Starseed

Chapter Nine

The next morning’s Eva was also eventful. Nobody died, but the near miss was spectacular.

We had progressed in proficiency to the point where Sulke would have half a dozen of us at a time unsnap our umbilicals and practice thruster use without constraint—six being the most she and Reb were confident of being able to supervise at one time. Learning precise thruster control was not easy, and several times Reb and Sulke had to rescue someone who’d blundered into something they couldn’t figure out how to undo. Sulke tended to hair-trigger reflexes; she was determined not to lose any more students. But Reb’s gentle good humor counterbalanced her and kept it being fun.

Raise your hands as if in surrender, palms forward. Your thrusters are now pointing in the same direction you’re facing. Put your arms down at your sides with your thumbs against your thighs, and the thrust is in the opposite direction. By torquing your forearms you can aim in almost any direction or combination of directions. Your ankle-thrusters, however, face in only one direction, “down,” and have only the one axis of motion. From those postulates all the equations of free-space jaunting are derived—and they’re complicated and often counterintuitive.

It took, believe me, a lot of courage to let go of that umbilical and hang alone and unsupported in space. I managed to do it, and to get through my short stint without disgracing myself or alarming Sulke, but my heart was pounding when I reconnected myself to my tether. Ben and Kirra were in the next group, and I watched with interest, knowing that they would do this well.

They did it beautifully, well enough to draw spontaneous applause. (Clapping your hands in a p-suit is a waste of energy. You applaud by making approving sounds. Softly, as dozens of people are sharing the same radio circuit.) What they did was more calisthenics than dance, but the consummate grace and skill with which they did it made it dance. Ben especially had pin-point control, using the tiniest bursts of gas to start himself moving and stop himself again when he was where he wanted to be. When they had run through the sequence of exercises, he and Kirra improvised a phrase similar to a square dance do-see-do, jetting toward each other and pivoting in slow motion around each other’s crooked elbow. As they separated again, Ben suddenly went into a violent high-speed spin, spraying yellow gas like a Catherine Wheel. It was lovely, and we started to applaud…and then suddenly it was ugly, asymmetrical and uncontrolled. The applause died away and we could clearly hear him say, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong?” Kirra cried, beating Sulke to it by a hair.

“Both left thrusters jammed full open.” I could see now that he was beating his right fist into his left palm, trying to free up the jammed controls, but it wasn’t working. He gave it up and flailed wildly for a moment, moving through space like a leaf in a storm.

“Here I come!” Kirra cried.

“No!” Sulke roared.

“No—stay clear!” Ben agreed. “I’m rogue, it’s too dangerous. Besides, I think maybe I…” Suddenly he came out of his tumble and his attitude stabilized. His left wrist was cocked over his head, balancing the ankle thrust; he was vectoring slowly away from us, but at least he was no longer a pinwheel. “There.”

Kirra had reached him by then, having ignored both warnings. “What should I do, love?” she asked him, decelerating to match his vector, doing it perfectly.

“Dock with me upside down.” She did, locking her arms behind his knees, being careful not to kick him in the face. “Can you find the snap-release for that ankle-thruster?”

“Right.”

“Okay, on the count of three, hit it—and be sure you’re not in the way of it when it lets go! One, two, three!” He disengaged his fuming wrist thruster at the same instant she released the other one. She and Ben wobbled briefly as the two renegade thrusters blasted off for opposite ends of the galaxy; then they used their remaining six thrusters to recover. By then Sulke had arrived, swearing prodigiously in low German. The three of them jaunted back to us together hand in hand, and Sulke snapped their tethers back on herself.

It was over too quickly for me to have time to be terrified for them—no more than twenty seconds from start to finish.

Sulke finished cursing and paused for breath. “You two—” she began, and took another breath. Reb started to say something, but she overrode him. “—are EVA rated. As far as I’m concerned, you can graduate yourselves whenever you’re ready.”

Ben and Kirra looked at each other. “There’s still a lot you can teach us,” Kirra said.

“Maybe so,” Sulke said, “and I’ll be happy to if you want—but you’ve both got what it takes to survive EVA. Hell, I couldn’t have recovered that fast.”

