Starseed

Chapter Thirteen

Forty-eight hours later I was back in my hotel room in San Francisco and my skin was its normal colour again. If anyone was following me, they were too good to be spotted. I was getting close to broke, but treated myself to the finest dinner the hotel could provide. I gave them fresh roasted coffee beans I had bought the day before from an unlikely madman named Gebhardt Kaiserlingck, who ran a wonderful screwball coffee plantation outside of Daintree, and insisted that the kitchen drip-brew them for me. I drank four cups with dessert and wanted more. It was the finest coffee I had ever tasted. A good omen, I felt.

The next morning I had three more cups with breakfast, and adjourned to the ladies’ room. There I changed into male drag, using much the same makeup I had used for drag roles on stage in years past, and left without causing any apparent notice (well, it was San Francisco). I spent some time re-learning how to walk like a male, and knew I was remembering it correctly when a stewardess gave me the eye as I was passing through the lobby. An hour later I identified myself to a taco vendor as a client of the Bay City Detective Agency; he insisted on a thumbprint, did something with it under the counter, squinted at it and then at me, and passed me an envelope containing a report on one Chen, Robert. I read it on the city’s last remaining cable car, holding it close so the passengers on either side could not have read it even with Ben’s trick glasses.

The top sheet mostly recapitulated what little I already knew about Robert from the things he had told me; most of the new information was irrelevant, except that he had in fact been observed to be living at the address I had for him. For the first time since I’d left Top Step I began to seriously wonder if the whole thing wasn’t only a grotesque figment of my overheated imagination, a psychosis manufactured by my mind to distract me from a series of traumas.

But then there was the second page.

“…first-order identity check seemed to establish that subject’s stated identity and background were genuine; all expected records were in fact on file and no inconsistencies or alterations were noted. But since you had expressed doubt concerning subject’s bona fides, further and more stringent inquiries were instituted, as per attached statement. Second-order ID check also proved out. Third-order check however revealed that subject’s given ID is bogus.

“Subject’s true name is Chen Po Chang. He is the bastard son of Chen Hsi-Feng, who is the son of the late Premier of the People’s Republic, Chen Ten Li. His last official place of residence is Shanghai; he disappeared there four years ago in March of 2016, concurrent with his father’s disappearance during the political upheaval which followed the death of Chen Ten Li. He is not presently wanted in any jurisdiction for any crime or malfeasance. Additional information may be accessed from any public database. Please inform us if you wish any of this information communicated to relevant authorities, or if you require any further action from us. See attachments.”

The third sheet was an itemized statement that said I was a pauper. It didn’t know how right it was.

I had the evidence I had sought, right there in my hands. Not proof that Robert had murdered Kirra and Ben—but enough to throw strong suspicion on him. With that as a start, further information might possibly be found by Interpol, maybe even enough to tie him to the nanotechnological bomb. The People’s Republic had more nanotechnologists than any other nation. (Not too surprising. They had more anythings than most other nations.)

And so what?

Suppose I could tie him to the killing, with monofilament strands of evidence. Who had jurisdiction over raw space, outside the cislunar band?

Was it even against the law—any nation’s law or the UN’s—to murder a Stardancer? The subject had never come up before. Nearly all motives for a murder were irrelevant in the case of Stardancers. They had nothing to steal, no territory to conquer, made love only with other Stardancers, and were damn near impossible to find if they didn’t want to be found. The one thing generally agreed was that they were not human beings in the legal sense.

If I blew Robert’s cover skyhigh, spread it across human space via UPI or Reuters, all I’d accomplish might be merely to annoy him and his secret masters, perhaps cause them to alter slightly whatever their plans were. At most Robert himself might suffer a tragic accident, walk out into traffic, say, and then no one would ever know what those plans were.

I composed an in-the-event-of-my-death letter, and used the last of my credit to send it up to Top Step, to my own personal memory node where Interpol itself couldn’t get at it, programmed to start announcing itself to Reb, Dorothy and Phillipe Mgabi if I didn’t personally disable it within twenty-four hours.

Then I called Robert’s home.

“Morgan, is that really you? I can’t see you—where are you?”

