Starmind

7 Logan Airport Boston, Massachusetts 5 December 2064

Rhea felt as if she were on a conveyor belt, sliding ever closer toward the butcher’s blade.

Logan Aerospaceport was used to celebrity press conferences; a soundproof room had been found for Rand, Rhea, Colly and the cronkites and riveras representing the planetary, national and local-birthplace media pools. Cambots swarmed like blackflies, recording the scene from at least eight directions. Once in a long while, one of them would decide the ambient light was insufficient, and turn into a white firefly for a moment or two.

Tough new laws had finally succeeded in taming the media: all four cronkites, and even the riveras, were scrupulously polite. Nonetheless they managed to annoy Rhea—by putting seventy percent of their questions to Rand. In the half-dozen previous press conferences they’d had together, the percentages had usually been reversed. It embarrassed her to be annoyed by that, but she couldn’t help it. At least she was able to keep him from noticing… though she wasn’t so sure about the cambots.

Colly lapped it up. And put on a performance that would have made a child holostar blush. That annoyed Rhea too.

Which made her ask herself why she was so irritable. She realized what bothered her most of all was how much Rand was enjoying the attention and flattery. It scared her. This was going to be a hard thing to undo. It was feeling more and more like a done deal… and she still hadn’t given her agreement to it. Rand knew that, but he wasn’t acting like it. Oh, he told the reporters—and the world beyond them—the assignment was only temporary, just completing Pribhara’s season: the story he’d worked out with Jay and that horrible-sounding Martin person. But when he said it, she heard in his voice the quiet certainty that the permanent job was his. She wasn’t sure if the cambots were hearing that too, or if she was projecting it.

She felt disconnected, surreal, moving against a tide of invisible molasses. This is a hell of a way to spend my last hour on Earth, she decided. “Time to go, darling,” she said helpfully, as Rand finished a reply.

“Just one more,” the flaky-looking rivera from the planetary pool said. “Do you have any comment on the breaking story about outbreaks of rogue assemblers?”

Rand looked startled. “I’m sorry, I’ve been too busy packing to monitor news. Nanoassemblers, you mean?”

The rivera nodded. “There seems to be growing evidence over the last few days of random instances of… well, of anarchist nanotechnology, all around the globe. Spontaneous healings, spontaneous slum regenerations—sort of little miracles. There’s no telling how many, since the tendency is to underreport miracles. Some say there may be some sort of… well…”

“A conspiracy of rapturists?” Rhea said, thinking of an old story-idea she had never gotten around to developing.

“Rapturists?” the woman from the New England pool pounced.

“The opposite of a terrorist,” Rhea said. “But what has this got to do with us?”

The flaky one tried not to look like he knew he was stretching for a tie-in hook. “Well, you’re going to space, where nanotechnology comes from. Are you, I don’t know, at all afraid some… uh, ‘Rapturist’ might decide to put laughing gas in your p-suit tanks?”

To everyone’s surprise, it was Colly who spoke up. “There hasn’t been one of those stories in space so far,” she said. They all stared.

“It’s true,” she insisted. “Not one. I watch the news. Anyway, they haven’t hurt anybody, have they?”

No one replied.

“Maybe not yet,” Rand said. “But anarchy can get pretty scary even when it means well, honey. Maybe especially when it means well.” He turned to the rivera. “But no, we’re not worried at all. Everybody knows you’re safer in space than you are on Earth: look at the stats. We really have to go now. Thank you all—”

On the flight up, Rhea tuned her seatback screen to a news channel, in time to hear herself ask, “… a conspiracy of rapturists?” and then, in response to the rivera’s prompting, define the term. A few moments later, Colly and Rand’s exchange was quoted too.

The piece in which the soundbite was featured might as well have been titled, “Nanotechnology—Threat or Menace?” It was about three times as long as the item she managed to find later on an arts channel, about Rand’s return to the Shimizu.

