PART SIX

16 The Shimizu Hotel 20 January 2065

Jay was watching the first full tech run-through of Kinergy, and wistfully praying God to strike him dead, when the alarm went off.

“FLARE WARNING—CLASS THREE—”

“Again?” someone groaned.

“—REPEAT, CLASS THREE! THIS IS A SAFETY EMERGENCY: ALL GUESTS MUST GO AS QUICKLY AND CALMLY AS POSSIBLE TO THE POOL AREA, AND REMAIN THERE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM AS LONG AS—”

“Jesus, Class Three!” Francine said. “All right, everybody: drop what you’re doing and move. Quietly! Rand, Andrew, kill the holo and sound—”

It vanished, and the theater reappeared.

“—PLEASE REPORT ALOUD WHEN YOU HAVE LEF’T FOR THE POOL; THE SHIMIZU WILL HEAR YOU AND NOT WASTE TIME SEARCHING FOR YOU—”

“Nova Dance Company, all members, leaving the theater now,” Jay barked.

Andrew, the tech director who had replaced the murdered Nika, was a spacer: he came popping out the hatch from backstage like a cork leaving a champagne bottle. Jay suddenly remembered that Colly was back there with Rand, and headed for the tech hole to see if his brother needed any help. On the way it dawned on him that his troubles were over, or at least postponed: the company—and everyone else in the Shimizu—would all still be in the pool when the curtain was supposed to go up on Kinergy. Rescheduling after the emergency would take days. The Sword of Damocles had extended its expiry date.

Rand and Colly were emerging from the tech hole as he reached it. Colly seemed frightened, but not panicked; Rand was looking grim. “Honey,” he said to her, “Uncle Jay is going to take you to the pool. Mom and I will join you there in two seconds.”

“Daddy, no—”

“Take her, Jay.”

“Rhea will be fine, bro,” Jay began, but Rand cut him off.

“I tried to phone. Not accepting calls.”

“At worst, somebody in a rad-suit will fetch her—”

“It’s only a little out of the way—take Colly.” He kicked off and fired his thrusters. Jay found himself reassuring Colly, which helped calm himself; they jaunted for the pool together.

So did most of the population. The crowd of course thickened as it neared the center of the hotel. Some had a festive, holiday spirit; some were manic; some were silent and terrified; some were being dragged, protesting bitterly, by employees in bulky anti-radiation gear. Those whose protests became loud were sedated. Every corridor seemed to have a calm, competent employee whose sole job was to keep traffic flowing, and another who said reassuring things to anyone who would listen. Colly was actually enjoying herself by the time they reached the pool area. A smiling employee gave her and Jay ear-buttons to insert; at once a calm voice was murmuring instructions in their ears. “The pool is nearly empty now. When you are told to enter, do so promptly. Look for your last initial in the large green letters on the pool wall, and jaunt to that area so we can sort you out. Look for an employee with red arm- and leg-bands. If you have any emergency—first aid, medicine, need for a toilet, a missing loved one—report it to that employee—” and so on. The whole thing was well thought-out, well rehearsed, and worked wonders in holding down the general confusion; the Shimizu had been doing this, successfully, every eleven years for the last half-century. In under a minute, all of the pool’s large doors opened at once, and they were told to enter. The ear-buttons became strident on the subject of not stopping in doorways to gawk. Jay and Colly were swept along with the flow, and found themselves inside the pool, with hundreds of chattering guests.

Jay looked around, located a green “P” on the wall a few hundred meters away, and took Colly there, breathing a sigh of relief that both Rand’s and Rhea’s last names happened to end with the same letter. “We’ll wait here for your folks, pumpkin,” he told the child. “This is gonna be lots more fun than a dumb old rad locker, huh?”

“Sure,” she agreed, counting the house. “Wow! Kids I don’t even know! There’s one that looks my age—over there, see? Uncle Jay, can I go say hi?”

“Later, honey. Let’s wait for your parents, okay? We’ve got three days, you know.”

“Oh… okay.” Suddenly she was horror-struck. “Uncle Jay—what about the show?”

He grinned. “The concert, you mean. Colly, do schoolkids back on Earth still get ‘snow days’?”

She blinked. “Oh. No—but Mommy told me about them. You mean like ‘sunspot days,’ when the school system crashes, and you don’t have to study.”

“That’s right. Well, your Dad and I, and the whole company, are about to have three ‘sunspot days’ in a row. And believe me, we can all use the rest.”

“Oh. Hey, well that’s great, then. Boy, it’s weird to be in here without any water…”

“That’s right, I hear this is your favorite place, isn’t it?” Jay said absently. His watch said there were a little less than five minutes left before the doors would seal; he was scanning all the door areas at once for Rand and Rhea. At this point the majority of the new arrivals were being dragged by no-nonsense employees; Jay tried to mentally subtract them from the view, and so he didn’t see Colly’s parents right away.

Then he did. They and Duncan were just being released by the trio of chasers who had hauled them in. They must have come peaceably, for they were all still conscious—but as Jay opened his mouth to call Colly’s attention to their arrival, he noted their respective body languages, integrated them, and closed his mouth again. Something was wrong…

He squinted. Duncan seemed to be saying something—whether to Rand or Rhea or both was unclear. Whatever it was required gestures to get across. Rand’s reply was so emphatic that even at that distance Jay could hear it, though not what was being said, amid the general din. Rhea and Duncan both answered at once and at length. This time Rand’s reply was inaudible. A few seconds’ pause… and Duncan spun around and started to jaunt away. Rand thrusted after him, overtook him, grappled with him, both their voices were heard shouting, Rhea chased them doing some shouting of her own—

For some reason nine groundhogs out of ten who attempt to fight in space make the same mistake: intuiting that a straight punch will push them away from their opponent, they instinctively go for an uppercut. But this only sends them sliding past him, toward his feet. Spacers know this, and are generally ready to meet the descending chin with an upthrust knee. Jay saw his brother begin an uppercut, and winced in anticipation. Rand massed much more than Jay—a terrible disadvantage under these conditions.

