Starseed

Chapter Six

A company manager I toured Nova Scotia with once summed up that province as follows: “Too many churches; not enough bars.” I’m afraid the same could be said of Top Step.

That overgrown cigar had churches and temples of almost every possible kind in its granite guts, over three dozen, including three different zendos; if I had wanted to do nothing but kûkanzen “sitting” or Rinzai chanting with my free time, I could have. But I’d never been all that committed as a Buddhist—I’d never been fully committed to anything except the dance—and somehow it felt wrong to spend all of my last three months as a human being pursuing no-thought. I intended to do a lot of thinking, before I stepped outdoors and jaunted into a big glob of red goo and opened up my p-suit. I still wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to go through with this.

I tended to spend my free time in one of four places: Solarium Three, Le Puis, my room, and the gym I came to think of as my studio.

Sol Three was a popular hangout for just about everyone in my class, and for some from the two classes ahead of us and some of the staff as well. Not Sol One, where I’d met Harry Stein and three others of The Six: this Solarium was, as its number indicates, all the way round the other side of Top Step. An accidental pun, for that’s the side facing Earth: Sol Three overlooking Sol III. It was more commonly and informally known as the Café du Ciel—a reference I understood the first time I saw its spectacular view.

Have you ever been to New Orleans, to the old French Quarter? Do you know the Café du Monde? You sit outdoors and sip chicoried café au lait, and eat fresh hot beignets smothered with so much powdered sugar you mustn’t inhale while biting, and you watch the world go by. Look one way, and there’s the Mississippi, Old Man River himself, just rolling along. Look another and you’re seeing Jackson Square, another and you’re looking at the French Market. Street buskers play alto sax, or vibes, or clarinet, very well. They say if you sit in the Café du Monde long enough, sooner or later you’ll see everyone you know pass by.

The same is said of the Café du Ciel—and it’s literal truth.

It tended to have a lot of people in it, and it tended to be rather quiet, although there was no rule about noise. There were no buskers there. There were no beignets available either—powdered sugar isn’t practical in free fall—but you could bring a bulb of coffee from the cafeteria. What made the Solarium reminiscent of the Café du Monde was the view.

The scenery was so majestic it was like being in some great cathedral. When the Fireflies originally whisked Top Step from the asteroid belt into High Earth Orbit as their final parting gift to humanity, they picked a polar orbit concentric to the day/night terminator, to keep the big stone cigar in perpetual sunlight. So the Earth we saw from Solarium Three was always half in sunlight and half in darkness, an immense yin-yang symbol. Our orbit was high enough that you could just see the entire globe at once. The slow grandeur of the dance it did I cannot describe, spinning end-on when we were passing over one of the Poles, then seeming to lurch crazily sideways as our orbit flung us toward the Equator and the opposite Pole. A whole planet endlessly executing the same arabesque turn. If you haven’t got graphic software that’ll simulate it, get an old-fashioned globe and see it for yourself, it’s the grandest roller coaster I know, endlessly absorbing. We all felt its pull: there in the big window was everything we were about to say goodbye to.

Second-month Postulants generally seemed to graduate into being attracted more by Solariums One and Four, which faced raw empty space: everything they were about to say hello to. I visited those cubics a few times; they had even more of that cathedral-hush feel. Too much for me, then.

(Only dedicated tanners spent much time in Sol Two—the only true solarium, the one which always faced the Sun—and for them I suppose it must have been Paradise. You could put a spin on yourself, go to sleep, and toast evenly on all sides without effort. But I never got the habit; skin cancer aside, a dancer with a tan is a dancer who’s out of work.)

But sometimes looking at Earth made you want to make noise and have a little fun. So if I wasn’t in Sol Three I could usually be found in Le Puis, our only tavern, where things were livelier.

