Starseed

Chapter Eight

Reb and Sulke were both waiting for us in Solarium Two. (For the rest of this week they would be teaching us together, twice a day; after that they’d teach separately again.) Although they knew us all by name and by sight, they marked us off on an actual checklist as we came through the open airlock chamber, and sealed both hatches carefully when we were all mustered. Reb was especially saintly, radiating calm and compassion, and Sulke was especially sour, nervous as a cat.

“If you haven’t checked your air, do so now,” she called. “We’ve got fresh tanks if you need them.” We were all in our p-suits, and I would have bet all of us had been smart enough to check our air supply. I certainly had—six times. But little Yumiko had to come forward, shamefaced, to accept a pair of tanks and a withering glare from Sulke. “Check your thruster charges too. You’re not gonna get much use out of them today, but start the habit of keeping them topped up.” Three people had to disgrace themselves this time, coming forward to have their wristlets or anklets recharged. Ben was one of them.

“You’ve heard it a million times,” Sulke told us in parade-ground voice. “I’ll tell you one more time. Space does not forgive. If you take your mind off it for five seconds, it will kill you.”

She took a breath to say more, and Reb gently cut her off. “Be mindful, as we have learned together, and all will be well.”

She exhaled, and nodded slowly. “That’s right. Okay, earthworms—” She caught herself again. “Sorry, I can’t call you that anymore, you’ve graduated.” She grinned. “Okay, spaceworms, attach your umbilicals. Make damn sure they’re hooked tight.”

The term was outdated: they weren’t real umbilicals like the pioneers used, carrying air from the mothership; they were only simple tethers. But they did fasten at the navel so that imagery was apt. Each of us found a ring to anchor ours to on the wall behind us. I checked carefully to make sure the snaplock had latched snugly shut. The umbilical was about the same diameter as spaghetti, guaranteed unbreakable, and was a phosphorescent white so it would not be lost in the darkness.

“Radios on Channel Four,” Sulke said. “Seal your hood and hold on to your anchor. Is there anyone whose hood is not sealed? Okay, here we go.”

There was a dysharmonic whining sound as high-volume pumps went into operation, draining the air from the Solarium. As the air left, the noise diminished. The cubic was large, it took awhile. We spent the time staring out the vast window.

Two was the only true solarium, the one that always faced the Sun. Its window worked like modern sunglasses: you could stare directly at the Sun, without everything else out there turning dark as well. The p-suit hood added another layer of polarization. The Sun looked like an old 60-watt bulb head-on, but by its light you could see Top Step’s own mirror farm a few miles away, a miniature model of the three immense ones that circle the globe, beaming down gigawatts for the groundhogs to squabble over. It looked like God’s chandelier. I could also just make out two distant Stardancers, their Symbiotes spun out into crimson discs, a little One-ish of the mirror farm. (That’s the side away from Earth in Top Step parlance.) They looked like they were just basking in the sun, rippling slightly like jellyfish, but for all I knew they could have been directing construction out in the Asteroid Belt. Who knows what a Stardancer is thinking? All other Stardancers, that’s who, and nobody else. There were no p-suited Third-Monthers visible at the moment, though there were surely some out there, too far to see or in other quadrants of space.

The sound of the pumps was gone now. The outside world is miked in a p-suit, but the mike only functions in atmosphere. There was no longer any air to support sound outside our suits, so we heard none.

“Hard vacuum,” Sulke announced in my ear. “Maintain radio silence unless you have an emergency. And don’t have an emergency. Here we go.”

A crack appeared at the bottom of the great window. In eerie utter silence, it slid upward until it was gone. A great gaping hole opened out on empty space. Radio silence or no, there was a soft susurrant murmur. For a moment my mind tried to tell me that the Sun and empty space were below me, that the huge opening was a bomb bay and I was about to fall out. But I suppressed the fear easily. Reb had trained me well.

“All right,” Sulke said, “starting over at this end, one at a time, move out when I tell you. Don’t move until the person before you has reached the end of their leash, I don’t want any tangles today. Try to fan out, so we end up making a big shaving brush. Rostropovitch, you’re first.”