I told him I was in a phone booth at the airport and the phone’s eye had been vandalized. He sounded so genuinely glad to hear my voice, to learn that I was really on Earth and in his city, that I was happy he could not see my face. I put great effort into controlling my voice. He offered to buy me dinner, named a restaurant. I demurred, insisting that I wanted to dine in a place I remembered from an old tour, picking the name out of the Yellow Pages as I spoke. I did vaguely remember it; mostly it was a place he had not chosen and could not have staked out already. And it was large enough and public enough to make violence awkward.

On the way I used the last of my cash to buy a Gyro model dart gun from a wirehead in a back alley off Haight Street. He claimed that the rocket-darts were tipped with lethal nerve poison, and used a passing rat the size of a raccoon to prove that at least the first one was. There were four left in the gun. He backed away from me very carefully after we’d made the exchange.

I was stone broke now. Maybe I should let Robert pick up the check for dinner before I killed him. If I was going to. I still did not honestly know whether I could.

Or even for sure that I intended to.

I deliberately got to the restaurant almost half an hour early. As the maître d’hôtel greeted me, I realized for the first time that the gravity had stopped bothering me. Even my lower back no longer ached unless I put stress on it. A little under two weeks to recover from over two months in free fall. Remarkable. I was an earthling again.

But on sudden impulse I decided to simulate gee fatigue for Robert, as though I had just landed within the past few days. He might underestimate me if he thought I was weak and logy, and I needed any edge I could get. As the maître d’ led me to my table I tried to walk as though I were strapped with heavy weights, and sank into my chair with a great sigh.

The body language part was no trouble for me; most dancers are half actor. It was actually an interesting technical challenge: instead of doing what dancers almost always did, making difficult movements look easy, I had to make easy ones look difficult. The tricky part was the intellectual details. When had the most recent shuttle landed, and at which of the three Stardancer spaceports? I could fake small talk about either Queensland or Ecuador, but I knew nothing at all of Uganda. What day of the week was this, and what was the date? Damn, this melodrama stuff was more complicated than it looked. It seemed to me that the most recent shuttle had grounded three days before, in Australia. Excellent. I had a fund of fresh trivia about that part of the world.

An adorable waiter took my order for Irish coffee with no Irish whiskey in it. “I get it,” he said archly as he set it before me, “you want him to think you’re drinking. Good luck, honey.” I winked at him, and he giggled. I sipped coffee with exaggeratedly weary gestures and looked around the restaurant, trying to spot a stakeout. There was a high percentage of tables with two or more males and no females, but perhaps not abnormally high for this town. And there was no reason why a stakeout team could not include female agents. Everyone looked normal and authentic and undangerous. Normal urban dinner crowd, Pacific Rim version. Every one of them could have been in the pay of the People’s Republic for all I knew. Half of them were Asian. The roof seemed to hover over me oppressively, a potentially destructive mass held away by four flimsy walls. A pianist with a shaky left hand was mangling “We Are in Love” in the far corner of the room. Waiters glided to and fro as smoothly as if they were jaunting. The lights had a tendency to strobe if I looked at them. I wanted Fat Humphrey to float up and tell me what I wanted to eat. I wanted Reb to come and tell me what to do.

Thinking of Reb, I straightened my spine, joined my hands in mudra on my lap, and began measuring my breath. It helped.

I spotted Robert before he saw me.

Suddenly I remembered my ex-husband telling me once that I could lie very well with my body, but not with my face. Well, a lot had happened since then.

Robert spoke with the maître d’, who pointed me out, and looked my way. Our eyes met. I concentrated on my breathing. I kept my face impassive, tried to relax every facial muscle completely. I am suffering from high-gee lethargy. He crossed the room to my table, with the graceful loping walk of a jungle cat, as I had imagined he would. No limp: his injured foot was healed. He stopped beside me, took my right hand in both of his, bent over it and kissed it. His lips lingered just an instant. He released it, sat across from me.

His expression was neutral, his eyes open and seemingly guileless. His face was different than I remembered, longer and leaner, the eyes less squinty, the wrinkles slightly more pronounced. His head appeared smaller, the hair lying close to the skull instead of fanning out. This was how he looked under gravity. I decided it made him even more attractive.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

I said, “I’m glad to see you too. You look different in a gravity field.”

