Starseed

Chapter Fourteen

A switch was thrown and I was awake. My mind was clear, and my body was its normal shape and consistency. There was an insistent ringing in my ears, but otherwise reality seemed real again. The leather-winged things were gone. I was very glad of that.

I was sitting in a chair. I was naked. My bearded Chinese uncle was looking at me from half a meter away, clinical curiosity on his face. “Can you hear me all right?” he asked.

Lie. “Yes,” I said. Okay, you can’t lie. More of that truth drug shit. Keep trying. Meanwhile, can you move?

“The neuroscrambler should have largely dismantled itself by now. How do you feel?”

Yes, but without precision. So don’t try any more now. “As if I were in free fall. Or wrapped in cotton.” It was true. I felt light as a feather. I seemed to be sitting in a chair, involuntarily I gripped it to keep from drifting away.

“Do you have any questions?”

“Yes.”

“You may ask them.”

“Is there a bomb in me?”

“No. A single detonation was both necessary and sufficient.”

“Why am I still alive?”

“I must know exactly what you know, and what you have done about it. You’ve already told me of the letter you left for your teacher, and I know your security code. But before I send an erasure command after the letter, I want to know exactly what it says.”

I started to recite the letter verbatim; after a few sentences he cut me off. “This will take forever. I have it: ask me any questions you still have about our activities. The gaps in your knowledge will define what you know. And you will have the comfort of dying with no unanswered questions, a rare blessing. It is safe enough: I know you are not wired in any way. What would you like to know?”

I tried prioritizing my questions, but couldn’t make them hold still. All over my body and brain, switches were hanging open, wires were cut. My mental thumb was mashed down on the panic button, but somewhere between there and my adrenal glands a line was down. In fact, the whole limbic system seemed to be down; my emotions were nothing more than opinions, with no power to command my body. My heart wasn’t even pounding particularly hard. I picked a question at random, sent a yapping dog to cut it out of the herd, and stampeded it toward Uncle Santa.

“Are you Chen Hsi-Feng?”

Why do they say, the corners of his mouth turned up? They don’t, you know; they just get farther apart and grow parentheses. “Ah, excellent: you are not certain. Yes, I am Chen Hsi-Feng.”

“Where are we?” Now there was a stupid, irrelevant question. What the hell difference could it make? Pick a better one next time.

“In one of my homes. Near Carmel, if it matters to you.”

I had been in Carmel once, on my way somewhere else. Down the coast from San Francisco. Upper-class stronghold; high fences and killer dogs; Clint Eastwood had once been Sheriff there or something. Estates big enough and private enough to hold a massacre without disturbing the neighbors.

“How come you do your own hatchetwork? If I were you, I’d be about eight layers of subordinates away, playing golf in some public place.”

He shook his head. “Your grasp of tactics is thirty years out of date. Multilayer insulation was indeed useful in conspiracy or fraud for centuries: before a fallible lazy human investigator could work his way to the top of the chain he was likely to give up or be reassigned or retire or die. But then they started buying computers, and interconnecting them. Now every layer of intermediaries is merely another weak point, another thread the enemy may stumble across, and pull on to unravel the entire knot in a twinkling. I have many such chains of influence, whose sole purpose is to be found and keep investigators happy and harmlessly employed. Really important work I assign to the only person I know will not betray me. What else puzzles you?”

“Your ultimate aim. Do you plan to keep on blowing up Stardancers until they get annoyed and go away?”

“I plan to annihilate them, root and branch.”

“But that’s silly.” Hunt down and kill more than forty thousand individuals in free space, who had low albedo, no waste heat, and nothing bigger than fillings in their teeth to show up on radar? Fat chance. With those huge variable light-sails attached to insignificant mass, they were more maneuverable than any vessel in space could ever be. What he proposed was not merely impossibly expensive, but impossible. “How could you hope to succeed?”

“By raising up an army against them,” he said blandly. “And for that I need a technological edge, an unbeatable one. I need the Symbiote, tamed.”