Reb arranged himself like a skydiver, feet toward us, and gave a short blast on his ankle thrusters. “Follow me, Dmitri,” he said softly, and jaunted slowly out into emptiness. Dmitri followed him, and then Yumiko, and the exodus began. When my turn came I was ready. A one-second blast, and I was in motion. As I passed through the open window there was a sensation as if I had pierced some invisible membrane…and then I was in free space, tether unreeling slightly behind me, concentrating on my aim.

The umbilical placed enough drag on me that I had to blast again halfway out. I did it for a hair too long, and reached the end of my rope with a jerk that put me into a slow-motion tumble. I stabilized it easily, and could have come to a stop—Sulke had trained me well, too—but I didn’t. Like someone standing on a mountaintop and turning in circles, I rotated slowly. Now that I was no longer busy, I let myself take it all in.

And like my mates, I was dumbstruck.

It’s like the psychedelic experience. It cannot be described, and only a fool will try. I know that even my clearest memories of the event are pale shadows.

In free space you seem to see better, in more detail than usual. Everything has an uncanny “realer than real” look, because there is no air to scatter the light that reaches your eyes. You see about 20 percent more stars than can be seen on the clearest night on Earth, just a little brighter and clearer than even the best simulation, and none of them twinkle. Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all visible, and visibly different from the other celestial objects.

For the first time I gained some real sense of the size of Top Step. It looked like a mountain that had decided to fly, a mountain the size of Mount Baker back where I came from. (Already I had stopped thinking, “back home.”) Even though at that point in history something over a quarter of it had been tunneled out and put to assorted uses, the only externally prominent sign of human occupancy was the mammoth docking complex at the tip—and it had the relative dimensions of the hole in the tip of a fat cigar.

And at the same time all of Top Step was less than a dust mote. So vast is space that mighty Earth itself, off Three-ish, was a pebble, and the Sun was a coal floating in an eternal sea of ink. That made me some kind of subatomic particle. A pun awful enough to be worthy of Ben came to me: it had been too long since I’d been lepton. That made me think of Robert, and I recalled vaguely that the force that keeps leptons together is called the Weak Force. I was rummaging through my forebrain, looking for wordgames to anchor me to reality, cerebral pacifiers.

I looked around for Robert, spotted his turquoise p-suit coming into my field of vision perhaps twenty meters away—why, we were practically rubbing elbows. As in the classroom simulation holo, half of him was in darkness…but here in real space, there was enough backscatter of light from Top Step to make his dark side just barely visible. Other students floated beyond him; I picked out Kirra and Ben, holding hands. Jaunting as a couple is trickier than jaunting solo, but they had learned the knack.

Reb and Sulke let us all just be there in silence for a measureless time.

A forest of faint white umbilicals, like particle tracks from a cyclotron, led back to the Solarium we’d come from. Its huge window now seemed a pore in the skin of Top Step. All around us, stars burned without twinkling, infinitely far away. I became acutely aware of my breath whistling in and out, of the movement of my chest and belly as I breathed, of my pulse chugging in my ears, of the food making its way along my digestive tract and the sensation of air flowing across my skin. I felt a powerful spontaneous urge to try a dance step I’d been working on, something like an arabesque crossed with an Immelman roll. I squelched the urge firmly. Right place, wrong time.

I seemed to be at the center of the Universe, turning lazily end over end. My breathing slowed. Time stopped.

“I’m sorry, Reb,” Yoji Kuramatso said sadly.

“It’s all right, Yoji-san,” Reb said at once. “Daijôbu-da!” he jetted toward Yoji, flipped over halfway there and decelerated, came to a stop beside him.

“I really thought I could handle it,” Yoji said, his voice trembling slightly.

“Simpai suru-na, Yoji-san,” Reb said soothingly. “Switch to Channel Six now.”

They both switched their radios to a more private channel, and Reb began conducting Yoji back to Top Step, letting their umbilicals reel them slowly in rather than trying to use thrusters.