To serve its several purposes, a tavern should have both places where one can be seen, and places where one cannot be seen. The designer of Le Puis had accomplished this splendidly. Being there was a little like being inside a stupendous honeycomb made of dozens of transparent globes, with a large spherical clearing at the center, in which danced two or three dozen small table-spheres, fuzzy with Velcro. The tables kept perfect station with each other; you could not move one more than a few inches before it maneuvered to correct, with little semivisible squirts of steering gas. (Odorless, I’m happy to report.) The pattern the tables made in space was not a simple grid, more of a starburst effect. You could hang around one of the tables (literally) until you met someone you liked, then adjourn for more private conversation to one of the dozens of surrounding sphericles—a word exactly analogous to “cubicle.” By simply pulling the lips of the door closed, you soundproofed your sphericle. If you found that you wanted to get really private, the walls could be opaqued. It reminded me a little of the private chambers you sometimes find in really first-rate Japanese restaurants, with rice-paper-and-bamboo walls, soft cushions, and a door that sometimes slides open to admit attentive servers, fragrant food, and the chuckle of a nearby fountain.

I was with Kirra on my first visit to Le Puis; I guess it was our third or fourth day in Top Step. As we emerged from the igloo-tunnel that led from the main corridor into the heart of the honeycomb, we were approached by the largest and happiest human being I’ve ever seen, before or since.

“Crikey,” Kirra said, watching him draw near. “Is that—?”

“God, I think it is,” I said. “I should have guessed when I heard the name of this place.”

“Hello, ladies,” the apparition boomed as he came to a halt beside us. He wore an expression of barely contained glee. When he smiled, his cheeks looked like grapefruits. “Welcome to my joint. I got a nice little table for you. If you’ll follow me…” He spun and jaunted gracefully away.

I’ve met a lot of celebrities in my time, but I felt a touch of awe. It was Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous, who used to own Le Maintenant, the Toronto restaurant in which Stardancers Incorporated was founded at the turn of the century. He was every bit as colorful and extraordinary as Charlie Armstead made him sound in the famous Titan Transmission of 1999.

Armstead says Humphrey was very fat when he was a groundhog. But I don’t think he could have been as big then as he was the day I met him. I don’t think you can be that fat in a one-gee field. In free fall, he was as graceful as any ballerina, and moved with stately elegance, like an extremely well-bred zeppelin.

He docked at a table with a good view of the room—even his bulk could not displace the table much—and we docked there too. “Let’s see,” he said to me, “you look to me like a nice dry white wine, maybe a Carrington 2004. And for you,” he said to Kirra, “I got some Thomas Cooper, fresh from Oz. Peanuts and a little sharp cheese and some of those little oyster cracker things, right?” He drifted away, beaming.

He was one of those special people who so obviously love life, so much, that you feel like a jerk for not enjoying it as much as they are. And so you cheer up to about half their level, which is twice as cheerful as you were. And for the next little while, you notice that everyone you talk to seems to be smiling at you.

But how had he known Kirra was from Australia?

“Funny,” I said, “he didn’t look red. But that was exactly what I would have ordered, if he’d given me a chance. If I’d known he had a vintage that good in stock.”

“Me too,” she agreed. “Armstead didn’t lie about that bloke. He reads minds, all right. Without Symbiosis.”

“Natural talent, I guess.”

The airflow in this space was breezier than usual, with the temperature upped just a notch to compensate. I understood why when someone a few tables away lit up a pipe of marijuana. The smell was familiar, pleasant. I hadn’t smoked in years myself, but it reminded me of good times past. Childhood on Gambier Island. The dorms at SFU, and the party on Legalization Day. Motel rooms after performances on the road. Perhaps it was time I took it up again. No, not until after I had mastered zero gee well enough to dance. If then.

Fat Humphrey returned with our drinks in free-fall drinking bulbs, docked on the next table while passing them to us. Kirra’s was three times the size of mine. I’m not much of a drinker; it seemed she was. “How do you do that, Mr. Pappadopolous?” I asked. “Know what we want and how much?”

“Call me Fat. How do you know how much to breathe?”

I gave up. “This is my friend Kirra. I’m Morgan McLeod.”

“Hello, Kirra.” He held out his hand, and when she tried to shake it he took hers and kissed it. She dimpled. The same thing happened to me. “You wouldn’t be the Morgan McLeod that danced Indices of Refraction with Morris, would you?”

I admitted it.

“Goddamn. It’s a pleasure to have you in my joint. You ever see her dance, Kirra?”

“No,” she said.