“That’s just my trick specs,” Ben said. “It’s easier getting out of a spin if you can see everything at once: you don’t have those long gaps when no useful information is coming in.”

“That makes sense. But Kirra was just as quick.”

“I had a secret weapon too,” Kirra said. “I’m in love with the bastard.”

We all broke up. Tension release.

“What the hell went wrong, exactly?” Sulke asked. “Did the palm-switches physically freeze closed?”

“No,” Ben said. “The controls worked fine…they just stopped controlling anything. If I had to guess—and I do, the damn things are halfway to Luna by now—I’d say a passing cosmic ray fried the chip.”

“Possible,” Sulke agreed reluctantly. “Or it could have been a passing piece of space junk, the odds are about the same. Damn bad luck. The rest of you spaceworms take heed. Anything can happen out here. Stay on your toes. Okay, next group—”

Ben and Kirra were even merrier than usual at lunch. But I noticed that they slipped away early, and got to afternoon class late.

“My best advice to you all,” Reb said about five minutes after they arrived, flushed and smiling, “would be to make love as much as you conveniently can during the next three weeks.”

The whole room rippled. There was a murmur made of giggles and gasps and exclamations and one clear, “I heard that,” which provoked more giggles.

“I’m completely serious,” Reb said. “I can think of no better rehearsal for telepathy than making love. If you’re a strict monosexual, now would be an excellent time to try to conquer your prejudice. There are no sexual taboos in Top Step, because there are none in the Starmind. You are preparing to enter a telepathic community, and in a telepathic community, you are naked to everyone. Sexual taboos won’t work there. Even more important, they’re unnecessary there—humans need taboos precisely because humans are not telepathic.”

The room was now in maximum turmoil, as physical touching took on sudden significance. “But what about disease?” someone called.

“If you weren’t healthy when you got to Suit Camp, you are now,” Reb said. “Confirmed at Decontam and guaranteed.”

“What about pregnancy?”

“All methods of contraception are available at the Infirmary. But you have no reason to fear pregnancy. Where you are going, there is no possibility of any child ever wanting for anything, no such thing as an unhappy childhood or a bad parent. All children are raised by everyone.”

That took some thinking about. Finally someone said, “Are you…are you trying to say that all Stardancers spend their time screwing? That this Starmind is some kind of ongoing orgy?”

“In a physical sense, no. Stardancers only physically join when conception is desired. But in a mental and spiritual sense, your description is close to the truth. Telepathic communion cannot be described in words, nor understood until it is experienced—but it is generally agreed that lovemaking is one of the closest analogies in human experience. The most essential parts of lovemaking—liberation from the self, joining with others, being loved and touched and needed and cherished, gaining perspective on the universe by sharing viewpoint—are all a constant part of every Stardancer’s life. Regardless of whether he or she chooses to ejaculate or lubricate at any given moment. Leon, you have a question?”

“What’s zero-gee childbirth like?” asked the man addressed. “Gravity can be kind of handy there.”

“Not for the first nine months,” Glenn called out, and was applauded.

Reb smiled. “In Symbiosis, childbirth is easy and painless. The symbiote assists the process, and so does the child itself.”

Wow! In spite of myself, an idea came to me. I made the finger gesture for attention, and Reb recognized me with a nod. “Reb? How old is too old to birth in Symbiosis?”

“We don’t know yet. No woman has ever reached menopause while in Symbiosis. Those women who’ve entered Symbiosis after menopause resumed ovulating, and Stardancers as old as ninety-two have conceived and birthed successfully. Ask again in fifty years and we may have an answer for you.”

The class went on for quite some time, and a lot of people said a lot of things, but I don’t remember much after that. I spent the rest of class trying to grapple with the fact that a door I had thought closed forever was opening up again, that all of a sudden it wasn’t too late anymore to change my mind and have children. The thought was too enormous to grasp. I had known about this, intellectually, before I had ever left Earth—but somehow I had never let the implications sink in before.

Probably because I had not known anyone whose children I wanted to have…until now.

“Robert,” I said that night in afterglow, “how do you feel about you and me having a child?”

He blinked. “Are we?”

“Not yet. I’ve still got my implant. But I could have it taken out at the Infirmary in five minutes, and be pregnant in ten. What do you think?”