There was a murmur of embarrassment and sympathy. Yoji was liked.

“He did that great,” Sulke said. “If you’re going to panic, that’s the way to do it. Quietly. Slowly. Is anyone else having trouble?”

No one spoke.

“Okay, we’ll marinate until Reb gets back, and then we’ll get to work.”

Robert was passing through my visual field again. I didn’t want to break radio silence, so I waited until he was facing my way and made a tentative come-here gesture. He worked himself into the right attitude, pointed his hands down at his feet and gave a short blast on both wrist thrusters. He glided toward me in ultraslow motion, stretching his hands out toward me as he came. I oriented myself to him. When he arrived, we locked hands like trapeze acrobats, only pressing instead of pulling, and I gave an identical blast in the opposite direction with my ankle-thrusters to kill his velocity. Maybe it was because we got it right that Sulke didn’t chew us out for maneuvering without permission…or she may have had other reasons.

We drifted, facing each other, holding hands. The sun was at my back, so there was too much glare from his hood for me to see his face clearly. He must have seen mine well in the reflected light.

By mutual consent we moved to a new position, side to side, each with an arm around the other, facing infinity together. Part of me wanted to switch off my radio and talk with him hood-to-hood. But Sulke would have skinned me…and there really were no words, anyway.

If you are going to fall through endless darkness for timeless time, it is nice to have someone’s arm around you.

After a while, Reb returned and we started doing simple maneuvers. Even classwork didn’t break the mood, pop the bubble of our dreamlike state of awe and wonder. I don’t mean we were in a trance—at all times we remained mindful, of our tethers and our thruster placement and our air supply—but at the same time we experienced something like rapture, a three-dimensional awareness. I had been in a similar mental/physical state before, often…but only onstage. I wondered which of the others had anything in their experience to liken this to.

I was going to like this. This had been a good idea. Way to go, Morgan.

We stayed out there until lunch time—and still it was over much too soon.

I demolished twice as much food as usual at lunch; I’d have eaten more but they ran out. Most of the group was keyed up, happy, darting around like hummingbirds and chattering like magpies. Robert and I did not chatter. We touched hands, and legs, and ate together in silence, totally aware of each other.

That afternoon’s class was with Reb only, in the cubic where he’d always held morning classes during the first month. For the first time, he allowed the gathering to devolve into a gabfest, encouraging us all to speak of what we had felt and thought that morning, to tell each other what it had meant to us. I was surprised at the diversity of things different people likened the experience to. Taking LSD, being in combat, falling in love, kensho, orgasm, electroshock, dying, being born, giving birth, writing when the Muse is flowing, doing math, an Irish coffee drunk…the variations were endless. For Robert it was the instant when a new design leaped into his head and began explaining itself.

One thing surprised me even more. Three of us reported that there was nothing in their previous lives to compare space to. They were the most profoundly affected of all of us, all three close to tears. This had been their first taste of transcendence. It seemed hard to believe, and terribly sad, to have lived so long without wonder.

Glenn confessed that she had several times come near giving up like Yoji and going back indoors. “I can take it as long as I’m perfectly still,” she said. “I just tell myself I’m watching an Imax movie. But the minute I start to move the least little bit, and it all starts spinning around me, I just lose it. I lose my place. I lose my self. I can handle it okay indoors, even in the simulations, but out there is different…”

“But you didn’t panic,” Reb said.

“I came damned close!”

“So did I,” Yumiko said softly.

“Da. Me too,” Dmitri chimed in.

She stared at them. “You did?”

They nodded.

“Experienced spacers have been known to panic,” Reb said. “Glenn, don’t worry. You may simply not be ready yet to have a revelation of the scale you were given this morning. That is not a failure. You don’t have to go back out tomorrow if you decide you’re not ready. You may need to spend more time in meditation first. I’ll be glad to spend private time with you if you like. Don’t force yourself to continue if you feel it is harmful to you. Charlotte Joko Beck once said, ‘A premature enlightenment experience is not necessarily good.’ Looked at from a certain angle, enlightenment is a kind of annihilation—a radical self-emptying. There is time, plenty of time.”

