Starmind

4 The Shimizu Hotel, High Orbit 2 December 2064

Jay Sasaki was in the studio when his AI spoke up. “Phone, Jay: your brother, Rand, flatscreen only.” It waited patiently while he finished a movement phrase for the camera and toweled off sweat.

“Thanks, Diaghilev,” he said then. “Monochrome head-shot, minimum audio, accept.” It was the cheapest possible earth-to-orbit call, small black-and-white image and rotten sound, probably relayed on a satellite circuit so old its expiry date began with “19.” Rand would have been offended if Jay had tried to reverse the charges—and it was not yet settled whether his kid half-brother could afford to make fullscreen color calls to High Earth Orbit on his own dollar. Jay spoke before the AI finished producing an image, to let Rand know the circuit was completed. “Well, how did she take it?”

“She’s right here,” Rand said. “Ask her yourself.” He swiveled the carphone so that Rhea came into frame. She was smiling wryly.

“ ‘Oops,’ he said gracefully,” Jay said. “Hi, Rhea. Well, how did you take it?”

“Rectally,” she said sourly.

The joke cued him—first, that Rand would indeed be coming back up to work in the Barn… and second, that it would not be a good idea to sound too delighted just yet. Was Rhea coming up with him right away? Was Colly? “You’ll really like it up here, I promise you,” he said experimentally.

“I’d better.”

Good. Rand would arrive still married. “And Colly will love it. Space was made for kids.”

“It must be,” she said. “You like it.” But she was smiling.

He relaxed, trying not to let the extent of his relief show. The worst that could happen now was that his half-brother’s wife would make Rand’s life miserable to the end of his days. But he’ll be able to work with me again! It would take a lot of the sting out of Ethan not being around anymore…

“We’re going to give it a trial period,” Rand said. He swiveled the phone again so that he was back in frame. “Two months, so Rhea and Colly can check it out before they commit themselves.”

Jay managed to hold his poker face. Fortunately, in zero gravity one’s face does not pale as blood pressure drops. If Rhea left in two months, Rand would go with her. With the example of Jay’s own disaster with Ethan before him, Rand would not risk losing her in a long-distance marriage. Kate was going to have a blowout when she heard this. “That’ll be hard to sell to the Board. They want this settled. Face, you know.”

“I’ve got face too,” Rand said. “I require notice before uprooting my family. If the Board doesn’t like it, they can start running want ads in the trades.”

Briefly, Jay fantasized telling his brother the whole truth. The primary reason the Board had abandoned the audition process and chosen Rand as their shaper was that Jay—feeling reckless in the aftermath of his breakup with Ethan—had privately sent word through the hotel manager that he would quit if they did otherwise. He had just enough clout to pull that off… and no margin at all: if the hotel came out of this looking bad, he was out of a job. He was the most famous living human choreographer of free-fall dance—but if he left the Shimizu, where could he go? There were only two other dance companies in space, and neither was hiring. Jay had been a spacer, permanently adapted to zero gravity, for over a decade now: if he could not work in space, he could not work—even if he could have learned to think and choreograph in up-and-down terms all over again.

No—he couldn’t tell Rand any of this. If he did, Rand would think—would suspect in his heart forever, no matter what Jay said—that Jay had put his job on the line purely and simply because they shared a mother. Rand would never believe the truth: that he was truly the only one of the four candidates who was any damn good, the only one Jay could stand the idea of being locked into working with for the next umpty years. The hole in his self-confidence would founder him. And the realization that Jay’s job was on the line would make his problem with his wife even worse.

Well, it was up to Jay to see that Rhea didn’t opt out. His other choice was to slit his throat. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll make them see it that way. Shall I call you back with their answer?”

Rand shook his head. “We both know they’re going to say yes. I can afford to call you now. Full-band color.”

Jay let the grin escape at last. His brother was right. Kate would hate this—but she was committed. As committed as he was. “Damn right. Call me back at… what the hell time is it down there?”

“About ten in the morning.” The Shimizu was on Greenwich Time; it was nearly 3 PM for Jay.

“… at about suppertime. Listen, I don’t want to crowd you, but… how soon can you come up? The sooner you can make it, the less trouble I’ll have selling this trial period.”

Rand acquired the harried look of someone who is trying to solve a tricky problem while long-distance charges are ticking away. He glanced sideways. “What do you think, hon?”

After a time, Rhea’s voice came from out of frame. “Three days, minimum. I’d like a month. I’d like a year, dammit.”

“I think I can get three days, no sweat,” Jay said cheerfully.

Rand tried for a diversion. “Anything we can bring up for you?”

“If I think of anything, I’ll tell you when you call back.” He gave the phone his best grin. “Listen, this is really great news. Really, Rhea—you’ll see! Kiss Blondie for me. Phone off.” As Rand’s smiling image dissolved, he went on, “Diaghilev, where’s Kate?”

“In her office, Jay. Do you wish an appointment to see her? She has an opening in her calendar tomorrow at—”

“No, I want her now. She’ll see me. ETA fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, Jay. You’re right: Ms. Boswell has accepted for her. Fifteen minutes from… mark.”

“Shower please, Diaghilev.”

“Yes, Jay.”

The studio shower accepted and cleansed him; ten minutes later he was dry, shaved, groomed and jaunting along the corridors of the Inner Sphere, heading inboard toward Katherine Tokugawa’s executive office in the Core.