He nodded. “Yes. So do you. I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

There now, just what I needed: a nice sample lie to calibrate my bullshit detector. I knew perfectly well that my hair looked awful. “Thank you for the gallantry,” I said. “It was ungodly hot in Queensland. The hair was always wet, and it kept crawling down my neck, so I had them hack it all off. I think I’m going to end up regretting it.”

“No, really, it suits you well.”

Okay, now see if you can get him to make some true statements for comparison, and we’ll get this polygraph interrogation started. “I just hit dirt a few days ago. I can’t get used to this up and down nonsense. It seems so arbitrary, like making all music be in the same key. And I can’t believe how much my feet hurt!”

He nodded. “My first couple of days dirtside I couldn’t imagine how humans had ever put up with gravity. It was just barely tolerable back when we didn’t know any better—but now, something’s simply got to be done about it. You must be exhausted.”

“Irish coffee helps,” I said. “It’s great for reconciling you to gravity: it’s got up and down built into it. The booze calms you down and then the coffee wakes you up.” Small talk, small talk—

“Small talk,” he said.

I nodded. “What do you say—stick to small talk until we’ve eaten?”

He nodded back. “Sounds sensible.” The waiter arrived, and Robert ordered Irish coffee, “like the lady.” The waiter nodded gravely, turned away—then stopped outside Robert’s field of vision, pointed at him, and gave me an exaggerated thumbs up. Keep this one. When he returned a few moments later with the coffee, he stopped behind Robert again, pointed at the coffee and fanned himself: this glass had whiskey in it, in good measure. I slipped him another wink when Robert wasn’t looking. I hoped Robert was going to tip him well, since I couldn’t. Robert ordered something to eat and I said I’d have the same and he twinkled away, delighted at his role in my little intrigue.

“So you just got into town? Where are you staying?”

I’d anticipated the question, and had decided there was no reason to lie. I told him the correct name of my hotel. It didn’t seem to matter; I need never go back there again. He nodded and said it was a good place, and I agreed.

Whatever it was we had ordered arrived. As we ate we kept jousting with our eyes, making contact and then finding reasons to look away, busying ourselves with the food. I felt like I was drowning in quicksand. No, in slowsand. But there was no hurrying things. I didn’t want him to have any busy little distractions available when I started asking pointed questions.

Which led to: what pointed questions? I had been thinking about this moment for something like two weeks now, and I still did not know how to play it. Should I go right for the jugular, tell him everything I knew and all I had guessed, and demand a response? Or keep what I knew to myself, give him to understand that I wanted to resume our relationship, and see what he said about that? That could lead in short order to a bedroom, and what would I do then?

Or should I indicate ambiguous feelings, which would allow me to prolong our contact without having to go to bed with him? The problem with that one was, it made it easy for him to get rid of me if he didn’t want to be under close scrutiny. No, the smart thing to do was feign passion and try to get as far inside his guard as I could. Feigning passion is natural for a performer. I could always plead gee-fatigue when things got intense.

But as I watched him eat, watched his slender fingers move, I knew I just could not go through with it. Perhaps it was exactly what he had been doing to me, all those passionate days and nights back in Top Step. But I could not do it to him.

The plates were empty. The second round of Irish coffees arrived. Mine was again denatured. The waiter winked at me for a change.

Well, then? Charge right in or dance around it as long as possible? Cowardice and caution both said to stall. Crazy to risk everything on one roll of the dice. Lots of misdirection first, then slip it in under his guard while he’s trying to figure out how to get into your pants.

“Chen Po Chang?” I said suddenly.

“Yes, Morgan?”

And there it was.

“It was on your tongue, wasn’t it?” That’s it, baffle him with misdirection.

“Yes.”

“Which one got it? Ben, or Kirra?”

“Kirra.”

I nodded. “I just wondered. You knew they’d both be meeting the Harvest Crew.” Under the table, I slid my hand into my handbag. Just the one question left, now. “Why?”

He seemed to think about it, as if for the first time. He started to answer twice, and changed his mind each time. Finally he said, “For my species.”