—but for some reason Duncan did not make the obvious counter. He took the punch, failed to lift his knee, and he and Rand went past each other like tectonic plates. That was all they had time for; the three chasers who’d fetched them here had already left in search of remaining stragglers, so it was a couple of the ear-button vendors who handled the job of sedating Rand and Duncan and, since she was still shouting, Rhea. In seconds, all three were at peace or a convincing imitation. The whole brief incident had gone largely unnoticed in all the general confusion.

“Do you see Mom and Dad anywhere, Uncle Jay?” Colly asked.

“No, honey,” he said gently. “But I’m sure they’re just fine. They’ve probably volunteered to help out with crowd control, since they know you’re with me.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you’re right,” she said. “Daddy’s real good at getting people to stay calm in a ’mergency.”

“Yeah.” He looked around and located an employee without arm- and leg-bands, a roving problem-solver, and waved her over. “How about this, pumpkin? How about if I stay here and wait up for them, and you go with this nice lady here, Xi—hi, Xi!—and meet some of those kids you saw? Xi, this is Colly Porter.”

“Hi, Colly.”

“Hi, Xi. Hey—get it? ‘High-gee,’ like the Space Commando’s ship.”

“That’s a good one,” Xi said patiently.

“Wow, suppose your parents really liked the Oz books, and they picked ‘Wiz’ for your last name? I have this friend named Duncan Iowa, because his parents—” They drifted away together; Colly forgot to say goodbye to Jay.

As soon as they were out of eyeshot, Jay made a beeline for the area where Rand, Rhea and Duncan had been towed and secured. A banded employee whose name Jay couldn’t recall was trying to ID them so that they could be processed. “Those two are mine,” he said. “Family.”

“Fine by me, Sasaki-sama,” she said respectfully. “Wrap ’em up and take ’em home. What about the Orientator?”

After a split-second’s hesitation, Jay said, “Process him.”

“You got it.” Duncan would regain consciousness in the presence of a proctor, receive a ringing lecture—and a large black mark would be entered on his record. It might even be a firing offense, if the cause of the fight had been what Jay suspected it was. His first instinct had been to cover for Duncan… but if it turned out that his brother had not had some good reason to take a poke at the boy, the record could always be jiggered retroactively.

“How’re you fixed for antidote?” he asked the woman.

She started to say something, then shrugged and tossed him a pair of infusers from her pouch.

He towed the sleeping Rhea and Rand slowly to the “P” section—an awkward task, especially in a crowd, but not difficult for a dancer. On the way he thought things through; when he got there he left Rhea in the care of the banded employee in charge, told him to let her sleep for now. Then he located a glowing letter whose adherents chanced to include few children and none near Colly’s age, and towed Rand there. He Velcroed his brother to a support, bared his arm, triggered the infuser, and backed off a few meters.

Rand woke as quickly and seamlessly as he had fallen asleep—and looked around wildly for his opponent and prepared another punch. In moments the world snapped back into focus for him. He groaned; his shoulders slumped and his head bowed. Then he drew in breath for what was going to be a great bellow of either anger or grief—but by then Jay was close again, and clapped a hand over his brother’s mouth.

“Easy,” he murmured. “You don’t want to get dosed twice. You might—” Some mental censor made him decide not to name the most common consequence of a double-sedation: temporary impotence. “—regret it. Calm down… and tell me what happened.” He took his hand away.

Again Rand slumped, this time all the way into free-fall crouch, a position halfway to fetal. He said nothing for long moments.

Jay already knew the general shape of what Rand was probably going to say, but it was important that Rand say it. “Well?”

His brother looked up with the expression of a man who has just lost a limb, and is trying to integrate the intellectual knowledge with his emotions. “When I got there… they were together.”

Jay thought of six or seven things to say, hundreds of words. “So?” was the one he chose.

Rand struggled to keep his voice down. “Come on, Jay, do I have to show you a graphic?” he said in strangled tones.

Jay frowned. “You caught them in the act? They ignored a Class Three alert? I don’t believe it!” Even if it really happened, he thought, there simply had to be time for them to at least throw a goddam robe on—they’re dressed now, for Christ’s sake!—and if they did, there’s no way to prove anything—this can still be fixed—

“They were fully dressed. It took me nearly two full minutes to get there. But Jesus, Jay—I’ve got a fucking nose, okay? I’ve got eyes. It happened. Something happened.”

“—and you don’t know just what. Do you?” When there was no answer he rushed on. “It could have been a passing thought, a fleeting temptation, and some very bad timing, okay? It happened to me once: I was flirting, like you do, you know… and just as I started to realize it was getting to be more than just flirting, just as I was deciding to back off, his wife came in and caught us both with boners. It didn’t mean a thing; it blew over. There’s no way to be sure this meant anything. Give her a chance to explain, when she’s over the embarrassment.”

Rand looked away. “I will.” He looked back again. “But Jay, I’ve lived with her for ten years. I’ve seen her look embarrassed. I’ve even seen her look guilty. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen her look ashamed. I already know all I want to know. And I thank you for your counsel and support, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave me the fuck alone now, so I don’t have a fight with you, okay? Wait—where’s Colly?”

“She’s covered,” Jay said. “Take it off your mind. I’ll go get her as soon as I wake Rhea up. You sure you’ll be okay here?”

“No, but moving won’t help. Go.”

“Listen to this when you’re ready,” Jay said, handing Rand his own ear-button. “It’ll tell you the procedures.” And he left his brother alone to mourn.

