Stardance

I

It was a week after that day that we next found an opportunity to talk together—and we spent the first hour and a half of our opportunity in relative silence. A week locked in a steel can with many strangers had turned out to be even less fun than a comparable period with as many students. Most of these strangers were our employers, the other two were our Space Command keepers, none of them were our subordinates and nearly all of them were temperamentally unsuited to live with artists. All things considered, we handled the close quarters and tension much better than we had in the early days of the Studio—which surprised me.

But as soon as we could, we all went out for a stroll together. And discovered that we had much more important things to do than compare notes, first.

Distance shrank the mighty Siegfried, but refused to turn it into a Space Commando model; it retained its massive dignity even when viewed from truly Olympian perspective. I felt an uncharacteristic rush of pride at belonging to the species that had built it and hurled it at the sky. It lightened my mood like a shot of oxygen. I tugged at the three kilometers of line that connected me to the great ship, enjoyed the vast snakelike ripples I caused, let their influence put me in a slow roll like an infinite swan dive.

Space turned around me.

Tom and Linda came into view. I didn’t call out to them—their breathing told me that they were in deep meditative trance, and my eyes told me how they had got there. You take that oldest and most enduring of children’s toys, the Slinky. You weld thin flat plates on either end, and bring the accordionlike result out into free space. You place the plates together, so that the Slinky describes a circle. Then you let go. Watch the result for long enough, and you will go into deep trance. The Worm Ourobouros endlessly copulating with himself. They would hear me if I called them by name; they would hear nothing else.

Raoul came into frame next, seen side-on to me. With deadly, matter-of-fact accuracy, he and Harry were hurling that other most durable of toys—a Frisbee (neon-rimmed for visibility)—back and forth across a couple of kilometers of emptiness. This too was more a meditational exercise than anything else; there is next to no skill involved. A flying saucer, it turns out, really is the most dynamically stable shape for a spacecraft. (Take a missile shaped like the old science fiction spaceships, fins and all, and throw it any way you want, with “Kentucky rifle” spin or without; sooner or later it will tumble. A sphere is okay—but unless it was formed in free fall, it’s imperfect: it’ll wobble, worse and worse as it goes.) They were practiced partners; their thruster was minimal.

Norrey was skipping rope with a bight of her lifeline. Naturally she was rotating in the opposite direction. It was incredibly beautiful to watch, and I canceled my rotation to enjoy it. Perhaps, I thought lazily, we could work that into a dance someday. Dynamic balance, yin and yang, as simple and as complex as a hydrogen atom.

“Don’t atoms dance, Charlie?”

I stiffened, then grinned at myself and relaxed. You can’t haunt me, Shara, I told the hallucinatory voice. You and I are at peace. Without me you could never have done the thing you did; without you I might never have been whole again. Rest in peace.

I watched Norrey some more, in a curiously detached state of mind. Considered objectively, my wife was nowhere near as stunningly beautiful as her dead sister had been. Just strikingly beautiful. And never once in the decades of our bizarre relationship had I ever felt for Norrey the kind of helpless consuming passion I had felt for Shara every minute of the few years I knew her. Thank God. I remembered that passion, that mindless worship that sees a scuff on an apartment floor and says There she placed her foot, that sees a battered camera and says With that I taped her. The sleepless nights and the rivers of scotch and the insulted hookers and the terrible awakenings; through it all the continuous yearning that nothing will abate and only the presence of the loved one will assuage. My passion for Shara had died, vanished forever, almost at the same moment that she did. Norrey had been right, two years ago in Le Maintenant: you only conceive a passion like that for someone you think you can’t have. And the very worst thing that can happen to you is to be wrong.

Shara had been very kind to me.

The love I now shared with Norrey was much quieter, much gentler on the nervous system. Why, I’d managed to overlook it for years. But it was a richer kind of love in the end.

Look, I used this metaphor before I ever dreamed of coming to space, and it’s still good. Picture us all as being in free fall, all of us that are alive. Literally falling freely, at one gee, down a tube so unimaginably long that its ultimate bottom cannot be seen. The vast tube is studded with occasional obstacles—and the law of averages says that at some finite future time you will smash into one: you will die. There are literally billions of us in this tube, all falling, all sure to hit some day; we carom off each other all the time, whirling more or less at random in and out of lives and groups of lives. Most of us construct belief-structures which deny either the falling or the obstacles, and place them underneath our feet like skateboards. A good rider can stay on for a lifetime.

Occasionally you reach out and take a stranger’s hand, and fall together for a while. It’s not so bad, then. Sometimes if you’re really desperate with fear, you clutch someone like a drowning man clinging to an anchor, or you strive hopelessly to reach someone in a different trajectory, someone you can’t possibly reach, just to be doing something to make you forget that your death is rushing up toward you.

That was the kind of need I had had for Shara. I had learned better, from her and from space, and finally from my Last Ride with Norrey a week ago. I had reconciled myself to falling. Norrey and I now fell through life together with great serenity, enjoying the view with a truly binocular vision.

“Has it occurred to any of you,” I asked lazily, “that living in space has just about matured us to the point of early childhood?”

Norrey giggled and stopped skipping. “What do you mean, love?”

Raoul laughed. “It’s obvious. Look at us--A Slinky, a Frisbee, and a jump rope. The thrusting apex of modem culture, kids in the biggest playground God ever made.”

“On tethers,” Norrey said, “like country kids, to keep us out of the garden.”

“Feels good to me,” Harry put in.

Linda was coming out of meditation; her voice was slow, soft. “Charlie is right. We have matured enough to become childlike.”

“That’s closer to what I meant,” I said approvingly. “Play is play, whether it’s a tennis racquet or a rattle. I’m not talking about the kinds of toys we choose, so much. It’s more like…” I paused to think, and they waited. “Listen, it seems to me that I have felt like an old old man since I was about, what, nine years old. This past few years has been the adolescence I never had, and now I’m happy as a child again.”

Linda began to sing:

“It’s an old Nova Scotia song,” she finished quietly.

“Teach it to me,” Raoul said.

“Later. I want to pursue this thought.”

So did I—but just then my alarm watch went off. I fumbled the stud home through the p-suit, and it subsided. “Sorry, gang. Halfway through our air. Let’s get together for the group exercises. Form up on Linda and we’ll try the Pulsing Snowflake.”

“Shit—work again?”

“Phooey—we’ve got a year to get into shape,”

“Wait’ll I catch this sonumbitch, boss,” and “Let’s get it over with,” were the entirely natural-sounding responses to the code phrase. We closed ranks and diddled with our radios.

“There we go,” I said as I closed. “Right, and Harry, you cross over and take Tom’s… that’s right. Wait, look out! Oh Christ!” I screamed.

“No!” Harry shouted.

“Ohmigod,” Raoul bubbled, “Ohmigod his suit’s ripped his suit’s ripped. Somebody do something, ohmigod—”

“May Day,” I roared. “Siegfried from Stardancers, May Day, God damn it. We’ve got a blown suit, I don’t think I can fix it, answer me, will you?”

Silence, except for Harry’s horrible gurgling.

“Siegfried, for the love of God, come in. One of your precious interpreters is dying out here!”

Silence.

Raoul swore and raged, Linda said calming things to him, Norrey prayed softly.

Silence.

“I guess that damper circuit works, Harry,” I said approvingly at last. “We’ve got privacy. By the way, that gurgling was horrible.”

“When did I have a chance to rehearse?”

“You got that heavy-breathing tape going?”

“In circuit,” Harry agreed. “Heavy breathing and cadence counts, no repeats. Hour and a half’s worth.”

“So if anyone’s listening, they’re just, uh, getting into our pants,” Raoul said almost inevitably.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s talk family talk. We’ve each spent some time with our assigned partners. What’s the consensus?”

Some more silence.

“Well, has anybody got presentiments of doom? Choice gossip? Tom? You follow politics, you knew most of these people by reputation anyway. Tell us all about that first, and then we can compare personal impressions.”

“All right, let’s see—is there anything to be said about DeLaTorre? If he is not a man of honor and compassion, no one is. Even his critics admire him, and a good half of them are willing to admit it. I’ll be honest: I’m not as certain of Wertheimer’s integrity as I am of DeLaTorre’s. Except of course that he picked DeLaTorre to head this posse, which raises him a notch. Anybody feel different? Charlie, he’s your puppetmaster, what do you say?”

“A heartfelt ditto. I’d turn my back on him in the airlock. Go on.”

“Ludmilla Dmirov has a similar reputation for moral toughness, unpusharoundable. She was the first diplomatic official ever to turn down a state-owned dacha in Sovmin. Those of you who don’t know nomenklatura, the patronage system in Moscow, adacha is sort of a country cabin for high-ranking officials, and turning one down is like a freshman senator refusing to vacation or junket, or a rookie cop turning down the usuals. Unthinkable… and dangerous.” He paused. “But I can’t be as certain that it’s integrity with her. It may just be orneriness. And compassionate she is not.”

Norrey was assigned to Dmirov; she spoke up. “I’m not sure I agree, Tom. Oh, she plays chess like a machine, and she sure knows how to be impenetrable—and maybe she doesn’t know enough about when and how to turn it off. But she showed me all her son’s baby pictures, and she told me that the Stardance made her cry. ‘Weep from the chest,’ she said. I think the compassion’s in there.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “I’ll take your word. And she was one of the ones who pushed hard for a UN Space Command. Without her there just might not be a UN anymore and space might have become the next Alsace-Lorraine. I’m willing to believe her heart’s in the right place.” He paused again. “Uh, with all due respect, I don’t think I’d be prepared to turn my back on her in the airlock yet. But my mind’s open.

“Now, Li,” he went on, “was also a prime mover in the formation of the Space Command—but I’ll lay odds that it was a chess-player’s move for him. I think he took a cold extrapolative look at the future and decided that if the world did blow itself up over the issue of space, it would seriously restrict his political career. He is reputed to be one sharp horse trader and one cold son of a bitch, and they say the road to Hell is paved with the skins of his enemies. He owns a piece of Skyfac Inc. I wouldn’t turn my back on him on live network TV and, Linda, I hope you won’t either.”

“That is certainly the image he has cultivated,” she agreed. “But I must add a few things. He is impeccably polite. He is a philosopher of incredible perception and subtlety. And he is rock steady. Hunger, lack of sleep, danger—none of these will affect his performance or his judgment in any measurable way. Yet I find his mind to be open, to change and to changes. I believe he might well be a real statesman.” She broke off, took a deep breath, and finished, “But I don’t think I trust him either. Yet.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Is he a statesman for mankind or for the People’s Republic? Okay, that leaves my own man. ‘Whatever else you can say about the others, they’re probably all statespersons. Sheldon Silverman is a politician. He’s held just about every elective office except President and Vice President. He could have been the latter any time he was silly enough to want to; only some incredibly subtle errors cost him the former. I think he bought or bribed his way onto this trip somehow, as his last chance to earn a whole page in the history books. I think he sees himself as the leader of the team, by virtue of being an American. I despise him. He costs Wertheimer the notch that DeLaTorre earned him, as far as I’m concerned?’ He shut up suddenly.

“I think you may be holding his past against him,” Linda said. “Damn right,” he agreed.

“Well—he’s old. Some old people change, quite radically. Zero gee has been working on him; wait and see.We should bring him out here some time.”

“My love, your fairness is showing.”

“Damn right,” she said, forcing a grin from him. “It sort of has to.”

“Huh?”

“He gives me the creeps.”

“Oh. I see. I think.”

“Harry, Raoul,” I said, “you’ve been hanging out with the Space Commandos.”

Raoul took it, of course. “Cox we all know or know about. I’d let him hold the last air bottle while I took a leak. His second-in-command is an old-time NASA science officer type.”

“Jock,” Harry put in.

Raoul chuckled. “You know, she is. Susan Pha Song was a Viet Nam War baby, raised in Nam by her aunt after her father split and her mother got napalmed. Hasn’t got much use for America. Physicist. Military through and through; if they told her to she’d nuke Viet Nam and drop rose petals on Washington. She disapproves of music and dance. And me and Harry.”

“She’ll follow orders,” Harry asserted.

“Yeah. For sure. She’s a chicken colonel as of last week, and in the event Commander Cox drops dead, the chain of command goes to her, then Dmirov, presumably. She’s got pilot training, she’s a space freak.”

“If it comes to that extreme,” I said, “I for one am going free lance.”

“Chen Ten Li has a gun,” Linda said suddenly.

“What?” Five voices at once.

“What kind?” from Harry.

“Oh, I don’t know. A small handgun, squarish looking. Not much barrel.”

“How did you get a look at it?” I asked.

“Jack-in-the-box effect. Took him by surprise, and he recovered late.”

The jack-in-the-box effect is one of the classic surprises of free fall, predictable but unexpected, and it gets virtually every new fish. Any container, cabinet or drawer you open will spew its contents at you—unless you have thought to velcro them all in place. The practical joke possibilities are nearly inexhaustible. But I smelled a rat. “How about that, Tom?”

“Eh?”

“If Chen Ten Li has been one of the major forces behind intelligent use of space, wouldn’t he know about jack-in-the-box?”

Tom’s voice was thoughtful. “Huh. Not necessarily. Li is one of those paradoxes, like Isaac Asimov refusing to fly. For all his understanding of the issues of space, this is the first time he’s been further off-planet than a jetliner goes. He’s a groundlubber at heart.”

“Still,” I objected, “jack-in-the-box is standard tourist anecdote. He’d only need have spoken with one returned spacegoer, for any length of time.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Raoul said, “but there was a lot about zero gee that I knew about intellectually, that I still tripped over when I got there. Besides, what motive could Li have for letting Linda see a gun?”

“That’s what bothers me,” I admitted. “I can think of two or three reasons offhand—and they all imply either great clumsiness or great cunning. I don’t know which I’d prefer. Well… anyone else see any heat?”

“I haven’t seen a thing,” Norrey said judiciously, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ludmilla has a weapon of some kind.”