“Then you one lucky person; you got a treat in store. Get Teena to dig some of her tapes and holos out of the Net for you.”

“I will,” she agreed.

I had never achieved the level of fame of a Baryshnikov or a Drummond, did not often get recognized by someone who was not in the dance world. It was dawning on me that Top Step was a nest of dance lovers.

“You wouldn’t be Kirra from Queensland, wouldja?” he went on. “The singer?” Kirra dimpled and admitted it.

A nest of arts lovers.

“Both of you please be sure you sign my visitors’ book on the way out. Look, I gotta tell this to ev’body comes here the first time: be careful with these.” He produced from somewhere on his person a pair of small mesh bags, and tossed them to us. Peanuts and oyster crackers. A wedge of sharp cheese followed after them. “It ain’t so bad if a little piece o’ cheese gets away from you…but them peanuts and crackers got salt on ’em. Somebody gets one o’ them in the eye, and maybe the bouncer has to go to work. And if you didn’t guess from lookin’ at me, I’m the bouncer.” He shook with mirth at his own joke. We both promised we’d be careful. “Oh, Kirra, one more t’ing. You drinkin’ that beer, an’ you feel like you wanna burp, s’cuse me, but don’t.”

“Why not, Fat?”

“You back on Earth, your stomach got food on the bottom an’ air on top, so you burp, no problem. But up here, the air an’ the food is all mixed together, you see what I mean?”

She frowned. “Thanks, mate. Hey, how about the other direction?”

“No problem there. Lotsa people spend all their time up here fartin’ around.” He shuddered with mirth again. “I’ll come back later and talk, okay? Meanwhile you both have a good time.” He drifted majestically away.

We looked at each other and giggled together. Then we looked down at our drinks and snacks. Twice as many peanuts as oyster crackers. Kirra generally ate twice as much as I did at cafeteria meals. Fat Humphrey magic again.

“Something else, i’nt he?” Kirra said.

“He sure is. All right, out with it: tell me everything about Ben.”

Her face glowed. “Oh, Morgan, i’nt he smashing? I don’t usually fall for a bloke this quick—but oh my, he lights me up. He’s so excited about everything, you know? The least little thing is special to him, and so it makes everything special for you to be around him. You know comin’ here to space wasn’t exactly my idea, I told you that: it just sort of landed on me plate and I took a bite—but Benjamin! He wants it so much, looks forward to it so much, I’m startin’ to get kind of excited about it meself. He explains to me all about how marvelous it’s gonna be, and I can understand it better. I was just thinkin’ of all this as an extra long Walkabout—but he makes it sound like more fun than Christmas.” She took a long swig of ale.

“He is fun to be around,” I agreed. “He’s sort of the backwards of my ex-husband. He had a way of making a good time dull.”

She lowered her voice. “And he’s a champion lover! He does a bit o’ what Fat just did, knows what you want about a second before you know it yourself.”

“Definitely the backwards of my ex.”

“If I hadn’t had to clear out so Robert could get some sleep, I might be there still. Hey, how are you and Robert gettin’ along, then?”

“What the hell is that stuff floating in your beer?”

“What, this? It’s yeast. Thomas Cooper leaves it in, for flavor. Kinda interestin’ the way it swirls about like that: the zero gee saves you havin’ to shake up the bottle to get it off the bottom. Seriously, though, what about you and Robert? I had this lovely idea how handy it’d be if you two hit it off like Ben and me. We could swap roomies and—”

“Whoa!” I said. “Take your time.” Change the subject again? No, deal with it. “I don’t know how I feel about Robert…but I do know I’m not in any hurry. The most important thing on my mind right now is learning how to dance all over again, and that’s all I want to think about until I get it done or it kills me. Robert will have to wait.” Now change the subject. “I wonder how Fat Humphrey manages to decant wine properly in free fall? This is delicious.”

Kirra started to answer, then took a sip of beer instead. “Look, Morgan, answer me this. Are we roommates, or are we friends?”

“Friends,” I answered without hesitation. “I hope.”

