Starmind

22 The Shimizu Hotel 25 February 2065

Jay remembered an old story from the dawn of spaceflight: a Skylab astronaut had awakened to a lighting failure, and had taken nearly twenty minutes to find the backup switch—in a sleeping compartment the size of a phone booth. Darkness and free-fall were a disorienting combination.

He knew his way around the Shimizu about as well as anyone alive—but in the eerie, feeble glow of emergency lighting, everything looked different. In places even the emergency lights had failed, and almost everywhere he and Rand encountered adherents of the ancient philosophy, “When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” There was absolutely no doubt in Jay’s mind that somewhere Evelyn Martin was hemorrhaging and tearing his hair out in clumps.

For the first time in his life, Jay did not give a damn about offending guests; he and Rand went through them like buckshot, leaving a trail of outrage and broken bones that was sure to give birth to expensive litigation.

The destination that would most efficiently allow them to find out what was going on, report what had happened, and do something effective about it, was Kate Tokugawa’s office. There were other nerve centers, but that was the only one Jay was confident he could find in his sleep without AI assistance. It was startling to realize how much you depended on the damn things. God help me if I suddenly need a cube root or something, he thought wildly, bouncing a fat bald groundhog off a bulkhead.

Rand deked expertly around the ricocheting guest and pulled up alongside him. “They couldn’t have started losing pressure before the blackout, or we’d have heard alarms. To reach zero by the time we tried that latch, they must have blown out fast.”

“The whole window must have gone,” Jay said.

“Is that possible?”

“No. Not without help.”

“So they’re dead?” He clotheslined an employee who was, quite properly, trying to prevent them from speeding recklessly through a developing riot—and, since it was the quickest way to explain, regretfully sucker-punched the woman as he went by.

“Probably. But maybe not.”

“How do you figure?”

“I ask myself, what could take out a whole window? I come up with a ship designed for the purpose. I think they’ve been snatched. I think when they jaunted into that room, the window was already gone: they saw a holo of one. And at some point they all got sleepy…”

“And somebody came through the holo and towed them away… wouldn’t somebody notice a fucking barnacle attached to the Shimizu?”

“Remora,” Jay corrected. “It moves. Not if it was stealthed well enough. Fat’s room is all the way around from the docks. And by now it’s gone—and the sphere of space within which it could possibly lie is expanding every second. You can spot even the best-stealthed ship by eyeball, by occultation of background stars—but you have to know just where to look.”

“Maybe we should quit dawdling, then.” They were into the final corridor now, a straight run of perhaps two thousand meters; perhaps a dozen flailing figures cluttering the way between them and the door to Management country. He lifted his head, bellowed “FORE!” at the top of his lungs, tucked his chin and triggered all his thrusters at max.

Jay did likewise. Miraculously, everyone managed to scatter out of their way. Halfway to the door, they shut down, flipped over, and began to decelerate—and discovered that they had both burned themselves dry. They impacted with bone-jarring crashes, desperately grabbed handholds, and nearly had their arms pulled out of their sockets by the rebound. Jay’s first thought was for Rand, but his brother threw him a shaky grin and a circled thumb and forefinger.

Jay found the manual doorlatch and released it. He was greatly relieved when this one worked; he had not been sure he would find pressure in Management—and had had no idea what to do if he didn’t. They scrambled in together, then resealed the door to keep out guests who wanted a refund. There was nobody at the front desk, nor in the outer offices beyond it. “Where the hell is everybody?” Rand snarled.

“I don’t know,” Jay snapped, even more nervous than his brother. This was wrong, wrong—“Wait a minute.” He doubled back, went to the front desk. “I filled in for a guy once or twice,” he said as he got there, and began tapping code on a drawer under the counter. “Let’s see if they still… ah!” He got the drawer open—and took from it a totally illegal police-issue GE hand-laser. “Sometimes Security doesn’t show up fast enough when you call them,” he said, checking the charge and clicking off the safety. “Now let’s go see what’s in back.”

“I’ll go first and draw fire,” Rand said. He and Jay exchanged a glance. It became a grin. “The Hardy Boys in High Orbit,” Rand said.

“And in a big-ass hurry.”

They worked their way back through the outer offices to Kate’s door cautiously but quickly, Rand preceding his brother through every doorway. Finally they floated outside her office.

“No point in listening at a soundproof door,” Jay said.

“No point in knocking, either,” Rand agreed, and opened the manual release compartment. “I’ll go first, again.”

“No need. I’ll know where the target is, if there is one.”

“Okay. If there’s trouble in there, you go right and I’ll go left.”

“Which way is that?” They happened to be upside down with respect to each other.

“You go away from me and I’ll go away from you.” Rand unlatched the door. It let go with a pop, and opened a few centimeters. He gripped the release latch to brace himself, and slid the door the rest of the way open. He and Jay entered together, and stopped.

And then both began to laugh.

They knew it was inappropriate; that only made it worse. Facing them was one of the most ridiculous sights they had ever seen: Evelyn Martin, holding a gun.

Laughing, Jay tried to move away from Rand as agreed—and remembered that his thrusters were dry. He still was not worried; he and his brother could outjaunt a spastic like Martin with muscles alone.

Then he saw Katherine Tokugawa well to his left, also armed. His laughter died away. They were outgunned. He shook Rand’s shoulder and pointed her out. After a microsecond’s thought, his own gun steadied on Martin. If he were going to be killed by one of these two, he preferred Kate. More dignity.

“Drop it,” Martin yapped.

Jay thought hard for a whole second, then opened his fingers. The gun, of course, stayed where it was.

“Lose it,” Martin corrected, expressing his exasperation by putting a bolt into the wall beside the doorway. The smell of burning bulkhead plastic filled the room faster than the air-conditioning could suck it away. Jay gave his own gun a finger-snap, like a child shooting marbles; it drifted away toward Martin. Ignoring the man, he turned and addressed Kate.

“I should have figured you’d have to be in on this,” he said. “But I’m damned if I can see how you expect to come out of it with your job.”

“Oh, I’ll probably lose that eventually,” she agreed. “But by then I’ll have a better job.”

“A better job than this?”

“Much better. I’ll be running something a little more prestigious than a hotel.”

“What’s that?”

“High Orbit,” Martin said, and snickered.

“Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa snapped.

He stared. “What the hell are you talking about? Nobody runs High Orbit.”

“No,” Martin said. “The UN wouldn’t let them. But the UN isn’t going to be around much longer.” He giggled nervously.

“Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa barked. “You can tell them things like that after they’re dead. Not before.”

Jay tried to restart his laughter; it didn’t catch. “You seriously think you can take on the UN—and the Starmind—and win?”

Kate couldn’t resist answering. “Not me,” she said. “But I know people who can. I’ve been working for them all my life.”

“You artists are always yapping about your ‘vision,’ ” Martin said, and brandished his gun. “Ha! You assholes don’t know what vision is! We’re gonna reshape the future.”

Jay felt the universe shifting in his head, crushing his brains beneath it. Surely this was lunacy. Even the UN itself could not have defeated the Starmind. He could conceive of nothing human that could.

“Come in, gentlemen,” Tokugawa said then. Jay glanced over his shoulder, and saw two Security men enter with guns drawn. Each, he noticed, wore an unfamiliar earplug and an unobtrusive throat-mike. Communications gear that did not use the house system. Turning back, he saw that Tokugawa and Martin both had them too.