“Anybody else?”

Nobody responded. But each of the diplomats had fetched a sizable mass of uninspected luggage.

“Okay. So the upshot is, we’re stuck in a subway with three rival gangleaders, two cops and a nice old man. This is one of the few times I’ve ever been grateful that the eyes of the world are upon us.”

“Much more than the eyes of the world,” Linda corrected soberly.

“It’ll be okay,” Raoul said. “Remember: a diplomat’s whole function is to maintain hostilities short of armed conflict. They’ll all pull together at the showdown. Most of ’em may be chauvinists—but underneath I think they’re all human chauvinists, too.”

“That’s what I mean,” Linda said. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”

Startled silence, then, “What do you mean, darling? We’re not human?” from Tom.

“Are we?”

I began to understand what she was driving at, and I felt my mind accelerate to meet her thought.

What does it mean to be human? Considering that the overwhelming mass of the evidence has been taken from observation of humans under one gravity, pinned against a planet? By others in the same predicament?

“Certainly,” Tom said. “Humans are humans whether they float or fall.”

“Are you sure?” Linda asked softly. “We are different from our fellows, different in basic ways. I don’t mean just that we can never go back and live with them. I mean spiritually, psychologically. Our thought patterns change, the longer we stay in space—our brains are adapting just like our bodies.”

I told them what Wertheimer had said to me the week before—that we choreographed as well as humans but not like humans.

“That’s John Campbell’s classic definition of ‘alien,’ ” Raoul said excitedly.

“Our souls are adapting, too,” Linda went on. “Each of us spends every working day gazing on the naked face of God, a sight that groundhogs can only simulate with vaulting cathedrals and massive mosques. We have more perspective on reality than a holy man on the peak of the highest mountain on Earth. There are no atheists in space—and our gods make the hairy thunderers and bearded paranoids of Earth look silly. Hell, you can’t even make out Olympus from the Studio—much less from here.” The distant Earth and Moon was already smaller than we were used to.

“There’s no denying that space is a profoundly moving place,” Tom maintained, “but I don’t see that it makes us other than human. Ifeel human.”

“How did Cro-Magnon know he was different from Neanderthal?” Raoul asked. “Until he could assess discrepancies, how would he know?”

“The swan thought he was an ugly duckling,” Norrey said. “But his genes were swan,” Tom insisted.

“Cro-Magnon’s genes started out Neanderthal,” I said. “Have you ever examined yours? Would you know a really subtle mutation if you saw one?”

“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this silliness, Charlie?” Tom asked irritably. “Do you feel inhuman?”

I felt detached, listening with interest to the words that came out of my mouth: “I feel other than human. I feel like more than a newman. I’m a new thing. Before I followed Shara into space, my life was a twisted joke, with too many punchlines. Now I am alive. I love and can be loved. I didn’t leave Earth behind. I put space ahead.”

“Aw, phooey,” Torn said. “Half of that’s your leg—and I know what the other half is because it happened to me, at Linda’s family’s place. It’s the city-mouse-in-the-country effect. You find a new, less stressful environment, get some insights, and start making better, more satisfying decisions. Your life straightens out. So something must be magic about the place. Nuts.”

“The Mountain is magic,” Linda said gently. “Why is magic a dirty word for you?” At that stage of their relationship, it suited Tom and Linda to maintain a running pseudodisagreement on matters spiritual. Occasionally they realized what was obvious to the rest of us: that they almost never actually disagreed with each other on anything but semantics.

“Tom,” I said insistently, “this is different. I’ve been to the country. I’m telling you that I’m not an improved version of the man I was—I’m something altogether different now. I’m the man I could never have been on Earth, had lost all hope of being. I—I believe in things that I haven’t believed in since I was a kid. Sure I’ve had some good breaks, and sure, opening up to Norrey has made my life more than I ever thought it could be. But my whole makeup has changed, and no amount of lucky breaks will do that. Hell, I used to be a drunk.”

“Drunks smarten up every day,” Tom said.

“Sure—if they can find the strength to maintain cold turkey for the rest of their lives. I take a drink when I feel like it. I just hardly ever feel like it. I stopped needing booze, just like that. How common is that? I smoke less these days, and treat it less frivolously when I do.”

“So space grew you up in spite of yourself?”

“At first. Later I had to pitch in and work like hell—but it started without my knowledge or consent.”

“When did it begin?” Norrey and Linda asked together.

I had to think. “When I began to learn how to see spherically. When I finally learned to cut loose of up and down,”

Linda spoke. “A reasonably wise man once said that anything that disorients you is good. Is instructive.”

“I know that wise man,” Tom sneered. “Leary. Brain-damage case if I ever heard of one.”

“Does that make him incapable of having ever been wise?”

“Look,” I said, “we are all unique. We’ve all come through a highly difficult selection process, and I don’t suppose the first Cro-Magnon felt any different. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that our talent is not a normal human attribute.”

“Normal people can live in space,” Norrey objected. “Space Command crews. Construction gangs.”

“If they’ve got an artificial local vertical,” Harry said. “Take ’em outdoors, you gotta give ’em straight lines and right angles or they start going buggy. Most of ’em. S’why we get rich.”

“That’s true,” Tom admitted. “At Skyfac a good outside man was worth his mass in copper, even if he was a mediocre worker. Never understood it.”

“Because you are one,” Linda said.

“One what?” he said, exasperated.

“A Space Man,” I said, spacing it so the capitals were apparent. “Whatever comes after Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. You’re space-going Man. I don’t think the Romans had the concept, so Homo novis is probably the best you can do in Latin. New Man. The next thing.”

Tom snorted. “Homo excastra is more like it.”

“No, Tom,” I said forcefully, “you’re wrong. We’re not outcasts. We may be literally ‘outside the camp, outside the fortress’—but the connotation of ‘exile’ is all wrong. Or are you regretting the choice you made?”

He was a long time answering. “No. No, space is where I want to live, all right. I don’t feel exiled—I think of the whole solar system as ‘human territory.’ But I feel like I’ve let my citizenship in its largest nation lapse.”

“Tom,” I said solemnly, “I assure you that that is the diametric opposite of a loss.”

“Well, the world does look pretty rotten these days, I’ll grant you that. There isn’t a lot ofit I’ll miss.”

“You miss my point.”

“So explain.”

“I talked about this with Doc Panzella some, before we left. What is the normal lifespan for a Space Man?”

He started to speak twice, stopped trying.

“Right. There’s no way to frame a guess—it’s a completely new ball game. ‘We’re the first. I asked Panzella, and he told me to come back when two or three of us had died. We may all die within a month, because fatigue products refuse to collect in our feet or our corns migrate to our brains or something. But Panzella’s guess is that free fall is going to add at least forty years to our lifespans. I asked him how sure he was and he offered to bet cash.”

Everyone started talking at once, which doesn’t work on radio. The consensus was, “Say what?” The last to shut up and drop out was Tom. “—possibly know a thing like that, yet?” he finished, embarrassed.

“Exactly,” I said. “We won’t know ’til it’s too late. But it’s reasonable. Your heart has less work to do, arterial deposits seem to diminish—”

“So it won’t be heart trouble that gets us,” Tom stipulated, “assuming that lowering the work load drastically turns out to be good for a heart. But that’s one organ out of many.”

“Think it through, Tom. Space is a sterile environment. With reasonable care it always will be. Your immune system becomes almost as superfluous as your semicircular canals—and do you have any idea how much energy fighting off thousands of wandering infections drains from your life system? That might have been used for maintenance and repair? Or don’t you notice your energy level drop when you go dirtside?”

“Well sure,” he said, “but that’s just....”

“—the gravity, you were gonna say? See what I mean? We’re healthier, physically and mentally, than we ever were on Earth. When did you ever have a cold in space? For that matter, when was the last time you got deeply depressed, morose? How come we hardly ever, any of us, have dog days, black depressions and sulks and the like? Hell, the word depression is tied to gravity. You can’t depress something in space, you can only move it. And the very word gravity has come to be a synonym for humorlessness. If there’s two things that’ll kill you early it’s depression and lack of a sense of humor.”

In a vivid rush came the memory of what it had felt like to live with a defective leg under one gravity. Depression, and an atrophying sense of humor. It seemed so long ago, so very far away. Had I ever really been that despairing?

“Anyway,” I went on, “Panzella says that people who spend a lot of time in free fall—and even the people in Luna who stay in one-sixth gee, those exiled miners—show a lower incidence of heart and lung trouble, naturally. But he also says they show a much lower incidence of cancers of all kinds than the statistical norm.”

“Even with the higher radiation levels?” Tom asked skeptically. Whenever there’s a solar flare, we all see green polliwogs for a while, as the extra radiation impacts our eyeballs—and it doesn’t make any difference whether we’re indoors or out.

“Yep,” I assured him. “Coming out from under the atmosphere blanket was the main health hazard we all gambled on in living in space—but it seems to’ve paid off. It seemed there should have been ahigher risk of cancer, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Go ask why. And the lower lung trouble is obvious—we breath real air, better filtered than the Prime Minister’s, dust free and zero pollen count. Hell, if you had all the money on Earth, you couldn’t have a healthier environment tailor-made. How about old Mrs. Murphy on Skyfac? What is she, sixty-five?”

“Sixty-six,” Raoul said. “And free-fall handball champ. She whipped my ass, three games running.”

“It’s almost as though we were designed to live in space,” Linda said wonderingly.

“All right,” Tom cried in exasperation. “All right, I give up. I’m sold. We’re all going to live to a hundred and twenty. Assuming that the aliens don’t decide we’re delicious. But I still say that this ‘new species’ nonsense is muddy thinking, delusions of grandeur. For one thing, there’s no guarantee we’ll breed true—or, as Charlie pointed out, at all. But more important, homo novis isa ‘species’ without a natural habitat! We’re not self-sustaining, friends! We’re utterly dependent on Homo sapiens, unless and until we learn how to make our own air, water, food, metals, plastics, tools, cameras—”

“What are you so pissed off about?” Harry asked.

“I’m not pissed off!” Tom yelled.

We all broke up, then, and Tom was honest enough to join us after a while.

“All right,” he said. “I am angry. I’m honestly not sure why. Linda, do you have any handles on it?”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “ ‘anger’ and ‘fear’ are damned close to synonyms…”

Tom started.

Raoul spoke up, his voice strained. “If it will help any, I will be glad to confess that our pending appointment with these super-fireflies has me, for one, scared shitless. And I haven’t met ’em personally like you and Charlie have. I mean, this little caper could cost us a lot more than just Earth.”

That was such an odd sentence that we just let it sit there a while. “I know what you mean,” Norrey said slowly. “Our job is to establish telepathic rapport with what seems to be a group-mind. I’m almost… almost afraid I might succeed.”

“Afraid you might get lost, darling?” I said. “Forget it—I wouldn’t let go of you long enough. I didn’t wait twenty years to be a widower.” She squeezed my hand.

“That’s the point,” Linda said. “The worst we’re facing is death, in one form or another. And we always have been under sentence of death, all of us, for being human. That’s the ticket price for this show. Norrey, you and Charlie looked death right in the eye a week ago. Sure as hell you will again some day. It might turn out to be a year from now, at Saturn: so what?”

“That’s the trouble,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Fear doesn’t go away just because it’s illogical.”

“No,” Linda agreed, “but there are methods for dealing with it—and repressing it until it comes out as anger is not one of them. Now that we’re down to the root, though, I can teach you techniques of self-discipline that’ll at least help a lot.”

“Teach me too,” Raoul said, almost inaudibly.

Harry reached out and took his hand. “We’ll learn together,” he said.

“We’ll all learn together,” I said. “Maybe we are other than human, but we’re not that different. But I would like to say that you are about the bravest folks I know, all of you. If anybody—wups! There goes the alarm again. Let’s get some real dancing done, so we come home sweaty. We’ll do this again in a couple of days. Harry, take that heavy-breathing tape out of circuit and we’ll boost our signal strength together at three, two, one, mark.”

I repeat the above conversation in its entirety partly because it is one of the few events in this chronicle of which I possess a complete audio recording. But also partly because it contains most of the significant information you need to know about that one-year trip to Saturn. There is no point in describing the interior of Siegfried, or the day-to-day schedules or the month-by-month objectives or the interpersonal frictions that filled up one of the most busy, boring years of my life.

As is common and perhaps inevitable on expeditions of this kind, crew, diplomats, and dancers formed three reasonably tight cliques outside working hours, and maintained an uneasy peace during them. Each group had its own interests and amusements—the diplomats, for instance, spent much of their free time (and a substantial percentage of their working time) fencing, politely and otherwise. DeLaTorre’s patience soon earned the respect of every person aboard. Read any decent book on life in a submarine, then throw in free fall, and you’ve got that year. Raoul’s music helped keep us all sane, though; he became the only other universally respected passenger.

The six of us somehow never discussed the “new species” line of thought again together, although I know Norrey and I kicked it around hood-to-hood a few times, and Linda and I spoke of it occasionally. And of course we never mentioned it atall anywhere aboard Siegfried—spaceships are supposed to be thoroughly bugged. The notion that we six dancers were somehow other-than-human was not one that even DeLaTorre would have cared for—and he was about the only one who treated us as anything but hired hands, “mere interpreters” (Silverman’s expression). Dmirov and Li knew better, I believe, but they couldn’t help it; as experienced diplomats they were not conditioned to accept interpreters as social equals. Silverman thought dance was that stuff they did on variety shows, and why couldn’t we translate the concept of Manifest Destiny into a dance?

I will say one thing about that year. The man I had been when I first came to space could not have survived it. He’d have blown out his brains, or drunk himself to death.

Instead I went out for lots of walks. And made lots of love with Norrey. With music on, for privacy.

Other than that the only event of note was when Linda announced that she was pregnant, about two months out of Saturn. We were committed to solving zero-gee childbirth without an obstetrician. Or, for that matter, a GP.

Things got livelier as we neared Saturn.