“Then listen’a me. There some blokes you can hold at arm’s length and after a while they go away. But I know you, and I’ve seen you with Robert. He’s got a hook in you…just a little one, maybe, but a hook. And you got one in him. You try keepin’ him at arm’s length forever, your arms’re gonna start gettin’ shorter. He ain’t gonna go away. You want to get on with your dancin’, it might be less distraction to just go ahead an’ get it over with, see where it goes an’ get it integrated. Might help to have somethin’ to dance about, eh?”

I don’t remember exactly what mumbled evasion I made. Just then a welcome distraction presented itself: the floorshow began.

Well, not exactly a floorshow. A single performer, a busker, doing an act I would have thought impossible in zero gee: juggling.

Free fall juggling is done barefoot. You do not make the balls or clubs or whatever go in a circle, because they won’t. Instead you make them go in a rectangle. Hand to hand to foot to foot to hand. This particular juggler used orange balls of some resilient material, the size of real oranges. It seemed he was known and liked here; people broke off conversations to watch him and clap along. He had twinkling eyes and a goatee. Except for a G-string, he was barefoot to the eyebrows. He began in a slow motion that would simply not have been possible on Earth, then got faster and faster until the balls began to blur into an orange rectangle in the air before him. He started with four, but keep adding more from a pouch at his waist. I thought I counted as high as sixteen. Then suddenly he changed the pattern, so that they crossed over and back in front of him in an X-pattern, and then went back to a rectangle again. There was applause. He brought his feet up and hands down until the rectangle was a square, then a horizontal rectangle, and returned to the basic position. More applause. Suddenly he had one hand high over his head and the rectangle was a triangle. With the suddenly free left hand he took a joint from his pocket and struck it alight, took a deep puff. Loud applause. He seemed to pay no attention at all to the balls. He took another puff, tossed the joint to the nearest patron, and resumed work with all four limbs. The balls began to ever so gradually slow down, until they were individually distinguishable, and continued to slow. Within a minute he was back in the slow motion he’d started with—yes, there were sixteen balls—and still they kept decelerating. Without warning he flipped over, upside down to his original orientation, without disturbing the stately progress of the balls. Thunderous applause. Suddenly all the balls exploded outward from him, in a spherical distribution. I half-ducked, not one came near me, or anyone else. All sixteen bounced off something harmless and returned to him in almost-unison; he caught them all in his pouch and folded at the waist in a free fall bow. The house came down.

“Teena,” I asked, “how do I tip that juggler five dollars?”

“It’s done, Morgan,” Teena said in my ears. “I’ve debited your account. His name is Christopher Micah.”

He began a new routine involving what seemed to be razor-sharp knives. I didn’t see how he could deal with knives with his feet—and didn’t get to find out that day, because just then there was a small disturbance behind me. Kirra and I turned to look. Micah kept on working, properly ignoring the distraction.

Fat Humphrey was drifting just outside one of the opaqued bubble booths, talking softly to someone inside, who was answering him in too loud a voice. It seemed to be the second-oldest argument in history: the customer wanted more booze and Fat was cutting her off, politely and firmly. I started to turn back to catch Micah’s knife act, when all at once I recognized the voice. It was Sulke.

Everyone else had returned their attention to the show. Kirra and I exchanged a glance and quietly slipped over to see if we could be of help, taking our drinks and munchies with us.

We were. Fat was handicapped somewhat by being an old friend of hers, but because Kirra and I were her students we were able to cheerfully bully her into quieting down. We swarmed into her booth with her, winked at Fat, and sealed the door to keep the noise inside.

“S’not fair, gahdammit,” she complained. “I’m not even near drunk enough.”

Kirra sent a peanut toward her in slow motion. “Catch that.”

She missed in three grabs, then tried to catch it in her mouth and muffed that too. It went up her nose, and she blasted it clear with a loud snort. “I didn’t say I wasn’t drunk. Said I wasn’t drunk enough.”

“For what?” I asked soothingly.

“To fall asleep, gahdammit. This is my one day off a week, the day I catch up on all the sleep I missed, an’ if I fuck up and miss any I’ll never get caught up.”

“How come you gotta be drunker’n this to fall asleep?” Kirra asked.

“Because I’m scared.” She heard the words come out and frowned. “No, I’m not, gahdammit, I’m pissed off is what I am! I’m not scared of anything. But I’m mad as hell.”

