Starseed

Chapter Eleven

I got home a few hours before breakfast. Kirra was alone in the room, and woke as I came in. “Are you right, love?”

I knew that was Aussie for, are you all right?, but I couldn’t help hearing the words as they sounded too. “Ask me again next year,” I said to both questions. “You heard, huh?”

“We heard.” She slipped out of her sleepsack. “Robert’s found himself another room until the ship leaves.”

“Where’s Ben?”

“I told him I’d wait here for you alone ’til brekkie, then we were gonna hunt you down together.”

By then she had reached me, and was hugging me. It helped a little, as much as anything could help. She did not say a single one of the clichés I’d been dreading, only held me. After a time she began singing softly, in Yirlandji, and that helped me a little too.

Awhile later she said, “Tucker?” and I said, “No. You go,” and she nodded. “Bring you back somethin’?” she asked, and I said, “No.” She left, and I slid into my sleepsack and went fetal.

She let me have the rest of the day, and then at around suppertime she showed up with what might just have been the only thing in human space that could have made me feel like eating. “You’re not serious,” I said when she took it out of its thermos bag and tossed it to me. “How could you possibly—”

“Sulke knows a bloke at the Shimizu.”

“But it must have cost—”

“The bloke liked me Song o’ Polar Orbit a lot; it’s his shout.”

Even in my misery it reached me. A full litre of fine Chilean chocolate chip ice cream. Back in Vancouver it would have been an expensive luxury; here it was a pearl without price. She had heard me speak longingly of it several times; she’d even remembered my favorite flavour. I had no idea what her favorite flavour was. “Pull up a spoon,” I said, and we dug in together.

As we ate she filled me in on the news.

It was going just as Robert had predicted. Third-Monthers were Graduating en masse. Some of the rest of us, mostly Novices, had decided they were ready for early Graduation—from one to five weeks early!—and some, mostly Postulants, had suddenly remembered pressing business dirtside. Already there were no more seats available on the next regularly scheduled transport (two days hence), and the special charter that had been announced was filling up fast. Robert and I were not the only couple who had split up.

There were some students who took neither course. Some lacked the imagination to realize how comprehensive a disaster it would have been if that missile had destroyed the docks—and some were just the kind of people who insist on building their home on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius or in San Francisco. (Come to think of it, Robert was going home to San Francisco. What kind of logic was that?)

And of course there were the spacers on staff. Going dirtside was not an option for them. Those who could were trying to change jobs, or rather, eliminate Top Step from their job rotations. Those who could not were trying to get work deep inboard, on the theory that they’d be safer from attack. It was a shaky theory.

I was unsurprised to learn Kirra and Ben’s choice.

“We’re doin’ it, love. Ben and me, this Sunday. I reckon you guessed we would.”

“Good for you,” I said. My eyes were stinging. “Pushing ahead the wedding. That makes me really happy.”

“You want to join us?”

“Thanks for asking. But no. I’m not ready. Reb would never let me do it in this state. You two go on—I’ll catch you up as soon as I can.”

Privately I wondered if I meant that. I still was not utterly certain that I wanted to go through with Symbiosis. The idea of lowering all my defenses, forever, was seeming less and less attractive. Wouldn’t it be just perfect if I finally decided to chicken out…after cutting my ties with Robert? If I played my cards right, I could come out of this with nothing at all.

The next couple of days were sheerest hell. I kept going over and over it in my mind. A thousand times I asked myself, why not just go back to Earth and Robert? So he didn’t love me the way I loved him; he cared, and that could well become love in time. A thousand times I answered, because he had made it an ultimatum, and because he would not admit he had done so, and because I just couldn’t risk losing dance forever, even for him.

And because he hadn’t asked me to—just assumed I’d “be sensible.”

A thousand times I concluded I had made the right decision. But I didn’t call Teena and tell her to cancel the reservation Robert had made in my name.

He called me once, about twenty-four hours after the quarrel. I had instructed Teena not to put through any calls from him, so he recorded a long message. When she told me, I had her wipe it, unplayed. A mistake: I spent hours wondering what he had said.