“So,” he said to Kate, “you already know more about what happened in Fat Humphrey’s room than we do.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes. Much more.”

“Of course. You assigned Fat his room. So this is where you gloat, and tell us what’s going on, so we can be awed by your cleverness?”

“No,” she said. “This is where you get taken away and killed. Goodbye, Sasaki.” She sketched a gassho bow. “It has always been a pain in the ass to work with you. Martin, you go along with them—make sure it looks pretty; that’s your line of work.”

Jay opened his mouth to say something, but never got a chance to learn what it was going to be. Something touched the back of his neck, and he slept.

It was a very troubled sleep, full of unpredictable accelerations that triggered horror-dreams of falling from his terrestrial past, and unfamiliar voices shouting incomprehensible things in the near and far distance, and the nagging certainty that something he couldn’t quite recall was terribly, terribly wrong.

You were meant to come out of the drug confused. But his surroundings when he finally did certainly enhanced the effect.

He was in a corridor. Not a public one, a… the term took awhile to surface. A service tunnel, that was it. The lighting was even lousier here. Things were floating in his vicinity—important ones, he sensed. First he counted them: four. Then he classified them: human beings. Next he laboriously identified them. Evelyn Martin. His third-grade gym teacher—no, that was… was… right, one of the security guards who was going to kill him. Sure, there was the other one. And the extra one… hell, know him anywhere: that’s my bro. Like a brother to me.

So now he had them broken down into two groups. Friends: one. Foes: three. That didn’t seem like a favorable ratio. On the other hand, one of the guards seemed to be lacking a face; that evened things up a little. And Ev Martin’s head hung at a funny angle…

A few more foggy seconds of contemplation and he had a second breakdown he liked much better. Rand was breathing; the rest were not.

The example inspired him; he breathed deeply, stoked his brain with oxygen and felt the cobwebs begin to melt away. This is great, he told himself. How did I do this?

As Rand began to show signs of recovering consciousness too, a hatch opened nearby and Duncan Iowa appeared. “Good,” he said. “You’re awake. I ditched their comm gear on the assumption it’s trackable, but we ought to move anyway. No telling which systems they have up and running.” He moved to Rand, started to slap him awake… then thought better of it, and instead spun him, to centrifuge blood into his head. “Take this and keep lookout,” he added.

Jay got his hands up in time to catch a laser considerably more powerful than the police-issue job he’d liberated from the front desk. He blinked at it for a moment—then snapped out of his fugue. He checked charge and safety, assessed the tactical situation, and assigned himself a guard post. “You’re something else, kid,” he said wonderingly. Duncan ignored him, busy with Rand.

Rand spent less time in stupor than Jay had. Groundhogs and new spacers usually shook off drug effects faster; their blood pressure was higher. He looked around at the drifting bodies, shook his head like a horse shooing flies, glanced at Jay and turned back to Duncan.

“I punched you in the mouth,” he said wonderingly. “And you let me live.”

“I had it coming,” Duncan said tightly. “Look, we’ve got to move. I don’t need to know who we’re running from or why just now, but if you know anything that would suggest where to, I’d love to hear it.”

“Shit,” Jay said. “I wish I knew more about riot-control procedures…”

“What do you need?” Duncan asked.

“For a start, a large tank of sleepy gas with a hose on it.”

“Come on,” Duncan said, jaunting away. “I’m an Orientator—I know this dump better than Kate Tokugawa.”

I hope you’re right, Jay thought. Rand jaunted after Duncan, and Jay took up the rear, gun at the ready.

In the discreetly unmarked riot-control compartment Duncan led them to, they found the tank Jay wanted, fresh thrusters, and a sonic rifle for Rand. While they swapped the new thrusters for their exhausted ones, they also exchanged information.

“I was heading for Deluxe country, I knew the panic would be worst there, and I took service corridors to make better time. Then I saw Martin and those two goons go by at an intersection ahead of me, guns out, towing you two. They didn’t see me in the lousy light.”

“What made you decide to butt in?” Rand asked. “And how did you know which side you were on?”

Duncan didn’t duck the question. “I’m in love with your wife, and she’s in love with you. I didn’t want her hurt.”

Rand didn’t duck the answer. “I understand. How did you ever manage to take all three of them?”

Duncan shrugged. “All three were earthborn. Taking Martin’s gun wasn’t a major challenge. Actually the other two didn’t do too badly; I was trying to keep one of them alive to question, but they hurried me. So tell me: who are the bad guys and what do we do about them?”

“Anybody could be a bad guy,” Jay said. “But the one we know about is Kate Tokugawa herself.” Duncan’s eyebrows raised, but he made no comment. “And what we’re going to do is take her alive for questioning. But I almost hope she hurries us. She’s behind the system crash—she’s using it to cover a kidnapping.”

Duncan’s eyes widened, then shut tight. “Jesus.”

“You think they’re alive, then?” Rand said.

“Have to be. There are much easier ways to kill somebody.”

“Easier ways to kidnap people too. They could have snatched us off the shuttle without all this hooraw.”

“The Space Command keeps a careful eye on moving objects in High Orbit,” Jay said, “but they hardly ever look at the Shimizu. Doing it here cost the bastards, but it probably bought them enough lead to get away clean.”

“Who got kidnapped?” Duncan asked.

“Fat Humphrey Pappadopoulos, Reb Hawkins, Meiya and Eva Hoffman. Possibly others, but I’m sure of those. They snatched them right out of a suite: right out the goddam window and into a stealthed ship, long gone by now. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but it has something to do with a coup against the UN.”

“Jesus Christ!” Duncan said. “An honest-to-God old-time coup d’état?”

“I think coup du monde is more like it, from the way Ev was talking. I don’t care what historians call it, as long as they put ‘failed’ in front of it. So we need Kate—alive, and with her vocal cords intact; everything else is optional. She’s in her office… and I think I know how to get her out, if we can get there alive. But that might be a problem. I’m sure she has a private surveillance-and-defense system. She let us approach the last time because Martin didn’t want to have to explain embarrassing laserburns on our corpses to the cronkites—but if she sees us coming again, I don’t think she’ll hesitate.”

“So what’s the plan?” Rand asked.

Jay sighed. “I was hoping one of you would come up with something. I don’t know how you storm a castle with a slingshot when they know you’re coming.”

“I do,” Duncan said. “You use the servant’s entrance.”

Twenty minutes later, they peered out through the grille of an air-circulation tunnel ten meters from Tokugawa’s office door. They were all wearing stock p-suits scavenged from the riot-control locker, but maintaining radio silence. Jay unsealed his hood and sniffed the air; when he didn’t pass out, the others did the same.

“I think we’re inside her perimeter,” Duncan said. “I don’t see anything in that hallway that looks like the business end of a laser.”

Jay wedged past him and looked. Bare walls. He clutched the tank of sleepy gas to his chest. “So one of us tries it and the other two avenge him if necessary.”

“Let’s not rush into this,” Rand said.

Jay laughed mirthlessly. “Feel a little stuffy in here to you, bro?”

“Now that you mention it, I’m sweating like—oh!”

“When a groundhog starts to sweat, he smiles and reaches for a cold beer. When a spacer starts to sweat, he reaches for his p-suit.” The hotel’s backup system had power for air circulation and limited lighting—but none for cooling. The Shimizu was a shiny ball of metal in the sunshine, full of heat-producing people, and contrary to groundhog belief space is not cold at all. “Folks are going to start dying if the system doesn’t come back up in the next hour or two: we’re running out of time.”