As Jay was returning to “P” section, he found himself humming a tune in a minor key, and suddenly recognized it as a nearly century-old Stevie Wonder song called “Blame It on the Sun.” The irony was too unsubtle for his conscious mind; he stopped humming. He knew he should be sad for his brother, he intended to be as soon as he could, but for now he was numb. Too much going on; too much still to do; an eight-year-old still his nominal responsibility—to whom this all must somehow be explained before much longer. Then, three days or more locked in a can with the problem. His head began to throb.

Rhea came out of it as quickly as Rand had—and began blushing the moment she focused on Jay’s face.

“What happened?” he asked. “No, forget that: how much did he see? How much can he prove?”

Her eyes widened as she took his meaning. “Oh, Jay—”

He turned away. “Dammit, Rhea… dammit to hell… fuck it to hell—”

“Where’s Colly?”

“Having a jolly time in the company of a very nice lady, meeting other kids,” he said bitterly. “I’d say we have at least another ten minutes before you’re going to have to explain to her why Mommy and Daddy aren’t talking to each other. And why Uncle Duncan has a bruise on his chin. But you’re a writer: I’m sure you can improvise something.”

“She doesn’t call him ‘Uncle Duncan,’ ” she said absurdly. And then: “Oh… my… God…”

“MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE,” said a loud and omnipresent voice. It repeated twice, as the hubbub dwindled, then went on, “WE ARE VERY PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE CLASS THREE FLARE ALERT WAS A FALSE ALARM—REPEAT, THE ALERT WAS A FALSE ALARM.” The hubbub became an uproar; the voice got louder to compensate. “THE EMERGENCY IS OVER. TO MINIMIZE CONFUSION, PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR STATEROOMS BY LETTER-GROUPS, BEGINNING WITH THOSE WHOSE LAST NAMES BEGIN WITH ‘A’ AND THEIR FAMILIES. PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO LEAVE UNTIL ALL THOSE IN THE PRECEDING LETTER-GROUP ARE GONE. THE SHIMIZU APOLOGIZES FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE, AND THANKS YOU ALL FOR YOUR COOPERATION DURING THE EMERGENCY—”

“Jesus Christ—” Jay began.

“Take her home for me, Jay,” Rhea blurted, and jetted away before he could object. She mingled with the crowd whose last names began with “A,” and was lost from sight. Jay stared after her, feeling his headache gather force.

Within moments, Colly appeared, trailing a frantic Xi. “Did they show up yet, Uncle Jay?”

He started to say no automatically. But then he had the thought that in the near future, a lot of people were going to be lying to this child, and he didn’t want to be one of them anymore. “I caught a glimpse of them,” he said, then skated quickly off the thin ice. “But we’ll never find them in this madhouse now. That’s okay; I’m sure we’ll meet them back at your suite”—whoops, hitting thin ice again—“eventually. Say, did you meet any interesting kids?”

“Wow, yeah—I met a boy my own age, named Waldo, and he’s a spacer, like me: he’s gonna be here forever too! I never saw him around before because he’s got something wrong with his muscles and he can’t go out and play—but who cares? I can go to his house and we can be friends forever! I invited him to my birthday party—”

Don’t count on it, pumpkin, Jay thought, but all he said was, “He sounds nice.”

A lot of people’s plans were going to be changing soon.


* * *

He had already left the pool with the rest of the S’s, and was in the corridors with Colly, before it sank in: Kinergy was going to go on at the appointed time after all…

In common with most of the choreographers who had ever lived, Jay had, two days before curtain, no idea whether he was on the verge of artistic triumph or disaster. It was no longer possible for him to evaluate the work, either objectively or subjectively. He was prepared to take the most ignorant amateur criticism to heart, or discount the most informed professional praise. The final, and only important, verdict would come two nights from now, in the form of applause or its embarrassing absence or—God forbid!—active booing. He burned to know what that verdict would be… and feared to find out. The only thing he knew for certain was that he could definitely have used another week to polish the damned thing. That was why he had welcomed the flare emergency.

And all the fucking emergency had accomplished was to cost him his tech rehearsal—and to shatter his brother’s world.

Well, perhaps there was a relatively bright side to all this—at least from Jay’s point of view. Presumably Rhea would go back dirtside now—that might even be why she had done it. That would leave Rand no real choice but to stay here in space! The only place waiting for him on Terra was Provincetown, Rhea’s town. He’d be miserable for a while, sure… but as Sam Spade had once said, that would pass. He’d heal. A season of his own original work, some media massage courtesy of Ev Martin, a few standing O’s…

Oh, shit! Would Rand be in any shape to come to the premiere?

Jay assumed his brother would not make the remaining two days of rehearsals—and that would hurt, but Andrew could probably handle things alone. Jay also knew he would miss Rand’s companionship, his services as a sounding-board, the last-minute inspirations he might have contributed—and that wasn’t fatal either.

But Kate Tokugawa would be livid if Rand did not appear at the premiere. His presence was required. All the media would be there. It was a matter of face. Hers, and the Board’s.

In his heart, Jay knew face was as low in Rand’s present scale of values as it was high in Kate’s. Oh, this was more than a tragedy: it had all the makings of a catastrophe…

“I wish that dumb old flare wasn’t a false alarm, Uncle Jay,” Colly said. “That was starting to be fun.”

Guilt tore at his heart. He thought he had problems? “Me too, honey,” he said softly, tightening his grip on her small hand. “Me too.”

What the hell am I going to do with her?

“Sergei?” he tried.

Personal AIs were back on-line. “Yes, Jay?” Diaghilev said.

“Excuse me, Colly, I have to check on something with Andrew. Sergei, hush-field, please.” The sounds of the crowd around him went away. “Phone Rand.”

“Not accepting calls, Jay.”

“God dammit, emergency override ‘P-Town’!”

Rhea answered. “What?”

“What do I do with your daughter?” Jay asked brutally.

There was a short silence. “Can… can you take her? For a while, anyway?”