In my present state, I was incapable of shock. I was only mildly confused. I tightened my grip on the edges of my chair, so that I would not float away. “ ‘Tamed’?”

“You did not know. Good.” He sat back and lit up a joint. No, a cigarette. My ex-husband had been a diehard smoker too. “By coincidence, it was a resident of Carmel, Sheldon Silverman, who first proposed the concept of a Symbiotic army—less than ten minutes after the existence and nature of the Symbiote was first revealed. It’s in the Titan Transmission. But Charles Armstead pointed out the flaw in the idea. An immortal, telepathic soldier will mutiny the moment he joins the Starmind. He cannot be coerced anymore. I have tried placing spies in the Starmind; all ceased working at the instant of their Symbiosis. Fortunately I had anticipated this; none of them carried knowledge especially dangerous to me.

“But just suppose one could genetically modify the Symbiote, to produce a strain which does not convey telepathy, and has a limited life-span without regular reinfection.”

He had not phrased it as a question, so I could not answer. I did as I was told, just supposed. The drug kept me physically calm, relaxed and at ease—but inside my head a tiny part of me was screaming, beating at the walls of my skull.

The toughest part of having an army is keeping it fed and supplied and in motion. If you had a Symbiotic army, all you’d have to do was issue them lasers and turn them loose. So long as they needed regular fresh doses of false Symbiote to keep breathing vacuum, they would follow orders.

“It would be useful,” he went on, “to further modify the altered Symbiote so that it could survive terrestrial conditions. But I am told that is fundamentally impossible. No matter: who controls space controls the planet, in the final analysis. And the only military force in space that cannot be defended against is naked human beings who never hunger and thirst, an infantry who cannot be seen until it is too late. Do you see a flaw in the plan?”

“How can you genetically modify Symbiote? You can’t get a sample, without giving yourself away.”

Again his mouth grew tiny parentheses. “I have done so. That is precisely why your friends died.”

The Symbiote Mass! Its mass and vector to several decimal places had been public information. Place an explosive of known force near it, trigger it by radio at a predetermined instant, apply a little chaos theory, and when the mass blows to smithereens…you’ll know the projected new vector of the largest smithereens. There’s no way anyone else can track shards of organic matter in open space—but you can happen to have a ship in the right place to intercept some.

I lacked the capacity to be horrified. I appraised the idea dispassionately, like the emotionless Vulcan Jerald in Star Trek: the Third Generation on 3V. The scheme was brilliant, without flaw that I could see. Not only did he have sample Symbiote for his geneticists to experiment on, no one even suspected that. His biggest problem would be making sure no human accidentally touched any of the Symbiote while working with it—but that’s why they make remote-operated waldos; it was nowhere near as complex a problem as coping with dangerous nanoreplicators.

I’d been asked if I saw any flaws in the plan. “Stardancers would still have tactical advantage in combat. Instant, perfect communications.”

He shrugged. “Telepathy is not that much more effective than good radio, at close quarters. I will match my generalship against any component of the Starmind. And they are utterly unarmed.”

“There are a lot of them.”

“Do you have any idea how many men I can put in space in a hurry, if I do not mind heavy losses in transit? At most, the Stardancer population is one ten thousandth of that of the People’s Republic. The outcome is foreordained.” He blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think you are the biggest monster I ever heard of.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

A phone chimed beside him. He answered at once. “Yes?”

Maybe the drug enhanced my hearing. I could make out Robert’s voice. “Is she all right?”

Chen Hsi-Feng frowned slightly. “Did I not promise?”

“Let me speak to her.”

“No.”

“Then I’m coming in. I have to see her once more, before you take her mind.”

His frown deepened…then disappeared. “Of course. Come.”

He put down the phone, and took an object from an inner pocket. My own Gyrojet, it looked like, or one like it. “There is time for one last question,” he said distractedly.

I nodded. “You’re not going to let me live, are you? You lied to him.”

“Yes. I dare not simply wipe your memory. Organic memory differs from electronic in that any erasure can be undone, with enough time and effort. A pity: it will cost me a son.”