Heads turned as he floated past, but only one of the hotel guests had the nerve to call out to him. “Hello, Jay. You look happy—good news?”

Jay made a long arm and grabbed a jaunt-loop, braked himself to a halt. His boss would have a fit if she ever heard that a mere guest had learned news of this importance before she did—but Eva Hoffman was more than just a guest: she had been a resident fixture in the Shimizu for sixteen years now. He glanced around mock-conspiratorially. “Are you sure those are your original eyes?”

Eva grinned. She was one hundred sixteen years old, and showed most of them—having, most unusually, given up controlling her appearance on her hundredth birthday. She drew stares everywhere she went in the Shimizu these days… the most horrified of them coming from those guests whose own odometers had rolled past zero. “Thirty years ago I’d have known exactly why you were looking happy, at twice the distance. So your brother’s coming back up to stay, eh? Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’m excited.”

“Me too. You two do good work together. Pribhara was a waste of air.”

“She… had her own way of doing things.”

“Yeah. Wrong. Would you like me to take charge of his wife and daughter? What’s her name, Spaniel?” Eva, of course, knew perfectly well what Colly’s name was. “Help them get reoriented to free-fall, their first day, show ’em around the Mausoleum, and all that, so that you and Rand can get right down to work?”

He was touched by the offer. Eva was a Shimizu institution, and she did not offer her time lightly or often. She was one of very few guests who knew her way around the place as well as Jay, who did not need to follow some AI’s trail of blinking lights to get where she was going. “I think I’ve got that covered,” he said. “But if they do need more help, I’ll know where to come. Thanks, Eva.”

She looked dubious. “Who have you got in mind?” Eva had a low opinion of most of the Shimizu’s staff Orientators—which Jay shared.

“The new kid. Iowa.”

“Seen him a couple of times; don’t know him.”

“He’s a natural. Spaceborn.”

That interested her. “Is that good? Will he know what it is they don’t know?”

Jay nodded. “He’s been dealing with mudfeet all his life, one way or another. The ones here are just richer, that’s all. I think he and Colly are really going to hit it off.”

“I’ll have to meet him. I always wanted to get to know a spaceborn.”

Diaghilev cleared his virtual throat. “One minute, Jay.”

Jay was still in Deluxe country—the cheapest of the Shimizu’s accommodations, the inner-sphere suites with no windows onto space. It was time to jaunt. “I’ve got to go. Uh… look, keep this absolutely top secret for, oh, at least another fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Twelve, my final offer.”

“Okay, I’ll talk fast.” He kissed her wrinkled cheek and pushed off.

“Drop by for a chat before dinner, all right?” she called after him. “Something I want to ask you.”

He waved agreement without looking back.

He passed quickly through the rest of the Deluxe Tier to the inmost core, jaunted past his own suite without stopping, and reached the executive offices on time. Warned of his arrival by Diaghilev, Tokugawa’s own AI had materialized its Personal Executive Assistant persona for him, rather than the Front-Desk Clerk avatar it would have shown to a guest. “Good afternoon, Mr. Sasaki,” she said. Her voice was oddly flat and nasal, perhaps in an attempt to make her seem real.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Boswell.”

“Ms. Tokugawa will see you now.” The door to the inner sanctum dilated.

Jay jaunted through it, brushing the doorway with his fingertips to decelerate himself to a stop inside.

Katherine Tokugawa was sitting kukanzen in the center of her spherical office, dressed in black ceremonial robes, her back to him. At the sound of the door hissing shut behind him, she unlaced her fingers, unfolded her legs from lotus, and flexed at the waist, rotating until she faced him. He politely spun until their local verticals matched, and they exchanged a bow. Then they each “took a seat,” in the free-fall sense of the term, giving a short puff with their thrusters so that they backed away from each other and velcroed their backs and buttocks to opposing surfaces, Jay maneuvering to avoid sitting on the door he had just come through; they sat more or less simultaneously.

“Well?” she said then, in the slow exhalation of one emerging from profound meditation.

It was all bullshit, of course, and Jay knew it. If she had really been meditating, she’d have velcroed herself to a wall or some other support. A person who sits kukanzen in the center of a room in zero gee, unsecured, sooner or later ends up bumping against the air-exhaust… and shutting down the airflow only causes a ball of exhaled carbon dioxide to accumulate and smother the meditator. The Manager of the Shimizu was—as the job called for—one of those people who prize appearance over content, style over substance, and Rinzai Buddhism was merely part of her admittedly impressive act. To have actually practiced it would have been an inefficient use of time.

But Jay was not about to let his boss know he saw through her. Not when he was about to piss her off. He slowed his breathing, adjusting to her rhythm. “My brother said yes,” he told her.

She smiled wearily.

Tokugawa—he dared not let himself think of her as “Kate” while in her presence—was a hundred and sixty centimeters long, and massed forty-six kilos. In free-fall her small size had the effect of making her seem to be a little farther away than she actually was. Which made her seem just a little more crisply in focus than other people. She had stabilized her apparent age at forty standard years, with silver streaks in her hair that were in different places each time you met her. Jay had no idea what her real age might be. She was the granddaughter of Yoji Tokugawa, who had succeeded Bryce Carrington as Chairman of the Board of the original Skyfac consortium back before the turn of the millennium, and her family still controlled a large share of space industry today. She had their “look of eagles,” backed by a competence that few Tokugawas actually possessed anymore: she looked so much like the Manager of the finest hotel in human space that her genuine fitness for the job was almost a happy accident. Neither attribute particularly impressed Jay, but then, he had to work for her.

