Starseed

Chapter Seven

I certainly knew what to do with my time. Each night Robert tutored me for an hour, then I spent the rest of the evening dancing in private until I couldn’t move anymore. I hadn’t worked so hard in years. But my back and knees continued to hold up, thanks to free fall…and as the days turned into weeks, I began to get somewhere. By the end of the second week I could do a fair imitation of Liberation, and I could quote sections of Mass Is a Verb. More important, I was making some progress on a new piece of my own. Choreography had never been my strong suit—but there was something about zero gee that made it come easier. I still wasn’t ready to show anything to an audience, but I was content to be making progress, however slow it might be. I had thought, for an endless time, that I was finished as a dancer. It was like a miracle, like being reborn, to get another chance; there was no hurry. I luxuriated in each painful minute.

Ben and Kirra knew what to do with their time too—and I don’t just mean making love. Ben did not fully acquire all the fundamentals of jaunting in two days—much less the fine points—but he did become the star pupil in our shift, and under his tutelage Kirra too became something of prodigy. They progressed just as fast in morning class, learning less tangible skills like spherical thinking, spatial orientation and conscious control of their own metabolisms and mental states. By the third week Reb admitted that they were good enough to start EVA instruction right away…but the system wasn’t set up to allow it, and they stayed behind with the rest of us dummies, serving as assistant instructors in Sulke’s class. (And, at Reb’s insistence, getting paid for doing so. They both donated their unwanted salaries to the Distressed Spacer’s Fund, which made Sulke happy.)

Robert was almost as adept when he arrived as Ben became, but seemed disinterested in teaching the group. He spent most of his free time, according to Ben, designing free fall structures on his computer terminal in his room. I rarely saw him in Le Puis. Occasionally I ran across him in Sol Three. He was always by himself. We would chat quietly, then part. Part of me had hoped that he’d take me off the hook by becoming involved with some other woman. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had; most of our fellow students seemed to be pairing up. He continued to tutor me every night, without pressing me for further intimacy. We remained aware of each other, slowly building a charge.

It had been a long time since a man had courted me with that kind of mixture of determination and patience. I liked it.

According to Teena, our class had one of the most painless, trouble-free Postulancies in the history of Top Step. Only three of us dropped out and went back to Earth during the first two weeks (all three for the most common of reasons: persistent inability to tolerate a nonlinear environment, to live without up and down). None of us got so crazy that we had to be sent home. None of us died, or sustained serious injuries. There were no incidents of violence, even on the level of a fistfight. Six of us got married—all at once, to each other. (Ben and Kirra were that kind of committed, but never bothered with any formal ceremony or celebration.) All of us formed friendships, which expanded in informal affinity groups, which somehow did not become exclusionary cliques. Dorothy Gerstenfeld logged an all-time record minimum of complaints and emergencies. As Reb said one day, smiling his Buddha smile, “Good fellowship seems to be metastasizing.” People who wanted them gravitated to temple or zendo or shrink or encounter group or whatever it took to ease their pain or enhance their mindfulness, and Le Puis became the first bar I’d ever seen that rarely seemed to have anything but happy drunks.

All this was in sorry contrast to the planet we orbited. From the great window in Sol Three, Earth looked peaceful, serene. But we all followed Earthside news, and knew just what an anthill in turmoil it really was. That was the month that China and Argentina were making war noises, and none of the other major players could figure out which side to back. For one three-day period we honestly thought they might start setting off Big Ones down there at any moment. Who really knew whether the UN-SDI net would actually work? One afternoon when I was meditating in Sol Three I mistook a sudden flare of reflected sunlight off Mar Chiquita, a huge Argentinian lake, for a nuke signature—just for an instant, but it was a scary instant.

I was surprised to find that political upheaval on Earth did not carry over to Top Step. We had several ethnic Chinese besides Robert in our class, and close to a hundred inboard altogether, as well as an equal number of Hispanophones and four actual Argentinians. (One of the three Suit Camps was located in Ecuador.) If there was ever so much as a harsh word exchanged among any of them, I didn’t hear about it—and any space habitat has a grapevine that verges on telepathy.