He had sense enough not to hesitate. “I think I would love to make a baby with you. But I also think it would be prudent to wait until after Graduation.”

“Huh. Maybe you’re right.”

“Are you absolutely a hundred percent sure you’re going to go through with Symbiosis? I’m not. And I wouldn’t want a decision either way to be forced on either one of us. If we both do Symbiosis, fine. If we both go back to Earth, fine. But wouldn’t it be awful if we started a child, and then—”

“I guess.” It would be least awful, perhaps, if I stayed in space and Robert went home: a husband/father must be much less essential in a telepathic family than in human society. But Robert had already had to walk away from one child in his life, and still felt grief over it.

And there was another horrid possibility. What if we conceived together—and then one of us was killed in training? It could happen. I didn’t think I could have survived what had happened to Ben that morning, for instance.

“Another month or so, maybe less, and we’ll know. Okay?”

“You’re right.” I was disappointed…but only a little. Morning sickness in a p-suit could be a serious disaster. There was plenty of time.

Without any actual discussion, Kirra started spending most of her time at Ben’s place, leaving our room for Robert and me. They gave the two of us a week to focus on each other and our new love without distraction. Then one day they came by and invited us to join them for drinks at Le Puis, and the four of us reformed and reintegrated our friendship again. Soon it stopped making any difference which room we used, or whether it was already occupied when we got there. Robert was a little more reticent than I about making love with Ben and Kirra present, at first, but he got over it. I could sense that one day, whether before or after Graduation, we four were all going to make love with each other. But there didn’t seem to be any hurry for that, either, and for the present I was just a little too greedy of Robert.

Even falling in love couldn’t distract me completely from dance. After our first few days together, I resumed working for a few hours every evening. Sometimes Robert watched and helped; sometimes he stayed back in the room and designed support structures for asteroid mining colonies, or wrote letters to his son in Minneapolis. I slowly began to evolve a piece of choreography, which I took to calling Do the Next Thing.

Kirra too made progress in her art. In the middle of the week, while we were all outside in class, she sang her second song for us, the Song of Polar Orbit. I had to get my p-suit radio overhauled that night—the applause overloaded it—and so did others. Raoul Brindle phoned more congratulations and repeated his invitation to Kirra. Within a few days, Teena reported that the recording had been downloaded by over eighty percent of the spacer community, and that audience response was one hundred percent positive. Kirra told me privately that she was tickled to death; she had never before received so much approval from non-Aboriginals and whitefellas for her singing. And according to her Earthside mentor Yarra, the Yirlandji people were equally pleased. Ben, for his part, was fiercely proud of her.

On Sunday afternoon the four of us took a field trip together, to watch a Third-Monther enter Symbiosis. I cleared it with Reb; he had no objection. “As long as Ben and Kirra and Robert are along, you can’t get into too much trouble. They’re pretty much spacers already. But you be sure to stay close to them,” he cautioned with a smile. I smiled back and agreed that we could probably manage that.

We left, not via the Solarium, but by a smaller personnel airlock closer to the docking end of Top Step. It was about big enough to hold three comfortably, but we left in pairs, as couples, holding hands.

The Symbiote mass floated in a slightly higher orbit than Top Step, because Top Step routinely exhausted gases that, over a long period of time, could have damaged or killed it. I can’t explain the maneuvering we had to do to get there without using graphics prefaced by a boring lecture on orbital ballistics; just take my word for it that, counterintuitive as it might seem, to reach something ahead of you and in a higher orbit, you decelerate. Never mind: with Ben astrogating, we got there. It took a long lazy time, since we didn’t have a whole lot of thruster pressure to waste on a hurried trip.

My parents used to have an antique lava lamp, which they loved to leave on for hours at a time. The Symbiote mass looked remarkably like a single globule of its contents: a liquid blob of softly glowing red stuff, that flexed and flowed like an amoeba. Years ago there had been so much of it that you could see it with the naked eye from Top Step. So many Stardancers had graduated since then that the remaining mass was not much bigger than an oil tanker. (That was why the Harvest Crew was fetching more from Titan.) But it was hard to tell size by eye, without other nearby objects of known size to give perspective—a common problem in space.