“Good,” she said quietly. “It was about time for something to go right.”

“Troubles, Ms. Tokugawa?” Jay asked, testing the waters to see just how bad a time this was to bring up the matter of the two-month escape clause Rand wanted.

She made a flicking-away gesture. “Not really. Just an infinity of minor nuisances.”

“How minor? Is the house still pressurized?”

“For the moment,” she replied drily. “No, nothing serious. I’ve got a major economic summit coming up next month, with so much weight I’m going to have to double security, and—”

“Excuse me, I could have sworn you just said you were going to double security.”

“I did.”

Jay stared. “There is no such quantity. You can’t double infinity. God isn’t as secure as a Shimizu guest.”

She grimaced. “If He had security like those five are going to have, Satan would never have gotten off a speech, much less a coup attempt. Their combined resources are…” She paused, and Jay waited, curious to hear what word she would choose. “… impressive,” she finished, and he repressed an impulse to lift his eyebrows. Any personal fortune that impressed Katherine Tokugawa staggered Jay. “If they ask me to, I’ll have to taste-test their food myself—or anything else they want.”

“That does sound like a lot of pressure.”

“Special diets, special requirements, protocol headaches—the Muslim needs to know where Mecca is at all times, precisely, and the Chinese wants me to have that Soto Zen roshi flown in from Top Step to do dokusan with him, and as for the American—well, never mind what she’ll want—and of course each and every one of them must be honored and coddled and pampered precisely as much as the other four, to the tenth decimal, never mind that it’s apples and—” She caught herself, glanced down at her meditation robes, and took a long cleansing breath. “Never mind any of it. It’s par for the course these days. And not your pidgin. About your brother—any problems I should be aware of?”

Jay’s turn to take a deep breath. “One potential glitch… but I’ll make sure it doesn’t express. Don’t even give it a thought.”

“Fine. What am I not thinking of?”

“He says he wants a two-month trial period. He’ll finish out Pribhara’s season—but if his wife and daughter don’t like it up here, he’ll quit then.”

Her eyes closed momentarily, and the ghost of a frown chased across her brow; those were the only external signs she gave. Those who choose style over substance are compelled to stay with style no matter how tough it gets. But Jay knew she was furious. And here he was, a convenient and fully qualified target…

“Why couldn’t his family have come up with him the last time?” she asked quietly.

“His wife was on deadline and couldn’t leave her desk for more than a few days,” Jay reminded her. “She’s a writer. Remember, they thought he had at least two more seasons—two more years—before the Board would make a final choice… and only a twenty-five percent chance it’d turn out to be him.”

Tokugawa had her hands clasped in the kukanzen mudra—but now she was unconsciously twiddling her thumbs. The effect was so ludicrous that he knew she would be even angrier if she became aware of it; he concentrated his gaze on her eyes. “True,” she admitted grudgingly. “We are rushing him. His demand is reasonable. But if his wife decides she’s a groundhog, the house loses face. Damn Pribhara—this is her fault.”

Privately he disagreed. Pribhara could not help being a perpendicular. None of those poor unfortunates could. If anything, the situation was the fault of the Shimizu’s Board of Directors, for not simply picking a shaper. The three-year rotating audition scheme had always seemed crackbrained to Jay; something like this had been bound to happen. But his advice had been ignored, and now was not the time to mention it. The blame looked better on Pribhara than it did on him…

“I’d better call in Martin,” she said. “I hate speaking to the man, but this is his pidgin. Maybe he can…” Her voice trailed off disconsolately.

Jay empathized completely. Even for a PR man, Evelyn Martin was a weasel; you wanted to bathe after talking with him on the phone. But he was gifted at spin control—

A metaphorical lightbulb seemed to appear over Jay’s head.

“You’re not looking at this right,” he said suddenly. “This isn’t bad news—it’s mitigated good news. All it takes is a little spin control.”

“Explain.”

“Look, all Martin’s press release has to say is that Pribhara has canceled for medical reasons, and that Porter has graciously consented to fill out her term. At the end of two months, maybe you have to announce that Porter has dropped out too, and let Choy and Mazurski carry on competing from there—a minor kerfluffle. But most likely his wife and kid will love this place as much as everyone else does—so you announce then that he’s been given the final position and has accepted. Either way, none of the Board’s face is lost.”

“Your brother would accept that? Not announce that we’ve picked him as the final winner until he’s committed himself? And not announce that at all, ever, if he decides to opt out?”

“Gladly, I think. It gets him out of an impossible situation too.” He had a rush of brains to the head. “But you should bump him to the permanent salary right away.”

Her thumbs stopped twiddling. “Done. Mr. Cohn!”

Her AI materialized its lawyer-persona between her and Jay, facing both of them. As always, Mr. Cohn reminded Jay of an impossibly motionless shark. “Yes, ma’am?”

She gave instructions for the amendment of Rand’s contract, relying on Cohn’s legal software to translate her wishes from conversational English into Lawyerese, and spoke her signature. At Jay’s suggestion, she had Cohn upload a copy to Diaghilev so that Jay could pass the document on to Rand later that night. Then she dismissed the AI and turned back to Jay. “Sasaki?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve earned your air today.”