“What do I tell her?”

He heard Rand say something angry in the background. “… something good, okay?” she said. “Please, brother? I’ll call you when… when we’re ready for her.”

It was the word “brother” that made up his mind. Rhea had never called him that before. She was begging. “Okay.” He was prepared to end the conversation, but could not decide how. Did he say “Good luck”? Instead he said, “I’ll wait for your call. Off.”

Something good, okay?

“Colly, you’re coming home with me. The cronkites want to interview your mom and dad about the flare—you know, celebrity on the spot stuff.”

It was weak; no one had interviewed them after the previous, genuine emergency. But Colly bought it. “Neat! Maybe we can watch it at your house—they’ll probably rush it onto the Net—”

Jay winced. “Well, maybe not right away. It’ll take time to edit, you know—”

“Phone, Jay,” Diaghilev said. “Two calls waiting: Andrew and Francine.”

Jay wished someone would solve brain-cloning. “Colly, excuse me; Sergei, give me both of them; Andrew, Francine, I can’t talk for long right now, but…” His mind raced. “… uh, today’s a wrap. We’ll do the tech rehearsal tomorrow at noon; first dress after supper; final run-through will have to be the afternoon of the performance.”

“Are you sure, Boss?” Francine asked. “We could do the tech tonight—cancel the pony show.”

“No,” Jay said. “After something like this, the cabaret show is essential. I won’t be there, but trust me: you’ll never have a better house. They’ll cheer themselves hoarse, and tip like Shriners. Everybody needs to celebrate still being alive”—well, almost everybody…—“and not being trapped in a swimming pool for three days. I’ve got to go; I’ll leave my notes from this afternoon with your AIs later and talk with you tomorrow. Off.”

“Calls waiting, Jay: Katherine Tokugawa, Evelyn Martin, Eva Hoffman… and another just coming in, Duncan Iowa.”

“Suffering Jesus! Flush Iowa and Martin, tell Eva I’ll call her back, refuse all further calls, and give me Kate. Greetings, Tokugawa-sama—some excitement, eh? I know why you’re calling, and don’t worry: we’ll be ready when the bell rings—”

By the time he had given his boss every reassurance he could counterfeit and gotten her off the phone, he was back home. Once inside, he turned Colly over to the White Rabbit; it checked, learned that Room Service was not yet back on-line, and led her off to Jay’s personal pantry, glancing irritably at its pocket watch, for the stiff peanut-butter and jelly it knew she required. Jay took a deep breath—

—let it out; took another—

—thought longingly of a drink, and retracted all the furniture in his living room, and began to dance. And kept on dancing, ricocheting around the room in great energy-wasting leaps and landings and spins and recoveries, until his body was as exhausted as his brain. He poured all his fear and confusion and guilt and anger into the dance… his irritation with his beloved brother, for picking now to be betrayed… his sneaking sympathy for the bitch who had picked now to put the horns on his brother… his heartbreak for the small child who was about to become a helpless leaf in a storm she would not understand for years…

When he finally stopped, Colly’s applause startled him. He had not been aware of her watching, hadn’t thought to censor what his body was saying. But she was not disturbed by his dance, only impressed; her applause was sincere. She was oblivious to her doom.

They ended up napping in each other’s arms.

17 Nova Dance Theatre The Shimizu Hotel 22 January 2065

Early on in the dance, Eva knew she was in good hands, and relaxed.

You couldn’t always tell, that early. Sometimes a serious dance was over before you had decided whether you liked it or not. Every piece must, along with what it actually conveys, explain to you the rules by which it is meant to be judged, and sometimes that subtext can take as long to grasp and evaluate as the work itself. For that very reason, Eva had avoided seeing any rehearsals, so she could assess the finished work fairly. But a minute or so into Kinergy, she stopped praying that her friend’s work wouldn’t bomb, and became lost in it. Jay and his brother had meshed well, for the second time: this piece, despite its origins in the turgid head of Pribhara, was even better than Spatial Delivery had been.

It was not as cerebral as that piece, nor as simple. For one thing, it was staged in the sphere rather than in proscenium, so it had to work in any direction. The stage was bare: apparently none of the standard vector-changing hardware of free-fall dance was going to be used tonight… which meant the dancers were going to work harder. The piece’s title was another clue. Spatial Delivery had been a single pun, based on a long-obsolete term—but Kinergy was a cascade of overlapping ones—synergy/kinetic energy/kinship energy/kin urge—all primal concepts of the human universe, as old as DNA and as unlikely to ever become dated. It had opened, in fact, with two chains of six dancers unwinding from a double helix in a sudden burst of illumination. The musical accompaniment that appeared as they separated was likewise timeless: the tones of its individual voices did not precisely match any classical instrument, but neither did they sound electronic. The music they made together was difficult to categorize; one could have imagined such music being played at just about any time in history. The dancers were costumed as neutrally as possible, in unitards that matched their complexions, with hoods that masked their diversity of hair styles and colors, and with oversized wings and disguised thrusters.

Nor did the ensuing choreography seem to contain any period or style “flags” in its movement vocabulary—not even those characteristic to its creator. Eva was familiar with most of Jay’s work, and might not have identified this as his if she hadn’t been told: he had managed to transcend his own limitations.

Ordinarily, for instance, he hated unisons, referred to them as “redundancies,” and tended to use them as little as possible—but once his two chains of dancers had separated into twelve individuals, they spent several minutes dancing in unison, changing only in their dynamic relation to one another, like birds altering their formation in flight.