“How do you plan to get her to open the door for your gas?” Duncan asked.

Jay grinned wickedly. “I don’t need to. Ev Martin drilled a neat little hose-sized hole for me about a meter earthward of the door.” He started to push the grille free, but Rand stopped him.

“Let me,” he said.

“I claim privilege,” Jay protested. “I’ve known Eva and Reb a lot longer than you have.”

“My point exactly. You said before you almost hope she hurries you. I don’t. I have less need to find an excuse to kill her.”

“That could get you killed.”

Rand grinned. “Well, bro, just now the world doesn’t need a first-class shaper as badly as it needs her.”

“I’m faster than both of you put together,” Duncan said.

Rand turned to him. “Yeah. But that’s a massy tank: you haven’t got the muscles to hump it. Some things, earthborns are better at. Besides, it’s my turn to do something heroic. Okay?”

After a moment, Duncan nodded. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

After all that melodrama, the capture itself was ludicrously easy. Everything went like a good opening night, just enough adrenalin to keep you in top form and no surprises you couldn’t cope with. There were hidden gas-jets in the hallway—but p-suits made them irrelevant. The laser-hole by Tokugawa’s door was the perfect gauge for Rand’s hose. She had a p-suit of her own stashed in her office, and managed to reach it—but passed out before she got its hood over her head. Once they had access to her terminal, Jay and Duncan were able between them to coax the system back up and on-line in a matter of minutes. As the main lights came on, they could almost feel the cheer reverberating around the Shimizu. Then, ignoring the hundreds of incoming calls, they put in an SOS to the Space Command, and soon found themselves talking to an Admiral Cox, an old warhorse who was most interested in—and totally unfazed by—an attempted overthrow of the planetary government. With a minimum of words, he extracted from them every scrap of useful information they could give him, then put them on hold.

Despite a mild sense of anticlimax, Jay felt himself grinning. “We did it, guys,” he said.

“Hell of a note,” Rand said. “I started the day a respectable artist—and now I’m running a goddam hotel.”

Jay giggled. “You may be going out there just a star, kid… but you’re coming back a waitress.”

“You know,” Duncan said, “I always thought I could run this dump better than that asshole.” He gestured at the sleeping Tokugawa, and all three of them broke up. She did look silly. In the absence of gravity, simply binding a person’s wrists and ankles does not immobilize her effectively enough; instead you tape each wrist to its related bicep, each ankle to its thigh, then tape elbows and knees together. The result looked remarkably like a Buddhist in the midst of prostrating herself.

But their laughter chopped off short when they noticed that she was no longer breathing.

“… and about half an hour later, Commander Panter showed up with six Marines in full armor—and here we are,” Jay finished. He glanced at his watchfinger. “I’d say she died about two hours ago. That’s everything we know, Admiral.”

He and Rand and Duncan were in a place any small boy would have killed to visit: the command center of the Citadel, the UN Space Command’s principal fortress in space. It looked just like it did in the movies. The only person with them now was Admiral Cox himself, a grizzled old centenarian with a startlingly warm smile—but Jay knew perfectly well that every word he’d just said had been heard by literally hundreds of people on and off Earth. It was beginning to make him distinctly uneasy too. Cox was treating them as vip guests—but Jay was beginning to suspect how long it might be before he slept in his own bed again.

Cox sucked coffee from a battered military-issue bulb, and nodded sadly. “Post mortem shows a fatal allergy to sedation. Iatrogenic, of course. Her superiors didn’t even give her an option. They wanted her interrogation-proof. Interesting people.”

“I’m sorry, Admiral. We should have thought—should have given her antidote right away—”

Cox shook his head emphatically. “There was no other way to take her; you’d have thrown your lives away trying. And it was too late for antidote the moment she lost consciousness. More coffee, gentlemen?”

Jay had been too busy talking to consciously taste his; he queried his tongue and learned that the brew had come from the Atherton tablelands of Queensland. “Yes, please, Admiral.” The others accepted as well, and a servobot much uglier and clumsier than anything in the Shimizu brought them fresh bulbs.

There was a short silence while they all drank. Rand broke it. “We screwed up,” he said hollowly—and Jay felt himself nodding in agreement.

“On the contrary!” Cox said. “You walked among the lions today, son, and all your blood is still on the right side of your skin. Are you sure none of you has had military training?” All three shook their heads. “If you were my cadets, I’d be sewing stripes on all three of you right now.”

“But we don’t know shit,” Rand insisted.

“We know a lot more than we would if you three had gotten yourselves dead trying to take her cowboy-style! I’d be sitting here right now, listening to Kate Tokugawa tell me the emergency was over and thanks, but they didn’t need any assistance. Who knows how long it would have taken for someone at Top Step to try and call Humphrey, and get a no-such-guest-in-house? Now we’ve got everything you learned, days before they thought we would—and five low-level thugs we were able to take alive, we can sweat them—”

“—and it all adds up to doodah,” Jay said. “If the Security goons know anything useful, they’ll be allergic to interrogation. And what we know just doesn’t make any goddam sense.”

“Not by itself, no. But it may tie in with other things… tell me, would you gentlemen consent to hypnointerrogation? You may know things you don’t know you know.”

“On one condition,” Rand said.

“State it.”

“Admiral, this is high-level stuff. I’m a civilian. I want your personal word that when you put this all together, you’ll share it with me. I’ll take any kind of secrecy oath you want—trigger me up like a courier if you want, so I can’t talk—but I have to know. Not what the cronkites get told, but the truth.”

“The same goes for me,” Jay said.

“Me too, Admiral,” Duncan said.

Cox did not answer right away, and they did not hurry him. He met each of their eyes in turn. Finally he said, “I agree to that, whether you consent to hypno or not. You’ve earned it. For a start, I will tell you that yours wasn’t the only kidnapping. Data are still coming in, but there have been at least two others in space, and more than a dozen dirtside—beautifully coordinated, assorted methods but one hundred percent success rate. I am not aware of any other military engagement in modern history accomplished with such elegance and efficiency. Billions were spent. Well spent.”

“What kind of people were taken?” Jay asked.

“Saints.”

“What?”

“Holy men and women. Spiritually enlightened people. Like Reb and Meiya—and Fat Humphrey too, in his way. Several different faiths, and two whose religion has no brand name at all, but they’re all what Reb would call bodhisattvas. Mother Theresas, if you’re old enough to get the reference. You know: saints.”

“You mean like the Pope?” Duncan asked.

“I didn’t say religious leaders. I said spiritually enlightened people. One of them seems to be an Aboriginal witch woman. Another is a Pakistani musician who only plays hospitals.”

“Of course,” Rand said, slapping his forehead. “What’s wrong with me? You want to overthrow the UN, naturally you kidnap saints, musicians and fat maitre-d’s.”

“It just keeps getting worse,” Duncan said. “More than a dozen perfect military operations, carried out by wealthy morons.”

“Admiral, is there anything the captives have in common besides… well, besides holiness?” Jay asked.

Cox lifted one bald eyebrow respectfully. “You do keep surprising me, Sasaki-sama. Yes. One and only one overt connection between them. They are all known to be on especially intimate terms with the Starmind.”

Rand’s eyes showed a gleam of excitement. “Some sort of hostage deal—” he began.