II

We had not succeeded in persuading any of the diplomats to join us in EVA of any kind. Three refused for the predictable reason. EVA is measurably more dangerous than staying safely indoors (as I had been forcibly reminded on the day I had gotten into this), and duty forbade them from taking any avoidable risk on their way to what was literally the biggest and most important conference in history. We dancers were considered more expendable, but pressure was put on us to avoid having all four dancers outboard at the same time. I stuck to my guns, maintaining that a group dance must be planned, choreographed, and rehearsed ensemble—that what Stardancers, Inc. was, was a creative collective. Besides, the more buddies you have, the safer you are.

The fourth diplomat, Silverman, had been specifically ordered not to expose himself to space. So early on he asked us to take him out for a walk. Sort of a “they can’t tell a fearless SOB like me not to take risks,” thing: the other impugned his masculinity. He changed his mind when p-suit plumbing was explained to him, and never brought the subject up again.

But a few weeks before we were to begin deceleration, Linda came to my room and said, “Chen Ten Li wants to come out for a walk with us.”

I winced, and did my Silverman imitation. “It would kill you, first to sit me down and say, ‘I have bad news for you’? Like that you tell me?”

“Like that he told me.”

What would DeLaTorre think? Or Bill? Or the others? Or old Wertheimer, who had told me with his eyes that he believed I could be trusted not to fuck up? And as important, why did Chen now want to earn his wings? Not for scenery—he had first-class video, the best Terra could provide, which is good. Not for jackass reasons like Silverman.

“What does he want, Linda? To see a rehearsal live? To drift and meditate? What?”

“Ask him.”

I had never seen the inside of Chen’s room before. He was playing 3-D chess with the computer. I can barely follow the game, but it was clear that he was losing badly—which surprised me.

“Dr. Chen, I understand you want to come outside with us.”

He was dressed in tastefully lavish pajamas, which he had expertly taken in for free fall and velcro’d (Dmirov and DeLaTorre had been forced to ask Raoul for help, and Silverman’s clothes looked as though he had backed into a sewing machine). He inclined his shaven head, and replied gravely, “As soon as possible.” His voice was like an old cornet, a little feathery.

“That puts me in a difficult position, sir,” I said as gravely. “You are under orders not to endanger yourself. DeLaTorre and all the others know it. And if I did bring you outside, and you had a suit malf, or even a nausea attack, the People’s Republic of China would ask me some pointed questions. Followed by the Dominion of Canada and the United Nations, not to mention your aged mother.”

He smiled politely, with lots of wrinkles. “Is that outcome probable?”

“Do you know Murphy’s Law, Dr. Chen? And its corollary?”

His smile widened. “I wish to risk it. You are experienced at introducing neophytes to space.”

“I lost two out of seventeen students!”

“How many did you lose in their first three hours, Mr. Armstead? Could I not remain in the Die, wearing a pressure suit for redundancy?”

The Die wasn’t cast; it was spot-welded. It was essentially an alloy-framed cube of transparent plastic, outfitted for minimal life support, first aid, and self-locomotion through free space. The crew and all the diplomats except Chen called it the Field Support Module. This disgusted Harry, who had designed and built it. The idea was that one of us Stardancers might blow a gasket in midconference, or want to sit out a piece, or conserve air, or for some other reason need a pressurized cubic with a 36o° view. It was currently braced tight against the hull of the big shuttlecraft we called the Limousine, mounted for use, but it could easily be unshipped. And Chen’s pressure suit was regulation Space Command armor, as good as or better than even our customized Japanese-made suits. Certainly stronger; better air supply... .

“Doctor, I have to know why.”

His smile began to slo-o-owly fade, and when I hadn’t blanched or retracted by half past, he let it remain there. About a quarter to frowning. “I concede your right to ask the question. I am not certain I can satisfy you at this time.” He reflected, and I waited. “I am not accustomed to using an interpreter. I have facility with languages. But there is at least one language I will never acquire. I was once informed that no one could learn to think in Navajo who was not raised a Navajo. Consequently I went to great lengths to accomplish this, and I failed. I can make myself understood to a Navajo, haltingly. I cannot ever learn to think in that language it is founded on basically different assumptions about reality that my mind cannot enfold.

“I have studied your dance, the ‘language’ you will speak for us shortly. I have discussed it with Ms. Parsons at great length, exhausted the ship’s computer on the subject. I cannot learn to think in that language.

“I wish to try one more time. I theorize that confrontation with naked space, in person, may assist me.” He paused, and grinned again. “Ingesting buds of peyote assisted me somewhat in my efforts with Navajo—as my tutor had promised me. I must expose myself to your assumptions about reality. I hope they taste better.”

It was by far the longest speech I had gotten out of the epigrammatic Chen since the day we met. I looked at him with new respect, and some astonishment. And a growing pleasure: here was a friend I had almost missed making. My God, suppose old Chenis Homonovis?

“Dr. Chen,” I said, when I could get my breath, “let’s go see Commander Cox.”

Chen listened with total absorption to eighteen hours’ worth of instruction, most of which he already knew, and asked infrequent but highly insightful questions. I’m willing to bet that before the instruction he could have disassembled any subsystem in his suit in the dark. By the end I’d have bet he could build ’em in the dark, starting with free-floating components. I have been exposed to a rather high number of extraordinary minds, and he impressed me.

But Istill wasn’t sure I trusted him.

We held the party to three, on the less-to-go-wrong theory—in space, trouble seldom comes in ones. I was the obvious Scoutmaster; I had logged more EVA hours than anyone aboard except Harry. And Linda had been Chen’s Alien 101 instructress for the past year; she came along to maintain classroom continuity. And to dance for him, while I played Mother Hen. And, I think, because she was his friend.

The first hour passed without incident, all three of us in the Die, me at the con. We put a few klicks between us and Siegfried, trailing a suspenders-and-belt safety line, and came to rest, as always, in the exact center of infinity. Chen was reverentially silent rather than awed, impressed rather than intimidated, absorbed rather than isolated. He was, I believe, capable of encompassing that much wonder—it was almost as though he had always known the universe was that big. Still he was speechless for a long time.

So were Linda and I, for that matter. Even at this distance Saturn looked unbelievably beautiful, beyond the power of words to contain. That planet must unquestionably be the damndest tourist attraction in the Solar System, and I had never seen anything so immensely moving in my life.

But we had seen it before in recent days—the whole ship’s complement had been glued to the video tanks. We recovered, and Linda told Chen some last thoughts about the way we danced, and then she sealed her hood and went out the airlock to show him some solo work. By prearrangement we were all to remain silent for this period, and Bill too maintained radio silence on our channel. Chen watched with great fascination for three quarters of Linda’s first hour. Then he sighed, glanced at me oddly, and kicked himself across the Die to the control panel.

I started to cry out—but what he reached for was only the Die’s radio. He switched it off. Then he removed his helmet in one practiced-seeming move, disconnecting his suit’s radio. I had my own hood off to save air, and grabbed for it when I saw him kill the radio, but he held a finger to his lips and said, “I would speak with you under the rose.” His voice was thin and faint in the low pressure.

I considered the matter. Assuming the wildest paranoid fantasy, Linda was mobile and could see anything that happened in the transparent cube. “Sure,” I called.

“I sense your unease, and understand and respect it. I am going to put my hand in my right pouch and remove an object. It is harmless.” He did so, producing one of those microcorders that looks like a fancy button. “I wish there to be truth between us,” he added. Was it low pressure stridency alone that gave his voice that edge?

I groped for an appropriate response. Beyond him, Linda was whirling gracefully through space, sublimely pregnant, oblivious. “Sure,” I said again.

He thumbnailed the playback niche. Linda’s recorded voice said something that I couldn’t hear, and I shook my head. He rewound to the same cue and underhanded it gently toward me.

“That’s what I mean,” Linda’s voice repeated. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”

The tape record I spoke of a while ago.

My brain instantly went on computer time, became a hyper-efficient thinking machine, ran a thousand consecutive analysis programs in a matter of microseconds, and self-destructed. Hand in the cookie jar. Halfway down the Mountain and the brakes are gone. I’d have sworn I closed that airlock. The microcorder hit me in the cheek; instinctively I caught it on the rebound and shut it off as Tom was asking Linda, “Aren’t we human?”

And that echoed in the Die for a while.

“Only an imbecile would find it difficult to bug an unguarded pressure suit,” Chen said tonelessly.

“Yeah,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, that was stupid. Who else—?” I broke off and slapped my forehead. “No. I don’t want to ask any stupid questions. Well, what do you think, Chen Ten Li? Are we Homo novis? Or just gifted acrobats? I’m God damned if I know.”

He jaunted cleanly back to me, like an arrow in slow-motion flight. Cats jaunt like that. “Homo caelestis, perhaps,” he said calmly, and his landing was clean. “Or possibly Homo ala anima.”

“Allah who? Oh—‘winged soul.’ Huh. Okay. I’ll buy that. Let me try a whammy on you, Doc. I’ll bet a cookie that you’re a ‘winged soul’ yourself. Potentially, at least.”

His reaction astonished me. I had expected a sudden poker face. Instead naked grief splashed his face, stark loss and hopeless yearning, etched by Saturnlight. I never saw such wide-open emotion on his face before or since; it may be that no one but his aged mother and his dead wife ever had. It shocked me to my socks, and it would have shocked him too if he had been remotely aware of it.

“No, Mist’ Armstead,” he said bleakly, staring at Saturn over my shoulder. His accent slipped for the first and last time, and absurdly reminded me of Fat Humphrey. “No, I am not one of you. Nor can time or my will make it so. I know this. I am reconciled to this.” As he got this far, his face began relaxing into its customary impassivity, all unconsciously. I marveled at the discipline of his subconscious mind, and interrupted him.

“I don’t know that you’re right. It seems to me that any man who can play three-D chess is a prime candidate for Homo Whateverthehell.”

“Because you are ignorant of three-D chess,” he said, “and of your own nature. Men play three-D chess on Earth. It was designed under one gravity, for a vertical player, and its classic patterns are linear. I have tried to play in free fall, with a set that is not fixed in that relationship to me, and I cannot. I can consistently beat the Martin-Daniels Program at flat chess” (world class) “but in free-fall three-D Mr. Brindle could easily defeat me, if I were unvain enough to play him. I can coordinate myself well enough aboard Siegfried or in this most linear of vehicles. But I can never learn to live for any length of time without what you call a ‘local vertical.’ ”

“It comes on slow,” I began.

“Five months ago,” Li interrupted, “the night light failed in my room. I woke instantly. It took me twenty minutes to locate the light switches. During that entire time I wept with fear and misery, and lost control of my sphincters. The memory offended me, so I spent several weeks devising tests and exercises. I must have a local vertical to live. I am a normal human.”

I was silent a long time. Linda had noticed our conversation; I signaled her to keep on dancing and she nodded. After I had thought things through I said, “Do you believe that our interests will fail to coincide with yours?”

He smiled, all diplomat again, and chuckled. “Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law, Mr. Armstead?”

I grinned back. “Yeah, but is it probable?”

“I don’t believe so,” he answered seriously. “But I believe that Dmirov would believe so. Possibly Ezequiel. Possibly Commander Cox. Certainly Silverman.”

“And we must assume that any of them might also have bugged a suit ”

“Tell me: Do you agree that if this conference generates any information of great strategic value, Silverman will attempt to establish sole possession of it?”

Chatting with Chen was like juggling chainsaws. I sighed. We were being honest. “Yeah—if he got a chance to pull it off, sure. But that’d take some doing.”

“One person with the right program tapes could bring Siegfried close enough to Terra for retrieval,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t say “one man.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I am presently jamming any possible bugs in this vehicle. I believe Silverman will attempt this thing. I smell it. If he does, I will kill him at once. You and your people react quickly in free fall; I want you to understand my motives.”

“And they are?”

“Preservation of civilization on Terra. The continued existence of the human race.”

I decided to try throwing him ahot one. “Will you shoot him with that automatic?”

He registered faint distaste. “I cycled that out the airlock two weeks after departure,” he said. “An absurd weapon in free fall, as I should have realized. No, I shall probably break his back.”

Don’t give this guy strong serves: his return is murder.

“Where will you stand in that event, Mr. Armstead?”

“Eh?”

“Silverman is a fellow Caucasian, a fellow North American. You share a cultural matrix. Is that a stronger bond than your bond with Homo caelestis?”

“Eh?” I said again.

“Your new species will not survive long if the blue Earth is blown apart,” Chen said harshly, “which is what that madman Silverman would have. I don’t know how your mind works, Mr. Armstead: what will you do?”

“I respect your right to ask the question,” I said slowly. “I will do what seems right to me at the time. I have no other answer.”

He searched my face and nodded. “I would like to go outside now.”

“Jesus Christ,” I exploded, and he cut me off.

“Yes, I know—I just said I couldn’t function in free space, and now I want to try.” He gestured with his helmet. “Mr. Armstead, I anticipate that I may die soon. Once before that time I must hang alone in eternity, subject to no acceleration, without right angles for frames, in free space. I have dreamed of space for most of my life, and feared to enter it. Now I must. As nearly as I can say it in your language, I must confront my God.”

I wanted to say yes. “Do you know how much that can resemble sensory deprivation?” I argued. “How’d you like to lose your ego in a spacesuit? Or even just your lunch?”

“I have lost my ego before. Someday I will forever. I do not get nauseous.” He began putting his helmet on.

“No, dammit, watch out for the nipple. Here, let me do it.”

After five minutes he switched his radio back on and said, shakily, “I’m coming in now.” After that he didn’t say anything until we were unbuttoning in Siegfried’s shuttlecraft bay. Then he said, very softly, “It is I who am Homo excastra. And the others,” and those were the last words he said to me until the first day of Second Contact.

What I replied was, “You are always welcome in my home, Doctor,” but he made no reply.