Twice I forced myself to go to the cafeteria, using Teena to make sure he was not there at the time. The food tasted like hell. Once I let Ben and Kirra (almost literally) drag me to Le Puis. Even Fat Humphrey didn’t cheer me up, nor the Hurricanes he prescribed for me. With Kirra right there listening, Ben made the politest pass I’d ever received; I almost smiled as I thanked him and turned him down.

That night Reb came to visit me in my room. He expressed sympathy, and offered to help in any way he could. He did not, as I’d half expected, try to persuade me to stop grieving. Instead he encouraged me to grieve, the faster to use it up. But I noticed something subtle about his word choice. He never said he was sorry Robert and I were breaking up. He only said he was sorry I was suffering over it.

A friend of my parents, back on Gambier Island, once responded to his wife’s leaving him by taking their beloved dog back up into the woods and shooting him. I’d never understood how anyone could do something so simultaneously selfish and self-destructive until I found myself on the verge of making a pass at Reb. Hurt people do crazy things, that’s all. I was luckier than my parents’ friend had been: I caught myself in time, and Reb failed to notice, the nicest thing he could have done.

Later that night I started to record a message for Robert…then gave up and erased it unsent.

The next day the shuttle left for Earth.

I found myself in the corridor outside the Departure Lock, in an alcove where I could watch the queue forming. I avoided the gazes of those who lined up, and they avoided mine. Robert was one of the last to arrive, coming to a stop right outside my alcove. I saw him before he saw me. It had an almost physical impact. Then he saw me, and that was even worse. We looked at each other, treading air. He glanced at the others, then back to me.

He waved Earthward. “Come with me.”

I waved starward. “Come with me.”

He made no reply. After a time I left the alcove, grabbed a handhold and flung myself away into the bowels of the rock, not stopping until I reached hardhat territory. I joined a handful of gawkers and watched a new tunnel being cut. They struck ice, and that was good, because soon there were so many warm water droplets in the ambient air that a few tears more or less went unnoticed.

I cut classes that day, as I had the previous two, and spent some time in the studio in the afternoon, trying to dance. It was a fiasco. I sought out Reb’s after-classes sitting group, and sat kûkanzen for a couple of hours, or tried to. It was my first time with the group. I had done a fair amount of sitting outside class, but never with the group. But that night I needed them to keep me anchored, to keep me from bursting into tears. Sitting, and the chanting after, helped, a little. Not enough.

I went to Le Puis, where Fat Humphrey allowed me to get drunk. He did so with skill and delicacy, so that I woke the next day without a hangover despite my best efforts.

But I was dumb enough to decide to go to morning class, and logy enough to sleepwalk through suit inspection, and so I came damned close to dying when a thruster I should have replaced went rogue on me at just the wrong moment. I was not able to recover as Ben had from a similar problem, and had to be rescued. By Ben, since Robert was no longer there to take care of it.

It straightened me up. I did not want to die—not even subconsciously, I think. Or if I did, I wanted it to be at a time and place, and by a method, of my own choosing; not in some stupid accident, not over a man. I won’t say I started to feel better…but I did start to take better care of myself again. That’s a beginning.

Sulke didn’t chew me out for my stupidity. She was the one I’d gotten drunk with the night before, the one who’d gotten me to bed, as I had once done for her.

I don’t know, maybe it’s easier to turn your back on Earth if there’s someone down there you never want to see again. Perhaps it’s easier to attain Zen no-thought if your thoughts are all painful ones anyway. I started to make real progress in my studies, both practical and spiritual.

When I arrived at Top Step, free fall had seemed an awkward, clumsy environment; the graceful Second- and Third-Monthers had seemed magical creatures. I didn’t feel particularly magical now, but free fall seemed a natural way to live, and the new crop of Postulants seemed incredibly awkward and clumsy. My p-suit had once seemed exotic, romantic; now it was clothing. Sitting kûkanzen had once been unbearable boredom and discomfort; now it was natural and blissful. I told myself that I had learned a brutal lesson in nonattachment, which would actually help me in the transition to Symbiosis. All my bridges were burnt behind me. All I had left to lose were dance and my life itself. All I had to do was to go forward, or die trying.