As we got nearer, we picked out such objects: half a dozen Stardancers, their solar sails retracted. We came to a stop relative to the Symbiote mass, and saw perhaps a dozen p-suited humans approaching it from a slightly different angle than us. One of them had to be Bronwyn Small, the prospective graduate, and the rest her friends come to wish her well. By prior agreement, we maintained radio silence on the channel they were using, so as not to intrude. We had secured Bronwyn’s permission to be present, through Teena, but there can be few moments in anyone’s life as personal as Symbiosis.

The p-suited figures made rendezvous with the six Stardancers. We approached, but stopped about a kilometer or so distant.

I guess I had been expecting some sort of ceremony, the speechmaking with which humans customarily mark important events. There was none. Bronwyn said short goodbyes to her friends, hugged each of them, and then turned toward the nearest of the Stardancers and said, “I’m ready.”

“Yes, you are,” the Stardancer agreed, and I recognized the voice: it was Jinsei Kagami. She did nothing that I could see—but all at once the Symbiote extended a pseudopod that separated from the main mass, exactly the way the blob in a lava lamp will calve little globular chunks of itself. The shimmering crimson fragment homed in on Bronwyn somehow, stopped next to her, and expanded into a bubble about four meters in radius, becoming translucent, almost transparent.

Without another word, Bronwyn jaunted straight into the bubble and entered it bodily. Within it, she could be seen to unseal her p-suit and remove it. She removed its communications gear, hung it around her neck, and then pushed the suit gently against the wall of the bubble that contained her. The Symbiote allowed the suit to emerge, sealed again behind it, and at once began to contract.

We were too far away to see clearly, but I knew that the red stuff was enfolding her and entering her at every orifice, meeting itself within her, becoming part of her.

She cried out, a wordless shout of unbearable astonishment that made the cosmos ring, and then was silent. She seemed to shudder and stiffen, back arched, arms and legs trembling as if she were having a seizure. She began turning slowly end over end.

There was silence for perhaps a full minute.

Then Jinsei said to Bronwyn’s friends, “You may leave whenever you choose. Your friend will not be aware of her immediate surroundings again for at least another day…and it might be as much as one more day before you will be able to converse with her. She has a great deal to integrate.”

“Is she all right?” one of them asked, sounding dubious.

“ ‘All right’ is inadequate,” Jinsei said, with that smile in her voice. “ ‘Ecstatic’ is literally correct—and even that does not do it justice. Yes, she has achieved successful Symbiosis.”

Bronwyn’s friends expressed joy and relief at the news, and left as a group, talking quietly amongst themselves.

Ben gestured for our attention and pointed at his ear. We four all switched to a channel on which we could chatter privately.

“Not much of a show,” he said.

“I dunno,” Kirra said dreamily. “I thought it was lovely.”

“Me too,” I said. “I could almost feel it happening to her. That moment of merging.”

“So did I,” Ben said. “I don’t know, I guess I expected there to be more to it.”

“More what?”

“Ceremony. Speeches. Hollywood special effects. Fanfares of trumpets. Moving last words.”

“You men and your speechmaking,” I said. “All those things ought to happen too every time a sperm meets an egg…but they don’t.”

“And I thought those were moving last words,” Kirra said. “She said, ‘I’m ready.’ Can’t get much more movin’ than that.”

“You’re pretty quiet, darling,” I said to Robert. “What did you think?”

He was slow in answering. “I think I feel a little like Bronwyn: it’s going to take me at least a week to integrate everything well enough to talk about it.”

“Too right,” Kirra agreed. “I’ve had enough o’ words for a while. But I could use a little nonverbal communication. Come on, Benjamin, let’s go on home an’ root until sparrowfart.”

(If you ever spend time in Oz, don’t speak of rooting for your favorite team; “root” is their slang term for “fuck.” Whether this is a corruption of “rut,” or an indication that Aussies are fond of oral sex, I couldn’t say. And “sparrowfart” is slang for “dawn.”)

“That sounds like exactly what I’d like to do right now,” he said.

“Me too,” I agreed. “ ‘Ecstatic,’ she said. I could use some of that. How about you, darling?”

“ ‘I’m ready,’ ” he quoted simply.