So I was going to die. And so was Robert, or Po Chang, or whoever he was today. Interesting. Regrettable. At least I would be forever safe from the things with the leather wings. Or perhaps not; perhaps they came from the land beyond life. No matter. An old traditional blues song went through my head.

“Sit there and be silent,” he commanded me. He swiveled his chair away, faced the door with his back to me. The door opened and Robert came in. Not Chen Po Chang—my Robert Chen. The door closed behind him, and locked. He registered that at the same instant he saw the gun. His face did not change, but his shoulders hunched the least little bit, then relaxed again. “I have been stupid,” he said.

His father nodded. “When you called her a romantic in the restaurant, I nearly laughed aloud. Do you remember what I told you on your thirteenth birthday?”

“…‘Love is to be avoided, for it causes you to believe not what is so, but what you must believe.’ You were right. You must kill her…and so you must kill me. Pray proceed.”

No!

“I know you do not share my religious views,” Chen Hsi-Feng said. “But I will summon a priest of any denomination you wish.”

Robert grimaced. “No, thank you.”

“You are sure? There is no hurry, and this much I can do for you. Of course, whoever shrives you must die also—I never understood why a good priest should fear death.”

Robert shook his head without speaking.

“Is there anything else you want to do first?”

Robert thought about it. “Cut your throat,” he suggested.

“So sorry,” his father said, and lifted the gun.

I had spent the last seconds, scurrying about inside my skull, recruiting every neuron I could. Now I threw everything I had into a massive last-ditch internal effort, trying desperately to throw off my chemical chains and regain control of my body. The counterrevolution was a qualified disaster. I could not invest the motor centers—or even, equally important to me, regain access to my emotional glandular system—but I managed to briefly retake the speech center. “He…is…your…son,” I said in a slurring drawl.

I succeeded in surprising him. He stiffened slightly, and rolled his chair to one side so that he could watch me without taking his gaze off Robert. Then he answered. “He is my illegitimate son. True, he is worth two of my heirs. But that is exactly why I have not been able to afford him since the moment he stopped being ruled by self-interest. I can no longer predict his actions. Last words, Po Chang?”

“Fuck you,” Robert said.

His father shot him in the face. The dart worked exactly as the demonstrator slug had worked on the rat. Robert stiffened momentarily, then began to tremble, then fell down and shivered himself to death. Blood ran from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth, then stopped. From the huff of the shot to the end of his death rattle took no more than five or ten seconds. I wished I could scream.

Chen Hsi-Feng spun his chair to me. “Last words?” he said again.

Even without emotions, and with nothing objective left to live for, I was not ready to die. “I would like to…I guess the word is, pray.”

“Do you require a cleric of some kind? I’m afraid I will not go to as much trouble for you as I was prepared to for my son.”

I shook my head. “I just want to sit zazen for a few minutes.”

He nodded at once. “Ah—Zen! An excellent faith. You may have five minutes. Who knows? Perhaps you will attain enlightenment this time.” He composed himself to wait.

I tried to get down from my chair and sit on the floor. But the persistent delusional feeling of being in low gravity threw me off; I fell to the floor with a crash. Distantly I heard the unmistakable sound of a bone cracking—every dancer’s nightmare horror sound—but it didn’t seem important at all. I didn’t even bother identifying which bone it was. I established that I could still force my legs into lotus, with the ease of two months of training. I tried to straighten my spine, but could not get a strong fix on local vertical. “Antidote,” I said. “Partial at least.”

He shook his head. “No. It is not a drug that hinders you, but a team of nanoreplicators. They will completely disassemble themselves when your temperature falls below 20 Celsius, but until then nothing can counteract them. Do the best you can. You have five minutes.”

All that is important is to sit, I had heard Reb say once. And to breathe. Last chance for both.

I closed my eyes and became my breath.

Time stopped, and so, for once, did I.