One thing never changed. Space itself was always and forever a place of heart-stopping majesty and terrible beauty.

I even learned to stop resenting Kirra and Ben’s happiness in time to preserve our friendship. I’m ashamed to admit how hard a learning that was. Other happy couples, triads and group marriages in Top Step somehow did not grate on me—but at first it seemed disloyal for my friends to be joyous when I was not. And Ben certainly had more than enough quirks for which one could work up a dislike. But Reb caught me at it, diagnosed my problem, and talked it over with me until I could be rational again. In my heart of hearts, I loved them both, and wished them well.

They both made an effort to bring me out myself, to invite me for drinks and include me in their games and discussions. We three had been friends like this before I’d become Robert’s lover; now we were again, that was all.

Only one thing was really keeping me from symbiosis, now. I wanted to make one last dance before I went, to choreograph my farewell to human life while I was still human. I knew I would make other dances in concert with my Stardancer brothers and sisters, and perform in theirs, for centuries to come—but this last one would be mine alone, the last such there could ever be. In a way, it was almost good that Robert was gone, for now the dance could be all my own personal farewell, rather than ours.

I stopped calling the piece Do the Next Thing. Although those words are a pretty fair approximation of the meaning of life—they’ll get you through when life itself has lost its meaning—they were a little too flip for the title of my last work as a human. Instead I began thinking of it simply as Coda.

There is a pun in there that perhaps only a choreographer would get. In music, a coda is the natural end of a movement, the passage that brings it to a formal close. In dance, it is the end of a pas de deux.

I worked on it for hours at a time, throwing out ideas like a Roman candle, ruthlessly pruning every one that wasn’t just right, then trying them in different combinations and juxtapositions, like someone trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube by intuition alone. I had the constant awareness that something might kill me at any minute, but I tried not to let it hurry me. Better to die with it incomplete than do a sloppy job of it.

It ate up a lot of time. Or kept the time from eating me up. One of those.

“When are we gonna see this bleedin’ dance, then?” Kirra asked me that Friday. “Ben and me are gone day after tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, love,” I told her. “It’s just not ready to show yet.”

“Why don’t you do a bit of it just before we swallow the stuff? It don’t have to be finished—just a little bit to send us off in style, like.”

“Yeah,” Ben chimed in. “We’d love to have you dance at our GraduWedding, Morgan.”

“And I’d love to,” I said, “but it just won’t be ready in time. I’m sorry, I wish it could be.”

“Ah, don’t be stingy with it, Morgan,” Kirra said. “I sung for you, ain’t I? An’ Benjy taught you free fall handball an’ all. It’s your shout.”

I started to get irritated. Tact had never been the strong suit of either of them…but this was a little excessive. Suddenly I understood something. Underneath their excitement and anticipation, Kirra and Ben were both scared silly.

“I’ll dance it at my own Graduation,” I said, softer than I might have. “You can both see it then.”

“We’ll be halfway to Titan by then,” she protested.

“So what? As long as one Stardancer is in the neighborhood, you’ll have a front-row seat.”

“Huh. Right enough, I guess.”

“Have you two recorded your Last Words for your families, yet?”

They let me change the subject. But I kept thinking about their request, wishing I had something to give them for a wedding gift, and a little while later I had a very bright idea. I excused myself, went off and made a phone call. It worked even better than I had hoped. I had to work hard to conceal my excitement when I rejoined them.

We three slept together that night, for the last time. It was a memorable night; people who are scared silly make incredible lovers. We spent the next day together, visiting all their favorite places. Solariums One and Three, Le Puis, the Great Hall, the games rooms and all the places where we’d shared so much fun and laughter. After dinner I slipped away while they weren’t looking and let them have their last evening to themselves. They didn’t come back to the room, and I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

The next day was Sunday. I didn’t see them until dinner time; according to Teena they never left Ben’s room until then. We talked awhile, and they gave some attention to their last meal. Then the two of them instigated one last food fight. It was glorious. You could tell how close a person was to Graduation by how little food they wore when the fight was over. Ben and Kirra were the only ones who ended up completely unmarked—somewhat unfairly, as they had started it. Either of them could dodge anything they saw coming, and Ben had no blind spot, and had enough attention to spare to guard Kirra’s back and warn her of sneak attacks. I only got hit a couple of times myself, each time from behind.