She wanted the flight to be miserable. It was idyllic. No dropsickness in her family—none on the whole plane. No emergencies; minimal, gentle maneuvering; a perfect hop. Superb, pleasant service from human and robot alike. Even the food was excellent: real, microwave cooking rather than flashpak. The Shimizu did not permit clients to arrive unhappy, whether they wanted to or not. The hardest part of the flight was keeping Colly’s seat belt buckled once the gravity went away.

The approach was spectacular. The Shimizu looked like God’s Christmas ornament, a vast gleaming globe. Its exterior was fractalized for maximum radiating surface, so it sparkled in the sunlight like a vast ball of crinkled aluminum foil. It was girdled by an equator of huge cooling and power-collecting vanes, brilliant silver on one side and space black on the other, that slowly rotated independently as the relative position of the sun changed. A thousand points of light—peoples’ windows!—added to the illumination, randomly distributed, going on or off as tenants entered or left their rooms.

The plane crept up on the hotel sideways, spinning slowly around its own axis to distribute the sun’s heat, so there were no bad seats. Every time you decided you were there now, the damned thing got a little bigger; it seemed planet-sized by the time they actually reached the spaceport at the “north pole.”

After a textbook docking, all four doors opened the instant the seat-belt light went out, so that passengers need not stand in line to debark; customs formalities occurred electronically without any of them noticing. The dock itself was beautiful and impressive, its layout and decor operating somehow on the subconscious to make you feel you were home.

Then Rand muttered, “Oh no—that asshole.”

A large spider monkey with a head like a red sea anemone sprang at them out of nowhere. At the last possible moment he braked to a stop with smelly, poorly tuned thrusters and flung his arms around Colly. She looked wildly around to Rhea, her eyes asking permission to be terrified.

“I could kiss you,” the apparition said, and did so, on the forehead. Colly decided she didn’t need permission; the man said “Eek” and let her go and clutched his groin.

“Nice shot, dear,” Rhea said, and interposed herself between them before Rand could. She was pleased to find that free-fall reflexes came back quickly to her; she still remembered how to jaunt. “Who or what are you?” she asked him.

He forgot his aching testicles. “The guy who could cheerfully strangle you, Ms. Pash-o,” he said cheerfully. “What ever possessed you to give them a bite like that, for God’s sake? You blew my whole story right off the Net with that rapturist line, lady. Who asked you to improvise? If it hadn’t been for this little genius here,” he said, pointing to Colly, “it could have been a disaster.” Forgetting that she had just kicked him, he reached out and tried to pat her head. “You just keep following your mama around, kid, and every time you see her open her mouth to a sniffer, you talk instead.”

Colly ducked until he gave up. “Rhea and Colly,” Rand said through clenched teeth, “this is Evelyn Martin, Shimizu’s publicity chief.”

“And people still come here?” Rhea asked. The man was strikingly ugly. His head looked like a large red Brillo pad with bat-ears and pop-eyes. She had not met him on her previous visit, but Rand had assured her Martin was an excrescence; she decided he had understated the case.

Martin didn’t seem to hear. “It’s okay for you to talk like that now; I’ll dub the audio later, give us all beautiful lines for the release. But I’ve got the top three cronkites in space waiting nearby to do the personal bit, so pee if you have to and we’ll—”

Jay arrived. “Rand and his family will be happy to meet with them later this evening,” he said firmly, and embraced his brother. “Sorry I’m late, bro.”

Martin continued to talk rapidly while Jay greeted Rhea and Colly in turn, but they all ignored him. “Twenty-one hundred, Ev,” Jay said as he led them from the hall. “They’ll wait. Nobody ever turned down a free dinner at the Shimizu. Least of all a cronkite.” Martin watched speechlessly as their luggage emerged from the plane and began to follow them.

Rhea had known Jay since her courtship with his half-brother over a decade ago, had chatted with him for dozens of hours on the phone since. But since Jay had made the permanent move to space, around the time she and Rand got married, she had only been in his physical presence once, briefly, during Rand’s previous residency. In one sense she knew him well already. But to know if you really like someone, you have to smell them. As they all relaxed over drinks in their suite—Rhea’s new home!—she found herself remembering how much she really liked Jay.