“For your species.” I seemed to be having trouble with my voice. “And what species would that be? Insect, or reptile?”

“Homo sapiens,” he said calmly. “It’s us or them. Us or Homo caelestis. The universe isn’t big enough for both of us.”

“Why not? What could the two species possibly compete for?”

“Nothing at all. And everything. That’s the point. Here below we scurry about like blind rats in a two-dimensional maze, hungry and thirsty and horny and terrified and alone, fighting like rats for food and power and breeding room and a chance to live before we die. And right over our heads, at the literal top of the hierarchy, there fly the angels, free of everything that plagues us, needing nothing, fearing nothing, looking down with fond amusement at our ape antics. Of course I hate them. Who would not?”

“For God’s sake, this planet would have gone to pieces years ago if it weren’t for—”

“And that too is the point. It would be bad enough if they kept themselves aloof, ignored us in our misery—but how can we not resent their monstrous charity? How long can the human race stand playing the role of the idiot nephew who must be cared for by his betters, the welfare client who has nothing conceivable to offer his benefactors in return? The racial psychic damage which that awareness causes is half the reason the world is so close to hysteria, so angry and self-destructive.”

“So you want to exterminate the hand that feeds you.”

“It may come to that,” he agreed. “Sometimes I think that it might be enough to drive them from human space, to force them far above or below the ecliptic or out beyond Mars where we don’t have to keep seeing them and interacting with them, take their damned Promised Land off somewhere where we don’t have to look at it every day, right overhead, just out of reach.”

“But it’s not out of reach—”

“Oh shit, it is too! If all the Chinese in the world lined up at Suit Camps, how long would it take the last one to pass Top Step? Assuming a sufficient mass of Symbiote could be brought to orbit without pulling Luna out of its track.”

“If the world wanted to, it could build more Suit Camps.”

“And it doesn’t. Most of us know in our guts that Stardancers are just plain inhuman. They’re alien. They’re like ants. They’re a hive-mind. They’re our enemy, and they’ll be a damned hard one to beat.”

“But why do they have to be enemies?”

“Morgan, think, won’t you? Think about that hive-mind. That ‘Starmind.’ I know they breed like hamsters up there, but even after twenty years of it, well over half the minds that make up what they call the Starmind started out as human beings, on Earth, yes?”

“Exactly. They’re our brothers and sisters, or at least our cousins.”

“And how many million years old would you say is the human lust for power? For control? For dominance?”

“But there’s none of that in the Starmind.”

“Exactly. What can ‘power’ mean to a member of a telepathic commune? What is there to control? By what means can dominance be asserted? Mental machinery that has served men for countless generations is useless.” He leaned forward and locked eyes with me. “But I ask you to consider this: that a telepathic group consciousness implies a group subconscious too. Submerged in that Starmind are the instincts of thousands of killer apes, the genetic heritage of the most successful predator ever evolved. Maybe competition and aggression aren’t inherited, maybe they’re not instinct but learned behaviour transmitted to each new generation—maybe the Stardancers born in space, who’ve never known want or fear or envy, are gentle creatures, without the Mark of Cain. But the majority of the Starmind comes from a long line of cutthroats. Human beings weren’t built for Utopia, no matter what weird things may happen to their metabolisms. They know the only thing they could possibly need to fear, must fear, is us, is the rage and envy of the irrational human beings they have to share the Solar System with. They know a clash is inevitable one day, and they’re doing their best to see that they’ll win it. By creating a planet full of helpless welfare dependents. By showering us with gifts that lead us to a place where we need their gifts to survive. They’ve read their Sun Tzu. Don’t you see, they’re killing us with kindness!”

I closed my eyes briefly. I remembered one of my old dance-circle acquaintances, an intellectual snob, a sort of Alexander Woolcott/H.L. Mencken/Oscar Wilde wanna-be, saying, when he heard I was about to go to Top Step, “Stardancers? A society with no corruption, no hypocrisy, no neurosis and total respect for art—and worst of all, they’re willing to let me join? How could I not despise them?” And I had laughed with the others, but privately thought he was a cripple, seeking approval of his deformity.