I showered and was done in time to catch them coming out of Reb’s room. “Hey, you guys. Hello, Reb.”

“Hi, Morgan,” Kirra said. “Guess it’s time to get it done, eh?”

“Yeah. Listen, I know this is kind of last-minute, but…would you mind a bit of dance at your Graduation after all?”

They both brightened. “That’d be great, love,” Kirra said. “Gee, I’m glad you changed your mind.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “I’m dying to see Coda.”

“Oh, it won’t be Coda,” I said. “I came up with something special for the occasion. I think you’ll like it. Are you coming, Reb?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” he said. He took Kirra’s arm and I took Ben’s, and the four of us jaunted away like a chorus line on skates.

A fair-sized group was waiting at the airlock. Kirra and Ben had invited anyone who wanted to come, and they were well liked; all of our class that were still around were present, and even some people I didn’t know. There were hugs and handshakes and goodbyes, and then everybody put their hoods on. It took awhile to cycle everybody through the lock. While we were waiting outside, Kirra asked me, “Don’t you need to warm up or somethin’, love?”

“Not this time,” I said.

She made a sound of puzzlement, but let it go.

When everyone was assembled outside, we set off as a group, led by Reb. Newer chums who drifted out of formation did their best to recover without drawing attention to themselves. We ascended like a slightly tipsy celestial choir; Top Step slowly fell away below us, and when it had dwindled into a distant cigar, the Symbiote Mass was visible above us. “Above” in an absolute sense, relative to Earth: by that time we had flipped ourselves so that it seemed to be below our feet. “I don’t see any Stardancers waitin’ to meet us,” Kirra said as we closed in on the red cloud.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be along.”

“Bloody well better. I don’t know how to make that big glob squeeze off a piece my size.”

“Relax, Kirra,” Reb said. “Be your breath.”

“Right. No worries, mate.”

Our formation became most ragged as we came to rest near the Mass, but Reb issued quiet instructions and got us all together again with minimal confusion. Kirra and Ben floated a little apart from the rest of us. Ben’s p-suit was a pale yellow that suited him and his red hair as well as cobalt blue suited Kirra. Between the two of them and the glowing red Symbiote Mass beside them, they had the rainbow covered. There was a moment of silence.

“Well, here we are,” Kirra said finally. “I’d like to thank you all for comin’—”

“—or however you’re reacting.” Ben interjected, and she aimed a mock blow at him that he dodged easily. We all chuckled, and some of the solemnity went out of the occasion.

“We got no speeches to make or anythin’,” she went on. “But before we get down to it, our good friend Morgan McLeod is going to dance for us all.” An approving murmur began.

“Me?” I said. “Oh, no!”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? You promised.”

“I asked if you’d mind a bit of dance. I didn’t say I’d be dancing. Curtain!”

“I don’t get you, love.”

“Wait a second, spice,” Ben said. “Here comes our stuff, I think.” (Ben and Kirra called each other “spice,” a term of endearment I find distinctly superior to “honey” or other sticky sweetness.)

She processed to face the way he seemed to be looking. “Where?”

“No, no, there,” he said, and pointed behind him and to his right.

“You and your trick eyes,” she said, and faced the way he was pointing. “Right you are, here it comes. Still don’t see any Stardancers, though.” A red blob was slowly growing larger in the distance.

“You’re looking at six of them,” I said, enjoying myself hugely.

“Where?”

“Twelve, actually, but they’re squeezed into six bodies at the moment. Kirra and Benjamin Buckley, allow me to present Jinsei Kagami, Yuan Zhongshan, Consuela Paixio, Sven Bjornssen, Ludmilla Vorkuta, and Walerij Pietkow.”