During a visit to the bathroom she took the occasion to summon Diaghilev, Jay’s AI, and ask if there had been any recent news of Ethan. “Ethan who, Ms. Paixao?” was the reply, which was all the answer she needed. The relationship was irreparable. A shame; Rhea had liked Ethan, at least over the phone. “Is Jay seeing anyone?”

There was an imperceptible hesitation while Diaghilev made sure she was cleared for that information. “No, ma’am. He dates occasionally, but has not dated anyone twice.” She made a mental note to keep an eye open for a nice young man for Jay, and rejoined the others.

The suite was considerably nicer than the one she’d had on her last short visit. It took her a while to note, and a little longer to believe, that the window was real. Earth was centered in the frame, the terminator just reaching what looked like a major blizzard over the northwest coast of North America. This was one of the more expensive suites in the hotel. She hunted for flaws, and cheered up a little when she noticed the furniture was all permanent. Excellent, and fully programmable, but it didn’t go away when you were done with it.

But everything else she could see was state of the art or better.

She told herself sourly that the hotel had given them this suite to soften her up—that once Rand signed on for good, they’d be moved to somewhere inboard with the rest of the peons.

It was Jay who snapped her out of her gloomy mood, by asking her about her work. She thought of the story about Mr. Hansen and his beloved nun, but did not bring it up, speaking instead of the novel she had been struggling with for nearly a year now. Jay listened well, widening his eyes at the right spots, making little murmurs of agreement, asked insightful questions with great diffidence. Several of the questions made knowledgeable reference to her earlier works. He was either as much of a fan as he claimed to be, or a gifted actor. Either was gratifying.

Colly jaunted around the room like an old-fashioned maid robot, inspecting everything and trying out acrobatic maneuvers with both her wings and her child-strength thrusters, having the time of her life. Every few minutes she found something that made her giggle and call Rhea or Rand to “Look!” or “Come see!” Rhea let her roam unchecked, knowing she would tire herself out and nap soundly soon. They’d all had to get up before dawn to make the flight, and it was now nearly 6 PM, Shimizu time. Besides, this suite was safe for kids. It was probably safe enough for a blind hemophiliac epileptic.

One of Rand’s early songs, “Blues in the Dark,” was playing in the background. It was relatively obscure, but one of her personal favorites, since it was about her and Rand’s courtship. Jay had selected it when they came in; either he had remembered some casual reference she’d made in a phone chat, or they shared similar tastes. Either way, it helped her warm to him.

She had to admit, it did feel good to be in free-fall again. She had forgotten how restful it was, how reminiscent of childhood fantasies of being able to fly, like the Little Lame Prince. The drugs had controlled the stuffy-head feeling this time, and her stomach felt fine. Rand had already inserted his personal wafer into a terminal in the suite: Maxwell Perkins, her own personal AI avatar, was again at her beck and call, moved from home into new quarters in the Shimizu’s memory cores, as was Rand’s version, Salieri—while their original copy still maintained the house back in Provincetown. (Also present, and presently in use, was the persona by which Colly addressed it: a large rabbit named Harvey.) Before long Rhea found herself thinking that this wasn’t the worst possible place in the world… and then reminded herself sharply that it wasn’t in the world. Not the same one P-Town was. She glanced out the window at the distant Earth and failed to locate New England.

Look on the bright side. Your husband might fail spectacularly. You might get a terrific divorce settlement. You might even convince your daughter to come back to Earth with you. The damned hotel could get hit by a runaway planet. Some Rapturist might put laughing gas in your air tank. The future holds infinite possibility.