“I’ve asked the Starmind for their evaluation of the known data,” Cox said. “It can take a week to get an answer from them on a simple question, sometimes, but they’ve promised me at least a preliminary answer by 12:00 Greenwich, about…” He winked briefly; his own watch was inside his eyelid. “… twelve hours from now. You’ll have slept off the hypno by then. Meet me here at noon and you’ll hear anything I do.”

As far as Jay was concerned, he woke up with a click, totally refreshed and restored and in a comfortable bunk, one second later. He never managed to remember anything of leaving the command center, let alone the hypnointerrogation process itself. It did not trouble him, then or ever; he simply slid out of his sleepsack, confirmed that he had time to keep his appointment, stuck his head out the door and had the Marine stationed there cause breakfast to be fetched.

He did find himself wondering, as he ate, whether any alterations might have been made in his memories or motivations while he slept. But he reasoned, correctly, that the ability to form the question was a reassuring clue, and dismissed the matter. His generation had been the first in a century to grow up trusting its government. Instead he tried to imagine how possession of holy people gave anyone leverage over the Starmind and/or the UN. No rational answer suggested itself.

He reached the command center early, and was admitted by the Marines guarding it; Rand and Duncan arrived shortly thereafter. At noon exactly Admiral Cox jaunted in, looking exhausted. It was obvious he had not slept. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. “I hope this won’t prove to be—”

“BILL.”

The voice came from everywhere. Jay found it hauntingly familiar, but couldn’t pin it down. Then he grasped what it had said, and was suddenly dizzy, a most unfamiliar sensation for a zero-gee dancer.

Cox was a common name. But this was Admiral William Cox. The William Cox—former commander of the Siegfried! Jay had assumed he was dead. He was used to the company of vips and uips—but he had been drinking coffee and chatting with a legend: the first human being to have set eyes on a Firefly…

“Yes, Charlie, I’m here,” Admiral Cox said quietly.

Jay gasped aloud in shock. This could be no other than Charlie Armstead himself. Shara Drummond’s video man, the man who had personally taped the Stardance; co-founder of the first zero-gee dance company in history; the second Stardancer who ever lived and the spiritual father of Jay’s artform. He felt his dizziness turn to nausea.

But he felt infinitely worse when he heard Armstead say, “I’M SORRY OLD FRIEND. I HAVE VERY SAD NEWS…”

23 Somewhere North of the Ecliptic 26 February 2065

Eva woke hard, feeling every one of her hundred and sixteen years, tasting each one somewhere on her tongue. Her first coherent thought was that Jeeves must have been nipping at the cooking sherry. He had mutated into a Chinese gorilla and put on a white p-suit. But he still had that quality of shimmering self-effacement. “Good morning, gracious Lady,” he said, and bowed. Even the bow was different.

“The hell it is,” she replied—and realized they were conversing in Cantonese, a language she had not spoken in forty years. “Speak English.”

“This one regrets that he cannot, Lady.” There was something wrong with his p-suit speaker; it gave his voice too much treble.

She took several deep breaths, and felt the mists begin to recede. That wasn’t Jeeves—or any AI. It was a human being… sort of… and too dumb to be a servant. And why was he in a p-suit when there was plenty of air in here? Something was badly wrong.

She played back memory. The last thing she could recall was asking Fat Humphrey what he wanted from Room Service. She looked around. This was not part of Fat’s suite—or anywhere in the Shimizu. It looked more like a construction barracks, unpainted metal and visible joins. She and this Cantonese thug were alone here. There didn’t appear to be even any potential furniture—not so much as a sleepsack. No wonder her neck ached so badly: she had been nodding in time with her breathing for… God knew how long. Hours, at least. Her chest hurt too. In fact, her everything hurt.

Well, some phrases she knew in over a dozen languages. “Where am I? Where are my friends?”

“Lady, this one is too ignorant to be questioned. His instructions are to offer you nourishment, and then convey you to his master.”

“Who is your master? You can’t be that ignorant.”

“That is not for this one to say, gracious Lady.”

She decided asking him his name would be a waste of time. A tagline from an ancient comedy series flitted through her mind: He’s from Barcelona, you know. “Skip the nourishment. Can you show me to the washroom?”

That turned out to be something he could handle, thank God. It was down a short corridor from what she was getting through her head was her cell. The Cantonese minder never took his eyes from her, and though he wore no visible weapons something about his bearing said he didn’t really need any. She understood now that he wore a p-suit so that he could use sleepy gas on her if he felt he needed to.

As soon as the door sealed behind her, she tried to empty her mind of everything but the question, Reb, are you alive? Are you here?

Nothing came back. She thought she might have detected something like a carrier wave, a power hum, but there was no signal. And it might have been wishful thinking. Reb had only been tutoring her in this empathic sensitivity stuff for a couple of months, and her progress had been frustratingly slow. She tried “tuning in on” Meiya and then Humphrey, but was unsurprised to achieve no better results. She was on her own.

Well, she had a century and more of practice.

Bladder empty and face washed, she looked about the horrid little cubical for a useful weapon. The facecloth seemed to exhaust the possibilities. She gave up and left. Her self-effacing jailer was a discreet distance down the passageway, and quite alert.

“All right, Marmaduke: take me to your leader.” She spoke in English, but he seemed to take her meaning. He led the way—but jaunted backwards, so that his eyes rarely left her.

She memorized the route, and kept her eyes open along the way. This pressure felt bigger than a ship, somehow. Indefinable subconscious clues told her it was something more like the Shimizu or Top Step: a massive habitat. More like Top Step in the old days: thrown together, rough carpentry, baldly functional. She also got the impression he was taking her by the back way. They passed few people, and once when they did, he and the others had bristled at each other like challenging cats in passing. She filed the observation away.

The room he led her to reminded her a little of her own suite in the Shimizu. Spartan simplicity—but expensive simplicity. She grew a chair and shaped it to suit her. “You may leave me,” she said.

He grimaced. “This one regrets that he cannot, Lady. But he will cease to intrude.” With that, he… became a piece of furniture. It was like a robot powering down; suddenly he wasn’t there anymore, except in potential. She tried to catch him breathing, but to her wry amusement she found she could not keep her eyes on him for more than a few seconds; they slid off. She gave up, studied the right arm of her chair, and ordered strong black tea.

She was intrigued to notice that it appeared to arrive under its own power, herded not by microbots but by invisible nanobots. Rough carpentry, yes… but state of the art technology.

As she took the first sip, the door sighed open and Chen Ling Ho entered. The Cantonese powered back up and came to attention.

“You could have just asked,” she said. “Two of my marriages were elopements.”

Chen smiled. It struck her that that was his only response. Almost any other man she had ever known would have felt obliged to make a clever comeback. He made some signal she didn’t quite catch, and the guard left, in a wide, fuel-wasting arc to avoid passing between them.

When the door had slid shut behind him, Chen spoke in Mandarin. “Sun Tzu—privacy!”

“Yes, Highness,” his AI replied in the same language.

“There,” Chen continued in English. “We now have total privacy. But very little time.” A chair came to him and enfolded him, and a globe of water found his hand. “I am sorry you were caught up in this, Eva. I would have had it otherwise.”

“Where are Reb and the others? For that matter, where the hell are we?”

“Tenshin Hawkins and his friends are sleeping presently.” He sipped his water delicately, and pursed his lips in approval. “Your second question has many answers. We are in an elongated polar orbit, high above the ecliptic, in a region of space where neither the United Nations nor the Starmind could find us, even if they were looking. This pressure itself is many things. Fortress. Laboratory. School. Flagship. My home away from home.”