The red blob was much closer now. Music swelled out of nowhere, a soft warm A chord with little liquid trills chasing in and out of it. It couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was major or minor.

“They are all trained dancers themselves, but they have all agreed to lend remote-control of their bodies to six of their more distant siblings, who will now dance in your honour. These are Shara Drummond, Sascha Yakovskaya, Norrey Armstead, Charles Armstead, Linda Parsons, and Tom McGillicuddy. Choreography is by all six, around a frame by Shara. Music prerecorded by Raoul Brindle; playback, set design and holographic recording by Harry Stein. The piece is called Kiss the Sky.”

By now the jumbled murmuring of our group was as loud as the soft music. Shara Drummond…and all of the original Six…and Yakovskaya, the first truly great dancer to join them in space, the man who had choreographed the Propaedeutics in his first week as a Stardancer…all dancing together, if only by proxy, for the first time in over a decade—with Brindle on synth! “Pull the other one,” Kirra said. “I don’t see a bloody soul. Just that great hunk of—oh!”

She and everyone fell silent. The approaching blob of Symbiote had suddenly flexed, and stretched in six directions at once to become a kind of six-pointed red snowflake, swirling gently as it approached, like a pinwheel in a gentle breeze, its axis of rotation pointed right at us.

It took a moment for the eye to get it into correct perspective: it was not just enough Symbiote for two people, but enough and more than enough for six, therefore somewhat farther from us than it had seemed to be. Six Stardancers had mingled their Symbiotes and were joined at the feet, held together by their linked hands, a hundred meters from us. The snowflake shifted and flowed, as the six dancers who comprised it changed their position in unison from one pattern to another by flexing elbows and knees, contracting and releasing.

The music acquired a slow, steady pulse in the bass. The pattern of the spinning snowflake changed with each beat, as if it were some great red heart clenching rhythmically. Percussion instruments and a Michael Hedges-like guitar began adding counterpoint accents to the rhythm. The total mass of Symbiote began to swell away from the dancers it contained, until it was a translucent crimson disc with six people at its heart, perhaps twenty meters in diameter. The disc swelled from the center and became a convex lens, nearly transparent; pink stars swam behind it, rippling. Lights came up. The lamps themselves were invisible to us, since they were tiny and dull black and pointing away from us, but we saw their blue and yellow reflections come up as highlights on the crimson lens, highlights that bled all the other colours there are at their edges.

The six children of the lens separated like a bud opening into a flower, fanned out in six directions and wedged themselves into the narrow parts of the lens wall. One of them doubled and jaunted back to the center of the lens, came to rest there…and began to move. Even at a hundred meters, even behind that carmine film of Symbiote, even wearing a different body, there was no mistaking her. The familiar motif that emerged in brass in the underlying music only confirmed it. Jinsei’s body it may have been, but it was Shara Drummond, the greatest dancer of our time, who took the first solo.

She wore thrusters at wrists and ankles, but could not have used them inside that lens, I think. She danced only with body and muscles, moving three-dimensionally in place, with her unmistakable fluidity and precision of line. It reminded me of a piece I’d seen years ago by a colleague recovering from a leg injury called Dancing in Place: confining himself to one spot on stage, standing on one leg, he had explored more ways of dancing and looking at dance than most performers can do using an entire stage. Shara/Jensei did the same now, tumbling, arching, turning, while her center stayed anchored to the center of the lens. She could have been a butterfly gifted with limbs, or a leaf in flight, or a protozoan swimming in the primordial soup. The brass stopped hinting at Shara’s Theme and made a new statement, underlined by strings. Soon, inevitably, she drifted far enough from the center of the lens to touch its inner surface, and used it to jaunt back to her original place at the periphery.

This time two figures moved to the center and met there. Linda Parsons and Tom McGillicuddy, the hippie and the businessman who had met in space, fallen in love, and become the fourth and fifth founding members of Stardancers Incorporated (after Charlie, Norrey and Raoul). McGillicuddy at least was easy for me to identify: he had always been the least trained of the original company; even after decades of practice, and even wearing a better-trained body than his own, there were minor limitations to his technique. But Linda compensated for them so perfectly after thirty-four years of dancing with him that I don’t think anyone else noticed. They did a pas de deux at the heart of the lens, like mating hummingbirds, and now the brass and strings made different but complementary statements to accompany them.