The state Buddhists call “enlightenment,” or satori, is so elusive, so full of contradiction and paradox, that many outsiders throw up their hands and declare it a chimera, a verbal construct with no referent. You seek to attain thought that is no-thought, feeling that is no-feeling, being that is non-being, and the cosmic catch-22 is that if you try, you cannot succeed. You must free yourself of all attachments, including even your attachment to freeing yourself. This state seems, verbally at least, to be so synonymous with, so identical to, death, that some scholars go so far as to say that everyone becomes enlightened sooner or later in his or her own turn, and there is no problem in the universe. The literature is filled with cases of Buddhists who claimed to have found enlightenment in the moment that they looked certain death in the face. Uyesugi Kenshin once said, “Those who cling to life, die, and those who defy death live.” Taisen Deshimaru said, “Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honour, pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?” And Reb Hawkins had once told Glenn and the rest of us in class, “Looked at from a certain angle, enlightenment is a kind of annihilation—a radical self-emptying.”

Perhaps it was nearness to death, then. Perhaps the microscopic nanoreplicators in my brain actually helped, by switching off emotions, making it impossible for me to feel thalamic disturbance, insulating me from physical aches and restlessness and even boredom. Perhaps it was the brutal fact of my despair—which is not an emotion, but a point of view. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Whatever the reason, all at once I attained satori.

I was one with all sentient beings, and there was nothing that was not sentient in all the universe, not even space, not even chance. Everything that was, was simply quantum probability wavefronts collapsing into phenomena, dancing a teleological dance that was choreographed and improvised at the same time. “I” still existed, but I coexisted with and was identical to everyone/everything else.

I had been here before, for brief instants in my life, up until I gave my life to cynicism in my twenties—and then again, for a scattered few seconds, in Top Step, during a long period of kûkanzen. One of the things that had subconsciously held me back from entering Symbiosis, I now saw, had been a desire to experience it again for more than seconds, one last time the “natural” way, before I gave up and ate it prepackaged. A kind of spiritual pride.

It happened now, since I no longer yearned for it. Once again I was little Rain M’Cloud dancing on a floating dock, and was bobbing sea lions, and was the dance that connected us, all at the same time. And then I was not even that.

Sentient beings are numberless, says the Great Vow. I became one with that numberless number. And being one, we perceived ourself, with great clarity.

First, the things called no-thing. Vacuum, space, time, gravity, entropy, the void.

Next, the things called nonliving matter. Rock. Water. Gases. Plasma. Endless reshuffled combinations of hydrogen and the various ashes of its fusion.

Next, the things called living. The film of life that crawled and swam and flew and ran through and ultimately sank back into the surface of the Earth. I was all the viruses that swam in the soup of the world, all the grasses that grew, insects and reptiles and birds and fish and mammals, all striving to make ever-better copies of themselves. I seemed to be a part of all that lived, without being distinct from that which did not.

Then the things called sentient. I could see sentience as if it were a fire burning in the darkness. A tapestry of cool fires that was the dolphins and the orcas. Every dull selfish glow that was the consciousness of a cat. Every hot coal of fear and self-loathing that was a human being. I could pick out every Buddhist among them, tell the adepts from the students. There were all the Christians, and there the Muslims, those were the superstitious atheists and those all the lonely agnostics. I knew everyone on Earth who was happy, and everyone who was in agony. High overhead, and scattered about the Solar System from the orbit of Mercury to the fringes of the Oort Cloud, I saw/felt/was every Stardancer and all Stardancers, the Starmind—for the first time I began to understand it, what it was and what it was trying to become, I knew that it was a Starseed, and that if/when it finally bore fruit, there would be joy among the stars, and on Earth.

And further out I sensed things that were as far beyond sentient as I was beyond an idiot. The Fireflies, who had grown all of this from Earthseed, and others greater even than them, beyond all describing or human understanding. Of all, they were furthest removed from my experience, and thus most interesting. I could know them, there was time, there was no-time—

But just as my awareness left Earth to expand and encompass them, began to pass through High Orbit…there was a change.