If Jay was scheming to convert her, his next move was below the belt—literally. He led them all to dinner at the Hall of Lucullus. Not the Grand Dining Room, which peasants like governors and pop stars had to make do with—where Rhea had dined on her last visit—but the Lucullus, the most famous oasis in human space. Rhea had dined well in her time, but this was something out of the realm of her experience. They did not turn the cherries into beans for her dessert coffee until she had named the blend she preferred—then roasted them before her eyes… and under her nose. The coffee waiter—there was a separate, live coffee waiter—announced proudly as he was pulverizing them (pausing every few seconds so as not to overheat them prematurely) that these cherries had seen the sun rise from a tree on the island of Sulawezi that very morning. When she had tasted the result, she believed him.

The meal preceding had been so perfect that Rhea took the coffee almost in stride, which mildly shocked her. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, dead over two millennia, would have been proud of what was being done in his name. She was halfway through her bulb before she realized how many live human beings had been waiting on them hand and foot throughout dinner, with only the maitre d’, wine steward and coffee waiter ever coming to her conscious attention. Zero gee left a lot of ways to skirt the edges of peripheral vision, but still…

Jay saw her glance around and read her mind. “They’re a highly specialized breed of dancers,” he said, grinning. “A few of them take class with me. The standard joke is, if you can see one, you don’t have to tip him.”

Rhea was used to superb service from machines. From human beings it was much less common, and a bit unnerving. It made her feel a little like a plantation owner before Civil War One. She reminded herself that these serfs almost certainly made more money than she did—and didn’t have to keep thinking up new ideas.

Even Colly, who hated restaurant dining, was impressed. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich she was served (by yet another waiter! They couldn’t keep one around just for that; he must be a kind of utility infielder) precisely matched her specifications down to brand and relative proportion of ingredients, and when she challenged the kitchen by impishly requesting an obscure brand of ice cream only sold in Provincetown, they accommodated her without batting an eye.

For all of Rhea’s life, “cooking skill” had consisted of selecting the right equipment. It still tended to be the wife who told the equipment to start working, but it had been half a century or more since women’s sense of self-worth had depended to any significant degree on the results. Nonetheless, she was mildly irritated to see Rand put away twice as much food as usual.

She managed to find a more acceptable reason to be disgruntled almost at once. A glance around the sumptuous room reminded her of how terrifyingly easy it was to get fat in free-fall. A fat person floating overhead will never again be able to impress you face to face. She had heard that plumpness was fashionable in space—at least among those raised in gravity—but she didn’t care if it was.

For his pièce de résistance, Jay let Rand pick up the check… making the point that he could now afford to. Colly’s eyes grew round at that, and Rand swelled visibly as he thumbprinted the pad.

What can I do? What can I possibly do?

The second press conference was a little more fun than the first, because at least half the time was devoted to asking her to expand on her comments about Rapturism, which by now had acquired an audible capital letter. The fun part was ignoring Martin’s frantic attempts to change the subject or put words in her mouth. Book interviews were wonderful training for that sort of thing. And Rand didn’t seem to mind sharing the camera—perhaps because this time the implied larger audience was spacers, people he didn’t identify with yet. Or perhaps, she had to concede, he was just being in love with his wife.

An hour later, on that assumption, she gave him the fuck of his life in the ingeniously designed bedchamber of their lavish new suite, using tricks only possible in free-fall, and drifted (literally) off to sleep curled around his back, furious at him.

The next day she and Colly were peeled away from Rand, and sent on a tour of the hotel with a slender, frail-looking, yet strikingly handsome young Orientator, while the two brothers holed up in Jay’s studio to try and salvage what Pribhara had started.

Colly gaped at him when he stated his name. “Duncan Iowa?”

Rhea started to chide her, but Duncan only grinned broadly. “My mother was a Frank Herbert fan.” Seeing that she didn’t get it, he went on, “He wrote a book called DUNE with a character named Duncan Idaho. So she always wanted a son named Duncan… and then she married my dad, Walter Iowa, and just couldn’t resist.”

Rhea noticed that he did not go one step too far, and explain to an eight-year-old Terran that Idaho and Iowa were both the names of states. That was careful diplomacy. He was spaceborn, and would have explained it to another spaceborn, to whom states were distant and remote abstractions. But he could think like an earthborn, well enough to preserve a child’s dignity. She decided she liked him.