“About what?”

She sneered. “Hmmph! How would you know? You groundhogs. You freebreathers. Never paid for an hour’s air in your life, either of you. Where’d you come from, McLeod, North America somewhere, right? Worst come to worst, you could always go on welfare. Kirr’, you could always jungle up and live off the land. There’s no fuckin’ land to live off up here.”

“Rough,” Kirra agreed.

“You don’t know the half of it! Nineteen friggin’ outfits in space I can work for, and eighteen of ’em suck wind. The only place that doesn’t treat you like shit is this one…and now crazy bastards are shootin’ at it.”

“Shooting at it!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

“Aw fer chrissake, you really think the air plant went down last night by accident? You have any idea how many different systems have to fail in cascade before that can happen? You probably think it was space junk put a hole in your Elevator on the way up here, huh?”

I was shocked. “What makes you think it wasn’t?”

“You were there. Did you see the object that hulled you?”

“Well, no. I think it ended up in the Steward’s head.”

She shook her head. “There was nothin’ in Henderson’s head but burned meat. It was a laser. They’re keepin’ it quiet, but a frenna mine saw the hull.”

“But who the hell would want to hurt Top Step?”

She stared. “You serious? Religious fanatics, wanna pull down the false angels and their wicked cosmic orgy. Shiites, Catholics, Fundamentalists, take your pick. Then you got the Chinese, since old Chen Ten Li got tossed out on his ear. Then there’s the other eighteen sonofabitch outfits I tol’ you ’bout, and their parent corporations dirtside. Top Step could outcompete any one of them at what they do, and the only reason it doesn’t is because the Starseed Foundation chooses not to. How could they not all hate this place?”

I thought of the epidemic of food poisoning that had run through Suit Camp just before takeoff. “Jesus.”

She was frowning hugely. “Gahdammit. Not supposed to talk about this shit with you people. Prob’ly get shit for it. Bad for morale. Might get scared an’ go home, kilobucks down’a tube. Forget I said anything, okay?”

“Sure,” Kirra said soothingly.

“Thanks,” Sulke said. “You’re okay, for a freebreather.” She reached out and snatched Kirra’s beer, finished it in a single squeeze.

I placed my own drink unobtrusively behind me, and hoped it would stay there. “Sulke, tell me something. If being a free-lance spacer is really so bad—and I believe you—then why not opt out? Take that last step and become a Stardancer like us? Then you could tell Skyfac and Lunindustries and all the rest to go take a hike.”

She boiled over. “You outa your gahdamn mind? You people are all assholes. Worse than assholes, you’re cowards: solving your problems by runnin’ away from them. You won’t catch me doin’ that shit. Maybe I can’t ever go home again, but at least I’m human! I’ve hung around Stardancers a long time, and by Jesus they ain’t human, and I can’t understand how in hell a human bein’ could deliberately stop being a human bein’. I’ll teach you fools how to swim, but I got nothing but contempt for ya. Nobody gets inside Sulke Drager’s head but Sulke Drager, an’ don’ you forget it, see?”

Like all true spacers, she was a rugged individualist. She was certainly paying a high price to be one in space.

“Do you have to go EVA to get home, Sulke?”

“Crash here on my day off,” she said, eyes beginning to cross. “And even if I did, I can navigate safely in free space when I’m dree times trunker than this. That’s why it’s not fair that fat bastard cut me off.”

“Well, since he did,” Kirra said reasonably, “what do we want to stay around here and class up his place for him, then?”

“Damn right,” I agreed. “Sleep’s too precious to miss on his account. Let’s quit this program.”

Sulke allowed herself to be taken home. Teena guided the three of us to the dormitory where employees crashed. It was basically a cube full of sleepsacks, with minimal amenities and few entertainment facilities. If Top Step was the best of nineteen employers in space, the others had to be pretty bad.

By the time we got back to Le Puis, Micah had finished for the night. But the tenor sax player who’d replaced him was very good, had a big full Ben Webster sound, so we stayed and drank and tipped him, and this time remembered to sign Fat Humphrey’s guest book—in tipsy scrawls—before we left. As we were doing so, he came up beside us. “You handled Sulke real nice,” he said, “and I like her. You two didn’t spend no money in here tonight, you understand?” We thanked him.