“All right,” she said, “I’ll sleep on it and let you know.”

“You can do it, love,” Kirra called out. “I know you can!”

“Goddam right,” Ben seconded, and there were noises of agreement from others.

Glenn smiled, embarrassed but pleased. “Thanks.”

Reb dismissed class early, suggesting we all meditate privately when we felt ready.

Robert and I paused in the corridor outside the classroom, off to one side. As other Novices jaunted past us, we stared deep into each other’s eyes, communicating wordlessly.

It seemed that almost everything I’d seen outside was there to be seen in those almond hazel eyes. Perhaps more—for space was indifferent to me, and utterly cold. Effortlessly I reached a decision which had eluded me for a month.

“A lot of things came clear out there today,” I said. My voice was rusty.

“Yes.” So was his.

“Teena, is my studio free for the afternoon?”

“Yes, Morgan.”

I reached out and took Robert’s left hand with my right. “Come with me.”

He nodded, and we kicked off together.

Once inside the studio I dimmed the lights slightly, to about the level of dusk on Earth. I told Teena to hold all calls, and to see that we had privacy. I gently maneuvered Robert to a handhold near the camera I’d been calling Camera One and using for main POV.

“Stay here,” I told him.

He nodded.

It took an effort to look away. I spun and jaunted to the far side of the room. I paused there. I unsealed my p-suit and took it off, making no attempt to strip erotically, simply skinning out of my clothes like an eleven-year-old on a shielded wharf. I worked the thrusters from the suit and slid them over my bare wrists and ankles, seated the controls against my palms. I closed my eyes, and cleared my mind…

…and danced.

I had been working on a piece, but did not dance that. Nor did I quote existing works of others, although I was capable of it now. I had no choreographic plan; for the first time in over thirty-five years I simply let the dance come boiling out of me.

One of the reasons I had failed as a choreographer on Earth was that I had let them teach me too much, absorbed too many rules and conventions of dance to ever again be truly spontaneous. But here I was a child again. Once again I could create.

And what came boiling up out of me first was much the same as what had come boiling out of the eleven-year-old Rain McLeod. I can’t describe the dance to you: it was improvised, and the cameras were not rolling. But I can tell you what I was saying with it, when I began.

I was saying the same thing I had said with that first dance, back on Gambier Island. The same thing Shara Drummond had been saying in the Stardance.

Here I am, Universe! I’m here; look at me. I exist. I matter.

I was talking back to endless empty blackness spattered with shards of ancient starlight, to a universe cold and burning down forever, to all the awful immensity I had seen that morning.

At first I danced only with my muscles, maintaining my position in space while I spun and turned around my center, making shapes and changing them, stretching and contracting, hurling my spine about with the force of my limbs. Then I began to use my thrusters, first to alter attitude, and then to move me around the room. I borrowed some vocabulary from ice-skating, and adapted it to three-dimensionality, swooping in widening curves that came ever closer to the wall of the spherical gym, decorating them with axel-spins.

Robert watched, as expressionless as a sea lion, bobbing slowly in the air currents I was creating.

I made him the focal point of my dance, danced not just to him, but of him. As I did my dance began to change. I danced Robert, as I saw him. I danced quiet competence, and ready courage, and strength and self-reliance and patience and mystery and grace.

There you are! You’re there: I see you. You exist. You matter.

He understood. I saw him understand.

My dance changed again. I began to dance not of the awesome immensity of space, but of the exhilaration of being alive in it; to speak not of eternity but of now. I had proclaimed myself to the Universe; now I offered myself to him.

Here we are! We’re here: look at us. “We” exists. We will matter.

He watched, so utterly relaxed that his head began to nod slowly with his breathing, as though he were asleep with his head unsecured. Or was he nodding agreement?

Finally I was done. I had said everything that was in my arms and legs and spine, everything in my heart. I floated facing him across the room, arms outstretched, waiting.