So did Colly. “I have the same problem,” she said solemnly. “My own parents thought it would be fun to name me after a breed of dog.”

Duncan nodded gravely. “That’s something to bitch about.”

She burst into giggles, and they were friends.

The tour was not the standard first-time first-day grand tour Rhea had taken on her previous trip here. This seemed more like a kind of VIP, behind-the-scenes version. It was still quite impressive, but more intimate, somehow, conveying the added message that only special people got to be impressed in this particular way. “Of course, you’ll still be learning things about this place the day before you go back home,” he said at one point. “I’m still learning things about it.”

“How long have you had this job?” Rhea asked politely.

“I just got it. But I’ve been coming here since I was a kid.”

That long, huh? she thought ironically, but kept the thought to herself.

She swapped bio synopses with Duncan as the tour progressed. He was twenty, bisexual, single, and had a bachelor’s degree in molecular electronics from U.H.E.O. which he hoped to parlay into a Master’s once he had earned the tuition. If only he had been fifteen years older, massed twice as much, had a hairier torso and been muscled more like an earthborn, she would have considered trying to pair him off with Jay. His parents were both spacers who worked at Skyfac.

Colly’s favorite part of the tour was what she instantly dubbed the Blob: the Shimizu’s famous zero-gee swimming pool. Located at the very center of the hotel for reasons of orbital stability, it was essentially a large spherical tank, thirty meters across, containing 210,000 liters of crystalline water and happy people.

Of course Colly insisted on going in. You donned breathing and comm gear and four fins, and entered through an air-lock. Inside, it was preternaturally beautiful: artistically colored lights were deployed all around and blended to produce shifting effects, and the tank was stocked with multihued fish of tropical breeds—robots, of course, but no less brilliant or beautiful for that. They were absolutely impossible to catch, or even touch: Colly spent a happy time trying. Rhea enjoyed herself almost as much as her daughter. Afterward in the dressing room, Colly announced that air bubbles were prettier in free-fall—and acted more interesting too.

What Rhea thought was that swimming in P-Town was better—whether you did it on the ocean or bay side. But she kept the thought to herself.

When they rejoined Duncan, the first thing Colly said was, “Duncan, how come you don’t have muscles, like Daddy?”

“Colly!” Rhea began.

But Duncan cut her off, smiling. “I know that would be a rude question on Terra—but things are different in space. Here it’s just a good question.”

Colly looked pleased. “So what’s the good answer?” she asked.

“Because I don’t need ’em. Earthworm muscles—excuse me, Terran muscles—are worse than useless up here. You don’t need that much power, and you keep hurting yourself, by pushing off too hard.”

“Oh.” Colly looked down at her skinned knees, and rubbed a banged elbow thoughtfully. “I knew that: I was just testing you.”

“Can I ask you a question now?”

“Sure.”

“Back there in the pool—why did you like those angelfish so much?”

“They kept making, like, a flower,” she said. “You know, tails together but each head pointing out a different way, like a puffball.”

“Don’t real angelfish do that on Terra?” he asked.

She stared at him. “How could they? Some of them’d be upside down!”

He blinked, and grinned. “Isn’t that funny? I knew real fish can’t live in free-fall, because they die without a local vertical to align to; I’ve read that. But I didn’t follow it through and realize they wouldn’t ever make puffballs down there.”

“That’s the difference between book learning and experience,” Rhea said, seeing a chance to make this a lesson for Colly. “Duncan was born in space. He knows a lot, but you know things he doesn’t.”

“And vice versa,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m here. Over the next couple of days you’re both going to get real tired of hearing me repeat certain things. Free-fall safety, vacuum-drill, flare-drill, p-suit maintenance, things like that. And you’ll tell me that you know all that stuff, and you’ll be right. You know it as book learning. So let me keep bugging you, okay? Otherwise you may get in some kind of trouble, from expecting an angelfish to make a puffball.”