I became conscious of a level I had missed. It lay roughly halfway between human being and Stardancer, partaking of both. There were only a few of that nature, a tiny fraction of the sons and daughters of Eve—but a fraction that had stayed nearly constant for the last two million years. They were scattered here and there at apparent random, like salt particles in a bland soup, and they were all connected and interconnected by strands of something that has no name. Call them enlightened ones. Call them holy people. Call them the good and wise, or whatever you like. They had no collective name, only collective awareness. All their awareness was collective: none of them suffered from the delusion that they were anything more than neurons in a larger brain, cells in a body, atoms in a molecule. They were intimately connected with the Starmind, though separate from it.

In the same instant I became aware of their antithesis. Call them the destroyers. The truly evil, if you will. The ones who fear everything, and so seek to destroy everything they can reach. It did not surprise me that there were fewer of them by far. Their interconnections were fewer and much feebler. Each fought all the others, even when cooperation would further their aims. They were essentially stupid at their core, but so corrosively destructive in their childish rage that if they’d had numerical parity with their opposites, the human race would have ended long since.

Back in the reality I had left, frozen in the amber of now, one of them sat a few meters from me, waiting politely to kill me.

Ideas are like viruses. They transmit copies of themselves from host mind to host mind, changing themselves slightly in the process, and the ideas which are unfit soon perish, and the ones that survive grow strong. They compete for resources. Christianity competes with Islam for space in the brains of mankind; the idea of capitalism competes with the idea of Marxism, while theocratic monarchy nips at both their heels. The idea of freedom battles with the idea of responsibility, and so on.

On the highest level, the idea of Life competes with the idea of Death. Hope versus cynicism. Yes versus no. Joy versus despair. Enlightenment versus delusion. Conception versus suicide. This happens in all people…but some take sides.

I could see the human avatars of both sides, now. Call them the white magicians and the black, those who loved greatly and those who hated hugely, in awful stasis, terrible balance, like irresistible thrusters straining to move implacable mass. The black haters were far outnumbered, but they would not yield.

And they said nothing, put out nothing but a steady scream of rage and terror. While the others spoke, sang, reached out, reasoned, soothed. I could see them all, hear them all, almost touch them all.

One of them spoke to me from high over my head.

Morgan.

Yes, Reb, I said, with my mind only.

Another sang, from a different direction. Friend of my badundjari—

Yes, Yarra.

Miz McLeod, said the widowed Harry Stein in a third location.

Harry.

Rain, said a fourth, from impossibly far away.

Hello, Shara.

I was connected to their kind by four strands, now. I could see the strands, like spacer’s umbilicals, feel energy pulse along them in both directions.

Reb spoke for all. Cusp approaches. Action is needful.

I’m glad you know. Can you help me?

We shall.

What must I do?

Go within, deep within, and you will know.

I went within.

Deep within my own body, my own skull, my own bones. The knowledge of how to do so came from hundreds of minds, funneled through the four to whom I was connected. I went back past consciousness to preconsciousness. I was a fetus, swimming a warm saline sea, with a two-valved heart like a fish, parasitic on the mother-thing. I invested my limbs, kicked, dreamed. I was born, acquired a four-valved heart and eyes to match my ears, began my long battle with gravity. I was a growing youth, then a dying adult, and my awareness went further inward. I was a cell, absorbing nutrient and preparing to divide. I was a strand of DNA, scheming patiently to take over every speck of matter in the universe, measuring time in epochs.

Suddenly I was a corpuscle, racing through my own bloodstream like a cruise missile, singing at the top of my voice. I shrank down to an atom and roamed through tissue and bone and fluid. In moments I understood my whole body, better than any doctor ever could. I had the autonomic control of a yogi, a Zen master, a firewalker. Absentmindedly I destroyed the bacteria in my teeth, cured an incipient cold, strengthened my bad back and trick knee, began the repair of a lifetime of damage to my heart, lungs and other vital systems. I happened across the swarm of nanoreplicators deep in the vitals of my brain, huge slow clumsy things that moved at speeds measurable in great long picoseconds. I slipped inside one, studied its programming, and told it to become a factory for converting nanoreplicators like itself into norepinephrine, finishing with itself. Then I slipped out and down the medulla to the top of the spinal cord, checked all the skills I had spent a lifetime storing there, upgraded and enhanced them to their optimax. I located the bone I had cracked falling down, in my right ankle, saw that it would take at least half an hour to mend it, worked its limitation into my choreography, and ignored it thereafter. I devoted a huge portion of my body’s emergency reserve energy to enhancing my strength and coordination.