Deceleration brought a horde of minor disasters. If you move into a small apartment (and never leave it) by the end of a year your belongings will have tended to spread outconsiderably. Zero gee amplifies the tendency. Storing everything for acceleration would have been impossible even if all we’d had to contend with was the twenty-five hours of a hundredth gee. But even the straightest, laser-sighted pipeline has some kinks in it, and our course was one of the longest pipelines ever laid by Man (over a billion klicks). Titan’s gravity well was a mighty small target at the end of it, that we had to hit just precisely right. Before Skyfac provided minimicrochip computer crystals the trick would not have been possible, and we had had small course corrections en route. But the moon swam up fast, and we took a couple of one-gee burns that, though mercifully short, made me strongly doubt that we could survive even a two-year return trip. They also scattered wreckage, mostly trivial, all over the ship: Fibber McGee’s Closet, indoors. The worst of it, though, appeared to be a ruptured water line to the midships shower bags, and the air conditioning handled it.

Even being forewarned of an earthquake doesn’t help much.

On the other hand, cleanup was next to no problem at all—again, thanks to zero gee. All we had to do was wait, and sooner or later virtually all of the debris collected on the air conditioning grilles of its own accord, just like always. Free-fall housekeeping mostly involves replacing worn-out velcro and grille screens.

(We use sleeping webs and cocoons when we sleep, even though everything in a free-fall domicile is well padded. It’s not as restful—but without any restraints, you keep waking up when you bump into the air grille. One idiot student had wanted to nap in Town Hall, which has no sleeping gear, so he turned off the air conditioning. Fortunately someone came in before he could suffocate in the carbon dioxide sphere of his own exhalations. I paid for an unscheduled elevator and had him dirtside twenty hours later.)

And so nearly at once everyone found time to hang themselves in front of a video monitor and eyeball Titan.

From the extensive briefing we all studied, this abstract:

Titan is the sixth of Saturn’s nine moons, and quite the largest. I had been expecting something vaguely Luna-sized—but the damned thing has a diameter of almost 5,800 klicks, roughly that of the planet Mercury, or about four tenths that of Earth! At that incredible size its mass is only about .002 that of Earth’s. Its orbital inclination is negligible, less than a degree—that is, it orbits almost precisely around the equator of Saturn (as does the Ring), at a mean distance of just over ten planetary diameters. It is tidally locked, so that it always presents the same face to its primary, like Luna, and it takes only about sixteen days to circle Saturn—a speedy moon indeed for its size. (But then Saturn itself has a ten-and-a-quarter-hour day.)

From the time that it had been close enough to eyeball it had looked reddish, and now it looked like Mars on fire, girdled with vast clouds like thunderheads of blood. Through them lunarlike mountains and valleys glowed a slightly cooler red, as though lit by a gobo with a red gel—which, essentially, they were. The overall effect was of hellfire and damnation.

That preternatural red color was one of the principal reasons why Cox and Song went into emergency overdrive the moment we were locked into orbit. The world scientific community had gone into apoplexy when its expensive Saturn probe had been hijacked by the military, for a diplomatic mission, and into double apoplexy when they understood that the scientific complement of the voyage would consist of a single Space Command physicist and an engineer. So Bill and Col. Song spent the twenty-four hours we remained in that orbit working like fishermen when the tide makes, taking the absolute minimum of measurements and recordings that would satisfy Siegried’s original planners. Led by Susan Pha Song, they worked from taped instructions and under the waspish direction of embittered scientists on Terra (with a transmission lag of an hour and a quarter, which improved no one’s temper), and they did a good, dogged job. It is a little difficult to imagine the kind of mind that would find chatting with extrasolar plasmoids less exciting than studying Saturn’s sixth moon, but there are some—and the startling thing is, they’re not entirely crazy.

It’s that red color. Titan should look sort of blue-greenish. Yet even from Earth it is clearly red. Why? Well, the thing that had professors in a flutter was that Titan’s atmosphere (mostly methane) and temperature characteristics made it about the last place in the Solar System where theory grudgingly admitted the possibility of “life as we know it.” Experiments with a Titan-normal chamber produced Miller’s “primal flash” chemical reactions, a good sign, and the unspoken but dearly beloved theory was that maybe the red cloud-cover was organic matter of some kind—or even conceivably whatever kind of pollution a methane-breafher would produce. I couldn’t follow even Raoul’s popularization of the byplay, and I was only peripherally interested, but I gathered that by the end of twenty-four hours, a pessimist would have said “no” and an optimist “maybe.” Raoul mentioned a lot of ambiguous data, stuff that seemed self-contradictory—which didn’t surprise me in light of how prematurely Siegfried had been rushed into commission.

I divided my own attention between Titan and Saturn, which the scientists wouldn’t be interested in until after the conference, when they could get a closer look. From where we were it took up about a 6 or 7° piece of sky (for reference, Luna seen from Earth subtends an angle of about half a degree; Earth seen from Luna is about 2° wide. Your fist at arm’s length is about 10°.), and the Ring, edge on to us, added another couple of planetary diameters or almost 14°. Call it a total package of 20°, two fists’ width. Not cosmic; at home, at the Studio, I’ve seen Mother Terra take up more than half the sky at perigee. But when Earth did take up 20°, we were about 22,000 klicks from its surface. Saturn was 1.2 million klicks away.

It’s a hellacious big planet—the biggest in the System if you don’t call Jupiter a planet (I don’t call it at all. It might answer). Its diameter is a little over 116,000 klicks, roughly nine Earths, and it masses a whopping ninety-five Earths. This makes its surface gee of 1.15 Earth normal seem absurdly low—but it must be borne in mind that Saturn is only .69 as dense as a comparable sphere of water (while Earth has more than five times the density of water). Even that low a gee field was more than enough to kill a Homo caelestis or a Homo excastra, were we silly enough to land on Saturn. And the escape velocity is more than three times that for Earth (a weak gravity well—but a big one).

It doesn’t exactly have asurface, though, as I understand it. Oh, there’s probably rock down there somewhere. But long before you got down that far, you’d come to rest, floating on methane, which is what Saturn (and its “atmosphere”) mostly is.

Its mighty Ring appears to be a moon that didn’t make it, uncountable trillions of orbiting rocks from sand- to boulder-size, covered with water ice.

Together they present an indescribably beautiful appearance. Saturn is a kind of dreamy ocher yellow with wide bands of dark, almost chocolate brown, and it is quite bright as planets go. The Ring, being dirty ice, incorporates literally every color in the visible spectrum, sparkling and shifting as the independent orbits of its component parts change relation. The overall impression is of an immense agate or tiger-eye circled by the shattered remnants of a mighty rainbow. Smaller, literal rainbows come and go randomly within the orbiting mass, like lights seen through wet glasses.

It was a sight I never tired of, will never forget as long as I live,and it alone was worth the trip from Earth and the loss of my heritage. I couldn’t decide whether it was more beautiful at the height of our orbit, when we were above the Ring, or at the other end when we were edge-on; both had their points. Raoul spent virtually every minute of his free time glued to the bulkhead across from his video screen, his Musicmaster on his lap, its headphones over his ears, fingers seeking and questioning among its keys. He would not let us put the speakers on—but he gave Harry the auxiliary phones. I have subsequently heard the symphony he derived from that working tape, and I would have traded Earth for that.

The aliens, of course, were the utter and total center of Bill Cox’s attention. Their high-energy emissions nearly overloaded his instruments, though they were too far away to be seen. About a million klicks, give or take a few hundred thousand, waiting with apparent patience at the approximate forward Trojan point for Saturn-Titan. The actual locating of that point was extremely complicated by the presence of eight other moons, and I’m told that no Trojan point would be stable in the long term—even if the O’Neill Colony movement ever gets going at L-5, it’ll never spread to Saturn. But what it came down to was that the aliens were waiting about 60° “down the line” of Titan’s orbit, at a sensible place for a conference. Which made it even more probable that that was their intention.

So ournext move was to go say howdy. Siegfried and all: that Trojan point was a good four light-seconds away, and lag was not acceptable to any of us.

We dancers also had business of our own to occupy us while Bill and Col. Song were slaving, of course. We didn’t spend all our time rubbernecking.

The Limousine had been fully supplied and outfitted, field- and board-tested down to the last circuit, and secured long since, in transit. So naturally the first thing we did was to check the supplies and fittings and board-test down to the last circuit again. If we should buy the emptiest of farms, the next expedition would be two or three years in arriving at the very least—and maybe by then the alien’s Trojan stability would have decayed enough to irritate them and they’d have gone home.

Besides, I wanted personal words with them.

And that was the root of the last thing we did before blasting for their location, which was to hold the last several hours of a year-long quarrel with the diplomats over choreography.

I finally jaunted right out on them, prepared to float in my room and let them dance. I hadn’t lost my temper; only my will to argue.

DeLaTorre waited a polite interval and then buzzed at my door. “Come in.”

The free-fall haircut spoiled his appearance; he should have had hair like Mark Twain. He had had to shave his beard too—there’s no room for one in a helmet—and hating shaving he did it badly; but it actually improved his looks, almost enough to compensate for the big fuzzy skull. His warm brown eyes showed unspeakable fatigue, their lids raisinlike with wrinkles. He stuck himself to the wall, moving with the exaggerated care of the bone-tired, so that he was aligned with the local vertical built into it by its terrestrial designers (when Harry builds his first billion-dollar spaceship, he’ll be more imaginative).

DeLaTorre would, at his age, never make a Space Man. Out of respect, I assumed the same orientation. What little anger I had had was gone; my determination remained.

“Charles, an accommodation must be reached”

“Ezequiel, don’t tell me you’re as blind as the rest of them.”

“They only feel that the first movement might more properly be respectful, rather than stern; solemn rather than emotional. Once we have established communication, opened relations with these beings in mutual dignity, then would be the time to state our grievances. The third or fourth movement, perhaps.”

“Dammit, it doesn’t feel right that way.”

“Charles, forgive me, but—surely you will admit that your emotional judgment might be clouded in this matter?”

I sighed. “Ezequiel, look me in the eye. I have not been in love with Shara Drummond since shortly before she died. I have examined my soul and the dance that came out of it, and I feel no urge for personal vengeance, no thirst for retribution.”

“No, your dance is not vengeful,” he agreed.

“But I do have a grievance—not as a bereaved lover but as a bereaved human being. I want those aliens to know what they cost my race when they wrought the death of Shara Drummond, when they forced her hand and made her into Homo caelestis before there was any place or any way for one to live—” I broke off, realizing that I had blundered, but DeLaTorre did not even blink.

“Was she not already Homo caelestis, or ala anima, when they arrived, Charles?” he asked as blandly as if he was supposed to know those terms. “Would she not have died on her return to Earth in any case, by that point?”

I recognized and accepted the sudden rise in our truth level, distracted by his question. “Perhaps, Ezequiel. Her body must have been on the borderline of permanent adaptation. I have lain awake many nights, thinking about this, talking it over with my wife. I keep thinking: Had Shara visualized what her Stardance would do financially, she might have endured a brief wait at Skyfac, might have survived to be a more worthy leader for our Studio. I keep thinking: Had she thought things through, she might not have chosen to burn her wings, so high above her lost planet. I keep thinking: Had she known, she might have lived.”

I sucked rotten coffee from a bulb and made a face. “But all the fighting spirit had been sucked out of her, drained into the Stardance and hurled at those red fireflies with the last of her strength. All of her life, right up to Carrington, had been slowly draining the will to live out of her, and she threw all that she had left at those things, because that was what it took to scare them back to interstellar space, to frighten them so bad that their nearest subsequent approach was a billion klicks away. There was no will to live left after that, not enough to sustain her.

“I want to convey to those creatures the value of the entity their careless footstep crushed, the enonnity of her people’s loss. If grief or remorse are in their emotional repertoire, I want to see some. Most of all, I think, I want to forgive them. And so I have to state my complaint first. I believe that their reaction will tell us quicker than anything else whether we can ever learn to communicate and peacefully coexist with them.

“They respect dance, Ezequiel, and they cost us the greatest artist of our time. A race that could open with any other statement is one I don’t much want to represent. That’d be Montezuma’s Mistake all over again. Norrey and the others agree with me: this is a deal-breaker.”

He was silent a long time. The last thing a diplomat will concede is that compromise is impossible. But at last he_said, “I follow your thought, Charles. And I admit that it leads me to the same conclusion.” He sighed. “You are right. I will make the others accept this.” He pushed free and jaunted to me, taking both my shoulders in his wrinkled, mottled hands. “Thank you for explaining to me. Come, let us prepare to go and state our grievance.”

He was closeted with the other three for a little over twenty minutes, and emerged with an extremely grudging accord. He was indeed the best man Wertheimer could have chosen. Half an hour later we were on our way.

III

It took the better part of a day to coax Siegfried from Titan orbit to the Trojan point, without employing accelerations that would kill us all. Titan is a mighty moon, harder to break free of than Luna. Fortunately we didn’t want to break free of it—quite. We essentially widened the circle of our orbit until it intersected the Trojan point—decelerating like hell all the way so that we’d be at rest relative to it when we got there. It had to be at least partly by-guess-and-by-God, because any transit in Saturn’s system is a ten-body problem (don’t even think about the Ring), and Bill was an equal partner with the computer in that astrogating job. He did a world-class job, as I had known he would, wasting no fuel and, more important, no passengers. The worst we had to endure was about fifteen seconds at about .6 gee, mere agony.

Any properly oriented wall will do for an acceleration couch—since everything in a true spaceship is well padded (billion-dollar spaceprobe designers aren’t that unimaginative). I don’t know about all the others, but Norrey and I and anybody sensible customarily underwent acceleration naked. If you’ve got to lie flat on your back under gravity, you don’t want wrinkly clothes and bulky velcro pads between you and the padding.