The trip back to Top Step was as long as the trip out, but there was no further conversation along the way. When we got there we found that four could fit into that airlock at once if they didn’t mind squeezing. The route back to our quarters was one we had taken only once before, on the day of our arrival at Top Step—save that we bypassed Decontam. As we jaunted across the Great Hall, I felt again many of the same confused and confusing feelings I’d experienced on that first day, and hugged Robert tightly. He squeezed back.

Without any discussion, we all headed for my and Kirra’s room, and entered together. Pausing only to store our p-suits and dim the lights, we went to bed.

Actually, the euphemism is misleading: we didn’t use our sleepsacks. I did not want to be confined, needed to feel as free as a Stardancer, and it seemed Kirra did as well.

For over an hour I was almost completely unaware of Ben and Kirra, or anything else but Robert. We caromed off walls or furniture from time to time, but barely noticed that either. Then at some point the two drifting couples bumped into each other in the middle of the room, at a perpendicular so that we formed a cross. The small of my back was against Kirra’s; our sweat mingled. I sensed her flexing her legs and tightening her shoulders, and knew kinesthetically what she was going to do and matched it without thinking: we spun and flowed and traded places. Ben blinked and smiled and kissed me, and I kissed him back. The dance went on. Ben was sweet, bonier and hairier than Robert but just as tenderly attentive. Perhaps half an hour later, we all met again at the center of the universe and made a beast with four backs; awhile later I was back in Robert’s arms, and slept there until Teena told us it was time for dinner.

We ate together without awkwardness, talking little but making each other smile often. After the meal, Ben kissed me, Robert kissed Kirra, and Robert and I went off to my studio together, while Kirra and Ben headed for Le Puis. They were asleep in Kirra’s sleepsack when we got back: we slid into mine and were asleep almost at once.

Glenn was murdered the next day.

We had all been weaned from our umbilicals by that point, and were spending that class touring the exterior of Top Step. Most of the interesting stuff was down by the docking area. We were able to watch the docking of a Lunar robot freighter, carrying precious water from the ice mines. We should not have been able to: that freighter was not scheduled to arrive for another four hours, or Sulke would not have had us down there. Vessels are almost always punctual in space—the moment the initial acceleration shuts down, ETA can be predicted to the second. But while this can was on its way, the Lunar traffic control computer apparently detected a small pressure leak from the hold, and applied additional acceleration and deceleration to minimize transit time. Sulke was angry when the word came over the ops channel.

Oh, we were safe enough: we were at least half a kilometer from the docks. Sulke’s gripe was that the event constituted an unplanned distraction from our curriculum—but we were all so eager to watch the docking that, after consultation with Reb, she reluctantly conceded that it would be instructive, and suspended lessons until it was over. I was pleased, since events had prevented me from watching my own docking five weeks earlier.

Long before we could see the freighter itself, we saw the tongue of fire it stuck out at us as it decelerated. Then the torch shut off, and we could see a spherical-looking object the size of a pea held at arm’s length. It grew slowly to baseball size, then soccer ball, and by then it was recognizable as a cylinder seen end-on. It grew still larger, and began to visibly move relative to the stars behind it as it approached Top Step. Now it could be seen to be as large as the Symbiote mass I’d seen the day before, tiny in comparison to Top Step but huge in comparison with a human. From one side a thin plume of steam came spraying out of the hull to boil and fume in vacuum; on the opposite side you could just make out the less visible trail of the maneuvering jet that was balancing the pressure leak, keeping it from deforming the freighter’s course to one side.

The ship was coming in about twice as fast as normal. But that’s not very fast; dockings are usually glacial. Sulke had run out of educational things to point out long before the ship had approached close enough for final maneuvers. Since our first day EVA she’d generally kept us too busy to stargaze or chatter, but now we had time to rubberneck at the cosmos and ask questions.

“What’s that, Sulke?” Soon Li asked, pointing to a far distant object in a higher orbit than our own.

Sulke followed her pointing arm. “Oh. That’s Mir.”

“Oh.” Silence. Then: “I think someone ought to…I don’t know, tear it down or blow it up or something.”

“Would you want your grave disturbed?” Dmitri asked.

More silence.