I polished the choreography for an endless time, perhaps as much as a second, with a thousand minds looking over my figurative shoulder and doublechecking me, making suggestions for improvement. My four pipelines, Shara Drummond, Yarra, Harry Stein and Reb Hawkins took a personal interest, and there were a number of other dancers out there in the Starmind who had ideas to offer, in particular an Iranian Muslim named Ali Beheshti who had been a dervish before he accepted Symbiosis, and a former break-dancer from Harlem named Jumping Bean.

There was one last question to be decided. Was it necessary that Chen Hsi-Feng die? Opinion was divided, consensus oscillated.

Fat Humphrey spoke from near at hand. Forget necessary or unnecessary. You know what he wants to drink. Serve him.

The debate was ended.

I was out of full lotus and on my feet before he knew I was moving. The broken ankle made a horrid sound and hurt like blue fury, but I was expecting that, ignored it. I had not danced in a one-gee field for years, had not danced at all in weeks, but it didn’t matter at all, I was now at least briefly capable of anything that any human could do, factory rebuilt from the inside out, in a controlled adrenaline frenzy. I became a dervish, spinning and whirling and leaping.

In my normal state of performance mania I am capable of moving faster than the eye can follow for brief periods. Now I was inspired, exalted. My feet had not kissed the stage in so long! I flashed to and fro before him, must have seemed to have multiple arms and legs, like the goddess Kali. I had no clothes to hinder me; my bare feet gripped the hardwood floor beautifully.

Instinctively he thrust his feet away from him so that he and his chair flew backwards away from me. He brought up his gun and gaped at me, thunderstruck.

I danced for him.

It was a true dance, a thing of art, a statement in movement. I knew he could sense that, even though he could not slow down his time-sense enough to grasp the statement. He stared, fascinated as a rabbit by a cobra, for nearly ten seconds.

But he was no rabbit. He realized what my dance implied, and exactly when I had known he would, he shook off his shock and awe and pulled the trigger.

The first of the three remaining rocket-darts came floating toward me as slowly as a docking freighter in free fall. I could see the dot of wetness at its tip.

I made it part of the dance, teasing it as a matador teases a bull, eluded it with ludicrous ease.

The harsh flat sound of laser-rifle fire came from outside the room. Someone in the distance screamed. There was a chuff sound just outside the door. He sprang from the chair to a point where he could see both me and the door, the gun waving back and forth. I was waiting for that: I went into a spin, standing in one spot and whirling like a top, tempting him. Just after he passed out of my field of vision for the eighth time, he fired; the needle was halfway to me by the time I could see it. I had all the time in the world. It was heading for my heart; the easiest thing to do would have been to simply squat and let it pass overhead. Instead I jumped, impossibly high, and it passed under my feet. When I landed I broke out of the spin and resumed my dance, completing the second movement in two or three seconds. I reprised the final phrase, then did it again, and again, giving him a predictable pattern to extrapolate.

He had one rocket left, and just then something outside struck the door heavily. But he must have decided that whatever lay outside that door, it could only be human. Clearly I was not. Without any real hope—what could he know of real hope?—he sobbed and fired his last round at me.

The instant he did so his fight was over, one way or another. I could see him grasp that, and devote his last second to trying to comprehend the meaning of my dance.

I ran toward the dart, reached it halfway to him, before it had had a chance to build up to full speed, snatched it out of the air, let the force of it put me into a turn and then fling me at him again, and closed on him before he could lift a hand to defend himself.