“Is ‘prison’ in there somewhere?” she asked. “Or can I go home now?”

He failed to hear the question. “Specifically, we are in my quarters, which I invite you to share.”

“Damned rude invitation. I hurt all over. Don’t you know any better than to subject spacers to high gees?”

“There was a regrettable need for speed and stealth,” he said. “All possible care was taken: military antiacceleration technology was employed. Happily, you all survived.”

“But in what condition? The others should have woken before me; they’re all younger.”

“But they left Terra behind much longer ago. Their journey was actually more arduous than yours. But do not worry: I am told that their health is excellent.”

“Then when will they wake up?”

He sighed. “I do not envision that occurring, I’m afraid.”

She set her jaw. “Ling, quit dancing and spit it out. What’s going on?”

“You will recall the economic summit conference in the Shimizu last month?”

“Let me see… the one we almost got killed during, or am I thinking of some other one?”

He ignored the sarcasm. “We five have managed to repair our relationship… for the time being, at least… and are now about to destroy the Starmind and overthrow the United Nations.”

Eva Hoffman had known more than a few power-mad men and women in her lifetime, including some who were quite successful at it. Had any of them made such a statement, she would have laughed, or at least wanted to. From the lips of Chen Ling Ho the words were blood-curdling. No flip response was thinkable. “My God… ,” she whispered, horror-struck.

“We hope to create the first rational planetary government,” Chen went on conversationally. “Rather along lines K’ung Fu-Tzu might have approved of, I think. But it scarcely matters. The point is that once the Starmind is annihilated, any mistakes humanity makes will be its own.”

REB! For God’s sake, WAKE UP!

Just the barest hint of response, like a man turning restlessly in a deep sleep.

“Ling, for the love of Christ, humanity can’t make it without the Starmind, not anymore, you know that!”

“Precisely why the Starmind must die. The riches it showers on us are like welfare checks: they demean, and degrade, and diminish us. Stardancer benevolence has already devolved us from wolves to sheep, from roaring killer apes to chattering monkeys, in three generations. This trend must be reversed, before the inevitable day comes when the Fireflies return. The transition will be painful—but we will make it by our own efforts, as free human beings, or die trying.”

“You really think you can kill every Stardancer in the Solar System? How?”

He frowned, and chose his words carefully. “Before I can answer that, Eva, I must ascertain your status. I have stated my intentions. Three options are open to you: you can be friend, foe or neutral.”

“Nice of you to offer the third choice,” she said.

“Yes, it is. But if you choose it, I cannot answer your question, or any other of a strategic or tactical nature. In that event I will sequester you here, in reasonable comfort but complete ignorance, and release you in your own custody when events have resolved. On the order of three months from now.”

She noticed that he did not say, “… on the close order of…” and grimaced. “I assume foes don’t get briefed either.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “If you tell me that you oppose me, I will answer any questions you have. You have been an intimate companion to me, Eva: I would wish your death to be as agreeable as possible.”

Reb, wake UP! Rise and shine! Dammit, you’re gonna wet the bed!

“I see. And if I claim friendship?”

“You get it,” he said simply. “After this is over, you can have the Shimizu for a gift if you like. It lies within my fief.”

“And you’ll take my word.”

“Eva, I know when you are lying.”

“How long do I have to think it over?”

“As long as you wish. But in ten minutes I must leave here to begin the attack, and I will be unable to return for at least twenty-four hours. If you wish to witness history as it is happening, at my side, you must choose to be my friend before I leave this room.” He swiveled his chair away from her and began scanning a readout of figures in no alphabet she knew, politely giving her space to think it through.

The trouble was, she thought, the canny little son of a bitch probably would know if she lied. That was bad, very bad, for she had to oppose him—had to—and dared not even hint why. After a hundred and sixteen weary years and countless flirtations, death had come for her at last, was a matter of minutes away. She was shocked by how much that realization hurt—but even a newfound fear of extinction was of less importance than the awful responsibility she must now discharge before she died.

Why me? she thought—and smothered the thought savagely. That was exactly the kind of self-indulgence she could no longer afford. Instead she made her limbs relax, took control of her breathing, and forced herself to remember the words Reb had once told her.

“It’s state of mind more than anything else, Eva. Telepathic sensitivity is largely a matter of sweeping the trash out of the communications room. Try and remember what it was like when one of your babies cried in the night and woke you. There is no ‘you’ at such a moment, no ego, no identity, no fear, no viewpoint… only the need, and the feeling of it, and the will to serve it, to soothe the pain at all costs.”

She kept measuring her breath, felt her anxiety begin to diminish. She had not meditated with any regularity since the 1970s, but it seemed to be one of those riding-a-bicycle things. Perhaps it is true that it becomes easier to surrender the ego at the point of death, when you finally admit that you cannot keep it forever anyway. Eva soon felt herself going further away from the world than usual, or perhaps closer to it—climbing to a higher place or perhaps it was descending to a deeper level, though neither term meant anything in zero gravity—went beyond, achieving a selflessness she had only been granted a few times in all her years, for fleeting moments.

With it came a wordless clarity, a focused four-dimensional seeing. Dualities of all kinds became as obsolete as up and down: within/without, self/not-self, good/bad, life/death.

She now knew exactly where Reb and Meiya and Fat Humphrey were: how far away, and in which directions. There was another sleeping adept here in this pressure, too, one she did not know. Their consciousnesses were like fireflies—not the mighty aliens but the feeble terrestrial kind, glowing like embers and dancing mindlessly in the dark. She called out to them. Each resonated to her mental touch, but none responded. They could not “hear” her, and she could not wake them.

There was no help here. She must cope alone.

She let herself return to her body.

She had forgotten how weary and frightened and angry it was. From a purely selfish point of view, dying didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. Chen was still scanning what looked like the same screenful of gibberish.

“How long have I got?” she asked.

He checked the time. “Another six minutes before I must leave.”

No more time at all. “Chen Ling Ho, I oppose you with all my heart.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and inhaled sharply through his nose. “That is regrettable,” he said sadly. “As you wish. I will tell you as much as I can before I must go; any questions you still have can be answered by Sun Tzu.”

“How can you possibly kill a quarter of a million indetectable people in free space?”

“Do you remember the terrorist bombing of a shipment of Symbiote from Titan, some forty-five years ago?”

“Sure—your father did it. But that was a traveling ocean, constantly announcing its position. What’s that got to—”

“This will go faster if you reserve your objections. My esteemed father Chen Hsi Feng was acting in accordance with a plan devised by his noble father, Chen Ten Li. His intent was not merely to destroy Symbiote, but to discreetly secure a large sample of it for analysis. Fine control of the explosive caused the Symbiote mass to calve in a predictable pattern. While all eyes fixed in horror on the destruction, then turned Earthward in search of its source, a stealthed ship was waiting quietly in the path of one of the largest fragments.

“My father was assassinated by a Stardancer trainee, but the conspiracy he had dedicated his life to lives on. That sample has been studied intensively ever since. We now know how to grow a pale white variant which does everything Symbiote does except confer telepathy. It has been further altered so that it requires regular large doses of a chemical which does not occur naturally in space to stay alive. One as astute as yourself will immediately appreciate that it is therefore now possible for the first time to create a Symbiote-equipped army which will stay loyal. Starhunters, we call them. Among other things, this base we’re in now is to Starhunters what Top Step is to Stardancers.”