When we drifted free of the wall and the “acceleration over” horn sounded, we dressed in the same p-suits we had worn on our Last Ride together, a year before. Of the five models of custom-made suits we use, they are the closest to total nudity, resembling abbreviated topless bathing suits with a collared hood. The transparent sections are formfitted and scarcely noticeable; the “trunks” are not for taboo but for sanitary reasons; and the hood-and-collar section is mostly to conceal the unaesthetic amount of hardware that must be built into a p-suit hood. The thrusters are ornate wrist and ankle jewelry; their controls golfing gloves. The group had decided unanimously that we would use these suits for our performance. Perhaps by the overt image of naked humans in space we were unconsciously trying to assert our humanity, to deny the concept of ourselves as other than human by displaying the evidence to the contrary. See? Navel. See? Nipples. See? Toes.

“The trouble with these suits, my love,” I said as I sealed my own, “is that the sight of you in yours always threatens to dislodge my catheter tube.”

She grinned and made an unnecessary adjustment of her left breast. “Steady, boy. Keep your mind on business.”

“Especially now that the bloody weight is gone. How did you women put up with it for centuries? Having some great heavy clod lay on you like that?”

“Stoically,” she said, and jaunted for the phone. She diddled its controls, and said, “Linda—how’s the baby?”

Linda and Torn appeared on the screen, in the midst of helping each other suit up. “Fine,” Linda called happily. “Nary a quiver.”

Tom grinned at the phone and said, “What’s to worry? She still fits into her p-suit, for crying out loud.”

His composure impressed and deeply pleased me. When we left Skyfac I would have predicted that at this pre-curtain moment, with a pregnant wife to worry about, Tom would be agitated enough to chew pieces off his shoulder blades. But free space, as I have said, is a tranquilizing environment—and more important, he had allowed Linda to teach him much. Not just the dance, and the breathing and meditational exercises for relaxation—we had all learned these things. Not even the extensive spiritual instruction she had given that ex-businessman (which had begun with loud arguments, and calmed down when he finally got it through his head that she had no creed to attack, no brand label to discredit), though that helped of course.

Mostly it was her love and her loving that had finally unsnarled all the knots in Tom’s troubled soul. Her love was so transparently genuine and heartfelt that it forced him to take it at face value, forced him therefore to love himself a little more—which is all anyone really needs to relax. Opening up to another frees you at least temporarily of all that armor you’ve been lugging, and your disposition invariably improves. Sometimes you decide to scrap the armor altogether.

Norrey and I shared all of this in a smile and a glance, and then she said, “That’s great, you two. See you at the Garage,” and cleared the screen.

She drifted round in space, her lovely breasts majestic in free fall, till she was facing me. “Tom and Linda will be good partners for us,” she said, and was silent.

We hung at opposite ends of the room for a few seconds, lost in each other’s eyes, and then we kicked off at the same instant and met, hard, at the center of the room. Our embrace was four-limbed and fierce, a spasmodic attempt to break through the boundaries of flesh and bone and plastic and touch hearts.

“I’m not scared,” she said in my ear. “I ought to be scared, but I’m not. Not at all. But oh, I’d be scared if I were going into this without you!”

I tried to reply and could not, so I hugged tighter.

And then we left to meet the others.

Living in Siegfried had been rather like living below-decks in a luxury liner. The shuttlecraft was more like a bus, or a plane. Rows of seats with barely enough room to maneuver above them, abig airlock aft, a smaller one in the forward wall, windows on either side, engines in the rear. But from the outside it would have appeared that the bus or plane had rammed a stupendous bubble. The bow of the craft was a transparent sphere about twenty meters in diameter, the observation globe from which the team of diplomats would observe our performance. There was extremely little hardware to spoil the view. The computer itself was in Siegfried and the actual terminal was small; the five video monitors were little bigger, and the Limousine’s own guidance systems were controlled by another lobe of the same computer. There would be no bad seats.

There had, inevitably, been scores of last-minute messages from Earth, but not even the diplomats had paid any attention to them. Nor was there much conversation on the trip. Everyone’s mind was on the coming encounter, and our Master Plan, insofar as we could be said to have one, had been finalized long since.

We had spent a year studying computer analysesof both sides ofthe Stardance, and we believed we had gotten enough out of them to prechoreograph an opening statement in four movements. About an hour’s worth of dance, sort of a Mandarin’s Greeting. By the end of that time we would either have established telepathic rapport or not. If so we would turn the phone over to the diplomats. They would pass their consensus through DeLaTorre, and we would communicate their words to the aliens as best we could. If, for some reason, consensus could not be reached, then we would dance that too. If we could not establish rapport, we would watch the aliens’ reply to our opening statement and we and the computer would try to agree on a translation. The diplomats would then frame their reply, the computer would feed us choreographic notation, and we’d try it that way. If we got no results by the end of nine hours—two air changes—we’d call it a day, take the Limo back home to Siegfried and try again tomorrow. If we got good or promising results, we had enough air cans to stay out for a week—and the Die was stocked with food, water and a stripped-down toilet.

Mostly we all expected to play it by ear. Our ignorance was so total that anything would be a breakthrough, and we all knew it.

There was only one video screen in the passenger compartment, and Cox’s face filled it throughout the short journey. He kept us posted on the aliens’ status, which was static. At last deceleration ended, and we sank briefly in our seats as the Limousine turned end over end to present the bubble to the aliens, and then we were just finally there, at the crossroads. The diplomats unstrapped and went forward to the bubble’s airlock; the Stardancers went aft to the big one. The one that had the Exit light over it.

We hung there together a moment, by unspoken consent, and looked around at each other. No one had a moving, Casablanca-ending speech to deliver, no wisecracks or last sentiments to exchange. The last year had forged us into a family; we were already beginning to be mutually telepathic after a fashion. We were beyond words. We were ready.

What we did, actually, we smiled big idiotic smiles and joined hands in a snowflake around the airlock.

Then Harry and Raoul let go on either end, kissed each other, seated their hoods, and entered the airlock to go build our set. There was room for four in the airlock; Tom and Linda squeezed in with them. They would deploy the Die and wait for us.

As the door slid closed behind them, Norrey and I shared our own final kiss.

“No words,” I said, and she nodded slightly.

“Mr. Armstead,” from behind me.

“Yes, Dr. Chen?”

He was half in his airlock, alone. Without facial or vocal expression he said, “Blow a gasket.”

I smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

And we entered the lock.

There is a kind of familiarity beyond deja vu, a recall greater than total. It comes on like scales falling from your eyes. Say you haven’t taken LSD in a long while, but you sincerely believe that you remember what the experience was like. Then you drop again, and as it comes on you simply say, “Ah yes—reality,” and smile indulgently at your foolish shadow memories. Or (if you’re too young to remember acid), you discover real true love, at the moment when you are making love with your partner and realize that all of your life together is a single, continuous, and ongoing act of lovemaking, in the course of which you happen to occasionally disengage bodies altogether for hours at a time. It is not something to which you return—it is something you suddenly find that you have never really left.

I felt it now as I saw the aliens again.

Red fireflies. Like glowing coals without the coals inside, whirling in something less substantial than a bubble, more immense than Siegfried. Ceaselessly whirling, in ceaselessly shifting patterns that drew the eyelike the dance of the cobra.

All at once it seemed to me that the whole of my life was the moments I had spent in the presence of these beings—that the intervals between those moments, even the endless hours studying the tapes of the aliens and trying to understand them, had been unreal shadows already fading from my memory. I had always known the aliens. I would always know them, and they me. We went back about a billion years together. Like coming home from school to Mom and Dad, who are unchanging and eternal. Hey, I wanted to tell them, I’ve stopped believing I’m a cripple, as a kid might proudly announce he’s passed a difficult Chem test... .

I shook my head savagely, and snapped out of it. Looking away helped. Everything about the setting said that something more than confused dreams had occurred since our last meeting. Just past the aliens mighty Saturn shone yellow and brown, ringed with coruscating fire. The Sun behind my back provided only one percent of the illumination it shone on Terra—but the difference was not discernible: the terrestrial eye habitually filters out 99% of available light (it suddenly struck me, the coincidence that this meeting place the aliens had chosen happened to be precisely as far away from the Sun as a human eye could go and still see properly).

We were “above” the Ring. It defied description.

To my “right,” Titan was smaller than Luna (under a third of a degree), but clearly visible, nearly three-quarters full from our perspective. Where the terminator faced Saturn the dull red color softened to the hue of a blood-orange, from the reflected Saturnlight. The great moon still looked smoky, like a baleful eye on our proceedings.

And all around me my teammates were floating, staring, hypnotized.

Only Tom was showing signs of self-possession. Like me, he was renewing an old acquaintance; reaffirming strong memories takes less time than making new ones.

We knew them better, this time, even those who were facing them for the first time. At that last confrontation, only Shara had seemed able to understand them to any degree--no matter how hard I had watched them, then, understanding had eluded me. Now my mind was free of terror, my eyes unblinded by need, my heart at peace. I felt as Sham had felt, saw what she had seen, and agreed with her tentative evaluations.

“There’s a flavor of arrogance to them—conviction of superiority. Their dance is a challenging, a dare.”

“… biologists studying the antics of a strange, new species....”

“They want Earth.”

“… in orbits as carefully choreographed as those of electrons....”

“Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”

Cox’s voice broke through our reverie. “Siegfried to Stardancers. They’re the same ones, all right: the signatures match to 3 nines.”

We had planned for the possibility that these might have been a different group of aliens—say, policemen looking for the others, or possibly even the second batch of suckers to buy a Sol-System Tour on the strength of the brochure. Even low probabilities had been prepared for. As Bill spoke, he, the diplomats and the computer flushed several sheafs of contingency scenarios from their memory banks and confirmed Plan A in their minds.

But all of us Stardancers had known already, on sight.

“Roger, Siegfried,” I acknowledged. “I’m terrible on names, but I never forget a face. ‘That’s the man, officer.’ ”

“Initiate your program.”

“All right, let’s get set up. Harry, Raoul, deploy the set and monitor. Tom and Linda, deploy the Die—about twenty klicks thataway, okay? Norrey, give me a hand with camera placement, we’ll all meet at the Die in twenty minutes. Go.”

The set was minimal, mostly positional grid markers. Raoul had not taken long to decide that attempting flashy effects in the close vicinity of the Ring would be vain folly. His bank of tracking lasers was low-power, meant only as gobos to color-light us dancers vividly for the camera—and to see how the aliens would react to the presence of lasers, which was their real purpose. I thought it was a damned-fool stupid idea—like Pope Leo picking his teeth with a stiletto as he comes to dicker with Attila—and the whole company, Raoul included, agreed wholeheartedly. We all wanted to stick to conventional lights.

But if you’re going to win arguments with diplomats of that stature you’ve got to make some concessions.

The grid markers were color organs slaved to Raoul’s Musicmaster through a system Harry designed. If the aliens responded noticeably to color cues, Raoul would attempt to use his instrument to make visual music, augmenting our communication by making the spectrum dance with us. Just as the sonic range of the Musicmaster exceeded the audible on both ends, the spectral range of the color organs exceeded the visible. If the aliens’ language included these subtleties, we would have rich converse indeed. Even the ship’s computer might have to stretch itself.

The Musicmaster’s audio output would be in circuit with our radios, well below conversational level. We wanted to enhance the possibility of a kind of mutual telepathic resonance, and we were conditioned to Raoul’s music that way.

Norrey and I set up five cameras in an open cone facing the aliens, for a proscenium-stage effect, as opposed to the six-camera globe we customarily used at home for 360° coverage. Neither of us felt like traveling around “behind” the aliens to plant the last camera there. This would be the only dance we had ever done that would be shot from every angle except the one toward which it was aimed, recorded only “from backstage,” as it were.

To tell you the truth, it didn’t make that much difference. Artistically it wasn’t much of a dance. I wouldn’t have released it commercially. The reason’s obvious, really: it was never intended for humans.

That had been the real root of our struggle with the diplomats over the last year. They were committed to the belief that what would be understood best by the aliens was precise adherence to a series of computer-generated movements. We Stardancers unanimously believed that what the aliens had responded to in Shara had been not aseries of movements but art. The artistic mind behind the movements, the amount of heart and soul that went into them—the very thing an over-rigid choreography destroys in space. If we accepted the diplomats’ belief-structure, we were only computer display models. If they had accepted our belief-structure, Dmirov and Silvennan at least would have been forced to admit themselves forever deaf to alien speech—and Chen would never have been able to justify siding with us to his superiors.

The result was, of course, compromise that satisfied no one, with provisions to dump whichever scheme didn’t seem to be working, if consensus could be reached. That was another reason I had had to gamble our lives and our race’s fortune on the damned lasers in order to win control of the first movement. The balance would be biased slightly our way: Our very first “utterances” would be—something more than could be expressed mathematically and ballistically.

But even if we had had a totally free hand, our dance would surely have puzzled hell out of anyone but another Homo caelestis. Or a computer.

I think Shara would have loved it.

At last all the pieces were in place, the stage was set, and we formed a snowflake around the Die.

“Watch your breathing, Charlie,” Norrey warned.

“Right you are, my love,” My lungs were taking orders from my hindbrain; it seemed to want me agitated. But I didn’t. I began forcing measure on my breaths, and soon we were all breathing in unison, in, hold, out, hold, striving to push the interval past five seconds. My agitation began to melt like summer wages, my peripheral vision expanded spherically, and I felt my family as though a literal charge of electricity passed from hand to p-suited hand, completing a circuit that tuned usto one another. We became like magnets joined around a monopole, aligned to an imaginary point at the center of our circle. It was an encouraging analogy—however you disperse such magnets in free fall, eventually they will come together again at the pole. We were family; we were one. Not just our shared membership in a hypothetical new genus: we knew each other backstage, a relationship like no other on Earth or off it.

“Mr. Armstead,” Silverman growled, “I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that for once the world actually is waiting for you. Can we get on with the show?”

I just smiled. We all smiled. Bill started to say something, so I cut him off. “Certainly, Mr. Ambassador. At once.” We dissolved the snowflake, and I jetted to the Die’s external Master Board. “Program locked and… running, lights up, cameras hot, hold four three two curtain!”

Like a single being, we took our stage.

