Stardance

I

Saturn burned ocher and brown against an aching blackness so vast it was barely interrupted by the cold light of a billion billion suns.

We danced as we jetted through that blackness, almost without thinking about it. We were leaving human life behind, and we danced our leaving of it. Essentially each of us created our own Stardance, and the great empty cosmic hall rang with Raoul’s last symphony. Each dance was individual and self-complete; each happened to mesh with the other three and with the music, in a kind of second-level statement; and although all of these were conceived without any perceived constraints of time or distance, Harry’s over-awareness saw to it that all five works of art happened to end, together, before the aliens. It was always Harry who made us meet our deadlines.

None of this was taped. Unlike Shara’s Stardance, this was not meant to be witnessed. It was meant to be shared, to be danced.

But it was witnessed. The Starseeders (aliens they were not) writhed in something analogous to applause as we hung before them, gasping for breath, savoring the feel of the last sweat we would ever know.

We were no longer afraid of them.

YOU HAVE MADE YOUR CHOICE?

Yes.

IT WILL BE A FINE BIRTHING.

Raoul hurled his Musicmaster into deep space. Let it begin without delay.

AT ONCE:

There was an excitement in their dance, now, an elemental energy that somehow seemed to contain an element of humor, of suppressed mirth. They began a pattern that we had never seen before, yet seemed to know in some cellular fashion, a pattern that alternated between the simple and the complex, without ever resolving. The Harry part of our mind called it “the naming of pi,” and all of us raptly watched it unfold. It was the most hypnotic pattern ever dreamed, the dance of creation itself, the most essential expression of the Tao, and the stars themselves seemed to pay attention.

And as we stared, transfixed, the semivisible sphere around the Starseeders began for the second time to weep bloody tears.

They coalesced into a thin crimson ring about the immense sphere, then contracted into six orbiting bubbles.

Without hesitation we each jetted to a bubble and plunged inside. Once we were in, we skinned out of our p-suits and flung them at the walls of our bubbles, which passed them out into space. Raoul added his glasses. Then the bubbles contracted around and into and through us.

Things happened on a thousand different levels, then, to all six of me; but it is Charlie Armstead who is telling you this. I felt something cool slide down my throat and up my nostrils, suppressed gag reflex with free-fall training, thought briefly of Chen Ten Li and the ancient Chinese legends of edible gold that brings immortality—felt suddenly and forever a total awareness, knowledge, and control of my entire body and brain. In a frozen instant of timelessness I scanned my life’s accumulation of memories, savored them, transmitted them in a single sending to my family, and savored theirs, Simultaneously I was employing eyes that now registered a wider spectrum to see the universe in greater depth, and simultaneously I was playing the keys of my own internal sensorium, tasting crisp bacon and Norrey’s breast and the sweet taste of courage, smelling woodsmoke and Norrey’s loins and the sweet smell of caring, hearing Raoul’s music and Norrey’s voice and the sweet sound of silence. Almost absentmindedly I healed the damage to my hip, felt complete function return as if it had never been gone.

As to happenings on a group level, there is not much I can tell you that will mean anything. We made love, again almost absent-mindedly, and we all felt together the yearnings toward life in Linda’s belly, felt the symbiote that shielded her body make the same perception and begin preparing its own mitosis. Quite consciously and deliberately, Norrey and I conceived a child of our own. These things were only incidentals, but what can I tell you of the essentials? On one major level we shared each other’s every memory and forgave each other the shameful parts and rejoiced in all the proud parts. On another major level we began what would become an ongoing lifespan symposium on the meaning of beauty. On another we began planning the last details of the migration of Man into space.

A significant part of us was pure-plant consciousness, a six-petaled flower basking mindlessly in the sunlight.

We were less than a kilometer from the Starseeders, and we had forgotten their very existence.

We were startled into full awareness of our surroundings as the Starseeders once again collapsed into a single molten ball of intolerable brilliance—and vanished without a good-bye or a final sending.

They will be back, in a mere few centuries of realtime, to see whether anybody feels ready to become a firefly.

In shinned surprise we hovered, and, our attention now focused on the external universe, saw what we had missed.

A crimson-winged angel was approaching us from the direction of Saturn’s great Ring. On twin spans of thin red lightsail, an impossible figure came nearer.

Hello, Norrey, Charlie, the familiar voice said in our skulls. Hi Tom, Harry. Linda and Raoul, I don’t know you yet, but you love my loved ones—hello.

Shara! screamed six voiceless brains.

Sometimes fireflies pick up a hitchhiker.

But how—?

I was more like an incubator baby, actually, but they got me to Titan alive. That was my suit and tanks you saw burning up. They were desperate and overeager, just as they said. I’ve… I’ve beenwaiting in the Ring for you to make your decision. I didn’t want to influence its outcome.

The Snowflake that was me groped for “words.”

You have made a good marriage, she said, you six.

Marry us! we cried.

I thought you’d never ask.

And my sister swarmed into me and we are one.

That is essentially the whole of this story.

I—the Charlie Armstead component of “I”—began this work long ago, as an article for magazine and computer-fax sale. So much nonsense had been talked and written about Shara that I was angry, and determined to set the record straight. In that incarnation, this manuscript ended with Shara’s death.

But when I was done, I no longer needed to publish the article. I found that I had written it only to clarify things in my own mind. I withheld it, and hung on to the manuscript with the vague idea of someday using it as a seed for my eventual memoirs (in the same spirit in which Harry had begun his Book: because someone had to and who else was there?). From time to time, over the next three years, I added to it with that purpose in mind, “novelizing” rather than “diarizing” to spare the trouble of altering the manuscript later. I spent a lot of the year of Siegfried’s outward flight in writing and revising the total, bringing the history up to the point where Chen Ten Li took his first space walk, a few weeks out of Saturn.

All of the subsequent material has been written in a single half-day “sitting,” here at the Die’s computer terminal. I have been limited only by the physical speed at which the terminal’s heat-sensitive “keys” can disengage. As I write, other parts of me drift through eternity. We make love. We worship. We sing. We dance. Endlessly we are each other, yet are ourselves. I know it does not seem that this could be: that is why I have chosen to tell my story by completing Charlie’s memoirs (while Sham, approving, reads over my shoulder from a hundred klicks away). I want you to know that Charles Armstead has not been dissolved or diluted into something alien. In no sense have I died. I never will. It would be more accurate to say that I am Charlie Armstead to the seventh power. At long last I have managed to destroy the phone company, and great is my glee. I still choreograph dances with Norrey and Shara and the others, still swap abominable multilevel puns with Raoul (right now he’s singing an old ’40’s love song, “I May Never Come Back to Earth Again”), still taste in my mind (where I always did) the smell of fine coffee, the bite of strong drink, the flavor of good grass. The distance between me and you is only time and changes. Once I was a bitter, twisted cripple, poisoning the air around me; now I know no evil because I know no fear.

I have spent the minuscule fraction of energy to complete this manuscript because Bill Cox is preparing to blast for Terra (he’ll be back) and it must go now if ever.

This news will not fit into any diplomat’s laser message, nor will even those extraordinary men and women be able to express it as I can.

I am Charlie Armstead, and my message to you is: The stars can be even yours.