He sighed deeply, and let go of his handhold. Eyes locked with mine, he removed his p-suit, and released it to drift. And then he came to me, and then he came into me, and soon he came in me.

We made love for hours, slow dreamy love in which orgasms were merely the punctuation in a long and unfolding statement. Zero gee changes everything about the oldest dance. Together we learned and invented, made shapes and figures impossible under gravity. Both of us kept the use of our hands; neither of us was on top. The room spun around us. We cried together, and giggled together, and planed sweat from each other’s backs with our hands. We told each other stories of our failed marriages and past lovers. Even with the freedom of three dimensions, we were unable to find any embrace in which we did not fit together as naturally as spoons. We drifted in each other’s arms between rounds of lovemaking, bumping occasionally into the wall, but never hard enough to cause us to separate.

By the time we remembered the existence of the so-called real world, it was too late to get supper at the cafeteria. Well, we might just have made it…but we had to shower first, and that turned into more lovemaking. But the grill at Le Puis is always open, so we headed there, arm in arm, aglow, kissing as we jaunted. People we passed smiled.

We stopped along the way to leave our p-suits in our rooms. We discussed dressing, but could not come up with any reasons for doing so, so we didn’t bother. (I don’t recall whether I’ve mentioned it before, but it should be obvious that Top Step had no nudity taboo. People who are uncomfortable with social nudity are not good candidates for Symbiosis.)

Fat Humphrey greeted us with a grin incredibly even bigger than usual, and a roar of delight. “So you finally got off the dime, eh? I t’ought I was gonna hafta be the one to tell you two you were in love. Hey, this makes me happy! Let’s see, you gonna want a booth—right this way!”

He led us to a booth off in what would have been a corner if Le Puis had corners—far from any other patrons, I mean. We did not bother stating requests, indeed didn’t even think about it. We gazed deep into each other’s eyes in silent communication until Fat returned with food and drink. He opaqued the booth, and sealed it behind him as he left. I was mildly surprised by the amount of food, but Fat didn’t make mistakes. Sure enough, when I next noticed, it was all gone. I don’t remember what it was…but the drink was champagne.

As we were squeezing the last sips into each other’s mouths, Fat scratched discreetly at the closure of our booth. Robert unsealed it; Fat passed in a pipe, then departed again, beaming. It turned out to contain just enough hashish for two tokes apiece. Robert took all four, and passed them to me in kisses; I drank intoxication from his mouth. We caressed each other, slowly, dreamily, not so much lustfully as affectionately. Music, selected by Fat Humphrey, began to play softly in the background. I hadn’t heard it before then, but it fit the moment perfectly: Vysotsky’s “Afterglow.” I’m terrible with song lyrics, but one verse I retain verbatim:

Finally, I said, “Put that thing away so we can leave here without making a spectacle of ourselves.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Reb’s taught me how to control my metabolism: I’ll just wish it away.”

“Right,” I agreed, and struck the most erotic pose I could.

Fifteen seconds later he conceded defeat by tickling me.

“Why leave?” he said. “It’s private in here.”

“True. But we’d jiggle it so much we might as well do it out in plain sight—and people are trying to eat. Besides, I want more room than this.”

“Good thinking.” He eased away from me and glanced down. “Well, if we wait for this to go away, we’ll be here come Graduation. Let’s brazen it out.”

So we did. If anyone noticed, they kept it to themselves. Fat Humphrey waved as we left, clearly overjoyed at our happiness.

We ran into Glenn along the way, headed in the same direction we were. She didn’t notice Robert’s condition. She had left Le Puis just before us, and was a little squiffed. We said hello, and then regretted it, for she wanted to talk.

No, worse. If she’d just wanted to talk, we could have politely brushed her off when we reached our door. But she needed to talk. She was still trying to come to terms with all she’d seen outside that morning.

She had always been polite, taciturn, reticent to intrude on anyone’s privacy with personal conversation; if she needed to unload now I felt an obligation to help. So when we reached my place I queried Robert with my eyes, got the answer I’d hoped for, and invited Glenn in.