Eva slowly realized that the piece did have an unavoidable period flag: since the dancers were weightless, the dance had to belong to the twenty-first century. Few of its sweeping movements could have been performed any earlier in history, on Terra, without the help of special effects. But as that realization came to her, Rand’s shaping began, and cut the piece adrift in time again. The audience facing her on the far side of the theater went away; the dancers were now flying in a blue Terran sky that went on forever, peppered with slow-moving clouds. The sun, its brilliance tempered to a tolerable level by an intervening cloud, was directly opposite Eva, so her subconscious decided that she was lying on her back, mere thousands of meters above Terra, about to fall, an effect so unsettling that she grabbed for her seatmate. (Glancing briefly around, she noticed that many others were doing the same—but not those who were spaceborn.) But the clouds and dancers did not recede, she did not “fall”; before long she relaxed and accepted the fact that she could float in a gravity field, that she was simply lying on a cloud. She resumed watching the dance.

How old is the concept of fairies? Of winged humans who play among the clouds? These dancers played with the clouds, buzzing them, bursting through them, batting them to and fro like fluffy beachballs. A sextet formed, grabbed each other’s ankles and made a great circle just in time for a cloud to thread it in stately slow motion. Another group at the opposite end of the theater seemed to echo the phrase, but contracted as the cloud was passing through their circle and pinched it into two clouds; the sextet broke into two trios, and each took one of the cloudlets to play with. The remaining six formed a puffball, like fish in the pool, with a cloud at their center; it slowly expanded outward through them, moving up their torsos, and became a translucent wispy sphere around them, then a globe of water, swirling with surface tension. All six came apart from each other and burst the bubble: it popped with a comical moist sound and sent droplets cascading in all directions like a cool firework blossoming. The ones coming toward Eva vanished just before arriving.

She was delighted. The simple beauty of weightlessness, which became prosaic for every Shimizu resident through daily familiarity, was made magical again by the setting. In this context, the dancers seemed somehow more than (or was it less than?) weightless; they seemed to be nearly massless as well, ethereal. They could meet at high speed without apparent impact, change vector so that it seemed to be their will rather than thrusters which caused the change, bounce from a cloud as easily as penetrate it, pivot on a passing breeze.

Fetch a Sumerian shepherd with a time machine, give him an hour or two to get used to zero gee, and show him this piece: it would communicate to him instantly. The same for a Cretan stonecutter or a medieval alchemist or, Eva imagined, a hypothetical twenty-third century energy creature. There were probably apes who would appreciate this dance. The creative audacity of trying to rekindle the ancient wonder of flying, for people in an environment where one had to fly to get to the bathroom, people who had been striving since their arrival inboard to become blasé about that very miracle, was inspired. Eva had been in space for a long time, and this was the first time in years that she had reflected on how lucky she was: that mankind’s oldest dream—to fly like a bird, and never fear hitting the ground—was for her a commonplace.

During the brief interval between movements, Eva reached up and tapped the program-button in her ear; she had deliberately not audited the program notes before the piece began, but now she wanted to know what the creators had had to say about it. She heard the recorded voice of the immortal Murray Louis, reading from one of his own books:

Performance is not mired, it floats. It exists upward, it hovers. It is immediate. It happens. It has no roots, it feeds from the air. It floats above all the tangibles that create it. From its loftiness, its aura descends and permeates all, lifting everything to its height as well as its depth. Performance is the revelation that speaks for itself.

She switched off as the credits began; the second movement had begun. During the interval the dancers had all exited—seeming to shimmer out of existence, one by one—and the clouds had thickened into banks of rolling thunderheads that blotted the sun and darkened the sky. Now the darkness was nearly complete; one could just make out individual billowings in the roiling storm. The temperature seemed to drop slightly, and the air pressure to rise.

Suddenly, with an earsplitting crash, a fractal fork of lightning arced between two prominences. It came toward Eva, ended only meters from her; for the second time she clutched her seatmate tightly. The audience gasped, then muttered and tittered nervously. Five or ten seconds later a second bolt, shorter and with a different vector, again gave a snapshot of the interior of the storm. The music began to sound like mountain horns in the far distance, great deep bass tones punching through intervening winds. Another bolt, more crooked than the last, flared and died… then another, and another. Their randomness was convincing; they came anywhere from two to twenty seconds apart, lingering in the eye for nearly a second.

Then all at once all twelve dancers were there, caught in the sudden glare of God’s flashbulb, frozen in tableau. Again the audience murmured. The next flash found them in a different tableau, and the next. Sometimes they were arrayed as two sextets, sometimes as four trios, or three quartets, or a septet and quintet, or six pairs; sometimes they were simply twelve lost individuals. No matter how close together the flashes came, the dancers were never caught in motion. Eva wondered how they managed to navigate to each new position in the dark without colliding, but refused to let herself speculate on how the trick was being done, preferring to simply enjoy it. Soon she was noting patterns in the progression of patterns itself. The whole thing began to remind her of the ancient computer game called “Life,” in which a collection of cells changes shape and structure in successive frames, “evolving” and “growing” according to simple rules. This was like a three-dimensional Life sequence run at a very slow frame rate, had the same weird but intuitively appealing beauty, constantly changing yet remaining stable over time.

Just as seeming chance brought the dancers fairly close together in a cluster, an especially bright bolt of lightning lingered longer than usual, split again and again, fractured into a hundred snake-tongues of fire that raced around the entire storm—and in their flickering light, the cluster of dancers began to move in space, turning end over end like a Catherine wheel. As the actinic sparkles faded slowly away, the dancers themselves began to glow softly, somehow emitting their own light, shining from within like fireflies. They began to move bodily too, without losing their place in formation, first in unison and then individually, and before long the tension of their solos tore the cluster apart into smaller groups.