He smiled; the first sincere smile of the day. He felt as if he had just successfully matched orbits by eyeball, without a computer—a terrestrial analogy might be walking a tightrope over an abyss. “Always nice to hear. I’ll let you get back to your meditation.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But first, your reward. You get to tell Martin about all this.”

He grimaced. “It’s true, then; no good deed goes unpunished.”

“Except those committed by Stardancers. They seem to be exempt.”

“That’s an idea,” he said. “I’ll go out the airlock without a suit.”

“ ‘In space,’ ” she said, seeming to be quoting something, “ ‘no one can hear you scream.’ Please yourself—but see Martin first.”

Jay sighed. “Yes, boss. After I’ve eaten.”

He had originally intended to call Eva Hoffman and beg off on the chat she had asked for. But now he needed to tell someone how relieved he was, and how clever he had been in wiggling, at least for the moment, off the spot marked X. As he left Tokugawa’s office, he consulted the mental list of people he trusted enough to share news like this, and—Ethan being history now—found only Eva’s name. She was not an employee of the house, plugged into that grapevine… nor did she fraternize much with the other guests, even the other Permanents. Most of them considered her crazy. She was easy to talk to, and in his opinion she had more character and style than any ten other people he knew. He had often thought that if Eva were, oh, say, seventy years younger, he might have considered turning hetero again for her. Hell, even sixty years younger…

Telling Diaghilev to call ahead and announce him, he left the Core and jaunted back outboard, through both Deluxe Tier (peasant country, at least in Shimizu terms) and UltraDeluxe Tier (the bourgeoisie; governors, national-level executives and so forth), all the way to the Prime Tier, the outer suites with the most cubic and a naked-eye view of space. Eva’s digs were in the Prime Plus hemiTier: the one whose view included Earth. She had chosen a suite offset from the center of that section, so that the home planet did not completely dominate the view, a choice Jay approved of since he had made the same one himself. Her door opened for him when he reached it, and her voice bade him enter.

Her suite was lavish and comfortable and hushed. As a long-time resident of the Shimizu, he knew the second most expensive thing in it was the hush. The third most expensive thing was the sheer cubic volume, and the air that filled it. Jay was one of the half-dozen hotel staff with enough clout to rate quarters in Prime Plus, and his own suite was a quarter the size of this one. Even by the standards of a permanent guest of the Shimizu, Eva was wealthy. Kate Tokugawa would have said that her assets were “substantial,” only a step below “impressive.”

His eyes found Eva where they expected to, by the room’s most expensive feature: floating within the three-meter-across bubble window (called an imax for obscure historical reasons), which made the best Prime Tier suites cost twice as much as Deluxe accommodations. As was her custom when at home, she was wearing only wings and fins, sculling them gently and quite unconsciously to hold her position in space against the gentle current of airflow. It was a sight he had seen countless times, and still found striking and moving: a butterfly with a withered body, Rodin’s She Who Was Once the Beautiful Heaulmière somehow given the wings of a swan by the gods in clumsy compensation for the ruin of her beauty. Nobody looked sixty anymore these days—certainly no one whose real age had three digits—and Jay found Eva’s defiant decay paradoxically entrancing. Especially juxtaposed against the wings, modern and high-tech… and that absurdly expensive surround-window… and the stars beyond, their steady fossil light unthinkably older than Eva could ever hope to be. He wished he had the nerve to use the image in a dance…

But Eva never missed a premiere. She had been born back in the days when nudity was strongly taboo—and while she’d obviously come into the twenty-first century, he had noted that she was never nude save when closeted with intimates.

Oddly, the thought had never once occurred to him that he would probably be free to use the image as he pleased one day, all too soon—that it could not be long before Eva died. If it had, the thought would have saddened him… but there was something about Eva that kept him from having it.

He politely removed his own clothing and let bee-sized tugbots take charge of each garment. He did not bother to remove his own wrist and ankle thrusters. Eva didn’t object to their emissions, she just didn’t care to use thrusters herself if she didn’t have to; and Jay felt far more naked without them than he did without clothes. Nonetheless he allowed other tugbots to give him his own set of wings and fins, slid them on over his thrusters, and used them to join his hostess at the window. He was, if anything, more skillful at air-swimming than she was; he simply preferred the superior kinetic and kinesthetic versatility thrusters offered.

The jaunt to her side was uncomplicated: the room seemed as starkly furnished as a Zen master’s cell, all its fabulous conveniences invisible until they were needed. That was its fourth most expensive feature.

She rode the turbulence of his arrival expertly, and helped him steady himself into station beside her, just far enough away to allow them both wingroom, all without taking her gaze from the window. She had chosen a local vertical that put Earth in the lower left quadrant of the window. Perhaps a fifth of the planet was visible, a lens-shaped slice of Old Home. The rest of the view was of eternity.

They shared it in silence for perhaps a minute.

“Drink with me, Jay,” she said then.

He didn’t care much for alcohol as a rule; he hated what it did to his balance and kinesthetic sense. But he did not hesitate. “Name your poison.” He told himself that it would anesthetize him against having to talk with Martin later.

“Jeeves,” she called, and her AI shimmered into view, oriented to her local vertical and seeming to be standing on air.