Then Kirra went to keep her rendezvous with her bug-eyed lover, and I went off to my gym to work.

To my surprise, the wine helped. This time I managed to set sixteen beats I could stand to watch on replay, and repeat them more or less at will. I was going to beat this! It was even harder than transitioning from ballet to modern had been, and I was no longer in my twenties…but I was going to do it.

It helped me forget the uneasiness that Sulke’s talk of sabotage had put in the back of my mind. I was pretty sure she was wrong, anyway.

Kirra was still out when I got back to our room. I sat kûkanzen for about an hour, watched dance holos for a while in bed, then put on a sleep mask and earphones that played soft music so she wouldn’t wake me when she came in.

Nevertheless I woke an hour or so later. There are no bedsprings to creak in zero gee, and they were probably making an honest effort to be quiet, but Kirra was after all a singer.

I thumbed the sleep mask up onto my forehead.

I can’t claim I was a voyeurism virgin. Dancers generally lead a lively life, and once or twice in my checkered past I had watched live humans go at it—often enough, it had seemed to me. It’s the oldest dance there is, of course, but as a spectator art it palls quickly, once the excitement of taboo-breaking is past.

But I never watched anyone make love, which is different, even to a mere witness.

Let alone in zero gee, which changes things.

They were beautiful together, moving in slow joyous unison, singing a soft, wordless song in improvised harmony, flexing together inside their sleepsack like a single beating heart.

A host of emotions ran through my mind. Annoyance that they were being so impolite, followed by the thought that in a few months I would be “in the same room with” thousands of love-making people, that soon none of us would ever again make love in private, that dealing with this disturbing situation was the best possible rehearsal I could have for what was to come, that if I couldn’t deal with two friends making love three meters away, I’d never be able to deal with forty-odd thousand strangers making love inside my skull…

…and I couldn’t get around the fact that watching them was turning me distinctly on. I had to deal with that, and with the fact that I was staring as much at Kirra as at Ben, and with jealousy of Kirra, and with the way my own growing arousal wanted me to get up and go find Robert and fuck his brains out, and with how another part of me that I didn’t understand wouldn’t let me do that, and it was hard to think about any of this stuff when I was getting horny enough to bark, and finally my hand crept down to my clitoris and began to move in slow circles, and as they increased in speed I realized with shock that Ben, unlike most men, had not taken his glasses off to copulate—

—his 360° vision glasses!

I froze in embarrassment for a long moment…and then I told myself he was too busy to pay attention to what was going on behind his back—no, I told myself the hell with it—and finished what I had started.

Eventually so did they. And then I think all three of us fell asleep. I know I did, feeling more relaxed than I had since I’d left Earth.

The next day the three of us discussed it over breakfast—Kirra brought it up, asking if they’d awakened me—and after some talk we agreed to be the kind of friends who can be that intimate among one another. It was something new for me, and a bit of a stretch: I’d never allowed anyone to observe me in ecstasy before except the one who was causing it. But in the days that followed I came to find it quite pleasant and natural to read a book, or watch TV, while Kirra and Ben made love a few meters away…and more than once the sight inspired me to pleasure myself. Kirra and Ben were delighted with this state of affairs, as it gave them a convenient place to make love whenever they wished—it seemed Robert was more inhibited, and so it was less comfortable for them in Ben’s room.

I think it’s different for men, harder to watch and not participate, harder to let yourself be watched. For some of them masturbating seems to represent a kind of defeat in their minds. Sad.

Those first few days in Top Step pretty much set the pattern for the next four weeks…to the extent that there was a pattern. Meals and classes loosely defined the day, but we had great slabs of unstructured free time after both morning and afternoon class, and our evenings, to spend as we wished—piefaced in Le Puis if that was what we chose.

One thing we all did was swap life stories. There’d been no time to do so back at Suit Camp, where every spare minute was spent studying or undergoing tests. I can’t recall how many times I told my own story until everyone had heard it. One common theme that ran through the stories I heard in return was technological obsolescence. Just as the automobile had once ruined the buggy whip trade, the recent enormous strides in nanotechnology (made with much help from the Starseed Foundation) had made a lot of formerly lucrative occupations superfluous. Suddenly a lot of white-collar workers found themselves facing the same dilemma as a dancer or an athlete in her forties: should I start life over from square one, or opt out of the game altogether? Quite a few of them chose Symbiosis.