I did some reading, guided by Teena, and learned that from the very beginnings of space exploration, spacers have always tended to feel themselves literally above the petty political squabbles of the groundhogs below. Immigrants to a new country can continue to cling to their ethnic or national or religious identity for a generation or two, but immigrants to space quite often seem to leave theirs on the launchpad. And Stardancer-candidates have even less reason to get agitated about the doings of nations than most spacers. In a matter of weeks, we’d all be surrendering our passports.

As for myself, I’d never felt especially patriotic about being a Canadian. But then, that was a notorious characteristic of most Canadians. The only thing we were proud of was not being Americans.

We all followed Earth news…but even as the drama below us began to get dangerously interesting, it became less and less relevant to us. We spent less and less time watching Earth in Sol Three. We retained concern for the suffering of human beings—but for humans as a species: the labels and abstractions they used to separate themselves seemed more and more absurd.

We weren’t spacers yet. But we were no longer Terrans.

By the end of the third week, Reb and Sulke between them had brought us former groundhogs to the point where we could not only stand to be in the dark in zero gee, but could navigate reliably in darkness.

Do you have any idea how incredibly far that was?

One of the first humans ever to live in space, a member of the Skylab crew, woke one night to find that the light in his sleeping compartment had failed. That compartment compared with a coffin for roominess. He knew exactly where the switch for the emergency backup lighting was located. It took him nearly half an hour to find it, half an hour on the trembling verge of fullblown panic. And he was a hypertrained jock. The first time Reb doused the lights, for not more than a minute, the classroom rang with screams, and about a third of us ended up having to go change our clothes. In the total absence of either visual or kinesthetic cues, your hindbrain decides that the sensation of falling is literal truth, and you just come unstuck. All the rational thought in the world doesn’t help. You clutch the first wall or structure or person you encounter like a panicking drowner, and hang on for dear life, heart hammering. Five of us dropped out that night.

But methodical disciplines of breath-control and muscle-control and self-hypnosis do help, and practice helps most of all. Once you get past the terror part, the disorientation diminishes quickly. We played orientation and navigation games. For instance: three of you crawl along the walls of the classroom in the dark, humming to each other, until your ears tell you that you’re all roughly equidistant in the spherical room; then you jaunt for where you think the center of the room is, and try to meet your mates there…ideally without cracking your skull or putting someone’s eye out. It was fun, once we all started getting good at it.

And it took us that last step toward being comfortable without even an imaginary local vertical. We lost our tendency to line up with whomever we were talking to or working with, and started living three-dimensionally without having to make a mental effort.

And that started to affect us all in subtle psychological ways, broadening us, opening us up, undoing other sorts of equally rigid preconceptions about the universe. Up/down may be the first dichotomy a baby perceives (even before self/notself), the beginning of duality, or either/or, yes/no logic. Hierarchy depends on the words “high” and “low” having meaning. Floating free of gravity is just as exhilarating in space as it is in dreams, and constant exhilaration can help solve a lot of human problems. The therapeutic value of skydiving has long been known, and we never had to snap out of the reverie and pull our ripcords.

One by one, we became more pleasant people to be with than we had been back on terra firma. Glenn, for instance, lost a great deal of her dogmatism, became more flexible, started making friendships with people she had considered airheads back in Suit Camp. Eventually she even lost the frown that had seemed her natural expression.

Yes, it was our time of Leavetaking, of saying goodbye to our earthly lives, and yes, some of it was spent in solemn meditation in Solarium or zendo or chapel or temple. But the solemnity was balanced by an equal and opposite quantum of gaiety.

Dorothy Gerstenfeld had been right, back on that first day: zero gee tended to make us childlike again in significant ways. We were doing some of the same sort of metaprogramming that a small child does—redoing it, really, with different assumptions—and do you remember how much fun it was being a small child?

We had the kind of late-night bull sessions I hadn’t had with anyone since college, full of flat-out laughter and deep-down tears, like kids around an eternal campfire with all the grownups gone to bed.