When they returned to their places at the rim, three figures replaced them. Charlie and Norrey and Sascha, legendary partners and friends, did a trio piece loosely derived from their famous Why Can’t We?, as woodwinds brought in a third theme that fit the brass and string motifs like an interlocking puzzle; all three resolved into a major chord as the trio broke up and returned to the rim again.

Next a quartet of both Drummond sisters and Armstead and Yakovskaya, faster and more vigorous, interacting with the kind of precision and intuition that nontelepaths would have needed weeks of rehearsal to achieve; a great pipe organ added its voice to the music, which rose in tempo and resolved into a four-note diminished chord at the quartet’s end.

Then everyone but Shara met at the center for a flashing quicksilver quintet, tumbling over one another like kittens in a basket; the music was all tumbling five-note ninth chords.

Finally all six danced together as a single organism, making strange, indescribable geometrical figures in three dimensions. As they danced, the lens filled out, became a sphere, which slowly contracted in on them, thickening and darkening as it came. Before long there was only a nearly opaque glowing red ball of Symbiote, flexing and shifting in time to the racing music. It quivered, trembled—

—then burst apart, becoming six separate Stardancers flying in different directions like a firework detonation. Their thrusters protruded through their individual coatings of Symbiote now, and they used them to put themselves into graceful wide loops, so that they returned to their starting point, missed colliding by inches, and then arced out again. Each had a different-coloured thruster exhaust; comet-tails of red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple attended them as they flew, leaving the afterimage of a multicoloured Christmas ribbon against the star-spangled blackness. The music swelled and soared with them as they danced, spilling trills in all directions to match their thruster spray. Eventually they all came together again in a tight formation like exhibition aircraft, and took turns passing each other back and forth from hand to hand.

There was joy in their dance, and hope, and endless energy, and manifest love for one another; from time to time one or another of them would laugh for sheer pleasure. I found that I was smiling unconsciously as I watched their dance unfold. I sneaked a look at Kirra and Ben; they were smiling too.

There was a short movement in which they were performing a kind of kinesthetic pun, moving mentally as well as physically, passing their selves from one host body to another. I don’t know how many others caught it, but I clearly saw Shara Drummond’s essence change bodies several times. Once or twice I spotted Yakovskaya or McGillicuddy transmigrating too. I think that for a time, the bodies’ original owners were present and dancing as well.

Then Shara was stationary, spinning slowly around her vertical axis, apart from the other five as they continued to interact, watching how their dance changed in her absence; then in a reversed reprise of their solo-to-group progression. Tom dropped out, then Linda, then Charlie, then Norrey. Quintet, quartet, trio, pair, finally Yakovskaya was soloing within a pentagon of stationary spinning companions, and then he too stopped dancing and went into a spin. The music had decayed too, to a single voice, a cello, and the theme it was quoting was not Shara’s signature motif this time, but Kirra’s Song of Polar Orbit.

By some means I didn’t and don’t understand, all six of them began to move relative to one another, around their common center, as though they were jointly orbiting some invisible mini black hole. The orbits tightened inexorably, until they darted like the Firefly aliens themselves, like electrons dancing in mad attendance on some invisible nucleus. Hands met and joined just as the Song of Polar Orbit reached its coda; again they were a six-personed snowflake. Thrusters sprayed coloured fire and smoke, and they became a living, madly spinning Catherine Wheel.

The thrusters went dark, and they were a scarlet pinwheel.

Their Symbiotes merged, and they were a disc again.

A hole appeared in the center, making the disc look for all the world like an old-fashioned phonograph record (all right, I’m dating myself) spinning on a turntable, seen from above. My parents used to own an album like that, red and translucent, a novelty gimmick. The hole enlarged, so that the disc looked like a 45 RPM single; paradoxically its spin slowed rather than speeded up.