Another common topic of conversation was politics, but—and I know you’ll find this hard to believe, for I did—political discussions somehow never once degenerated into arguments. Even in the first weeks, we were starting to find all political differences of Earthbound humans less and less relevant to anything in our own lives—and the tendency increased with time.

I’d expected to work harder than this. I said as much to Reb one day during class, sometime during the first week. “I guess I just pictured us all spending most of our time…working.”

“At what, Morgan?”

“I don’t know, studying concrete stuff we’ll need when we’re Stardancers. Solar system navigation, ballistics, solar sailing, astronomy, uh, zero-gee engineering and industry, nanotechnology, picotechnology—things like that.” There was a murmur of agreement from the others in the class.

“You may study any of those, if you wish,” he said. “Some of you are doing so, on your own initiative. But it’s not necessary. Studying data, memorizing facts, is not necessary. You won’t need those facts until you become a Stardancer and join the Starmind…and then you’ll have them. That’s the beauty of telepathy.”

He was right, of course. The instant I entered Symbiosis, I’d be part of the group consciousness Reb called the Starmind. I’d have total access to the combined memories of all living Stardancers, something over forty thousand minds. Anything they knew, I would know, when and if I needed to know it.

As they would know everything I knew…

You can be told about something like that a thousand times, and remind yourself a million…and still you just can’t get your mind around it, somehow.

“What you need to study,” Reb continued, “is not facts…but attitude, a flexible mindset, so that encompassing that much scope doesn’t destroy you. That’s why meditation is the best work you can do.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘destroy’?” a woman named Nicole asked. I thought: what a dumb question.

Reb brightened. “A good question.”

“I think so,” Nicole agreed. “I know the odds of failure—I passed the exam like everybody. One percent of those who enter Symbiosis suffer what they called ‘catastrophic mental trauma.’ But I don’t know what that means. I mean, they explained it to me back dirtside—but I need somebody to explain the explanation. Can somebody’s mind really…well, collapse, from having forty thousand other minds suddenly crash in on it?”

There was nervous laughter.

Reb did not smile. “Sometimes,” he said.

The laughter died.

“Those forty thousand minds do not all come crashing in at once…but the significance of their existence does. Some minds find that intolerable.”

“What happens to them?” Nicole asked.

“What happens when a star implodes?” Reb replied.

“Depends on how massive it is,” someone said.

Reb nodded. “It is much the same with a panicked ego. Whether it can survive telepathic union depends on how massive it is.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think of a mind which has never loved,” Reb said. “It knows that it is the center of the Universe, the only thing that is truly real, that matters. Then its body swallows some mysterious red gunk, and WHACK! Suddenly it knows better. The walls of its skull drop away; for the first time ever, it is naked. Observed…no, more; touched…in its most intimate chinks and crannies by forty thousand strangers. Mind sees Starmind, and knows its own true smallness. By all accounts it is a terrifying realization.”

This was exactly what I had been trying to imagine for weeks. Could I live with that much truth? Did I have the courage to be that naked? To let that big audience come swarming over the stage?

“Now sometimes an ego is so entrenched in itself that it refuses to yield the floor, will not love nor be loved. It rejects what it perceives—incorrectly—as a threat to its identity. Mad with fear, it seeks escape, and there is nowhere to go but inward. It implodes like a collapsing star, literally an ego deflating. Most often it shrinks down to a small hard dense core, like a neuron star. Invisible. Invulnerable. It must hurt terribly. Such catatonics can sometimes be saved, healed. With time. With skill. Many wise and compassionate minds work nonstop to do so; so far they have a discouraging success rate.”

He had our total attention.