I felt a sense of unreality, a Through-the-Looking-Glass feeling. In my wildest fantasies of this moment, it had gone much like this, with Robert calmly, rationally explaining why he had blown our friends to plasma. Why is he telling me all this? Surely to God he does not expect that I will nod and say, Damn, you’re right, I hadn’t thought it through, Kirra and Ben just got in the line of fire, guess you can’t make an interplanetary omelet without breaking some eggs, what can I do to help fight the menace of gods who have the nerve to be benevolent?

I met his eyes again. “So you acted selflessly. For the good of humanity.”

He didn’t even shrug. “Of course not. Am I a Stardancer? I acted out of intelligent self-interest, like any sane human.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “If our plans bear fruit, the least of the prizes to be won will be my father’s return from exile to unchallenged power over China.”

“So you put death in Kirra’s sweet mouth.” I slid the Gyrojet from the handbag. My thumb caressed the safety catch. Four darts. One for him, one for me, two surplus.

“Morgan, listen to me: for the first time in human history, total planetary domination is a genuine possibility—and it’s only the first step in the forging of a System-wide empire. The tools are nearly at hand! How many lives, how many betrayals is that worth?”

His eyes were boring into mine. “I have a gun aimed at your belly, Chen Po Chang,” I said softly. I hadn’t meant to warn him.

“I know,” he said just as quietly. “But you’re not ready to use it yet.”

“No. No, I’m not. First I want to know why you’re telling me such weighty secrets. Do you think you can persuade me to join you?”

He hesitated before answering. “No. I wish I could. But you’re a romantic. Because Stardancers look like angels, they must be angels. There’s not enough greed in you for your own good.” He looked bleak. “Oh, but I wish I could!”

“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. A woman at an adjacent table looked round; I lowered my voice again. “What the hell do you care? One day you’ll be Emperor of the Galaxy and you can have the hottest concubines your precious race can produce. I’m a broken down forty-six-year-old has-been dancer you screwed for a few weeks once on assignment.”

This was why I wasn’t ready to shoot him yet. Or at least part of it. I needed to know what, if anything, I had been to him.

For the first time his iron control cracked. Pain showed in his eyes. He looked down at the table. “Screwing you was good cover. You were my target’s roommate. Falling in love with you was stupid. So I was stupid.” He finished his Irish coffee in a single gulp. “I was horrified at how hard it was to leave you. That terrorist bombing was the perfect excuse to cut out, just when I needed it…and it took me half an hour to make up my mind to take advantage of it. I knew there was no way I could take you with me—but it killed me to leave you behind. When I heard your voice on the phone, realized you were here on Earth again, there was a whole five or ten seconds there when I…when I…”

“When you got a hard on, wondering how I am in a gravity field. But now you know I know you for what you are, and how I feel about your cause. So I repeat: why are you admitting everything and telling me your secrets? You have a gun on me too, is that it?”

He shook his head. “I’m unarmed. And no one else will try to kill you. That much influence I have.” He ran a hand nervously through his hair, brushing it back from his eyes, a gesture he’d never had in free fall. “I guess I’m telling you…because I have to. Because I wanted you to know.”

“Pardon me,” a kindly voice said.

A large heavily bearded stranger in a charcoal grey suit was standing at my side, hearty and jovial and avuncular. If they ever remade Miracle on 34th Street with an all-Asian cast, he’d be a finalist for the role of Kris Kringle. “I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing you…but are you Morgan McLeod, the dancer?”

I had danced in San Francisco hundreds of times, had actually achieved more fame here than in Vancouver, where I was “only a local.” “Yes, but I’m afraid this isn’t a good—”

“I won’t disturb you. But please—would you?” He held out a scrap of paper and a pen. “Your work with Morris meant a lot to me.”

The quickest way to get rid of him was to indulge him. I left the Gyrojet on my lap, concealed by the handbag, and signed the stupid autograph. As I handed it back, he took my hand, bent to kiss it—and just as he did so, he turned my hand over, so that instead of kissing the back of it, his full warm moist lips pressed my palm. I felt his tongue flicker momentarily between them. It was an odd, vaguely erotic thing for a man his age to do, with an escort sitting right there across from me. I retrieved my hand hastily. “Thank you very much; you’re very kind. Please excuse us.”

