kate is afraid of her. As a matter of fact, I think Eva’s going to be there as a guest of Chen Ling Ho. Her and Reb Hawkins-roshi. Look, just trust me on this, okay? Tell Rhea and Colly not to discuss this, even with Duncan. After the Fat Five have left, they can brag all they want; by then security won’t matter anymore. Between you and me, I suspect the news will be all over Shimizu within five minutes after they dock—but I do not want any leaks traceable to
us
. I like this job. And I’d like to get back to it, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll tell them. Boot up Terpsichore and let’s see how the new idea is going to work.”

While Jay brought up the holographic choreography software, a collateral descendant of the original twentieth century Lifeforms program, and set up the parameters of Pribhara’s wretched piece, Rand checked in with Salieri.

“How’m I doing, Salieri?”

“Rhea and Colly are expecting you for dinner at 19 o’clock in the Hall of Lucullus, but they will understand if you are late. I will remind you at 18:45. If you elect to keep working, I will inform them, and remind you to stop work and eat at 21 o’clock, using extreme measures if necessary.”

“Excellent. Whenever I go home, remind me about that new window program just before I get to the door. Dismissed. Let me at that interface, Jay—see how you like this…”

Extreme measures proved necessary. By the time he got back to his suite, Colly was fast asleep, dreaming of angelfish making puffballs.

He was eager to show Rhea the surprise he had prepared. But she had a surprise of her own to show him first. “I was checking on…oh hell, what I was doing was snooping,” she said gleefully, tapping a keyboard. The file she wanted displayed on the nearest wall. “And I found this in Colly’s partition.” It was a text document. At first he took it for one of Rhea’s manuscripts, since it had been created with the same arcane, obsolete word-processing software she used. But then he saw the slug at the top of the file: “
The Amazing Adventure
, by Colly Porter.”

“It’s a short story,” she said, her delight obvious. “About a little girl who goes to space and defeats spies.”

He grinned. “Oh, that’s wonderful. And she didn’t say anything to you about it?”

“Not a hint. Wait, let me show you the best part…” She scrolled the document a page or two, found the place she wanted, and highlighted a portion of the text. It read: “But the truth was far from reality.”

His bark of laughter triggered hers, and then they tried to shush each other for fear of waking Colly, and broke up all over again. The sequence ended with them in a hug, looking at the screen together in fond appreciation. “Is it any good?” he asked.

“Hard to tell; she hasn’t finished it yet. But so far…for an eight-year-old…it’s terrific.”

“How long has she been working on it?”

She punched keys. “File created three days ago.”

He was impressed. “And she’s got, what, eight pages down? Jesus, that’s amazing.”

She nodded vigorously. “Damn right. Eight pages in three or four days is good output for
me
.” She frowned. “Could we have raised one of those freaks who actually enjoy writing?”

He gave a theatrical shudder. “Could have been worse. At least it isn’t heroin.”

“That’d be cheaper. Ah well, she’ll grow out of it. At her age I wanted to be a gymnast.”

“Sure, I know. But it’s still cute as hell. And you should still be flattered.”

She hugged him closer and nuzzled his ear. “You watch: in another year or two, she’ll be shaping. I’ll go snooping through her files, and a monster will appear and bite me on the ass.”

“And it’ll serve you right,” he said, nuzzling back. “Snooping. Despicable. You haven’t been snooping in my partition, have you?”

She snorted. “As if I could outhack you. Why, is there anything interesting in there?”

He smiled. “Never accuse your husband of having a boring diary. Salieri!”

“Yes, Maestro?”

“Run file ‘Home.’”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take a look out the window, love.” He pulled his head back slightly so he could watch her reaction. He was really proud of this idea, and had high hopes for it. He had set himself the question:
my wife is suffering, and it’s my fault. What can a person of my special talents do about that?
This was the answer he had come up with after three days of thought. Because it was just a rough first draft, the visual image took a few seconds to coalesce and firm up, pixel by pixel. But somehow he got the idea she guessed what it was nearly at once, the moment she heard the soundscape. She stiffened in his arms.

Outside the window were Cape Cod Bay and Provincetown. The view from Rhea’s upstairs turret writing-room window, back home. Bay to the left, stone dike sticking its tongue out at the horizon; P-Town in the center, the Heritage Museum’s spire rising above the jumble of rooftops; and off to the right, the Pilgrim Monument. It was early evening there; a crescent moon was just rising over the water.

“That’s not a simulation,” he said quickly. “It’s live, and real-time. Well, three-second switching delay.” Somewhere a dog yapped. “See? That’s the Codhina’s rotten little Peke.”

Something told him to shut up now. He studied her face. It was as though a gifted actress had been asked to do the audition of her lifetime in fifteen seconds. Every expression of which her features were capable passed across it in rapid succession. The only sounds were distant waves, winter winds, a few gulls, a passing car with a bad gyro and, over all, the sound of Rhea’s deep breathing.

And when she finally settled on a reaction—silent, bitter tears—he only got to see it for a second before she left the suite at high speed.