Feet first, hands high and blasting, we plunged down on the firefly swarm.

Raoul’s stage marks pulsed gently with the color analog of the incredible piece he called Shara’s Blues. Its opening bars are entirely in deep bass register; they translated as all the shades of blue there are, a visual pun. Somehow the incredible splendor of color about us—Saturn, Ring, aliens, Titan, lasers, camera lights, Die, Limousine like a soft red flashlight, and two other moons I didn’t know—all only seemed to emphasize the intolerable blackness of the empty space that framed it, the immensity of the sea of black ink through which we all swam, planets and people alike. The literally cosmic perspective it provided was welcome, calming. What are man or firefly that Thou shouldst be mindful of them?

It was not detachment. Quite the opposite: I had never before felt so alive. For the first time in years I was aware of my p-suit clinging to my skin, aware of the breathing in my earphones, aware of the smell of my own body and of canned air, aware of the catheter and telemetry contacts and the faint sound of my hair rustling against the inside of my hood. I was perceiving totally, functioning at full capacity, exhilarated and a little scared. I was completely happy.

The music swelled suddenly. The far-flung grid pulsed with color.

We poured on full thrust, all four of us in a tight formation, so that we seemed to fall upon the alien swarm from a great height. They grew beneath our feet with breathtaking rapidity, but we were more than three klicks away when I gave the standby command. We stiffened our bodies, oriented and triggered heel thrusters together on command, opening out like a Blue Angels flower into four great loops. We let them close into circles, one of us spiraling about each of the “compass points” of the alien sphere, bracketing it with bodies. After three full circles we broke out in unison and met at the same point where we had split apart, slowing as we arrived and making a four-way acrobat’s catch. Hard jetting brought us to a halt; we whirled in space and faced the aliens; pinwheeled apart into a square fifty meters on a side and waited.

Here I am again, fireflies, Ithought. I have hatedyou for a long time. I would be done with hating you, however that may be.

Lasers turned us red, blue, yellow and aching green, and Raoul had abandoned known music for new; his spiderlike fingers wove patterns undreamed an hour before, stitching space with color and our ears with sound. Melancholy his melody, minor its wrestling two chords, with a throbbing undercurrent of dysharmonic bass like a migraine about to happen. It was as though he were pouring pain into a vessel whose cubic capacity might be inadequate.

With that for frame and all space for backdrop, we danced. The mechanical structure of that dance, the “step” and their interrelation, are forever unknowable to you, and I won’t try to describe them. It began slowly, tentatively; as Shara had, we began by defining terms. And so we ourselves gave the choreography less than half our attention.

Perhaps a third. A part of our minds was busy framing computer themes in artistic terms, but an equally large part was straining for any signs of feedback from the aliens, reaching out with eyes ears skin mind for any kind of response, sensitizing to any conceivable touch. And with as large a part of our minds, we felt for each other, strove to connect our awarenesses across meters of black vacuum, to see as the aliens saw, through many eyes at once.

And something began to happen... .

It began slowly, subtly, in imperceptible stages. After a year of study, I simply found myself understanding, and accepting the understanding without surprise or wonder. At first I thought the aliens had slowed their speed—but then I noted, again without wonder, that my pulse and everyone’s respiration had slowed an equal amount. I was on accelerated time, extracting the maximum of information from each second of life, being with the whole of my being. the aliens’ frenzy slow to a speed that anyone could encompass. I was aware that I could make time stop altogether, but I didn’t want to yet. I studied them at infinite leisure, and understanding grew. It was clear now that there was a tangible if invisible energy that held them in their tight mutual orbits, as electromagnetism holds electrons in their paths. But this energy boiled furiously at their will, and they surfed its currents like wood chips that magically never collided. They created a never-ending roller coaster before themselves. Slowly, slowly I began to realize that this energy was more than analogous to the energy that bound me to my family. What they were surfing on was their mutual awareness of each other, and of the Universe around them.

My own awareness of my family jumped a quantum level. I heard Norrey breathing, could see out her eyes, felt Tom’s sprained calf tug at me, felt Linda’s baby stir in my womb, watched us all and swore under Harry’s breath with him, raced down Raoul’s arm to his fingers and back into my own ears. I was a six-brained Snowflake, existing simultaneously in space and time and thought and music and dance and color and something I could not yet name, and all of these things strove toward harmony.

At no point was there any sensation of leaving or losing my self, my unique individual identity. It was right there in my body and brain where I had left it, could not be elsewhere, existed as before. It was as though a part of it had always existed independent of brain and body, as though my brain had always known this level but had been unable to record the information. Had we six been this close all along, all unawares, like six lonely blind men in the same volume of space? In a way I had always yearned to without knowing it, I touched my selves, and loved them.

We understood entirely that we were being shown this level by the aliens, that they had led us patiently up invisible psychic stairs to this new plane. If any energy detectable by Man had passed between them and us, Bill Cox would have been heating up his laser cannon and screaming for a report, but he was still on conference circuit with the diplomats, letting us dance without distraction.

But communication took place, on levels that even physical instruments could perceive. At first the aliens only echoed portions of our dance, to indicate an emotional or informational connotation they understood, and when they did so we knew without question that they had fully grasped whatever nuance we were trying to express.

After a time they began more complex responses, began subtly altering the patterns they returned to us, offering variations on a theme, then counterstatements, alternate suggestions. Each time they did so we came to know them better, to grasp the rudiments of their “language” and hence their nature. They agreed with our concept of sphericity, politely disagreed with our concept of mortality, strongly agreed with the notions of pain and joy. When we knew enough “words” to construct a “sentence,” we did so.

We came these billion miles to shame you, and are ashamed.

The response was at once compassionate and merry. NONSENSE, they might have said, HOW WERE YOU TO KNOW?

Surely it was obvious that you were wiser than we.

NO, ONLY THAT WE KNEW MORE. IN POINT OF FACT, WE WERE CULPABLY CLUMSY AND OVEREAGER.

Overeager? we echoed interrogatively.

OUR NEED WAS GREAT.All fifty-four aliens suddenly plummeted toward the center of their sphere at varying rates, incredibly failing to collide there even once, saying as plain as day, ONLY RANDOM CHANCE PREVENTED UTTER RUIN.

The nature of the utter ruin eluded us, and we “said” as much. Our dead sister told us you needed to spawn, on a world like ours. Is this your wish: to come and live with humans?

Their response was the equivalent of cosmic laughter. It resolved finally into a single, unmistakable “sentence”:

ON THE CONTRARY.

Our dance dissolved into confusion for a moment, then recovered.

We do not understand.

The aliens hesitated. Something like solicitude emanated from them, something like compassion.

WE CAN—WE MUST—EXPLAIN. BUT UNDERSTANDING WILL BE VERY STRESSFUL, COMPOSE YOURSELVES.

The component of our self that was Linda poured out a flood of maternal warmth, an envelope of calm; she had always been the best of us at prayer. Raoul now played only an om-like A-flat that was a warm, golden color. Tom’s driving will, Harry’s eternal strength, Norrey’s quiet acceptance, my own unfailing sense of humor, Linda’s infinite caring and Raoul’s dogged persistence all heterodyned to produce a kind of peace I had never known, a serene calm based on a sensation of completeness. All fear was gone, all doubt. This was meant to be.

This was meant to be, we danced. Let it be.

The echo was instantaneous, with a flavor of pleased, almost paternal approval.

NOW!

Their next sending was a relatively short dance, a relatively simple dance. We understood it at once, although it was utterly novel to us, grasped its fullest implications in a single frozen instant. The dance compressed every nanosecond of more than two billion years into a single concept, a single telepathic gestalt.

And that concept was really only the aliens’ name.

Terror smashed the Snowflake into six discrete shards. I was alone in my skull in empty space, with a thin film of plastic between me and my death, naked and terribly afraid. I clutched wildly for non-existent support. Before me, much too close before me, the aliens buzzed like bees. As I watched, they began to gather at the center, forming first a pinhole, then a knothole and then a porthole in the wall of Hell, a single shimmering red coal that raved with furious energy. Its brilliance dwarfed even the Sun; my hood began to polarize automatically.

The barely visible balloon that contained the molten nucleus began to weep red smoke, which spiraled gracefully out to form a kind of Ring. I knew it at once, what it was and what it was for, and I threw back my head and screamed, triggering all thrusters in blind escape reflex.

Five screams echoed mine.

I fainted.

IV

I was lying on my back with my knees raised, and I was much too heavy—almost twenty kilos. My ribs were struggling to inflate my chest. I had had a bad dream... .

The voices came from above like an old tube amp warming up, intermittent and distorted at first, resolving at last into a kind of clarity. They were near, but they had the trebleless, faraway characteristic of low pressure—and they too were finding the pseudogravity a strain.

“For the last time, tovarisch: speak to us. Why are your colleagues all catatonic? How do you continue to function? What in Lenin’s Name happened out there?”

“Let him be, Ludmilla. He cannot hear you.”

“I will have an answer!”

“Will you have him shot? If so, by whom? The man is a hero. If you continue to harass him, I will make full note of it, in our group report and in my own. Let him be.” Chen Ten Li’s voice was quite composed, exquisitely detached until that last blazing command. It startled me into opening my eyes, which I had been avoiding since I first became aware of the voices.

We were in the Limousine. All ten of us, four Space Commandsuits and six brightly colored Stardancers, a quorum of bowling pins strapped by twos into a vertical alley. Norrey and I were in the last or bottom row. We were obviously returning to Siegfried at full burn, making a good quarter gee. I turned my head at once to Norrey beside me. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully: the stars through the window behind her told me that we had already passed turnover and were decelerating.

I had been out a long time.

Somehow everything had gotten sorted out in my sleep. By definition, I guess: my subconscious had kept me under until I was ready to cope and no longer. A part of my mind boiled in turmoil, but I could encompass that part now and hold it in perspective. The majority of my mind was calm. Nearly all questions were answered now, and the fear dwindled to something that could be borne. I knew for certain that Norrey was all right, that all of us would be all right in time. Not direct knowledge; the telepathic bond was broken. But I knew my family. Our lives were irrevocably changed; into what, we knew not yet—but we would find out together.

At least two more crises would come in rapid succession now, and we would share these fortunes.

Immediate needs first.

“Harry,” I called out, “you did a good job. Let go now.”

He turned his big crewcut head and looked down past his headrest at me from two rows up. He smiled beatifically. “I almost lost his music box,” he said confidentially. “It got away from me when the weight came on.” At once he rolled his head up and was asleep, snoring deeply.

I smiled indulgently at myself. I should have expected it, should have known that it would be Harry, great-shouldered great-hearted Harry who would be the strongest of us all, Harry the construction engineer who would prove to have infinite load-bearing capacity. His shoulders had been equal to his heart’s need, and his breaking strain was still unknown. He would waken in an hour or so like a giant refreshed.

The diplomats had been yelping at me since I spoke to Harry; now I put my attention on them. “One at a time, please.”

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.

“Shut 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 intheir sleep, breathing to the same rhythm. We left Raoul’s Music master 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 shuttle-craft 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 hada 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! Youcouldn’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 as 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 cross-roads, 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 over mind 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. “Aperfectsymbiote....” 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?”

“No,” Silverman cried. “No, I do not. None of this makes sense! So the red crap is a living spacesuit, a biologically tailored what you said, you give it carbon dioxide it gives you oxygen, you give it shit it gives you strawberry jam. Very lovely: you’ve just eliminated all your overhead except for fuel and leisure aids. Very nice fellows, these aliens. How does it make you inhuman? Does the crap take over your mind or what?”

“It has no ‘mind’ of its own,” Raoul told him. “Oh, it’s remarkably sophisticated for a plant, with awareness above the vegetable. There are some remarkably complex tropisms but you couldn’t call it sentient. It sort of sets up partnership with the medulla, and rarely gets even as preconscious as a reflex. It just performs its function, in accordance with its biological programming.”

“What would make you inhuman then?”

My voice sounded funny, even to me. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know. We would never die, Silverman. We would never again hunger or thirst, never need a place to dispose of our wastes. We would never again fear heat or cold, never fear vacuum, Silverman; we would never fear anything again. We would acquire instant and complete control of our autonomic nervous systems, gain access to the sensorium keyboard of the hypothalamus itself. We would attain symphysis, telepathic communion, become a single mind in six immoral bodies, endlessly dreaming and never asleep. Individually and together we would become no more like a human than a human is like a chimpanzee. I don’t mind telling you that all six of us used our diapers out there. I’m still a little scared.”

“But you are ready…” Chen said softly.

“Not yet,” Linda said for all of us. “But we will be soon. That much we know.”

“This telepathy business,” Silverman said tentatively. “This ‘single mind’ stuff—is that for sure?”

“Oh, it’s not dependent on the aliens,” Linda assured him. “They showed us how to find that plane—but the capacity was always there, in every human that ever lived. Every holy man that ever got enlightened came down off the mountain saying, ‘We’re all one’—and every damn time the people decided it must be a metaphor. The symbiote helps us some, but—”

“How does it help?” Silverman interrupted.

“Well, the distraction factor, mostly. I mean, most people have flashes of telepathic ability, but there are so many distractions. It’s worse for a planet dweller, of course, but even in the Studio we got hungry, we got thirsty and horny and bored and tired and sore and angry and afraid. ‘Being in our heads,’ we called it. The animal part of us impeding the progress of the angel. The symbiote frees you from all animal needs—you can experience them, at whim, but never again are you subject to their arbitrary command. The symbiote does act as a kind of mild amplifier of the telepathic ‘wave band,’ but it helps much more by improving the ‘signal-to-noise ratio’ at the point of origin.”

“What I mean,” Silverman said, “if God forbid I were to let this fungus infest me, I would become at least mildly telepathic? As well as immortal and beyond having to go to the bathroom?”

“No sir,” she said politely but firmly. “If you were already mildly telepathic before you entered symbiotic partnership, you would become significantly more so. If, at that time, you happened to be in the field of a fully functioning telepath, you would become exponentially more so.”