“Yes, madam?”

“The good stuff.”

One holographic eyebrow rose half a centimeter. “Very good, madam.”

Both of Jay’s eyebrows rose at least that much. This was not going to be a casual conversation. He stopped rehearsing his account of how clever he had been in Kate’s office.

5

Jeeves moved away without moving his legs, as if he were under gravity and his feet were on wheels, and ceased to exist when he left the humans’ peripheral vision. Tugbots delivered an amber bottle, two bulbs and a spherical table to the spot where he had vanished. As they arrived, Jeeves reformed, and picked them all out of the air expertly as he “rolled” back into view. He placed the table between Eva and Jay and told it to stay there, placed a bulb against either side of its velcro surface and the bottle in the center facing them, so that the table looked like a stylized Pinocchio, and shimmied back a pace. Eva thanked and dismissed him; once again he glided out of view before dissolving.

“I never thought I’d see that again,” Jay said respectfully.

She nodded. The bottle was an ancient quart of Black Bush, about three quarters full. It was something like a century old, and its contents were twelve years older than that, a blend of whiskey so fine that at the time of bottling it could not legally be exported from Ireland. Its source was the oldest distillery on Earth, whose charter-to-distill had been granted in 1608. There probably was not another bottle like it left anywhere in the Solar System. Jay was the only person in the Shimizu besides herself who had ever seen it; they had shared a dram the night Ethan’s goodbye message arrived from Terra.

He steadied her while she poured, a process of pulling the bottle away while chasing it with the open end of the bulb, then pinching off the flow with one thumb while she sealed the bulb with the other. She did it better than the Chief Sommelier in the Hall of Lucullus, losing not a drop of the precious whiskey, fiercely proud of her ability to control her aged fingers. Jay accepted his bulb with thanks. He brought it up past his nose in a slow gentle curve, squeezing slightly so that the nipple dilated and the bouquet came to him. When she had filled her own bulb and replaced the bottle, he raised his in salute, and they drank.

The silence stretched on.

“Silly,” she said at last. “I’ll never get over how silly it is.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You could blindfold me, tug me around the hotel enough to confuse me, lead me into any room in the place and dock me in front of its window… take off the blindfold and defy me, without looking away from the window, to tell you which Tier I was in. There is no way to tell a real window from a fake one without instruments. And yet this thing is worth every yen it costs me. About the gross annual product of a medium town… and I’d pay three times as much if I had to. Why?”

He seemed to know a rhetorical question when he heard it; he made no reply.

“Why are they so goddam happy, Jay?” she asked then.

“Who?”

She gestured at the Earth. “Them.” Her gesture widened to take in orbital space, then widened farther. “All of them. Our species. The human race in this year of Our Lord 2064. I think I know why the Stardancers are happy—but why people too?”

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean.” She squeezed more whiskey into her mouth, rolled it around and swallowed. God, she missed her taste buds sometimes. “They probably don’t even seem all that happy to you, do they?”

“I never really thought about—”

“Trust me. I’ve been watching the human race a long time. At this point we ought to be more traumatized than ever before in our history. The Curve of Change is almost vertical by now, like a goosing finger—you do know about the Curve?”

“Sure.”

Of course he did—as a dry old chestnut from a history lesson. For millennia the curve of human social and technological progress had trended upward, but so slowly as to be almost imperceptible… then all at once it had passed some critical threshold and begun climbing sharply. Ever more sharply, the rate of increase itself accelerating steadily, until the race lurched from covered wagons to spaceships, from kingdoms and fiefs to planetary government, from chronic global poverty to staggering near-universal wealth, in a single century. Remarkable. Inexplicable. Where would it all end? And so on.

But Eva had been born into the middle of that century. Just about the time it was beginning to dawn on humanity just how oddly the Curve was behaving. And humanity’s general response had been to run a high fever…

“I don’t mean trivial things, like conquering cancer. I mean substantive changes in the map of reality. When I was a girl, the phrase ‘New World’ still meant North America. Now it means Mars. The Old World—that one right there—is just about unrecognizable, if you look at it any closer than this. The population has more than doubled since I was born, and look at that planet: it’s still green. All the most fundamental axioms of politics, of economics, of industry, have all come apart since the turn of the millennium, obsoleted by new technology. We seem to have a handle on pollution, for God’s sake! After half a century of holding my breath, I’m prepared to admit that it looks like we really may have outgrown war. Thanks to nanotechnology, I’m even getting ready to concede that a day may even come when we’ll have outgrown money… a day when no one alive has to work to earn her living, when nobody will remember—or care—what a ‘salary’ was, or why people gave up a third of their lives to get one.”

“And you wonder why people are happy?”