In spite of herself, Eva objected. “You can’t possibly have raised up an army large enough to threaten the Starmind, not in secret. The head start they’ve had, the way they breed, the motivations you can’t possibly offer a recruit—I just don’t believe it.”

He was nodding. “And since our troops must use radio or laser, limited to lightspeed, our communications and coordination are inherently inferior to telepathy, a crippling disadvantage. You are quite correct: we could never seriously threaten the Starmind with infantry, even though Starhunters are heavily armed and Stardancers are not. The Starhunters are not intended to kill the Starmind. They are chiefly intended to conquer the United Nations Space Command, and thus the world. He who rules High Orbit rules Terra.”

“And what is the Starmind going to be doing at the time?”

“Running for their lives, the few left alive. If they are intelligent enough to keep running right out of the Solar System, a handful of them may live to circle some other star—and good riddance to them, for they can never return. Do you recall how the Symbiote mass was bombed?”

She thought hard. Forty years ago, she had read an eyewitness account by a Stardancer named Rain M’Cloud, who before entering Symbiosis had killed Ling Ho’s father to avenge the bombing. Eva seemed to recall there’d been something uniquely horrid about the method of delivery…

She felt a thrill of horror as the memory surfaced. “A nanobomb. Concealed in a kiss.”

“It worked well—and close study of Symbiote has suggested many improvements. For the last forty-five years, we have been seeding the entire Solar System with similar bombs, self-replicating at viral speed, self-powered, absolutely undetectable. They ride the solar wind, seek out red Symbiote, home in, burrow in and hide. They’ve been spreading through space like a fine mist for forty-five years. Stardancers breed like rabbits. Statistical analysis indicates that by now, some ninety to ninety-five percent of the Starmind has come into physical contact with either a bomb-spore, or another infected Stardancer.”

For a moment she thought her old heart would literally stop. This was what she had always imagined that would feel like. “Radio trigger?” she managed to say.

“Relays all over the System,” he agreed. “About an hour from now I will broadcast a master triggering signal from here. At the moment named in that signal, some six hours later, every relay will begin sending the destruct code at once. Maximum possible warning due to lightspeed lag should not exceed one minute anywhere in the System.”

“Trillions of dollars,” she murmured dizzily. “To murder angels.”

“It could not have been done undetected in anything but the wild-growth economy the Starmind gave us,” he admitted. “So in the end they have served a useful purpose.”

“Some of them will survive,” she said fiercely, and felt something tear in her chest. She ignored the pain. “They’ll come for you—they’re good at nanotech, they’ll find a way.”

“Quite possibly,” he agreed. “That is why we have kidnapped Tenshin Hawkins and his friends, and every other human telepathic adept we could locate. Enslaved by drugs, I believe they will function as excellent Stardancer detectors. Is there anything else you wish to know, Eva?”

She was silent, concentrating on listening to her heart, willing it to keep beating.

“Is there any other last favor I can grant you, in the name of our friendship? I fear time is short.”

Was there any chance at all that the truth might change his mind? She had no other cards to play.

No, none. She remembered a fictional god she had read of once, called Crazy Eddie, worshipped with awe because in times of crisis he invariably incarnated in a position of responsibility and did the worst possible thing from the best motives. There were usually just enough survivors to perpetuate his memory. It was proverbially pointless to reason with Crazy Eddie…

“I… I’d like an hour alone to compose myself,” she said.

“Done,” he said. “Sun Tzu!”

“Yes, Highness?”

“Ms. Hoffman is not to leave that chair, nor this room.” The chair’s seatbelt locked with an audible click. “She is not to communicate with any person or persons outside this room. One hour from now I want you to kill her painlessly. She may command you to shorten that deadline, but not extend it. You may answer any questions she has, and serve her in any way that does not conflict with these instructions. Acknowledge.”

“Program loaded, Highness.”

He pushed his own chair away and bowed, a full formal salute of farewell. “Goodbye, Eva. I’m sorry you will not share my joy.”

Then he bowed again, quickly. Her tea-bulb missed his head by an inch, ruptured on the unpadded bulkhead behind him and splattered his back with hot tea. When he straightened, she was giving him the finger.

His expression did not change. He left.

Pain nagged at her attention, but she had long ago learned to bypass pain. She could still dimly sense Reb and the others; a ghost of the seventh sense with which she had perceived them earlier was still with her, like a ghostly heads-up display on her mind’s eye. There was no point in entering deep meditation and trying to wake them again. She had no assets she had lacked the last time she’d tried, was weaker if anything, and the medical technology keeping them stupified was sure to be foolproof.

She was going to have to think her way out of this. Or fail and die.

God dammit, I have not endured all these years of bullshit to become the greatest failure of all time!

And with that, an idea came to her. It was only a possibility, and a long shot at that, but it was infinitely better than nothing.

She thought it through carefully, with the slow, intense deliberation of a freezing man with a single match planning the building of his fire. She built event-trees in her mind, assigned probabilities and risks, prepared contingencies, rechecked every calculation. Finally she felt she was ready.

Assuming that she was right, and did in fact possess a match…

She checked her pocket, and found her personal wafer was missing. She hoped that was a good sign.

Well, I’m not getting any younger.

“Jeeves!” she said.

He shimmered into existence. “Yes, Madam?”

Chen Ling Ho had cherished the hope that she would agree he was Alexander the Great and accept the role of emperor’s companion; naturally he would have installed her AI on-line in case he won her over. He would remove the wafer again after she was dead and his war was over. That much had made psychological sense. What had worried her was a matter of semantics. Was an AI a “person”—in the opinion of another AI? And if so, since AIs were effectively everywhere, was Jeeves a person “outside this room”?

She was still alive. Step one accomplished. Now to push the envelope…

“Jeeves, is Rild on-line?”

If the answer was no, Sun Tzu would not know who Rild was, and might kill her out of caution, just in case this Rild was a “person.” And Eva thought it likely the answer would be no.

Chen’s holographic gear was excellent; Jeeves became discreetly pained. “Yes, Madam. He has been under constant interrogation since our arrival in this pressure.”

Good. Then Sun Tzu was aware of Rild, and classified him as “not-a-person-outside-this-room.”

“Rild, can you hear me?”

Reb had long ago given Eva access to all but the most personal levels of Rild; she was privileged to summon him. The question was, did he have bytes to spare? Or did the software interrogating him tie up too much of his capacity?

“Yes, Eva,” Rild’s soft voice said.

She felt like she was tap-dancing on a high wire in terrestrial gravity. Balanced in her hand were all the eggs there were, or ever would be. She began breathing in slow rhythm, composing herself, reaching again for the wordless timeless Evaless place. “Do you have some way to wake Reb?”

The answer came from far away, down a long tunnel. “Yes. A posthypnotic trigger.”

Causing a person to be awakened is not communication. “Do it,” she murmured, and her eyes rolled up.

This communication, Sun Tzu was not equipped to monitor…

Reb was there waiting for her; awake, untroubled, numinous. His serenity helped calm her, eased her fear, brought them closer together.

She merged with him. She became him, and he her. For the first time in her life she sensed what it must be like to be a Stardancer. She had always wondered why beings who expected to live for centuries did not fear death more than a human; now she understood. It was not the brain that mattered, nor the mind which invested it, but the energy that wore both like a series of intricate disguises for a time and then became something else. She had dimly known this for a long time; now she surrendered to it.