Colly nodded solemnly. She had been watching the way he handled himself in zero gee, and trying to copy his movements, but from then on she would ask his advice, and take it.

“For instance, both of you put in your earphones for a second.”

Rhea and Colly both complied.

“I want you to hear a sound without others hearing it. Listen—” He touched a pad at his wrist, and they heard a distinctive warbling shriek. “If you hear that, you have less than twenty minutes to get here to the pool. If you’re late, you’ll die. It means a bad solar flare is on the way—and this pool is also the Shimizu’s storm shelter.”

“How long do they last?” Colly asked.

“Anywhere from eighteen hours to three days or so.”

“We might have to swim for three days?” She didn’t seem alarmed. Rhea certainly was.

“Oh, no! They pump the water into holding tanks all around the pool, so it’ll do the most good as shielding.”

“That thing is huge,” Rhea said, “but is it really big enough to accommodate twelve-hundred-odd people for up to three days?”

“If they’re friendly,” he said with a grin. “Don’t worry: most flares you’re ever liable to see, you can deal with by just getting into the radiation locker in your suite. It takes a Class Three flare to empty the pool, and that hasn’t happened in my lifetime. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t in the next ten minutes—but they’ve got some real sharp folks modeling the sun nowadays, plus the Stardancers keep a couple of angels way in past the orbit of Venus all the time, keeping an eye on the old girl. They can send a telepathic warning back to Earth orbit instantly, a lot faster than a radio or laser message: when Mama Sol clears her throat, we get a lot better warning than you get of a quake in San Francisco. And in any emergency, trained men in radiation suits will chase down stragglers and sleepers. But—and this is what I was talking about before—you can’t ever leave safety to machines and other people. Sometimes they goof. If you ever start seeing green pollywogs—little green flashes in your vision—get into that locker, fast. Don’t wait for the central computer to tell you to… and don’t stop to pee.”

After lunch he took them to Wonderland. Both ladies found it delightful. As you approached it, the first thing you noticed was a child-sized white rabbit a little ahead of you, wearing a vest and consulting a pocketwatch. You followed him as he jaunted feetfirst “down” a long tunnel; onrushing air gave a reasonable illusion of falling in a magical sort of way.

The place into which you emerged lived up to its name.

Colly wanted to stay—forever. After an hour, Rhea was sick of rosy cheer and wanted to go be sullen with her husband. She left Colly with Duncan, made an agreement to meet them at suppertime, and followed Maxwell Perkins’s excellent directions through a maze of unfamiliar corridors to Jay’s studio. One thing about AIs: they made it hard to be a stranger in a strange land, even if you wanted to be. As long as there was a local database for your AI to invest, wherever you went, you were home.

She paused outside the door, and had Max ask his alter ego—Rand’s AI avatar Salieri—whether she could enter without disturbing her husband; with his assurances she thumbed the door open and jaunted in. The work in progress looked so odd that her eye ignored it, noting only that it seemed to involve some sort of pseudo-underwater visuals and twelve-tone music. She had been married to a shaper too long to expect a rehearsal to look or sound like much.

Rand was drifting a few meters off to her left, upside down with respect to her local vertical. His body was derelict, relaxed into the classic free-fall crouch, all his attention focused on the dozen writhing dancers who filled the cubic before him. Even upside down she could see that he was scowling so ferociously his forehead looked ribbed. He was making little growling mutters deep in his throat, shaking his head from side to side.

She knew she had never seen him happier.

Dammit.

In that first glimpse of him, utterly intent on his work, she knew deep down, below the conscious level, that she was doomed. She could either live the rest of her life here, or start reliving the glorious single years… with an eight-year-old. Her subconscious thought about it, decided her conscious mind did not require this information just now, and tucked it away in the inaccessible node where stories got worked out.

It stayed there for the next month. Every time it tried to get out, she went to work on a story instead. It was a very prolific month.