Nice work.
He breathed deeply himself for a minute. Then he jaunted to the window and gazed hard at Provincetown for a measureless time. Finally he shut down the display. “Salieri, let me speak to Rhea.”

“She is not accepting calls, sir.”

“Where is she?”

“Privacy seal, sir.”

He nodded. He knew a couple of ways around that…but he decided he had already done enough stupid things for one day. If Rhea had wanted him to find her, she wouldn’t have taken the trouble to invoke privacy seal.

He was too tired to deal with this much misery, and could not diminish or share it, so he took his work to bed with him, and fell asleep on the back of a cloud, winds whistling past his ears.

The Ring
Saturn
 
 

T
HE
S
TARDANCER WAS UNPLUGGED FROM THE
S
TARMIND
, thinking with only her own brain. The vast System-wide flow of telepathic information from the millions of Stardancers who made up the Starmind passed through her, but she did not pay any conscious attention to it, and sent nothing back out into the matrix.

A year ago, something she still did not fully understand had told her that she needed to be still and meditate. She had been engaged in the form of meditation that worked best for her—dancing—continuously ever since. This sort of unplugging was not unusual; at any given time, as many as several thousand Stardancers might be out of rapport, dropping in or out of the matrix as suited them, and as they could be spared from ongoing tasks. Having accepted the alien gift of Symbiosis, they were all untroubled by the need to eat, drink or sleep, and were impervious to fatigue. Furthermore they were effectively immortal, or at least
very
long-lived, which tended to produce a meditative state of mind.

To an observer unfamiliar with Symbiosis, she might have seemed to resemble a human being in an old-fashioned, bulky red pressure suit—without air tanks or thrusters or transparent hood. But she was not human, anymore, and the red covering was literally a part of her; the organic Symbiote with which she had merged forty-four years earlier. Designed by the enigmatic alien Fireflies to be the perfect complement to the human metabolism, Symbiote protected against cold and vacuum, turned waste products into fuel, could be spun out at will into an effective solar sail…and conferred telepathy with all others in Symbiosis.

It also required sunlight, of course, like all living things. She was now orbiting Saturn, almost as far as she could get from Sol without artificial life-support in the form of a photon source. But she did not feel cold…any more than she had felt hot when, decades earlier, she had traveled to the other extreme end of her range, the orbit of Mercury.

She had selected an orbit high enough above Saturn’s mighty Ring to free her from concerns about navigational safety in that endless river of rock. Her visual field was perhaps the most beautiful the Solar System had to offer, so beautiful that she had almost ceased to see it. And even her harshest critic—herself—could not have said that her presence there detracted from the view, for she had been a gifted dancer even before she had entered Symbiosis. A tape of the past year’s dancing would have fetched a high price on Earth. But this was hers and hers alone. As her body flung itself energetically through the near-vacuum, her mind was utterly still; she had long since reached that much-sought state in which one is not even thinking about not thinking. She was pure awareness, fully present yet leaving no trace.

Since she had once been a human being, there was a very primitive part of her mind which was never still for long, and in that part something like daydreaming took place from time to time. Sometimes it reached out across the immensity that engulfed her and touched the similar places in the minds of her most beloved ones, as if to reassure itself that they still existed and that all was well with them. As it went down the list, brushing against each mind, her dance unconsciously changed so as to express them and her relationship with them. Thus an occasionally recurring series of motifs ran through the dance: a sort of kinetic giggle that was her youngest child Gemma, followed by the syncopated, slightly off-rhythm movements that represented Olney Dvorak, the Stardancer she had conceived Gemma with…and so on, down to her eldest, forty-three-year-old Lashi, and his human father—

—it was at that point that her back spasmed and she screamed.

Any telepathic scream is strident and shocking enough; when it comes from one who has been in deep meditation for a year, every Stardancer in the Solar System flinches. And comes running to see what is wrong and what must be done about it. At once, the Starmind enfolded her like a womb, probing gently to learn the nature of her hurt.

But even she did not know.

The only clue was the word she had screamed: the name of her first co-parent.
I just touched him,
she told the others,
and suddenly I knew something was wrong. Everything is wrong.

He was in the hookup, of course, and as baffled as she was. He reported that as far as he knew, nothing specific was wrong. He was in a region of great potential danger, but he had been there for half a century now. He was presently engaged in a delicate and complex task, with elements of almost inconceivable danger in it, but as far as he could tell it was shaping correctly.

Since there was absolutely no explanation for her terror, she could not shake it off. Unreasonable fears are the hardest to conquer. She wanted to scan and analyze every second of his memories of the last several weeks at least, looking for clues to the danger, but since he was not a full-fledged Stardancer she could not probe as deeply as she wanted. Their son Lashi joined her, and they probed together.

The results were still ambiguous.

So Lashi turned his attention to his mother.
When did you first become aware that something was wrong?

When I screamed.

But how long
before
that could something have gone wrong? When was the last time you had monitored Father?

She thought about it.
Yesterday, I think. And everything was fine then.