Two of the groups, asymmetrically opposed, began to leave trails of light behind them as they moved. Short at first, mere afterimages, the trails slowly lengthened until they were winding tails, as though the invisible eraser that chased them was falling farther and farther behind—then they vanished, and three other groups began to leave trails of their own. Soon dancers were making light sculptures all over the sky, like particle tracks in a cyclotron, occasionally mirroring one another for a time and then diverging. Again Eva was reminded of something from the dawn of the Age of Silicon: a screen-saver program called Electric Fire. The effect was hypnotic—but a kind of hypnosis that made the pulse race and the breath come faster, a heightening of alertness. Forks of lightning still flared here and there among the clouds, imbuing the whole scene with a sense of energy, largeness, danger. Perhaps there were subsonics buried in the score as well. One sensed that something awful, cataclysmic, might happen if one of the dancers missed a movement, distorted the weave of the incomprehensible pattern they were shaping together. Something on the scale of Ragnarok. The speed and intensity of the dance increased, until all twelve were racing to and fro at the highest speeds they could reach without crashing into the unseen audience, threatening to lose control and do so. The very clouds seemed to back away from them. In their boiling frenzy, they came to resemble the classic historical footage of the Fireflies confronting Shara Drummond… save that they were not red. Each glowed a different color now, twelve distinct shades; together they seemed the shards of a proto-rainbow struggling to form.

As the music swelled and steadied, they succeeded: seemingly by chance, they settled one after another into the same stable orbit, a great ring whose axis kept changing, like the “orange-slice” orbit of Peace Monitor satellites around Terra, like a primitive model of an atom with twelve electrons. Their trails became one orbit in length: a coruscating rainbow chased itself around the globe.

A short blast of trumpets, and the rainbow flared, doubling in brightness. Each and every cloud dissolved into a trillion spherically expanding droplets of water, a trillion seeds, each carrying with it a tiny reflection of the rainbow. As they dispersed and vanished, the stormclouds lightened in color and mass, thinned out, became wispy, melted away save for a handful of benign white clouds. The storm was broken; the sun returned, and the achingly familiar blue of the Terran sky. (Even spaceborns, studies had long shown, resonated emotionally to that color; it seemed to be in the DNA somewhere, though none could say how.) The music moved gradually up the scale, from deep baritone horn sounds to medium frequencies that sounded eerily like human voices, yet moved in ways no human culture sang. The dancers glowed so fiercely now that they seemed to have enlarged, and their features were indistinct.

Then the rainbow-ring came apart, and they were again the playful, independent sprites they had been in the first movement—but shining, gleaming. The voices became a vast choir, hundreds of voices singing their hearts out in a language Eva had never heard before. The net effect was dysharmonic, but occasionally little resolutions came and went, as if the choir were singing a dozen songs in a dozen keys simultaneously.

The blue sky turned suddenly to gold. Groups of dancers formed, interacted and broke up with dizzying speed. A quartet would come together, agree on a movement phrase, split apart and bring the phrase to other groups, which made up new phrases to combine with them, then split apart in their turn. Choreographic ideas appeared spontaneously and spread around the stage like heat lightning or rumor. A unison formed by apparent accident among the twelve dissolved, then returned—while in the score, more and more singers reached agreement on a key and rules of harmony, until they too were working together to build something. Dance and music together established a stable base and began to climb higher.

Literally! Clouds came toward Eva, and wind into her face: she and the dancers were rising, leaving unseen Terra behind them. The illusion was utterly convincing, and quite breath-taking. The wind fell away, and they left the clouds below; the golden sky began to darken again—not the turgid dark of the storm, but the pure star-spattered blackness of space.

No, not pure. They traveled through a fine mist of some kind of dust. Red dust. It began to accumulate on the bodies of the dancers, until they were caked with it, coated by it, covered in it, each of them glowing a shade of red: ochre, umber, amber, crimson, scarlet, ruby. It was Symbiote, and they a dozen newborn Stardancers, spreading their wings now, spinning them out into lightsails, joyously learning a new way to dance together, rubbing together like blobs in a lava lamp.

Eva put all of her attention on keeping perfectly still and calm. It was difficult—but Reb had trusted her. Many decades of lucrative poker came to her aid.

Briefly the twelve boiled together at the center of the stage like swarming bees, a “quotation” of the Fireflies who had given mankind the Symbiote—then they opened out again, formed a spherical matrix… and folded gracefully together into the kukanzen posture of those who meditate in space, each facing out from the center, away from all the others. Together they bowed, to the Universe; the music resolved at last into a major chord spanning the entire audible range; dancers and music began to fade away, like Cheshire cats, until there was only silence and infinite space and the burning stars; then they too dwindled and were gone.

Five full seconds of total silence. Then, pandemonium—

One of the many reasons art in space is performed in spherical theaters is acoustics. Applause reinforces itself, just as a person standing in a hemispherical building on Earth can hear with total clarity a whisper from someone standing precisely opposite him. Any ovation in space sounds like a Terran audience going mad; it makes up for the fact that they cannot stand to deliver it. But this ovation would have shaken the walls of the Bolshoi.

Eva let herself glance at Jay and Rand, now, as the house lights came up. They were together at the opposite end of the vip section, unbuckling their belts to join the dancers for the bow. Her eyes were not what they had once been, but she had a century of experience in intrigue: one glance at Jay’s face and she was intuitively certain he didn’t know Reb’s secret. Rand was much harder to read. Ev Martin—hearing that Rand’s wife had left him yesterday, taking his daughter back to Provincetown with her—had spoken with the house physician. The shaper was stoned to his cheeks, smiling beatifically. His eyes were wounds, and he was jaunting like a tourist, but he would pass muster for the media.

Could Rand know something? Unlikely… but then, it was a visual that had shocked her, rather than choreography. Still, perhaps it was just coincidence…

The crowd was merciless in its admiration, demanding eight curtain calls before the exhausted dancers were allowed to go backstage and peel off their soaked costumes. Eva stopped clapping much sooner; her aged hands gave out. Finally the ovation was over, and her companion, Chen Ling Ho, was murmuring, “I liked it very much… despite the ending.”