“But if I took, say, the average man in the street and put him in a symbiote suit—”

“—you’d get an average immortal who never needed to go to the bathroom and was more empathic than he used to be,” I finished. “Empathy is sort of telepathy’s kid brother,” Linda said. “More like its larval stage,” I corrected.

“But two average guys in symbiote suits wouldn’t necessarily be able to read each other’s minds?”

“Not unless they worked long and hard at learning how that’s done,” I told him, “which they would almost certainly do. It’s lonely in space.”

He fell silent, and there was a pause while the rest of them sorted out their opinions and emotions. It took a while.

I had things to sort out myself. I was still possessed of that same internal certainty that I had felt since I woke up in the Limousine, feeling that almost prescient sense of inevitability, but the cusp was approaching quickly now. What if you should die, at this moment of moments? whispered an animal voice from the back of my skull.

As I had at the moment I confronted the aliens, I felt totally alive.

“Mr. Armstead,” DeLaTorre said, shaking his head and frowning mightily, “it seems to me that you are saying that all human want is coming to an end?”

“Oh no,” I said hastily. “I’m very sorry if we accidentally implied that. The symbiote cannot live in a terrestrial environment. Anything like that kind of gravity and atmosphere would kill it. No, the symbiote will not bring Heaven to Earth. Nothing can. Mohammed must go to the mountain—and many will refuse.”

“Perhaps,” Chen suggested delicately, “terrestrial scientists might be able to genetically modify the aliens’ gift?”

“No,” Harry said flatly. “There is no way you can give symphonies and sunsets to a fetus that insists on staying in the womb. That cloud of symbiote over Titan is every person’s birthright—but first they gotta earn it, by consenting to be born.”

“And to do that,” Raoul agreed, “they have to cut loose of Earth forever.”

“There is an appealing symmetry to the concept,” Chen said thoughtfully.

“Hell, yes,” Raoul said. “We should have expected something like it. The whole business of adaptation to free fall being possible but irreversible… look, at the moment of your birth, a very heavy miracle happened, in a single instant. One minute you were essentially a fish, with a fish’s two-valved circulatory system, parasitic on the womb. Then, all at once, a switch slammed shut. Zippobang, you were a mammal, just like that. Four-valved heart, self-contained—you made a major, irreversible physiological leap, into a new plane of evolution. It was accompanied by pain, trauma, and a flood of data from senses you hadn’t known you possessed. Nearly at once a whole bunch of infinitely more advanced beings in the same predicament began trying to teach you how to communicate. ‘Appealing’? The fucking symmetry is overwhelming! Now do you begin to understand why we screamed? We’re in the very midst of the same process—and all babies scream.”

“I don’t understand,” Dmirov complained. “You would be able to live naked in space—but how could you go anywhere?”

“Light pressure?” Chen suggested.

“The symbiote can deploy itself as a light sail,” I agreed, “but there are other forces we will use to carry us where we want to go.”

“Gravity gradients?”

“No. Nothing you could detect or measure.”

“Preposterous,” Dmirov snorted.

“How did the aliens get here?” I asked gently, and she reddened.

“The thing that makes it so difficult for me to credit your story,” Chen said, “is the improbability factor. So much of your coming here was random chance.”

“Dr. Chen,” I cut him off, “are you familiar with the proverb that says there is a destiny which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will?”

“But any of a thousand things might have conspired to prevent any of this from occurring.”

“Fifty-four things conspired to make it all occur. Super-things. Or did you think that the aliens just happened to appear in this system at the time that Shara Drummond began working at Skyfac? That they just happened to jump to Saturn when she returned to Skyfac to dance? That they just happened to appear outside Skyfac at the moment that Shara was about to return to Earth forever, a failure? Or that this whole trip to Saturn just happened to be feasible in the first place? Me, I wonder what they were doing out Neptune way, that first time they appeared.” I considered it. “I’ll have to go see.”

“You don’t understand,” Chen said urgently, and then controlled himself. “It is not generally known, but six years ago our planet was nearly destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Chance and good fortune saved us—there were no aliens in our skies then.”

Harry spoke up. “Know what a pregnant rabbit does if conditions aren’t favorable for birth? Reabsorbs the fetuses into the womb. Just reverses the process, recycles the ingredients and tries again when conditions are better.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Have you ever heard of Atlantis?”

Chen’s face went the color of meerschaum, and everyone else gaped or gasped.

“It comes in cycles,” I said, “like labor pains building to a peak. They come as close together as four or five thousand years—the Pyramids were built that far back—and as far apart as twenty thousand.”

“Sometimes they get pretty rough,” Harry added. “There used to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

“Bojemoi,” Dmirov breathed. “The Asteroid Belt....”

“And Venus is handy in case we screw up altogether,” I agreed, “reducing atmosphere all ready to go, just seed with algae and wait. God, they must be patient.”

Another extensive stunned silence. They believed now, all of them, or were beginning to. Therefore they had to rearrange literally everything they had ever known, recast all of existence in the light of this new information and try to determine just who, in relation to this confusion, they themselves might be. They were advanced in years for this kind of uprooting, their beliefs and opinions deeply ingrained by time; that they were able to accept the information and think at all said clearly that every one of them possessed a strong and flexible mind. Wertheimer had chosen well; none of them cracked, rejected the truth and went catatonic as we had. Of course, they were not out in free space, thinking seriously of removing their p-suits. But then, they had pressures we lacked: they represented a planet.

“Your intention, then,” Silverman said slowly, “is to do this thing?”

Six voices chorused, “Yes.”

“At once,” I added.

“And you are sure that all you have told us is true, that the aliens have told no lies, held out nothing?” Ever so casually he had been separating himself from the other diplomats.

“We’re certain,” I said, tensing my thighs again.

“But where will you go?” DeLaTorre cried. “What will you do?”

“What all newborns do. We’ll examine our nursery. The Solar System.”

Silverman kicked off suddenly, jaunting to the empty fourth wall. “I’m very sorry,” he said mournfully. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”

There was a small Beretta in his hand.

V

There was a calculator in his other hand. At least, it looked like one. All at once I knew better, and feared it more than the gun.

“This,” he said, confirming my guess, “is a short-range transmitter. If anyone approaches me suddenly, I will use it to trigger radio-controlled explosives, which I placed during the trip here. They will cripple the ship’s computer.”

“Sheldon,” DeLaTorre cried, “are you mad? The computer oversees life support.”

“I would rather not use this,” Silverman said calmly. “But I am utterly determined that the information we have heard will be the exclusive possession of the United States of America—or of no one.”

I watched diplomats and soldiers carefully for signs of suicidal bravery, and relaxed slightly. None of them was the kind of fool who jumps a gunman; their common expression was intense disgust. Disgust at Silverman’s treachery, and disgust at themselves for not having expected it. I looked most closely at Chen Ten Li, who had expected it and had promised to kill Silverman with his hands—but he was totally relaxed, a gentle, mocking smile beginning at the corners of his lips. Interesting.

“Mr. Silverman,” Susan Pha Song said, “you have not thought this thing through.”

“Colonel,” he said ironically, “I have had the better part of a year in which to do little else.”

“Nevertheless, you have overlooked something,” she insisted.

“Pray enlighten me.”

“If we were all to rush you now,” she said evenly, “you might shoot perhaps two or three of us before you were overwhelmed. If we do not, you will certainly kill us all. Or had you planned to hold a gun on us for two years?”

“If you rush me,” Silverman promised, “I will kill the computer, and you will all die anyway.”

“So either we die and you return to Earth with your secret, or we die and you do not.” She put a hand on the wall on either side of her.

“Wrong,” Silverman said hurriedly. “I do not intend to kill you all. I don’t have to. I will leave you all in this room. My pressure suit just so happens to be in the next room—I will put it on and instruct the computer to evacuate all the compartments adjacent to this one. I will of course have disabled your own terminal here. Air pressure and the safety interlocks will prevent you from opening a door to vacuum: a foolproof prison. And so long as I detect no attempts to escape on the phone, I will continue to permit food, air and water systems to operate in here. I have the necessary program tapes to bring us back to Earth, where you will all be treated as prisoners of war under international conventions.”

“What war?”

“The one that just started and ended. Have you heard? America won.”

“Sheldon, Sheldon,” DeLaTorre insisted, “what can you hope to accomplish by this insane expedient?”

“Are you kidding?” Silverman snorted. “The biggest component of capital investment in space exploitation is life support. This moon full of fungus is a free ticket to the whole Solar System—with immortality thrown in! And the United States is going to have it, that I promise you.” He turned to Li and Dmirov and said, with utter sincerity, the most incredible sentence I have ever heard in my life: “I am not going to allow you to export your godless way of life to the stars.”

Chen actually laughed out loud, and I joined him.

“One of those Canuck socialists, eh, Armstrong?” Silverman snarled.

“That’s the thing that bugs you the most, isn’t it, Silverman?” I grinned. “A Homo caelestis in symbiosis has no wants, no needs: there’s nothing you can sell him. And he submerges himself in a group: a natural Commie. Men without self-interest scare you silly, don’t they?”

“Pseudophilosophical bullshit,” Silverman barked. “I’m taking possession of the most stupendous military intelligence of the century.”

“Oh my God,” Raoul drawled disgustedly, “Hi Yo Silverman, the John Wayne of the Spaceways. You’re actually visualizing soldiers in symbiote suits, aren’t you? The Space Infantry.”

“I like the idea,” Silverman admitted. “It seems to me that a naked man with a symbiote would evade most detection devices. No metals, low albedo—and if it’s a perfect symbiosis there’d be no waste heat. What a saboteur? No support or supplies required… by God, we could use infantry to interdict Titan.”

“Silverman,” I said gently, “you’re an imbecile. Assume for a moment that you can bludgeon GI Joe into letting what you call a fungus crawl up his nose and down his throat. Fine. You now have an extremely mobile infantry man. He has no wants or needs whatsoever, he knows that he will be immortal if he can avoid getting killed, and his empathic faculty is at a maximum. What’s going to keep him from deserting? Loyalty to a country he’ll never see again? Relatives in Hoboken, who live in a gravity field that’d kill him?”

“Laser beams if necessary,” he began.

“Remember how fast we were dancing there before the end? Go ask the computer whether we could have danced around a laser beam—even a computer-operated one. You said yourself we’d be bloody hard to track.”

“Your military secret is worthless, Silverman,” Tom said.

“Better minds than mine will work out the practical details,” he insisted. “I know a military edge when I see one. Commander Cox,” he said suddenly, “you are an American. Are you with me?”

“There are three other Americans aboard,” Cox answered obliquely. Tom, Harry, and Raoul stiffened.

“Yeah. One’s got a pregnant Canadian wife, two are perverts, and all three are under the influence of those alien creatures. Are you with me?”

Bill seemed to be thinking hard. “Yeah. You’re right. I hate to admit it, but only the United States can be trusted with this much power.”

Silverman was studying him intently. “No,” he decided, “no, Commander, I’m afraid I don’t believe you. Your oath of allegiance is to the United Nations. If you had said no, or answered ambiguously, in a few days I might have believed a yes. But you are lying.” He shook his head regretfully. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, here is how we shall proceed. No one will make a move until I say so. Then, one at a time, on command, you will all jump to that wall there with the dancers, farthest from the forward door. I will then back out this door, and—”

“Mr. Silverman,” Chen interrupted gently, “there is something everyone in this room should know first.”

“So speak.”

“The installations that you made at Conduits 364-B and 111-A, and at the central core, were removed and thrown out the airlock some twenty minutes after you completed them. You are a clumsy fool, Silverman, and an utterly predictable one. Your transmitter is useless.”

“You’re lying,” Silverman snarled, and Chen didn’t bother to answer. His mocking smile was answer enough.

Right there Silverman proved himself a chump. If he’d had the quickness to bluff, to claim other installations Chen didn’t know about, he might even then have salvaged something. I’m sure he never thought of it.

Bill and Colonel Song made their decisions at the same instant and sprang.

Silverman pressed a button on the transmitter, and the lights and air conditioning didn’t goout. Crying with rage, he stuck up his silly gun and fired.

Ian Fleming to the contrary, the small Beretta is a miserable weapon, best suited to use across a desk. But the Law of Chaos worked with Silverman: The slug he aimed at Bill neatly nicked open Colonel Song’s jugular, ricocheted off the wall behind her—the wall opposite Silverman—and smacked into Bill from behind, tumbling him and adding acceleration.

Silverman was not a complete idiot—he had expected greater recoil in free fall and braced for it. But he wasn’t expecting his own slug to bring Bill to him quicker—before he could reaim, Bill smacked into him. Still he retained his grip on the pistol, and everyone in the room jumped for cover.

But by that time I was across the room. I slapped switches, and the lights and air conditioning did go out.

It was simple, then. We had only to wait.

Silverman began to scream first, followed by Dmirov and DeLaTorre. Most humans go a little crazy in total darkness, and free fall makes it much worse. Without a local vertical, as Chen Ten Li had learned when his bedroom lights failed, you are lost. The distress is primeval and quite hard to override.

Silverman hadn’t learned enough about free fall—or else he hadn’t heard the air conditioning quit. He was the only one in the room still velcro’d to a wall, and he was too terrified to move. After a time his screams diminished, became gasps, then one last scream and silence. I waited just a moment to be sure—Song was certainly dead already, but Bill’s condition was unknown—then jaunted back to the switches and cut in lights and air again. Silverman was stuck like a fly to the wall, dying of oxygen lack in a room full of air, an invisible bubble of his own exhalations around his head. The gun drifted a half meter from his outstretched hand.

I pointed, and Harry collected it. “Secure him before he wakes up,” I said, and jaunted to Bill. Linda and Raoul were already with him, examining the wound. Across the room Susan Pha Song drifted limply, and her throat had stopped pumping blood. I had lived with that lady for over a year, and I did not know her at all; and while that had been at least half her idea, I was ashamed. As I watched, eight or ten red softballs met at the air grille and vanished with a wet sucking sound.