“But once in a long while, an imploding star is so massive, it collapses past the point where it can exist. It leaves our Universe, becomes a black hole. Similarly, if an ego is massive enough, it may react to telepathic union by collapsing past the point where it can sustain itself. It suicides rather than surrender. It simply…goes away. The flame blows out. You could say it dies. What is left is a very long-lived humanoid with the mind of a plant or a starfish. These few are placed in stable orbits, and they are. . .” He paused. “Uh, ‘cherished’ is closer than ‘mourned,’ I think. By the rest of the Starmind.”

“What’s the ratio of deaths to comas?” Nicole asked.

“About one to a hundred. Roughly the same as the overall ratio of failures to successes.”

You could hear gears grinding as she tried to work out the arithmetic. Several seconds passed. “So out of every thousand people who eat red—”

“Out of every ten thousand who attempt Symbiosis, ninety-nine will go into stasis, and one will die,” he told her. “Approximately. In fact there have been eight deaths, and five hundred and eighty-seven catatonics, of whom fifty-three have been healed so far…and an additional six have died.”

There was a glutinous silence in the room.

Not that many of us, or even any of us, were surprised. Nicole may have been the only person in the room to whom these figures were news. I certainly knew them; it seemed to me that anyone who had come this far without knowing them was an idiot. But they were sobering statistics just the same.

And, it was just dawning on me for the first time that the Starmind, as Reb called it, the telepathic community I was proposing to join, did not discriminate against people I considered idiots. I was dismayed by how dismayed that made me. Me, an intellectual snob? Apparently.

“Look on the bright side,” Reb said. “You are five hundred times more likely to die during training, before you ever get to Symbiosis. Die completely, soul and body, in some EVA accident. And you’re two hundred times more likely to suffer serious mental breakdown and be sent dirtside.”

Now, there were some grim figures. Out of every hypothetical standard class of one hundred, an average of five died before ever attempting Symbiosis…and two went seriously nuts from brooding about it. I’d read about one class, back in the early days of Top Step, where nearly half had died, most of them in a single ghastly accident.

Then there was the drop-out rate to be considered. An average of twelve in every class changed their minds and went home—often at the last minute. Another five balked: when three months were up, they decided not to decide. The Foundation would let you hang around Top Step as long as you wanted…if you were willing to work for your air, and had a job skill they needed at the time. After eleven more months—if you were still alive—your body was permanently, irrevocably adapted to zero gee: you had to either sign on with the Foundation permanently—if they would have you—or else become part of the permanent-transient population of spacers, like Sulke. Or, of course, get off the dime and eat Symbiote.

“But if you survive long enough to attempt Symbiosis,” Reb went on, “your chances of success are much higher than those of, say a pregnant woman to birth successfully. The kind of mind that will collapse when exposed to telepathy tends not to come here to Top Step at all. Either it never applies, or we filter it out in the preselection stage, or it drops out during Suit Camp.”

“So why go through two or three months of preparation?” Nicole asked. “I read that some people have become Stardancers without it.”

“Because experience has shown it eases the transition,” Reb said patiently. “At best, Symbiosis is painful…one Stardancer likened it to a turtle having its shell ripped away…but those who have had the training agree it helps enormously. If you can learn to live without the false distinctions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ you probably can learn to live with the equally false distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘not-me.’ ”

“So why so much free time, why aren’t we working all the time?” Nicole wanted to know.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nicole!” Glenn blurted. By this time I was so annoyed with Nicole’s broken-record questioning myself that I grunted in agreement.

Reb looked at me. “You cannot think Nicole’s question is foolish, Morgan. You asked it yourself a minute ago.”

You blush easier in free fall, and more spectacularly.

“But it is foolish, nonetheless,” he went on gently. “You are working all the time, Nicole. Everyone is, everyone everywhere. You can’t help but keep working. Didn’t you know that?”

She looked confused.

“Nicole, I could have uncommon intuition and insight, and spend every minute of the next two months in your company, and still I would not know a tenth as much as you do about what you need to learn now, and what is the best way for you to learn it. Even Fat Humphrey’s kind of ‘telepathy’ doesn’t go that deep. That’s why we try to make sure you’ll have lots of so-called ‘free’ time here, to work on it without being distracted. There isn’t a lot of time left before you will have to make a big decision, and we don’t want your schooling to get in the way of your education.”

“But what are we supposed to do with all this free time?”

“You will know,” Reb told her. “You will know.”