“Yes! Two axioms I cling to are that change is painful and that humans react poorly to pain. Change that radical and fundamental has to hurt, to confuse, to anger. For the first seventy years of my life, I watched my species grow ever more neurotic, more sullen, more despairing, more bitter. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, I’ve read about it, seen records, old flatscreens and so forth—”

“They don’t convey it. Believe what I’m about to tell you: when I was forty-five years old, ninety-five percent of the intelligent, thoughtful university-educated people I knew believed as an article of faith that technology and change were dooming the planet, and that some of us would live to see the Last Days. Just about every one of them had a different candidate for what specifically was going to get us. Nuclear Winter was the big one until the Soviet Union went broke. Within about fifteen minutes, fifty other Ends Of Everything had moved in to replace it: global warming, ice age, the ozone layer, overpopulation, deforestation, dwindling resources, pollution, energy shortage—I can’t even remember them all anymore. Pestilence, famine and plague were evergreen favorites, and you could always find someone who was putting his money on a runaway comet. If you had a taste for the exotic, you could be terrified of flying saucers and empires of alien cattle-mutilators. But just about every adult I knew clutched some form of Ultimate Paranoia to his or her breast. Almost without exception they chose to believe that the End of All Meaning was just over the horizon. If you didn’t know that, you were too stupid or naive to be worth talking to.

“I’m overstating it slightly, because the sample I’m talking about consisted almost exclusively of affluent North Americans. But only slightly. In 1991 a major poll asked average Americans if they would like to live five hundred years, assuming that could be accomplished cheaply and comfortably. Only half of them said yes. Fully half of that society was looking forward to dying.”

Jay frowned and took a drink of his whiskey, forgetting to savour it. “How weird it must have been. To live in an age when the best and brightest worshipped Henny Penny. When the crew of Starship Earth, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, were on the verge of mutinous panic…”

She nodded. “And then right at the turn of the millennium, just as the worst thing possible happened and the wildest of all those paranoid fantasies came true… just as actual aliens appeared in the sky, changed our destiny for us in great and incomprehensible ways, and vanished again before we could ask them any questions… everybody calmed down. The Curve kept on rising faster than ever, and somehow everybody on Earth seemed to heave a great sigh, and kick back, and relax. Not right away, no, not all at once—but the damn planet has been getting slowly and steadily saner for over sixty years now. And it’s driving me crazy!”

He swirled whiskey around in his bulb, stared through and past the oscillating golden liquid to the planet they both had left forever. “It doesn’t seem all that sane to me,” he said.

“No, I’m sure it doesn’t, to someone your age,” she agreed. “It isn’t all that sane. But it’s sane-er. Do you know that at one time the United States had ten percent of its population imprisoned? Justly? As the best solution they could devise to problems they didn’t begin to understand? Every year the papers told you the crime rate was rising. It’s been falling for over twenty years, now… and somehow that never makes the headlines. The media just aren’t geared up to report good news. You have to dig that out for yourself.”

“I think it has to do with the Curve you were talking about,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The latest spike in the Curve. The Nanotechnological Revolution. Molecular-scale machines and computers. It’s qualitatively different from the Industrial Revolution or the Silicon Revolution or any of those. For once we got a new technology that cleans up its own wastes, doesn’t despoil anything we cherish, and produces so much new wealth nobody could steal it all. Our first healing revolution. Take the revolution you grew up with, Eva: nuclear fission. They told everyone it would produce power too cheap to meter. Then it turned out the plants were big kludges, and nobody’s power bill seemed to go down a dollar. No wonder they stopped trusting people in lab coats. But this generation got a technology that delivered on its promises.” He sipped his drink again, appreciating it this time. “And come to think of it, that was mostly thanks to the Stardancers. Without them and their Safe Lab, we’d still be skirting the edges of nanotechnology, too scared of someone getting a monopoly on it, or scared of the wrong little nanoassembler getting loose and turning all the iron to peanut butter or something.”

“Or we might have destroyed the planet in a war for possession of the new technology,” she agreed. “Instead we’ve got a UN that means something—and a repaired ozone layer and a healthy ecosystem and nonpolluting industry and a world so fat and rich it hasn’t had even a serious local war for thirty years.”

“The Stardancers kept us honest,” he said. “Thanks to the Fireflies, we had a precious resource: people we could trust to be above human greed and avarice, people with nothing to gain, people who could not be bribed or coerced.”

“Bodhisattvas,” she said.

“If you like,” he said. “Fair witnesses, anyway.”

“No wonder there used to be terrorists trying to kill them. A fair witness can be infuriating.”

“Yeah, maybe—but the last serious attempt was about the time I was born. Even a fanatic reactionary can see they’re just too valuable to the race now: they can live full time in space with no life support, and space is the only safe place to develop little artificial viruses, the only sensible place to collect solar power. Humanity got lucky. We got just what we needed, just when we needed it.”

“Luck, hell,” she snarled. He recoiled at her force. “You just said it yourself. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was those damned Fireflies: they saved our bacon for us, brought us the moon-full of Symbiote that makes a human a Stardancer, and gave it to us, for free. I could kill them for that!”

She could see that she had shocked him. She waited, to see how he would handle it. “This is what you really wanted to talk about,” he said finally.

She smiled. “Pour for us, please, Jeeves.”

When the AI had refreshed their bulbs, she turned to face him directly. He copied her, and they joined a hand to steady themselves in the new attitude. She held on.

“Jay,” she said, “I’m old. I was old enough to vote when the first tourist littered the moon. I was spending a fortune on cosmetic camouflage the year the Fireflies showed up and Shara Drummond danced the Stardance for them. I’ve had a five-cent Coca Cola, and watched the first television set on my block. Flatscreen, monochrome. I’ve owned 78 RPM phonograph records and a hand-cranked Victrola. I’ve buried three husbands, three children and two grandchildren. One of my great-grandchildren in Canada is dying, and I have to keep asking Jeeves her name. Jeeves, what is my dying great-grandchild’s name?”