“Of course, Ms. McLeod. Thank you. I have always loved your work.” He turned away.

I turned back to Robert. No, to Po Chang. “All right,” I tried to say to him, “Now I know. Now what?”

It came out, “All eyes down the put go, legs. Blower?”

I blinked and tried again. “Didn’t dog core stable imagine? Both pressure.”

A zipper appeared under his Adam’s apple. It peeled down to his diaphragm, splitting his sternum and spreading his ribs, exposing his pink wet chest cavity. A tiny Negro in a clown suit was clinging desperately to the top of his heart, fighting to stay aboard as it beat and surged beneath him. As I watched, fascinated, he managed to get to his feet and wedge himself into equilibrium between the lungs. He opened a door in the left lung and showed me something awful inside. I turned away in shame. The stranger was still standing there, but he stood ten meters tall now on rippling rainbow legs. His beard was made of worms. I knew he wanted to see me dance, but there wasn’t enough room on the table and the damned local vertical kept changing and there weren’t enough pens.

A little corner of my mind, way in the back, understood what was happening. I had forgotten that these people could kill with their kiss.

Chen Po Chang’s voice came from the far side of the universe, metallic and atonal. “The first one was just chemical. Call it truth serum. But the second one was a nanobandit.”

I reached for my lap, and it wasn’t where I had left it. Everything I found seemed to bend in the wrong directions; some of it felt wet and some of it was sticky to my questing fingers.

“Absorbed through the palm,” he was saying, “one heartbeat to the brain, another second to crack the blood-brain barrier, then it starts secreting.”

I had to find my lap—that was where I had left my gum! Gum? That wasn’t right. Gub? I couldn’t read my own goddamn handwriting. Where the hell was my fucking p-suit? Mist was closing in from all sides—

I beat at the mist, fought for control of my mind. I knew what I had to do. It was necessary to yell as loud and as clearly as possible, “Help me! I have been drugged and they’re going to take me out of here and kill me.” My old friend the waiter would then come and slap them both to death. My body was made of taffy, but I summoned all my will, directed all my desperate energy to making my mouth and tongue firm enough to function, obedient to my command.

“Productive marbles. Didn’t to bite wonder-log with it, the palaces. Curt! Curt!”

The waiter was back. There were four of him. “I’m very sorry, sir,” they all said slyly. “She had quite a few of those Irish coffees before you arrived. Maybe you’d better take her home. Can I call you a cab?”

“No, thank you,” Kris Kringle said. “We have a car outside. We’ll get her home.”

“Both of you? My.” Four eyebrows arched.

“Gunders,” I said, smiling to show I was in mortal danger. “S’ab.”

“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Robert/Po Chang said. His chest was closed up again now, but his face was melting. Never a dull moment with Chen Po Chang. It ran down his chest and formed an oily pool on the table. I tilted my head to see my reflection in it, and suddenly the local gravity changed. The spaceplane was taking evasive action. “Down” was that way. No, that way! No—

Lap dissolve.

Horrid dreams, that went on forever. My body was made of putty, which I twisted into the ugliest shapes I could devise. I butchered an infant, grew an enormous steel penis and raped a child, skinned and ate a living cat, burned a city, strangled a bird, poisoned a planet, masturbated with someone’s severed hand, stepped on a galaxy out of sheer malice, gutted God, gathered everything anywhere that had ever been good or beautiful and defecated on it. My laughter killed flowers, my gaze boiled steel, my touch made the Sun grow cold. I tortured my parents to death, brought them back to life and killed them again, and again, and again. I danced on Grandmother’s face with razor feet for days on end. Throughout all this, horrid little things with leathery wings at the edges of my peripheral vision watched and chittered and cheered me on. A snail kept oozing past, leaving a greasy trail, offering arch aphorisms in a language I could almost understand. My old shrink Alma appeared once, in a hockey uniform, and told me that my trouble was I kept everyone at arm’s length; I needed to open up and let someone love me. I vomited acid on her until she went away, and then cried carbonated tears.

Peace came at last, when the last star in the Universe burned out and the blessed darkness fell all around, like warm black snow in summer.