Suddenly the disc exuded some of its mass into the hole in the center, where a globe of red Symbiote grew like a pearl forming within an oyster. It moved away from the disc, coming toward us with infinite slowness. Toward Kirra and Ben. As it did so, the disc broke up into six Stardancers again, and they all braked violently to an instant stop, sudden total motionlessness. The music broke like a wave on a shore and faded to silence, the lights went out.

After several seconds of silence, there was wild applause.

Oh, I know I haven’t conveyed it; dance can’t be described. Look it up for yourself, it’s on the Net. Not a major work by any means, but a moving and lyrical piece, just right for a wedding feast and Graduation. I was terribly pleased on Kirra and Ben’s account.

They thanked me lavishly for the gift, and thanked all twelve of the dancers individually. “That was bloody marvelous,” Kirra said. “Morgan, really, it was special!” She was grinning, but her p-suit hood was full of tear-tendrils.

“Just my version of chocolate chip ice cream from Chile,” I said, grinning back at her. Though it marks a much happier occasion than your gift did. Dammit, I was leaking saline worms too.

“We’re deeply honoured,” Ben said. “Our GraduWedding has become part of dance history. Or almost. Get ready, spice, here it comes!”

Their blob of Symbiote was nearly upon them, a bead of God’s blood.

“I’ll sing at your Graduation, Morgan,” Kirra promised me hastily. “Wait an’ see if I don’t! Goodbye—see you soon—cheerio, all! Let’s go meet it, Benjy: one, two, three…”

They jaunted forward together, hit the Symbiote dead center, passed inside it. They stripped quickly, took the communications gear from their p-suits and hung it around their necks, pushed the suits clear of the Symbiote and joined hands. It contracted in upon them and around and through them, and they were two Stardancers, convulsing with their first shock of telepathic onslaught but still holding hands. Their combined shout of exaltation was picked up by their throat mikes and hurled to the stars.

Then they were silent and adrift, marinating in Symbiosis.

The dancers had already begun tiptoeing away on scarlet butterfly wings of lightsail. The show was over.

Reb took my arm, and we all headed back to Top Step.

They phoned me up five or six days later. They were well on their way out to meet the Harvest Crew returning with new Symbiote from Titan, about a day from rendezvous. It was an odd conversation. They both sounded as though they were very drunk or very stoned. Ben commented giddily that space now looked to him just like a newspaper. Black and white and red all over. They both assured me that Symbiosis was glorious, wonderful, not to be missed, but were quite unable to describe it in any more detail than that, at least in words. They did say they had two new senses, as expected, but could not describe or explain them any better than the instructors back at Suit Camp had. Kirra sang me part of a work in progress. The Song of Symbiosis, and made me promise to send a copy of it to Yarra and the Yirlandji people for her. It was terribly beautiful but very strange, haunting and confounding, hinting at things that even music can’t carry. She said she was collaborating on a Song with Raoul (whom she would be physically meeting in only a few more hours), but did not sing any of it for me. I told them my dance was about two-thirds finished, and they both exhorted me to hurry up and complete it so I could come join them. I assured them I was going as fast as I could, especially since I no longer had any close friends inboard to take up my free time. Kirra, pausing to consult some mathematician I didn’t know, worked out that they would in all likelihood be back with the fresh Symbiote just in time for my Graduation. We agreed to meet then, and I was very pleased to know they would be present for my own last breath.

I was hard at work on the piece the next day, had just solved a tricky and hard-to-describe esthetic problem in the third movement, when Teena said, “Morgan, Reb Hawkins needs to speak to you as soon as possible.”

“Put him on,” I said, brushing sweat from my back, and she did. I can’t reproduce the dialogue and won’t try. He told me the news, and I’m sure he did it as compassionately as it could have been done.

Shortly after Ben and Kirra had made rendezvous with the returning Harvest Crew, there had been an unexplained catastrophic explosion, cataclysmic enough to disrupt the entire mass of new Symbiote and kill the entire Crew. Raoul Brindle, Ben, Kirra, more than a dozen others, all were dead.

Black and white and red all over.