Again she had recourse to her poker experience. “Wasn’t that blackout section terrific? Where they did the tableaux in the lightning flashes? How do you suppose they got around in the dark without a train wreck?”

“ ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’ ” the trillionaire replied.

“You can’t possibly be old enough to remember that joke—Carnegie Hall was torn down before you were born!”

His eyes twinkled. “I like to think of myself as a student of classical humor.”

She blinked. “ ‘Your money or your life?’ ” she asked, quoting an ancient radio joke.

Chen gave the correct response: dead silence.

She rewarded him with a smile, unbuckled herself with one hand and took his arm with the other. “Let’s head for the reception—I want to congratulate the boys before the crowd beats them stupid.”

Rand and Jay were already glazing over by the time Eva elbowed her way into the receiving line with Chen, but she caught their attention—and managed to fluster them both—when she said, “Lads, somewhere Willem Ngani is smiling tonight.”

“He’d have loved that piece,” Chen agreed, and the two thanked them, both stammering. Then Eva let herself be chivvied away by assistant cronkites—this was the worst possible time and place to probe Rand’s secret thoughts.

She and Chen returned to her suite. He accepted a drink, and they moved to the window. Terra was about a quarter full. The illuminated crescent contained China; twilight in Beijing. They shared silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “You did not respond to my criticism of the ending of Kinergy. Did you like it?”

She felt like she was juggling eggs in a gravity field. “Yes, I did. It resonated for me. What didn’t you like about it?”

“The Stardancer motif.”

“Too obvious?”

He hesitated. “Yes, that.”

“Something else?”

Again he hesitated. “You know my true feelings toward the ones in red.”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m aware that you’re not a major fan—and that you don’t want that publicly known. Given your father’s history with the Starmind, I understand that. But do they really bother you so much that a reference to them spoils a work of art for you?”

“Yes.”

“For heaven’s sake, Ling, why? Personal feelings aside, you of all people must know how much the human race owes them—”

“Precisely. How then can I not resent them?”

“Oh, that’s silly!”

There might not be another person alive privileged to say that to Chen Ling Ho; from Eva he took it. “Gratitude implies obligation. The scale of the obligation is, in this case, horrifying.”

“But there’s almost nothing they want that we have—just trace elements we’ll never miss. The bill will never come due.”

He nodded, and again said, “Precisely. That makes the obligation even more intolerable. It is, on both sides, literally unforgivable.”

She frowned. “There’s more to it than that.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re not mankind. Your personal share of the debt… well, with your resources you could probably pay cash. At most, it’s a philosophical abstraction. To spoil a dance, something has to have its roots in your gut, not your head. What really bothers you about the Starmind?”

“Their virtue,” he said.

“Come again?”

For the first time, emotion came into his voice. “They are so damned virtuous! So relentlessly admirable. My instincts tell me to despise and fear anyone who appears above reproach. Their harmlessness disarms us. Again, literally! We allowed them to abolish war for us, allowed them to strengthen the United Nations into a true world government. Perhaps war is not, after all, a truly necessary evil—there are more efficient ways of getting rich now—but we may find one day that it was necessary in ways we do not yet grasp.”

“Jesus, Ling—you want war back? Even I’m not that nostalgic.”

“I feel in my heart that in the old days, when we were a brawling, clawing, struggling world, we were more human. Now we grow fat and soft on the riches flung down to us from on high—and because our short-term wealth has temporarily overtaken population growth, we have stopped fearing population growth. One day we will reach a point where no input of new wealth can help us… and then civilization will fall, and millions, billions, will die. Conceivably all. All humans. But not the Stardancers. They may never die.” He heard emotion creeping into his voice and caught himself. “You understand, I do not discuss these matters publicly. Stardancers are much beloved. In this age, no man can hold real wealth or power save he treat with them. Humanity is drunk, today, happily drunk, and in no mood for grim warnings. But how can the Neanderthal not hate the Cro-Magnon, Eva?”

She nodded. Time to change the subject. “Well, I can’t say I share your feelings, but at least I think I understand them now. Thanks for explaining. I’ll remember not to buy you the new Drummonds holo for your birthday.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Please do, if you like. One may admire the exquisite gyrations of cancer cells in the microscope. The choreography of the Stardancers themselves I find very interesting; it’s only their existence that offends me.”

That made her smile. “It’s a shame your country gave up emperors, Ling. You’d have been one of the great ones.”

“One hates to be a merely good emperor,” he agreed, and finished his drink.

She followed suit. “Are you sleepy?”

“No.”

“Shall we go to bed?”

He bowed and took her hand. “All my life I have wondered why other men prize young women.”

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “they do not feel they deserve the best.”

He smiled, and came closer.

18 Washington, D.C. 28 January 2065

The assistant director of the United States Internal Revenue Service knew that her office was as snoop-proof as human ingenuity could make it. Nonetheless she got up from her desk and personally made sure her office door was locked. Then she told her AI to cancel all appointments for the day and hold all calls, and opened a “Most Secure” phone circuit to Brussels.

Her global counterpart, the Right Honorable Undersecretary of Revenue for the United Nations, and Assistant Chairman of the Committee on Fiscal Anomalies, answered promptly. “Hello, LaToya. This is early in the day for you to call. What is it, 8 AM in Washington?” He looked closer. “My God—are you ill?”

“I’ve been up all night, George.”

The Undersecretary sighed. “Something serious, then. All right, which hat shall I wear?”

“Both of them, I think. And hold on to both. You may have to invent a third hat: I don’t think there’s any precedent for this.”

A sigh. “Go ahead.”

“George, I’ve run the integrations through again and again. I used three methods, different machines, I even had the software triplechecked.”

“And—”

“You’ll be receiving more than you’re expecting from us this year.”

The Undersecretary lifted an eyebrow. “How much more?”

“On the order of ten percent.”