“Charlotte, madam,” Jeeves murmured from somewhere nearby.

“I have been a success in three professions,” she went on, “and a failure in two. It’s not that most of my life is behind me. All of my life is behind me, receding. I always said I was going to check out when and if my clock showed three figures… and I came here to the Shimizu for that purpose. I stopped controlling my cosmetic age the day I moved into this suite, as a sign that I was withdrawing from human affairs. I’ve been saying goodbye for the last sixteen years. You know most of this.”

He nodded and sipped the Irish whiskey, still holding her hand.

“Haven’t you ever wondered what’s taking me so long?”

He shook his head. “Not once. I figure saying goodbye to life could take me, oh, seventeen years, easy.”

“You’ll find out,” she said. “Old age is not for sissies. I had all my goodbyes said years ago.”

“All right,” he said agreeably. “I’ll play Mr. Interlocutor. Why are you still using up air, Ms. Hoffman?”

“Sheer annoyance,” she said. “I’d always expected to live to see the world end. I planned to watch humanity die of its own stupidity and meanness, and chortle at the irony of it all. I expected to enjoy it immensely.”

“I can understand that,” he said slowly.

“Long before I came up here, I’d admitted to myself that it just isn’t going to happen any time soon. Okay: I didn’t insist on doom… as so many of my contemporaries had. I would have settled for watching us come through in the clutch, reach deep inside ourselves and pull out the best of us and solve our damned problems.” She glanced down at her bulb, found too much whiskey there and corrected the problem. “What I wasn’t prepared for was to have big red Fireflies drop in and fix things for us… and then scamper off to wherever the hell they came from without telling us why!”

She looked into his eyes for understanding, and did not find it. He was too young for questions like this to be troubling in anything but an abstract sense. And he had grown up in a world where telepathic Stardancers—and the mysterious alien Fireflies who had appeared out of nowhere, created the Stardancers and their collective Starmind, and then vanished back into deep space—were prosaic history, something that had happened sixteen years before he was born. She saw him try to understand, and fail.

She broke eye contact and sculled around to face the window and the world again. “Anyway, it’s come to me in the last few days that what I’ve been doing… what I’ve been waiting for… has been for the damned Fireflies to come back from wherever they went and tell us what’s going on. Or for me to cleverly deduce it for myself. The most important philosophical question the human race has faced since the aliens dropped in and out again is, ‘What the hell was that?’ In sixty-four years we haven’t made a dent in it.

“Realizing that has forced me to face the fact that I’m wasting my time. If nobody else can figure it out, I probably can’t either. Available evidence indicates the Fireflies drop by once every couple of thousand years at best. I can’t wait that long. And this steady diet of unearned good news lately has just got me baffled.”

“Are you sure it’s unearned?” he said. “Stardancers start as human beings, however different they may become after Symbiosis. The scientific name for them is Homo caelestis. Humanity birthed them: the Fireflies were just midwives.”

“Stardancers do not suffer from fear or hunger or poverty or lust or loneliness,” Eva said. “Thanks to their Symbiote, they’re immortal, effectively invulnerable, and perpetually loved. As far as I’m concerned, that means they’re not human anymore. And if things keep going the way they are, it’s conceivable that one day nobody on Earth may be hungry or cold or oppressed. If that day comes, by my lights there won’t be any human beings anymore.”

“So you want to leave while things are still miserable,” he said.

She frowned at her drink.

“No,” she said. “That’s my point. Everybody’s happy now. I personally think that in time the hangover will arrive, and people will find out that even nanotechnology has hidden costs. No matter how many miracles we come up with, I believe there are always limits to growth. I have a friend named Ling who says he can prove it—I can’t follow his math, but it sounds convincing. But meanwhile there is peace on the world… maybe it’s only temporary, but nobody can know that yet. So maybe this is a good time to leave, and I should stop dragging my feet.”

He kept his face expressionless. “How do you plan to do it?”

His very neutrality cued her that he was angry. It startled her. She precessed to face him again. “Is that relevant?”

“It’s closer than anything that’s been said since I jaunted in here,” he said. “Let’s cut through all the bullshit about Stardancers and Fireflies and how happy the world is today. You have obviously decided to check out. For some reason you think I need to know that in advance. That means you have some role in mind for me. I’m curious to know what it is. Do you want me to stand by with the ceremonial sword in case you lose your nerve? Am I supposed to talk you out of it? Or just be your witness and hold your hand? Angel’s advocate, enabler, or audience—I can go any way you like, Eva. I’m your friend and I’ll try to give you whatever you need of me, but you’ve got to tell me the steps.”

She let go of her drink and reached toward him with her withered hands. He abandoned his own drink and took them in his own.

“In a month,” she said, “Reb Hawkins will be coming to the Shimizu. I want to talk with him one more time. Immediately after that I plan to go out the airlock.” She gestured toward the window with her chin. “Out there. When I’m ready, my p-suit will kill me, painlessly and not abruptly. I want to die in space. As I die, I would like to watch you dance… if you’re willing.”

He was speechless. He tried to free his hands, and she would not let him. He tried to tear his gaze from hers, and she would not allow that either. “Why me?” he said finally.