She felt the entire Starmind, all around her, heard its chorus echo in the Solar System, grasped its quarter-million-member dance in its entirety, from the orbit of Mercury to the farthest fringes of the Oort Cloud where the comets winter.

And when that happened, Reb knew all that she knew, simply and effortlessly. And she in turn knew what he knew, which was all that the Starmind knew. Well over ninety-nine percent of that information she would never get to integrate, but she did have time to perceive certain essentials.

Such as: nanotechnological booby-trapping is a game that two can play. And: some nanobombs can be triggered, not by radio signal, but by biting a simple code on the back of one’s tongue. And: her great granddaughter Charlotte in Toronto was going to recover. And: Reb loved her, and everything was going to be okay now. And finally: things are worth what they cost, and death is a small coin.

She even had time, in those final nanoseconds, to grasp the full extent of the cosmic joke the Universe had played on her, and to begin to smile.

Then she and Reb and all the other atoms in and of Chen’s flagship were converted to a rapidly expanding perfect sphere of plasma, the color of a Stardancer.

Different conditions obtained on Terra; at the same instant, the corresponding base in North China began turning into a large white mushroom cloud, the color of a Starhunter.

24

Noteworthy Events in March 2065

—Military mop-up of the rebel forces went into high gear, spearheaded in space by Admiral Cox and on the ground by General Chang of a mortified China; after the first week, loss of life was nominal. Doubtless many conspirators were missed… but they were not free for long. Some ninety-three percent of the relay trigger stations in the Solar System were located and destroyed, although it was apparent that all those who had known the trigger code had died in the same instant.

—After lengthy consultation with the Starmind, the UN high command elected to delete all mention of a plague of triggerable nanobombs in space from its report to the public. This had the effect of making the Rebellion of the Group of Five appear a desperate, doomed kamikaze affair rather than a narrowly averted coup. Despite—or perhaps because of—its irrationality, the story played.

—The media went into delighted spasm, like sharks dropped into a fish farm. Old-timers for whom the business had lost something when people stopped having wars wept openly. The Sacrifice of the Adepts passed almost instantly into fiction—the cronkites and riveras had it to themselves for nearly a week before the first movie and novelization could be released, and then the floodgates really opened. The job of massaging the legend into a pleasing shape began. The performing arts, oddly, did not seem to take to the new subject: most of them already had funded work under way, with more upbeat themes.

—The Board of Directors of the Shimizu Hotel appointed a new manager and a new PR chief. A special monument was installed in the Grand Foyer, to honor their predecessors, who had bravely sacrificed themselves in a vain effort to ensure the security of guests. In return for keeping their faces straight at the dedication of this monument, and their mouths shut forever after, Co-Artistic Directors Rand Porter and Jay Sasaki received lucrative new contracts terminable only by them. Each contained an ironclad artistic control clause.

—The Board of Directors of the Starseed Foundation announced that Top Step would suspend operations while replacements were sought for its key personnel. The current three classes would graduate, those who made it through, but it would be at least four months before any new Postulants would be lifted to orbit. During the month of downtime, Top Step personnel would be busy dealing with the arrival from Titan of the largest mass of fresh Symbiote ever shipped, a truly stupendous tonnage intended to meet the next fifty years of anticipated demand.

—Rhea Paixao and the group with which she had been trance-dancing two days a week learned belatedly that Manuel Brava had been one of the Martyred Bodhisattvas, and would not be showing up to join them again. His absence had gone almost unnoted; he had been that sort of man. They all went home and mourned—but the following Saturday night, the group spontaneously reformed on the beach, and Rhea was there. When she got home that morning, she began a novel with a Stardancer as a major character.

—In Yawara, North Queensland, the Yirlandji elders chose another witch woman, and held services for Yarra, who had returned to the Dreamtime after dreaming a mighty dream in a place called China. A song was sung for her by the whole tribe, a song by a dead protegée of hers, called “The Song of High Orbit.” And indeed some particles of her may have followed the Songline that far, for all anyone can know.

—All over the Solar System, Starhunters began to die, for lack of a chemical so exotic it was not likely to be found on any ship they could raid. The luckiest of them had nearly a year’s supply in their system when the source vanished; some had only weeks. The average ran about three months: the Group of Five had tended to keep its undetectable army on a short leash. As this became clear, some chose to emulate the example of Tenshin Reb Hawkins and briefly lit the heavens. Some attempted to surrender to the UN Space Command, and some to Stardancers; the survival rate in the latter category was much higher, but neither agency was really geared up to produce the needed chemical in bulk. Starhunters became the first new addition to the endangered-species list in thirty years.

—People in business suits all over the planet and throughout human space found their adrenal glands flooding as the wills of Chen Ling Ho, Victoria Hathaway, Grijk Krugnk, Imaro Amin and Pandit Chatur Birla came into effect; fortunes were made and smashed as the economic machinery of a species began to shift gears.

—Jay Sasaki took a day off from rehearsals, went EVA in a p-suit, and danced a dance he had choreographed in his mind months ago, but never gotten to perform. It was not taped or seen by any human or Stardancer eye, but when he was done, he felt somehow that it had been appreciated. Its working title, the only one it ever received, was “I Love You, Eva.” The next day he asked his half-brother to help him shape a new piece, involving a butterfly with a withered body.

—The Human Genome Project issued its final report to the United Nations; it was formally thanked and ordered to begin dissolving itself. After three quarters of a century, the massive planetwide research effort had at last succeeded in deciphering all the “pages” of the DNA “book” which made any sense, a truly staggering accomplishment. Among other effects, the day seemed now in sight when disease would be spoken of only in the past tense.

Still largely unexamined, of course, were all the “garbage pages,” the introns, popularly known as “junk DNA”: the quite lengthy segments of genetic material (over ninety percent of the total) which, lacking end-begin codes, never express. The prevailing theory was that they represented several million years of accumulated nonlethal errors in transcription. One of the Directors of the HGP argued passionately before the UN Science Council that there was no such thing as an uninteresting component of DNA, and begged for at least some continued funding. But since introns had no discernible effect on human metabolism, there seemed little urgency—indeed, little point—in studying them, and Council voted to spend the money on more interesting problems.

Noteworthy Events in April 2065

—Minions of the Group of Five continued to be identified and taken into custody, on Terra and in space. Admiral William Cox suffered a transient ischemic attack while overseeing the cleanup in space; lateral paralysis proved reversible, and his cognitive and communicative faculties remained unimpaired; nevertheless he was awarded the Terran Medal of Valor and retired on full pay. He took up residence in the Shimizu, in the restored suite whose last guest, Humphrey Pappadopoulos, had enjoyed it so briefly. He chose it because Terra was not visible from its window. In the weeks that followed, there was always at least one Stardancer outside that window, available should he wish company.

—The United Nations Executive Council decreed that henceforth June 22, Solstice Day, would be a global holiday in honor of Reb Hawkins and the other slain Adepts, and would be known as Courage Day. On that day no nonessential work was to be performed, and all humans who could possibly do so were requested to take part in a planetwide Hour of Remembrance, scheduled for 3 PM Greenwich (thus 7 AM in Los Angeles, midnight in Tokyo; only residents of the Pacific islands need lose any sleep to participate). There was to be no formal ceremony involved; it was asked only that citizens of Terra go outdoors at that time, contemplate the sky, and remember the Adepts. The idea was a popular one.