The other eyebrow rose to join the first. “You are telling me the gross national product of the United States has taken a ten percent jump. Up.

“That is part of what I’m telling you. I talked with Jacques and Rogelio last night… and they report nearly identical bulges. Jacques puts his at nine percent; Rogelio is running behind, but says Mexico will probably run eleven and a half.”

The Undersecretary was frowning. “So someone is pumping serious money into North America. Is it real, or just pixels?”

“As far as I can learn, it’s genuine money.”

“Where is it coming from?”

“It falleth as the gentle rain from heaven. Drop by drop—all over.”

A grunt. “Stonewalled, eh? Very well—where is it going? Who’s paying taxes on it? What categories?”

“Take a tranquilizer.”

The Undersecretary frowned, then did as he was bid. At once the frown smoothed over. “Go ahead.”

“One category: self-employed income.”

“Self-employed?” That was the last sector in which he would have expected such a surge in earnings. “Any breakdowns as to subcategories yet?”

The assistant director nodded. “Again, one. Self-employed artists.”

The Undersecretary stared. After a full ten seconds of silence, he said, “What kind of artists?”

“All kinds of artists. Live theater, dance, film, music, literature, sculpture, painting… what it comes down to is, in every genre and subgenre there is, from grand opera to street theater, roughly ten percent of the working professionals have had a very good year.”

“And all from the same source?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I suspect it, because it all seems to be coming in the same way: anonymous donations, rather than grants or box office. One donation per artist or arts group. Substantial ones.”

“But then it’s simple!” the Undersecretary said. “Who’s declaring the increased donations on their taxes?”

“That’s the problem. Nobody. Not in North America anyway. But why the hell would someone overseas want to take such a huge flyer in North American art?”

“Confusing,” the Undersecretary agreed.

“Confusing, hell. It worries me, George. Good news on this scale is ominous. I smell a swindle of some kind.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance these benefactors are North Americans who elected for some reason not to claim…” He trailed off.

She politely pretended she hadn’t heard him. “Will you look into it, George? Quietly?”

“I’ll get back to you,” he said, and broke the connection.

For the rest of the day work devoured her attention, but she fretted most of the night. The next morning at the office she flinched when her AI said, “The Undersecretary of Revenue.”

“Accept!” she said at once.

“He is not on the phone, ma’am. He is in your outer office.”

“Jesus.” She took a deep breath, and rose to her feet. “Admit him.”

Two bodyguards entered first, scanned the room carefully, and nodded through the door. The Undersecretary came in, and dismissed them with some unseen signal. She started to come around her desk to greet him, but he waved her off. They sat together; he came to the point without formalities. “This room is secure?”

The assistant director checked a telltale. “Yes.”

“It’s happening all over the globe. And in space. High Orbit, Luna City, everywhere. Has been for over six months now.”

“Everywhere? The same way?”

“Not everywhere. Just the places where people make art for money. But all of those.”

She looked surprised. “All? You don’t have up-to-date data from all, do you? I thought there were several nations still refusing to switch over to a December 31 tax deadline.”

“True; there are nonconforming nations. But almost all nations require self-employed artists to report quarterly. I can’t prove there are no exceptions, yet, but I’d bet money. The pattern is clear.”

She powered her chair back away from her desk until it hit the wall. “Isn’t this the damndest thing?”

“Have you anything new to report?”

It took her a few moments to respond. “Null results, mostly. I tried to do further breakdowns and correlations, to see if I could get a clue regarding motive. Which artists are getting money? Why them? How much? That sort of thing.”

“And?”

“Nothing helpful. Some of them are starving-in-a-garret types, but some are major stars or companies, and some are in between. No geographical, financial, political, religious or even aesthetic connections I can find. Competing schools of theory, some of them. The one steady correlation I’ve identified tells me nothing useful.”

“And that is—?”

“The amount. Apparently, each lucky beneficiary—from the poorest poet to the richest director, from barbershop quartet to symphony orchestra—had his or her or its annual budget approximately quadrupled. In a few cases, that comes to megabucks.”

The Undersecretary nodded grimly. “That accords with what I’ve been able to learn.”

The assistant director paled. “Good God, George—there are less than a half dozen fiscal entities on or off Terra who are in a position to disburse that kind of money—”

“I know.”

She got a grip on herself. “So you went to the Secretary.”

“I deemed it necessary, yes. This is too big for a bureaucrat like me; I needed a statesman.”

“And he said—?”

“He said that an anonymous donation is an anonymous donation, regardless of size. He said no law requires a philanthropist to take a tax deduction. He said support for the arts is not a crime. He said it is the policy of the United Nations to respect the right of privacy. He said, with emphasis, that anyone who violates privacy with respect to support for the arts will be broken back to a G-7 clerk.”

She was staring at him in growing disbelief. “He said to forget it. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“He said nothing of the sort. Forget what?”

She opened her mouth. Thirty seconds later, words came out. In the interval, she examined her life, for the first time in decades. “I forget,” she said at last.

He nodded. “Elephants never look happy.”

She powered her chair back to her desk, looked at it, drummed her fingers on it. “The story will come out,” she said finally. “Artists always talk to cronkites. Sooner or later one will listen, and realize he has actual news on his hands. The data are public information.”

“They will be when we release them,” the Undersecretary agreed carefully.

She did mental arithmetic, checking a few figures with her desk. “George, this is scary. Whoever is doing this, they’re spending themselves broke. At the present rate of outlay, any conceivable candidate donor will be bankrupt in about five years.”

George nodded. “That’s the figure I arrived at. But there are signs that the rate is increasing.”

“My God! George, you know better than I: a fluctuation of this magnitude in the global economy simply has to translate into suffering and misery, sooner or later. Doesn’t the Secretary see—?”

“I’ll tell you what I wish,” he said.

“What?”

His voice was wistful. “I wish I had kept up the guitar.”

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