“You know what it was?” she told us. “I was doing just fine for the first while, I really was. And then I started thinking of the only other times I’d ever felt…I don’t know, felt that close to God. Once when I birthed my daughter…and just about every time I ever walked in a forest. I started thinking that I could birth kids again for the next couple of centuries, if I go through with this—but that if I go through with this, I’ll never go for a walk in the woods again. And I started to panic.”

“Reb says once you’re Symbiotic, you can reexperience any moment of your life, so vividly it’s like living it again,” I said. “Or anybody else’s life who’s in the Starmind.”

“I know,” she said. “But it won’t be the same as being there. Even if it’s close enough to fool me, it won’t be the same.”

“How real do you need reality to be?” Robert asked reasonably. “If it passes the Turing Test—if you can’t tell it from a real experience—then what’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but there’s a difference. Look, you’ve walked in woods, haven’t you?”

“Not in years,” he admitted. “Woods are kind of hard to come by where I lived.”

“But you know what I mean. When you walk in the woods, there are so many things going on at once, nobody could notice and remember them all. Leaves fluttering, birds chirping, wind in the branches, a hundred different smells of things growing and rotting—I could list things there are to notice in the woods for the next two hours and there’d still be a thousand things I left out, things I don’t even consciously notice. So how am I going to remember them all clearly enough to recreate them in my mind? It just doesn’t seem possible.”

Robert frowned. “I don’t know how to answer you.”

I had an inspiration. “I know somebody who does. Teena—who’s the nearest Stardancer who’s got time to talk?”

“Greetings, Morgan McLeod,” a feminine voice said. “I am Jinsei Kagami. May I do you a service?”

I was taken a little aback. I hadn’t expected such snappy service; I’d been planning on time for second thoughts. It was like praying…and getting an answer! I was a little awed to find myself talking to a real live Stardancer.

Well, I told myself, if you didn’t want the djinn, you shouldn’t have rubbed the lamp. At least don’t waste her time…

“My friends Glenn Christie and Robert Chen are here with me. Glenn would like to talk to you, if you’re not too busy.”

“There is time. Greetings, Glenn and Robert.”

Robert said hello and made a low gassho bow to empty air. Glenn said, “Hello, Jinsei; Glenn here. I’m sorry to bother you.”

Voices can smile. I know because hers did. “You do not, cousin. How may I help you?”

“Well, I…” Glenn frowned and gathered her thoughts. “I guess I’m having trouble believing that I won’t miss Earth after Symbiosis. I’ve been trying to say goodbye to it since I got here—and today I went EVA for the first time, and all I could think of was the places on Earth that I have loved. Jinsei-sama, don’t you ever miss…your old home?”

“Do you ever miss your mother’s womb?” Jinsei asked.

Glenn blinked, and did not reply.

“Of course you do,” Jinsei went on, “especially when you are very tired. And a fine sweet pain it is. I did too, when I was human. But I do not miss my mother’s womb anymore. I can be there, whenever I want. I have access to all my memories, back to the moment my brain formed in the fifth month of my gestation. You cannot remember the events of one second ago as vividly as I remember every instant I have lived—I and all my brother and sister Stardancers. I can be anywhere any of us has ever been, do anything any of us has ever done. For the memories of fetal life alone, I would trade a dozen Earths.”

Somehow even after meeting Harry Stein I had subconsciously expected that a Stardancer in conversation would be sort of dreamy and…well, spacey, like someone massively stoned. She sounded as alert and mindful as Reb.

“ ‘Every instant…’ Even the painful ones?” Glenn asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Don’t they hurt?”

“Oh, yes. Beautifully.”

Glenn looked confused.

“I think what you are asking,” Jinsei said gently, “is whether a Stardancer ever regrets Symbiosis.”

“Uh…yes. Yes, that’s just what I’m asking.”

“No, Glenn. Not one. Not so far.”

That extraordinary assertion hung there in the air for a moment. A life without regret? No, these Stardancers were not human.

Glenn was frowning. “What about the catatonics?” she asked.