“Dance is the only thing humans do that’s only beautiful,” she said. “It’s the only thing we do that speaks even to Fireflies, as far as we can tell. I want to die watching a human being dance. A human, not a Stardancer. You’re the best dancer I know. And you’re my friend. I thought about not putting this on you until the last minute… but I thought you might want some time to choreograph your dance. I know how busy you’ll be once your brother arrives.”

Globules of salt water began to grow from his eyes. Despite sixteen years in free-fall, she still found the sight of zero-gee tears simultaneously hilarious and moving. And contagious. He shook his head, and the droplets flew away. She blinked back her own, and waited.

At last, with difficulty, he smiled. “I am honored, Eva,” he said. He released her hands, plucked his bulb out of the air, and raised his arm in a toast. She reclaimed her own, and they emptied them together. She did not hesitate, spun and threw her bulb as hard as she could, directly at that absurdly expensive window. The bulb shattered musically.

She had startled him. A cannon couldn’t have broken that window—but still, what a gesture! He was game, though: his own bulb burst only a second or two after hers. When they had recovered from their throws, he bowed to her, a Buddhist gassho she suspected he must have learned from his grandmother. She returned it gravely. “Thank you,” she said.

There was nothing left to say. Or too much. After they had watched the tugbots chase and disassemble glass shards for a few moments, he cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got to see Ev Martin before dinner.”

She grinned. “Another argument for suicide. You’re right, you wouldn’t want to talk to him on a full stomach.”

“Not even on a stomach full of hundred-year-old whiskey,” he agreed. “But it’ll help. Thanks for it.”

She made a mental note to leave him the balance of the bottle in her will.

He paused at the door. “Eva?”

“Yes,” she said, without turning.

“Is it all right if I spend the next month trying to get you to change your mind?”

“Yes,” she said. “But don’t be attached to succeeding, Jay. I’ve been thinking about this a long time.”

After a while she heard the door close and seal.

6 Toronto, Ontario 4 December 2064

There is no such thing as a slight flaw in a dance floor.

And all floors have flaws. Anyone but a dancer would probably call them slight: certainly the manufacturers do. Nonetheless, each floor has its own invisible peculiarities, lurking in wait for dancers’ feet. Even the floor of Toronto’s famous Drummond Theatre. The company had gone through two complete rehearsals, undress and dress, without a hitch; it was in the final onstage warm-up class, a scant hour before curtain, that John DeMarco, who had been dreaming of and working toward this night for all his professional life, found the flaw with his name on it. It broke his ankle.

At any other time it would have been a nuisance. The actual repair could be accomplished in less than ten minutes at the nearest hospital, after two hours of datawork and waiting in the emergency room. And once fixed, you’d be hopping around good as new… in a matter of mere hours…

The ugly sound had riveted the attention of all. It took only minutes to establish that the nearest hospital was half an hour away in the best of times, and that everyone in the company seemed to have run out of painblock at once. So had John, of course. Dancers started to drift away to call hospitals and search dressing rooms and find the driver; the AD, watching her company scattering to the four winds an hour before curtain, bellowed them into stasis and bent over John’s recumbent form. “Is there any hope at all?” she asked.

It was clearly a break, not just a sprain. John shook his head, and started to apologize.

She waved it away. “Then you’ll have to live with it for a while. I can’t spare anyone here: I have to recast the whole performance in forty-five minutes, and everyone I can see I need. We’ll put you in dressing room two. Jacques! Harry!”

The pain was exquisite, almost nauseating. “No! Wait! Put me in the audience. If I can’t be in it, I’m gonna see the run-through.”

She nodded to Harry and Jacques. “Do it.”

Harry, the stage manager, gave him a jacket to put over his warm-up clothes, promised to try and find him some painblock and a ride as soon as possible, and left him front-row center. Not an ideal seat, but convenient. One of the dancers who could be spared momentarily brought him an improvised pack of ice from the concession in the lobby. He concentrated on the frenzied activity onstage to distract himself from his pain.

Shortly after he decided Anna was fucking the whole thing up, he noticed that the pain was gone. Utterly.

He yelped, in astonishment and something like fright. Anna glared at him from the stage. “Harry, take him back-stage—”

“No,” he said. “Sorry. I’m fine; won’t happen again.”

She went back to her work. He bent and looked at his ankle. No question, that was a broken ankle, all right. The swelling was already so advanced that he knew it was badly broken. Now why in hell didn’t it hurt?

The swelling began to visibly reduce.

He yelped again. Anna turned and came to the edge of the stage. “John, I’m sorry, but—”

“Look at my foot!”

She blinked.

“God dammit, come down here and look at my fucking foot!”

The dancers followed her. They gathered around and watched his ankle heal itself. After a few murmurs and gasps, no one said a word. In minutes, the ankle looked just like its mate. John flexed it slowly, listening for grating sounds, and then extended it with the same care. Then he circled it, one way and then the other, and started to laugh. Soon everyone was laughing, even Anna. He got to his feet, took a few cautious steps—then took a running start and sprang up on stage. He did a combination on his way to his place for the first piece. “Come on, boss,” he said, still laughing. “ ‘Time’s a-wastin’!” It was one of her catch-phrases; the company dissolved into hysterics.

Anna let that go on for a good five seconds. From then on they were so busy that it wasn’t until midway through the triumphant fourth curtain call that John had time to wonder about it all.

He never did figure it out. He had to be told. But he didn’t mind.