“What are those people doing?” Dmitri wanted to know.

We looked where he was pointing, at the docking area itself. At first I saw nothing: those docks are huge, designed to accommodate earth-to-orbit vehicles, orbit-to-orbit barges or taxis, and Lunar shuttles like the one we were watching—as many as two of each at one time. But then I saw the two p-suited figures Dmitri meant, just emerging from a personnel lock between the two biggest docking collars.

“Those are wranglers,” Sulke said. “As soon as that bucket docks, they’ll hook up power feeds and refueling hoses and so on. If there’s a nesting problem, they’ve got enough thruster mass to do some shoehorning too.”

“What’s wrong with that star?” Glenn asked, pointing in the direction of the slowly approaching freighters. She happened to be closest of us to it.

“Which one?” Sulke replied.

“That big one, a little Three-ish of the ship.”

I spotted the one she meant. Indeed, there were three things odd about it. It was just slightly bigger than a star ought to be, and it was the only one in the Universe that was twinkling, the way stars appear to on Earth, and it had a little round black dot right smack in the center of it. That certainly was odd. It grew perceptibly as I watched; could it be a supernova? What luck, to happen to see one with the naked eye…

“Jesus Christ!” Sulke cried out. “Reb—”

“I see it,” he said calmly. “Everyone, listen carefully: I want you to follow me at maximum acceleration, right now.” He spun and blasted directly away from the docking freighter, all four thrusters flaring.

We wasted precious seconds reacting, and Sulke roared, “Run for your fucking lives!” That did it: we all took to our heels, slowly but with growing speed. I cannoned into someone and nearly tumbled, but managed to save myself and continue; so did the other.

“Operations—Mayday, Mayday!” Reb was saying. “Incoming ASAT, ETA five seconds. Wranglers—” He broke off. There was nothing to be said to the wranglers.

The antique antisatellite hunter-killer slammed into the freighter at that instant. There was no sound or concussion, of course. I caught reflected glare from the flash off Top Step in my peripheral vision, and tried to crane my neck around to look behind me, but I couldn’t do it and stay on course, so I gave up. I’m almost sorry about that; it must have been something to see.

The water-ship was torn apart by the blast, transformed instantly into an expanding sphere of incandescent plasma, shrapnel and boiling water. It killed Ronald Frayn and Sirikit Pibulsonggram, the two wranglers, instantly. A half-second later it killed a Third-Monther named Arthur Von Brandenstein who had been meditating around the other side of Top Step, and had come to watch the docking like us, but had approached closer than Sulke would let us.

And a second later it caught up to our hindmost straggler, Glenn.

I’ll remember the sound of her death until my dying day, because there was so little to it. It was a sound that would mean nothing to a groundhog, meant nothing to me then, and that every spacer dreads to hear: a short high whistle, with an undertone of crashing surf, lasting for no more than a second and ending with a curious croaking. It is the sound of a p-suit losing its integrity, and its inhabitant’s final exhalation blowing past the radio microphone.

Later examination of tapes showed that the first thing to hit her was a hunk of shrapnel with sharp edges; it took both legs off above the knees, and that might well have sufficed to kill her, emptying her suit of air instantly. But you can live longer in a vacuum than most groundhogs would suspect, and it is just barely possible that we might have been able to get her inboard alive. But a split second later a mass of superheated steam struck her around the head and shoulders. P-suits were never designed to take that kind of punishment: the hood and most of the shoulders simply vanished, and the steam washed across her bare face—just as she was trying desperately to inhale air that was no longer there. When Sulke had us decelerate and regroup, she kept on going, spinning like a top. A couple of people started off after her, but Sulke called them back.

No one else died, but there were more than a dozen minor injuries. The most seriously injured was Soon Li, who lost two fingers from her left hand; she would have died, but while she was gawking at her fountaining glove, Sulke slapped sealant over it and dragged her to the nearest airlock. She suffered some tissue damage from exposure to vacuum, but not enough to cost her the rest of the hand. Antonio Gonella managed to crash into Top Step in his panicked flight, acquiring a spectacular bruise on his shoulder and a mild concussion. Two people collided more decisively than I had, and broke unimportant bones.

But the casualty that meant the most to me was Robert.