And with an overhand looping right, I rammed his death dart down his throat.

As I was yanking my hand clear, he bit off the tip of my index finger in death-spasm. My ankle gave way beneath me at last and we went down together, side by side, facing in opposite directions. He kicked me sharply in the ribs, and died.

The door shattered. A man sprang into the room and landed in a crouch, beautifully. He wore black shirt and trousers, and was barefoot. His face and skull were clean-shaven. His expression was serene. There was a fresh laser burn through one of his outflung hands, but it didn’t appear to bother him. He took in the scene in a glance and straightened up from his combat stance. Then he made deep gassho.

“I am Tenshin Norman Hunter,” he said, with the mild voice of a teacher. “I am the Abbot of Tassajara, a Zen monastery in the mountains east of here.”

I sat up, cupping my injured hand. I had already stopped the bleeding and sterilized the wound, was already beginning to regrow the missing fingertip, but it still hurt, and I could indulge things like that now. “I’ve heard of it,” I said. “And I felt you coming. I am Rain M’Cloud, of Top Step. Thank you for coming.”

“Reb called, when you were captured in San Francisco,” he said. “I answered. It takes some time to come up over the mountain.”

Thank you, Reb, for watching over me.

You’re welcome, Rain.

I glanced at Robert’s body. Whatever else he had done, he had died for love of me. I bade him goodbye, and looked away, forever. “Are there any hostiles left out there?”

The abbot shook his head. “All the guards sleep. The gas grenades we used are good for at least an hour. Three other monks are here: Katherine, and Yama, and Dôjô Sensei, who is badly wounded.”

I got to my knees. “Anmari-kuyokuyo-suru-na, kare-ga kitto umaku-yaru-sa,” I rattled off.

He looked slightly discomfited. “I’m sorry, I don’t really speak Japanese.”

I smiled at him. “I don’t either. Never mind, I just said ‘don’t worry, he’ll make it.’ ”

“I think so. But it would be good to leave here quickly.”

I managed to get my good leg under me and stand. The adrenalin was wearing off, and while I was cushioning it as much as I could, a crash was somewhere on my horizon. I had just used up about three days’ worth of energy in less than a minute. “Let’s go.”

Tenshin Hunter had a large and rugged four-wheel drive ATV waiting. As soon as I was strapped into a seat, I relaxed a block in my brain, and human emotions returned to me for the first time since I’d blacked out in the restaurant. They didn’t overwhelm me, didn’t bring me back from my state of satori. I knew they were illusory, impermanent, transient. But I experienced them to the fullest. I had been storing up a backlog for a long ghastly time.

I cried and cried for the whole two hours it took us to crawl up over a mountain and crawl down to Tassajara, rocking with sobs, bawling like a child, while Katherine held my head to her shoulder and stroked my hair. I cried for Robert, and for Kirra and Ben, and Glenn, and Yumiko, and poor angry Sulke; for Grandmother and my parents; for my ex-husband David and the Chief Steward of my first shuttle flight to orbit; and for Morgan McLeod, who had suffered so bitterly for all her stubborn attachments.

When we finally reached Tassajara in the cool dark of evening, I was done with crying, done with a lifetime of suppressed crying. I never cried again, and I don’t think I ever will.

Five days later I was in Top Step again, and eight hours after that—just long enough to conceive a child with Reb—I entered Symbiosis fully. Twelve hours ago, I came out of the Rapture of First Awakening. I have taken the time to tell this story, impressing it directly into the memory of Teena at the highest baud rate she can accept, because it is the consensus of the Starmind that the world must know what happened, and what nearly happened, and I am in the best position to tell it.

Now I am done, and now I will spread my blood-red wings and sail the photon currents beyond the orbit of Pluto, where something truly wonderful is happening. There I will physically touch, for the first time, Shara and Norrey Drummond and Charlie Armstead and Linda Parsons and Tom McGillicuddy, and a thousand more of my brothers and sisters. We will dance together.

We will always dance.

I am Rain M’Cloud, and my message to you is: the stars are at hand.