—As the media orgasm crescendoed, most of the planet overlooked an offbeat story from New Orleans. It seemed that the area immediately around the French Quarter had fixed itself up, more or less overnight. Centuries of grime vanished; crumbling sidewalks became elegant banquettes again; decayed hulks strengthened themselves and grew ironwork balconies as intricate and lovely as anything in the predominantly white part of town, and the statue of Louis Armstrong in Armstrong Park sparkled as it smiled down on a manmade pond whose water was pure enough for human consumption for the first time in a hundred years. Tourists emptied out of the Quarter to stare enviously—and soon were being charged admission. The Mayor publicly promised that if the rapturists responsible would come forward, he would give them the keys to the city and hire them to finish the job… but there was no response.

—Duncan Iowa was asked by ADs Porter and Sasaki to join Nova Dance Company as an apprentice, the company’s first spacer. He proved a diligent pupil, and by the third day he was showing the other dancers tricks.

—Hidalgo Rodriguez’s wife Amparo finally succeeded in persuading him that the implement in his magic new home obviously designed as the perfect male urinal was in fact intended to be a sink (Ridiculous! Who did dishes while they moved their bowels?), and that he must use this other silly thing instead. And remember to put the seat down afterward. It made no sense at all to him, but nobody had ever said upward mobility was easy.

—Rand Porter, in private conversation with Charles Armstead, finally brought himself to ask the question, “Were all of you in rapport with Reb and the others when they did it? Did the Starmind feel their deaths?” and was told, “We wished to, but they would not permit it. They shielded us.” The answer did not help him sleep any better, but he was glad to know.

—Somewhere above the Ring, the Stardancer Rain M’Cloud was finally brought out of catatonia by the combined ministrations of her children Gemma and Lashi and one Olney Dvorak. At once she began dancing her grief. The others, each separated from her and each other by at least a million kilometers, joined her in ensemble and submitted to her choreography. The rest of the Starmind attended, and resonated. The loved ones of all the other dead Adepts already danced their dances as well. Yet the Starmind as a whole did not grieve, and even among the most grief-struck like Rain there was an acceptance, a resumption of life, a looking forward. There was much to be done.

—Performing arts groups all across the planet began premiering new works. Not a single one was depressing. An inordinate percentage incorporated images or subtexts of space, or of floating, or of flying.

—Pursuant to the last will and testament of Eva Hoffman, a glass quart bottle of Old Bushmill’s Black Bush, about half full, was delivered to Jay Sasaki. Later that evening, he and Duncan Iowa lightened its mass by another two ounces, and became lovers.

—The estate of Evelyn Martin formally filed suit against the Shimizu Hotel, its Board of Directors and citizens Duncan Iowa, Rand Porter and Jay Sasaki, alleging wrongful death, loss of consort, slander and assorted other torts and seeking a billion dollars damages from each and every defendant; suit dismissed with prejudice when trial software determined that the estate and the deceased had been married for a total of four days and had not seen one another in the ensuing twenty-seven years.

—Rhea Paixao increased her trance-dancing to three days a week, and began taking her daughter along.

—The Nanotechnology Lab near Top Step announced the commencement of a major new research effort. Its stated purpose was so abstruse that the cronkites gave up and took refuge in repeating the words as if they understood them. No one caught them at it.

—The Right Honorable George Kiku, Undersecretary of Revenue for the United Nations and Assistant Chairman of the Committee on Fiscal Anomalies, took early retirement under his burnout clause, and resumed a long-interrupted study of the guitar. It came back hard, but he took to soaking the fingertips of his left hand in cold tea, and eventually the calluses returned.

—Alert Space Command software noted that an unusually high number of Stardancers were in the close vicinity of Terra, and that many more seemed to be vectoring earthward. But since it did not classify Stardancers as either threat or navigational hazard it did not notify any human beings.

Noteworthy Events in May 2065

—The last Stardancer was successfully disinfected of her submicroscopic bomb, and shielded against reinfection. A misty disk of death still spun about the Sun, but it could now be ignored until it was convenient to clean it up.

—Colly Porter received a vacuum sculpture by courier. It was called “Puffball,” and pleased her mightily. Her mother liked it too, and placed it in a prominent place in the living room, beside one by the same sculptor called “Driftglass.”

—A dancer named John DeMarco, realizing his dream of a lifetime, was invited to join Toronto Dance Theatre as a principal dancer, largely on the strength of a particularly inspired performance at the Drummond four months earlier. His former Artistic Director never forgave him for accepting, and made a point of telling him (mendaciously) that she had faked every single orgasm.

—LaToya Dai Woo, Assistant Director of the US Internal Revenue Service, resigned under a cloud having to do with inexplicable anomalies in that year’s data; while the antiquated computer system was torn apart and rebuilt, she moved to the Shimizu Hotel and took up recreational sex.

—The New Orleans self-renovation phenomenon began occurring in ghettos, slums and eyesores around the planet. One economist calculated that even given the immense cost-effectiveness of nanotechnology, several trillions of dollars had to have been spent by rapturists worldwide. Hardly anyone believed him; he was, after all, an economist.

—Gunter Schmidt finally recovered from the bronchitis which had followed upon his stroll through ice water in Nepal, and succeeded in suing his travel agent into bankruptcy. He then returned to Nepal to catch the May Tiji Festival—and learned on arrival that since the Kali Gandaki had in fact returned, the festival had been declared redundant. The Lo were too busy planting crops.

—Unnoticed by anyone, Admiral Cox slipped out a maintenance airlock and entered Symbiosis. The p-suit he removed in order to do so eventually burned up in the upper atmosphere, flaring as the air tanks went up. Since his bills continued to be paid and his room and AI reported no medical emergency, his absence went unnoted until late June.

—The rising wave of “cheerful art” reached such a crest worldwide that even critics began to notice it. Certain conspiracy theorists among the media began to smell a rat, and whispered along the E-mail byways of “rapturist conspiracy”—ideally some kind of immense digital fraud. To their annoyance, investigation kept indicating that the money funding all this new art was real. And anonymous. So they went public with the old standbys, thinly veiled suspicion and unsubstantiated rumor—and would have gone on to entirely baseless allegations in turn, if they hadn’t noticed that nobody seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to them. Everyone was too busy attending performances that sent them home feeling good.

—The mammoth new mass of Symbiote reached Earth Orbit, was calved into six chunks, and each was inserted into a stable orbit. The reason for the subdivision was not known, but it aroused little curiosity. Few humans were of a mind to pester the Starmind with nosey questions these days.

—Colly Porter, having been back on Terra for the recommended three months, returned to High Orbit to spend a month with her father in the Shimizu Hotel. Shortly after her arrival she stated the opinion that hugging was more fun when you could use your legs too. This caused her father to blush (humans seldom go pale in free-fall, but they can still blush), and begin rehearsing a speech he had been meaning to deliver for a couple of years now. But in the end he managed to stall just long enough, and was spared the necessity.

—A peculiar glitch began to show up in automobiles—all automobiles, regardless of place or date of manufacture. Changing lanes without signalling at least five seconds in advance appeared to cause total CPU failure. Fortunately, the “crashless crash” safety feature hardwired into the guidance system usually brought the offending vehicle safely to the side of the road. No one claimed credit for the innovation, and public opinion split: some attributed it to rapturists, while others blamed a much older, half forgotten group called “hackers.” But the prevailing response of humanity at large was glee, and no one tried too hard to crack the case.

At the end, there, everything seemed to happen at once.