8 The Shimizu Hotel 7 January 2065

Rand became aware that a fragment of his attention was needed somewhere. His wife was present, and speaking to him. He played back mental tape and found that she had asked him if he would be free for dinner.

The question confused him. It called for speculation, and contained a word with at least six different meanings. He searched for a proper response, and selected, “Hah?”

She understood perfectly. “Thanks, darling. I’ll have Salieri ask you again later. Listen to Salieri, okay? He’ll know where we are.”

There were so many words, he decided a nod would be safest. It seemed to work: she went away, and though she was frowning slightly she did not slam anything on the way. Relieved, he relaxed and let his eyes and mind go where they needed to. Damn Pribhara anyway! Thanks to her, he had been placed in a position where his triumphal first achievement as Resident Shaper would be to wash someone else’s laundry. He had been doing so for a month, and all he had to show for it was a mountain of wet laundry.

The thing was worse than awful: it was more than half done. Pribhara might not be good, but she was fast. There was no hope of scrapping it altogether and doing something completely new; deadline wouldn’t allow it.

Ah well—the ones he should feel sorry for were Jay and the dancers of his company. They had already wasted hours and liters of sweat trying to make this dopey idea work… and were committed to performing the results in public, unarmed. All he had to—

She didn’t say, “I love you” before she left.

He was going to give that some serious thought—but just then it came to him in a clap of thunder how something might be salvaged from this fiasco. Steal from that weird dream he’d had last night: scrap the fakey underwater visuals completely… and substitute mid-air. Instead of sea-bed, substitute a city-sized carpet of clouds, backlit. Individual clouds could billow and move almost the same way the stupid seaweed did, the way the dancers needed it to for the choreography to work. From time to time, clouds could part to reveal the ground far below. Sure, it had been done before—but not lately, and not by him. God damn, that might just make the nut. But could he get away with it? What about the abominable shark in the second movement? Substitute a roc, perhaps? No, screw the details—what did it do to the overall feel? Did the dance still work with the music?

Well, hell, just about anything worked with that twelve-tone noise. Or didn’t, if you asked him. No, it felt feasible. The essential artistic wrongness of dancers moving normally while supposedly deep underwater vanished now. If he had to, he’d write all new music to match the dance—he could almost hear it now, he certainly knew the choreography well enough. “Jay! I got it!”

It took a while to establish communication; Jay was in work-mode himself. But eventually they had recognized each other and agreed on a common language, and Rand floated his concept. Jay liked it—said, in fact, that he had had a vaguely similar dream himself only the week before. He sank a few experimental harpoons into the idea before he would get excited, but when it continued to hold air he became nearly as elated as Rand.

But not quite. There is a special pleasure in solving a difficult puzzle that has baffled your big brother. Jay had always been thirteen years older, stronger, smarter and more successful. Rand did not resent him, exactly: he had always been kind, supportive and generous with his time and attention. That they had had a childhood relationship at all had been primarily Jay’s doing; he’d seemed to really enjoy having a brother to teach things to. He had doubtless influenced Rand’s career choice, and had never (Rand was sure) insulted him by using his own artistic clout to pull strings on Rand’s behalf. And they were as easy in each other’s company as brothers were supposed to be; the difference in their ages had not been relevant for decades.

And still, it was always pleasurable to pleasantly surprise the man.

Jay handed the group off to Francine, his dance captain and assistant choreographer, and took Rand to his own suite. Along the way they tossed the new concept back and forth like an intellectual medicine ball, firming it up considerably in the process.

“One thing that helps a lot,” Rand said as the door sealed behind them, “this crew is really good.”

Jay nodded enthusiastically. “Best of the two. They actually enjoy the pony shows as much as the art.” The Shimizu offered two streams of dance entertainment to its guests: the high art on which Rand and Jay were collaborating, performed in the Nova Dance Theatre, and the “pony show”—essentially cabaret dance adapted for free-fall, sophisticated T&A—performed in the Dionysian Room. “I think of the two assistant ADs, Francine is the one who’ll take over my job when I retire. The team you worked with last time is good too—but this team is the original. It’s not just more hours logged: about a year ago something clicked and they meshed.” He tossed Rand a bulb of cola, got a root beer for himself.