“They’re not Stardancers,” Robert pointed out.

“They have not enough awareness to regret,” Jinsei said. “When they are healed, they no longer regret…or perhaps it is the other way around. And the fraction who die renounce regret forever, along with all other possible experiences.”

There was a short silence. Finally Glenn nodded slowly. “I think I see. Thank you, Jinsei. You have comforted me.”

“I am glad, Glenn.”

“Jinsei-sama?” Robert said.

“Yes, Robert?”

“Can a Stardancer lie?”

I thought the question rude, opened my mouth to say so…and found that I wanted to hear the answer. It was a question that had never occurred to me before.

Jinsei found it amusing. “Can you think of any answer I could make that would be meaningful?”

Robert blinked in surprise, and then chuckled ruefully. “No, I guess not. I don’t even now why I asked that. I know the answer, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Thank you,” she said, and he looked relieved. “Forgive me: I find that I am needed; is there anything else I can do for you three?”

We said no and thanked her, and she was gone.

Glenn jaunted near and offered a hug. I accepted without hesitation. Her p-suit was cool on my bare flesh, but not unpleasantly so. “Thank you, Morgan, very much. I’d never have had the nerve to do that.”

“Glad to. It seemed like it was called for. Are you okay now?”

“Yes, I think I am. I need to sit kûkanzen some more, but I think I’ll be able to go back out there tomorrow—thanks to you and Robert. Good night.”

To my mild surprise, she hugged Robert too. “Thank you for lending me some of your courage,” she said, and left.

Robert and I looked at each other and smiled.

“Where were we?” I said.

“About to make some memories so good that we’ll relive them every day for the next two hundred years,” he said.

We certainly did our best. After a while reality turned all warm and runny, and when I was tracking again I noticed idly that Kirra and Ben were in the room now too. But there was no need to restart my brain: they were busy, just like we were. I don’t think Robert even noticed. Good concentration, that man.

Yumiko died the next day.

For the second day in a row, she failed to check her air supply—and this time Sulke did not remind us before opening the Solarium window. An hour later Yumiko failed to respond to a direction. It’s hard to see how one could run out of air without noticing something is wrong…but if Yumiko ever did realize she had a problem, she was too polite to bring it up. They say lifeguards in Japan have to be terribly alert, because drowners there can be too self-effacing to disturb everyone’s wa by calling for help. When she was missed, it was too late.

(Reb flashed to her side, diagnosed her problem, threw her empty tanks into deep space and replaced them with his own, headed for home on what air he had in his suit, squeezing her chest energetically enough to crack ribs as he went—to no avail. When they got her out of the suit she was irretrievably brain dead.)

Sulke would not cancel the rest of the class, and insisted on taking us all out again in the afternoon. She was so clearly controlling anger that I knew she must be feeling horrid guilt—and she did not deserve it, in my opinion: there comes a time when the teacher must stop wiping the students’ noses. She had told us yesterday, space does not forgive. But she could not forgive herself, either.

Reb conducted the funeral service that night. Little Yumiko had been a follower of Ryobu Shinto, or Two-aspect Shinto, an attempt to reconcile Shinto with Buddhism which had recently been revived in Japan after more than a thousand years of dormancy; apparently they used the Buddhist funeral rites. There were prayers offered in all the other holy places in Top Step as well; sadly, those pages were well thumbed in all the hymnals.

Robert and I attended none of these observances. We held one of our own, in my room, saying goodbye to Yumiko and consoling ourselves in the only real way there is, the oldest one of all. I’m pretty sure Kirra and Ben were doing the same thing down the hall…and doubtless others were too. Sudden death seems to call for the ultimate affirmation of life. Sharing it brought Robert and me closer together; all smallest reservations gone, I gave my heart to him, opened to him as though he were my Symbiote, and he flowed into me.

As I was trying to fall asleep, I kept thinking that I had barely known Yumiko. Sure, she had been shy—but if I had made the effort, gotten to know her, she could have lived forever as real as real in my brain once I became Symbiotic. I hoped her roommate Soon Li had made the effort.