“How is he?”

“I don’t think it’s critical,” Linda reported. “Grazed a rib and exited. Cracked it, maybe.”

“I have medical training,” Dmirov, of all people, said. “I have never practiced in free fall—but I have treated bullet wounds before.”

Linda took him to the first aid compartment over by the duckpins and Frisbees. Bill trailed a string of red beads that drifted in a lazy arc toward the grille. Dmirov followed Linda, shaking with rage or reaction or both.

Harry and Tom had efficiently trussed Silverman with weighted jump ropes. It appeared superfluous—a man his age takes anoxia hard; he was sleeping soundly. Chen was hovering near the computer terminal, programming something, and Norrey and DeLaTorre were preparing to tow Song’s body to the dispensary, where grim forethought had placed supplies of embalming fluid.

But when they reached the door, it would not open for them. Norrey checked the indicator, which showed pressure on the other side, frowned, hit the manual override and frowned again when it failed to work.

“I am deeply sorry, Ms. Armstead,” Chen said with sincere regret. “I have instructed the computer to seal off this room. No one may leave.” From behind the terminal he produced a portable laser. “This is a recoilless weapon, and can kill you all in a single sweep. If anyone threatens me, I will use it at once.”

“Why should anyone threaten you, Li?” I asked softly.

“I have come all this way to negotiate a treaty with aliens. I have not yet done so.” He looked me right in the eye.

DeLaTorre looked startled. “Madre de Dios, the aliens—what are they doing while we fight among ourselves?”

“That is not what I mean, Ezequiel,” Chen said. “I believe that Mr. Armstcad lied when Commander Cox asked him if he was still human. We have yet to negotiate terms of mutual coexistence between his new species and our own. Both lay claim to the same territory.”

“How?” Raoul asked. “We have no interests in common.”

“We both propose to eventually populate what is known as human space.”

“But you’re welcome to any of it that’s of any conceivable human value,” Tom insisted. “Planets are no use to us, the asteroids are no use to us—all we need is cubic and sunshine. You’re not begrudging us cubic, are you? Even our scale isn’t that big.”

“If ever Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal lived in peace in the same valley, it took an extraordinary social contract to enforce it,” he insisted. “Precisely because you will need nothing that we need, you will be difficult to live with. As I speak I realize that you will be impossible to live with. Looking down godlike on our frantic scurrying, amused by our terrible urgency—how I hate you already! Your very existence makes nearly every living human a failure; and only those with a peculiar acrobat’s knack for functioning spherically—and the resources to get to Titan!—can hope to strive for success. If you are not an evolutionary dead end, then most of the human race is. No, Stardancers: I do not believe we could ever share the same volume of space with you.”

He had been programming the computer as he spoke, by touch, never taking his full attention from us.

“The world we left behind us was poised on a knife edge. It has been a truism for a long time that if we did not blow ourselves up by the year 2010, the world would be past the crisis point, and an age of plenty would follow. But at the time that we left Earth, the chances of surviving that long were slim, I think you will all agree.

“Our planet is wound to the bursting point with need,” he said sadly. “Nothing could push it more certainly over the edge than the erosion of planetary morale which your existence would precipitate—than the knowledge that there are gods, who have no more heed for Man than Man has for the billions and trillions of sperm and eggs that failed to become gametes. That salvation and eternal life are only for a few.”

Ezequiel was glowering thoughtfully, and so was Dmirov, who had just finished bandaging Bill. I began to reply, but Chen cut me off.

“Please, Charles. I recognize that you must act to preserve your species. Surely you can understand that I must protect my own?”

In that moment he was the most dangerous man I had ever known, and the most noble. With love and deep respect I inclined my head. “Li,” I said, “I concede and admire your logic. But you are in error.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But I am certain.”

“Your intentions?” I knew already; I wanted to hear him state them.

He gestured to the computer terminal. “This vessel was equipped with the finest computer made. Made in Peking. I have set up a program prepared for me before we left, by its designers. A tapeworm program. When I touch the “Execute” key, it will begin to disembowel the computer’s memory banks, requiring only fifteen minutes to complete a total core dump.”

“You would kill us all, like Silverman?” DeLaTorre demanded.

“Not like Silverman!” Chen blazed, reddening with anger. At once he recovered, and half-smiled. “More efficiently, at the very least. And for different reasons. He wished this news communicated only to his own country. I wish it communicated to no one. I propose to disable this ship’s deep-space communications lasers, empty its memory banks, and leave it derelict. Then I shall kill you all, quickly and mercifully. The bomb you call the Planet Cracker has its own guidance system; I can open the bomb-bay doors manually. I do not believe I will bring my pressure suit.” His voice was terrifying calm. “Perhaps the next Earth ship will find the aliens still here, four or five years hence. But Saturn will have eight moons and two Rings.”

Linda was shaking her head. “So wrong, Li, so wrong, you’re a Confucian Legalist looking at the Tao—”

“I’m part of a terrified womb,” Chen said firmly, “and it is my judgment that birth now would kill the mother. I have decided that the womb must reabsorb the fetus of Homo caelestis. Perhaps at the peak of the next cycle the human race will be mature enough to survive parturition—it is not now. My responsibility must be to the womb—for it is all the world I know or can know.”

It had begun at the instant that I asked him his intentions, knowing them already.

It had happened before, briefly and too late, at the moment of showdown with Silverman. It had faded again unnoticed by the humans in the room. There had been nothing visible to notice: our only action had been to darken the room. We had been afraid then—and a person had died.

But this threat was not to our freedom but to our existence as a species. For the second time in fifteen minutes, my family entered rapport.

Time spiraled down like an unwound Victrola. Six viewpoints melded into one. More than six camera angles: the 360° visual integration was merely useful. Six viewpoints combined, six lifetimes’ worth of perceptions, opinions, skills, and insights impinged upon each other and coalesced like droplets of mercury into a single entity. Since the part of us that was Linda knew Li best, we used her eyes and ears to monitor his words and his energy in realtime, while beneath and around them, we contemplated how best to bring tranquility to our cousin. At his only pause for breath, we used Linda’s words to try and divert his energies, but were unsurprised to fail. He was too blind with pain. By the time the monitor fragment of her awareness reported that his finger was tensing to reach for the “Execute” key, the whole of us was more than ready with our plan.

All six of us contributed choreography to that dance, and polished it mentally until it filled our dancers’ souls with joy. The first priority was the tapeworm program; the second was the laser. It was Tom the martial-arts expert who knew precisely where and how to strike so as to cause Chen’s muscles to spasm involuntarily. It was Raoul the visual-effects specialist who knew where Chen’s optical “blind spot” was, and knew that Norrey would be in at the critical instant. Norrey knew the position of the racked Frisbees behind her because Harry and I could see them peripherally from where we were. And it was Linda who supplied me with the only words that might have captured Chen’s attention in that moment, fixing his gaze on me and his blind spot on Norrey.

“And what of your grandchildren, Chen Ten Li?”

His tortured eyes focused on me and widened. Norrey reached behind her with both arms, and surrendered control of them. Harry, who was our best shot, used her right arm to throw the Frisbee that yanked Chen’s right hand away from the terminal in uncontrollable pain reflex. Raoul, who was left-handed, used her left arm to throw the Frisbee that ruined the laser and smashed it out of the crook of Chen’s left arm. Both missiles arrived before he knew they had been launched; even as they struck, Tom had kicked Song’s corpse between Linda and the line of fire in case of a miss, and Norrey had grabbed two more Frisbees on the same chance. And I was already halfway to Chen myself: I was intuitively sure that he knew one of the ways to suicide barehanded.

It was over in less than a second of realtime. To the eyes of DeLaTorre and Dmirov we must have seemed to… flicker and then reappear in new relative positions, like a frightened school of fish. Chen was crying out in pain and rage and shame, and I was holding him in a four-limbed hammerlock, conspicuously not hurting him. Harry was waiting for the ricocheting Frisbees, retrieving them lazily; Raoul was by the computer, wiping Chen’s program.

The dance was finished. And correctly this time: no blood had been spilled. We knew with a guiltless regret that if we had yielded to rapport more freely the first time, Song would not be dead and Bill wounded. We had been afraid, then, yielded only tentatively and too late. Now the last trace of fear was gone; our hearts were sure. We were ready to be responsible.

“Dr. Chen,” I said formally, “do I have your parole?”

He stiffened in my grip, and then relaxed totally. “Yes,” he said, his voice gone empty. I released him, and was stunned by how old he looked. His calendar age was fifty-six.

“Sir,” I said urgently, trying to hold him with my eyes, “your fears are groundless. Your pain is needless. Listen to me: youare not a use-less by-product of Homo caelestis. Youare not a failed gamete. You are one of the people who personally held our planet Earth together, with your bare hands, until it could birth the next stage. Does that rob your life of meaning, diminish your dignity? You are one of the few living statesmen who can help ease Earth through the coming transition—do you lack the self-confidence, or the courage? You helped open up space, and you have grandchildren—didn’t you mean for them to have the stars? Would you deny them now? Will you listen to what we think will happen? Can happen? Must happen?”

Chen shook his head like a twitching cat, absently massaging his right arm. “I will listen.”

“In the first place, stop tripping over analogies and metaphors. You’re not a failed gamete, or anything of the kind, unless you choose to be. The whole human race can be Homo caelestis if it wants to. Many of ’em won’t, but the choice is theirs. And yours.”

“But the vast majority of us cannot perceive spherically,” Chen shouted.

I smiled. “Doctor, when one of my failed students left for Earth he said to me, ‘I couldn’t learn to see the way you do if I tried for a hundred years.’ ”

“Exactly. I have been in free space, and I agree.”

“Suppose you had two hundred years?”

“Eh?”

“Suppose you entered symbiosis, right now. You’d have to have a tailored environment of right angles to stay sane, at first. But you’d be immortal. With absolutely nothing better to do, could you not unlearn your gravitic bias in time?”

“There’s more,” Linda said. “Children born in free space will think spherically from infancy. They won’t have to unlearn a life-time of essentially false, purely local information about how reality works. Li, in free fall you are not too old to sire more children. You can learn with them, telepathically—and inherit the stars together!”

“All mankind,” I went on, “all that wants to, can begin preparing at once, by moving to Trojan-point O’Neill Colonies and entering symbiosis. The colonization of space can begin with this generation.”

“But how is such a migration to be financed?” he cried.

“Li, Li,” Linda said, as one explaining to a child, “the human race is rich, as of now. The total resources of the System are now available to all, for free. Why haven’t L-5 colonies gotten off the ground, or the asteroid mining that would support them? Silverman said it ten minutes ago: The biggest single component of expense has always been life support, and elaborate attempts to prevent the crew from adapting to free fall by simulating gravity. If all you need is a set of right angles that will last for a few centuries, you can build cities out of aluminum foil, haul enormous quantities of symbiote from Titan to Terra.”

“Imagine a telepathic construction gang,” Harry said, “who never have to eat or rest.”

“Imagine an explosion of art and music,” Raoul said, “raining down on Earth from the heavens, drawing every heart that ever yearned for the stars.”

“Imagine an Earth,” Tom said, “filled with only those who want to be there.”

“And imagine your children-to-be,” Norrey said. “The first children in all history to be raised free of the bitter intergenerational resentments that arise from a child’s utter dependence on his parents. In space, children and parents will relate at eyelevel, in every sense. Perhaps they need not be natural enemies after all.”

“But you are not human!” Chen Ten Li cried. “Why should you give us all this time and energy? What is Man, that you should be mindful of him?”

“Li,” Linda said compassionately, “were we not born of man and woman? Does not the child remember the womb, and yearn for it all his life? Do you not honor your mother, although you may never be part of her again? We would preserve and cherish the Earth, our womb, that it may remain alive and fruitful and bear multiple births to its capacity.”

“That is our only defense,” I said quietly, “against the immense loneliness of being even Homo caelestis in empty space. Six minds isn’t enough—when we have six billion united in undisturbed thought, then, perhaps, we will learn some things. All mankind is our genetic heritage.”

“Besides,” Raoul added cheerfully, “what’s a few centuries of our time? We’re in no hurry.”

“Li,” I went on, “to be human is to stand between ape and angel. To be angel, as are my family and I, is to float between man and the gods, partaking fully of both. Without gravity or a local vertical there can be no false concept of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’: how could we act other than ethically? Immortal, needing nothing, how could we be evil?”

“As a species,” Tom picked up, “we naturally will deal only through the United Nations. Dr. Chen, believe me: we’ve studied this on something faster than computer-time. There is no way for our plans to be subverted, for the symbiote to be hijacked. All the evil men and women on Earth will not stop us, and the days of evil are numbered.”

“But,” I finished, “we need the help and cooperation of you and every man like you, on the globe or off it. Are you up to it, Chen Ten Li?”

He drifted freely, in the partial crouch of complete relaxation, his face slack with thought and his eyes rolled up into his head. At long last his pupils reappeared, and life returned to his features. He met my eyes, and a gentle slight smile tugged at his mouth.

“You remind me greatly,” he said, “of a man I once knew, named Charles Armstead.”

“Dr. Chen,” I said, feeling tension drain away, “Li my friend, I am that man. I am also something else, and you have rightly deduced that I am maintaining my six discrete conversational personas only as a courtesy to you in the same way that I adapt my bodies to your local vertical. It demonstrates clearly that telepathic communion does not involve what you would call ego loss.” Shifting persona as I spoke, so that each of us uttered a single word, I/we said:

“I’m”

“more”

“than”

“human”

“not”

“less.”

“Very well,” Li said, shaking his head. “Together we will bring the millennium to our weary planet.”

“I am with you,” DeLaTorre said simply.

“I too,” Dmirov said.

“Let’s get Bill and Col. Song’s body to sickbay,” six voices said.

And an hour later we six departed for the Starseeders’ location. We didn’t bother with the shuttlecraft, this time. Our suit thrusters held enough for a one-way trip…