“That must be rare,” Rand said.

“About like the odds of any twelve people in the same occupation falling in love and making it work.”

The analogy, with its reminder of the collapse of Jay’s relationship with Ethan, made Rand’s good cheer begin to evaporate. Work had driven the crisis in his own marriage clear out of his mind—as he had hoped. Jay must have seen something in his face, because his next words were, “So how are things going with Rhea?”

“Honest to God, I don’t know what to tell you, bro. She’s adjusted to free-fall now, and she seems to like it here okay—but it’s going to take more than that. All I can do is cross my fingers and pray that she falls head over heels in love with the place before the next month is up. Because if she doesn’t, I’m screwed.”

“It happens,” Jay said sadly. “Happened to me: I’m in love with this dump. It sort of creeps up on you. Don’t—”

“You weren’t born in Provincetown.” But he knew Jay was trying to cheer him up, and did his best. “That kid you picked to show her and Colly around is a good salesman, though.”

Jay grinned. “If you’re not careful, she’ll fall head over heels in love with him. I’m kidding! As a matter of fact, I have it on good authority that he’s, well… at least bi.”

“That was my guess… just how good is your authority?”

“Don’t be silly. A twenty-year-old? I’m old enough to be his… his…”

“… best lover yet. Come on, what have you got to lose?”

“A lot. You obviously haven’t tried to keep up with a twenty-year-old lately. Anyway, I like ’em with muscles. We’re wandering. Look, what I started to say was, don’t change that diaper until you smell it. I know how much that house means to Rhea, and I know Provincetown is the most amazing place on Earth. But this is the most amazing place in space. Give her time.”

“Well… I’ve got a surprise I’ve been working on for her in my spare time; I plan to spring it on her soon. Maybe tonight. It might just—”

“Phone, Jay,” Diaghilev said. “Eva Hoffman, urgent.”

Jay’s face changed. “Oh, shit. Excuse me, bro. Sergei, give me privacy.” Tugbots brought him earphones, hushmike and a monitor screen. He tossed Rand his holo remote and took the call. Rand passed the time by not-quite-watching flatscreen music videos from the Old Millennium, with the sound off, trolling for images to swipe.

He killed the screen when he heard Jay say, “Jesus Christ.”

“Something wrong?”

His brother looked stricken. “One of my closest friends just decided not to die after all.”

Rand looked at him. “Yeah, that’d be hard to take,” he said solemnly.

Jay grinned, then frowned, then emitted a short burst of nervous laughter. “God, that sounds dumb, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “Maybe I’ve got the same problem she has. I just don’t know how to deal with good news.”

“Who are we talking about? Or should I ask?”

“Eva Hoffman.”

Rand was shocked. “She was thinking of catching a cab? I always figured her for an honored guest at the Party at the End of the Universe. I’m glad she changed her mind. I like her a lot.”

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

“What special?”

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

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

“ ‘Whips’?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’m I doing, Salieri?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long has she been working on it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Maestro?”

“Run file ‘Home.’ ”

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She is not accepting calls, sir.”

“Where is she?”

“Privacy seal, sir.”

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

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

9 The Ring Saturn

The Stardancer was unplugged from the Starmind, thinking with only her own brain. The vast System-wide flow of telepathic information from the millions of Stardancers who made up the Starmind passed through her, but she did not pay any conscious attention to it, and sent nothing back out into the matrix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But even she did not know.

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

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

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

The results were still ambiguous.

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

When I screamed.

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

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

And we know what has changed in the last twenty-four hours. So we know where the danger lies.

Lashi’s father said, But why are they any more dangerous to me today than they were yesterday?

I don’t care, she wanted to say. Can’t you get out of there? But she could not ask that, because she already knew the answer.

I don’t know, she said instead. But dammit, you be careful!

You know I will, Rain, he replied.