There are so many games you can play in zero gee. Acrobatics; spherical handball, billiards, and tennis; monkey bars; tag…the list is endless. Even a moderately good frisbee thrower becomes a prodigy. You’d be astonished how many solid hours of entertainment you can get from a simple glass of water, coaxing it into loops and ropes and bubbles and lenses with the help of surface tension. A man named Jim Bullard devised a marvelous game involving a hollow ball within which a small quantity of mercury floated free, causing it to wobble unpredictably in flight; in gravity it would have just been a nuisance, but in zero gee it was an almost-alive antagonist. I used my Canadian background to invent one of my own: 3-D curling. The idea was to scale pucks so gently that air resistance caused them to come to rest in an imaginary sphere in the center of the room, while knocking away your opponent’s pucks. Your teammate tried to help by altering the puck’s trajectory inflight with a small compressed-air pen—with strictly limited air which had to last him the whole round. As in curling, it took forever to find out how good your shot was…and you all had to keep moving while you waited, since the room’s air-circulation had to be shut off. Robert and I teamed up at it and soon were beating all corners. Ben invented a three-dimensional version of baseball—but it was so complicated that he never managed to teach it to enough people to get a game going. With assistance from Teena, Kirra actually managed to locate a piece of genuine wood somewhere inboard (at a guess, I’d say there isn’t enough real wood in all of space to build a decent barn; even the legendary Shimizu Hotel uses a superb fake), and borrowed tools to work it from one of the construction gangs who daily burrowed ever deeper into the rock heart of Top Step. When she was done, she got permission from Chief Administrator Mgabi, and took her creation down to the Great Hall. A small crowd went along to watch. She tested the breeze, locked her feet under a handrail to steady herself, and threw the thing with considerable care and skill. That boomerang was still circling the Hall when she reached out and caught it three hours later. I wanted her to let it keep going, but she and I and the volunteers at the major tunnel mouths who kept passing pedestrians from jaunting out into the thing’s flight path all had to get to class.

One of the best games of all could be played solo in your room without working up a sweat: browsing through the Net. We all had Total Access, like the most respected and funded scholars in the Solar System, and could research to exhaustion any subject that interested us, initiate datasearches on a whim which would have bankrupted us back on Earth, download music and literature and visual art to our heart’s content. Ben in particular was heavily addicted to Netwalking, and it was a common occurrence for Kirra to have to drag him away from his terminal to go eat…whereupon he would begin babbling to her about what he’d just been doing or reading. Glenn too binged heavily, as did several others. As for myself, all I really used my access for was to watch hour after hour of Stardancer works, especially the ones that Shara Drummond and the Armsteads performed in. They were unquestionably the best dancers in space, and not just because they had been the first. By that point in history, all Stardancer dances were officially choreographed by the Starmind as a whole, in concert…and that must have been to a large extent true. But from time to time I was sure I recognized phrases or concepts that were pure Shara or pure Charlie/Norrey, even in works in which they didn’t physically appear.

On the last day of week three, Kirra sprang a surprise on us. Reb called her up beside him in class that morning, and told us that she had something special to share with all of us. Most of us knew by then about her background and reason for being here; for the benefit of those who didn’t know all the details, she briefly sketched out the history of the Dreamtime, and the Songlines, and the importance of Song in the Aboriginal universe.

“My people want to start movin’ out into space,” she finished up, “and so my job is to start sussin’ out the Songs for all this territory, so’s we can come make Walkabout here without bein’ afraid it’ll all up and turn imaginary on us.”

“How’re you doing?” someone asked.

“Well, that’s what I’m doin’ here in front of you. It’s been a lot slower goin’ than I expected…I got the Song o’ Top Step now, but. An’ I want to sing it for all you bastards.” (By now we had all learned that to an Australian, “bastard” held no negative connotations, meaning simply “person,” usually but not always male. Similarly, “tart” merely meant “female person.”)

A surprised and delighted murmur went through the room: most of us knew how much her responsibility weighed on her. I was thrilled.

“I just finished it this mornin’ before brekkie, even Ben an’ me roomie haven’t heard it yet. You all been here as long as I have, you ought to hear it. This ain’t just a tabi, a personal song, this is a proper corroboree Song, an’ it calls for an audience. Anyway I wanted you all to hear it, an’ Reb said it was all right with him if I did it here.”

There were universal sounds of approval and encouragement.

“All right, then: here goes.”

She took her boomerang from her pocket, slapped it rhythmically against her other palm for ten counts, and began to sing.

I cannot supply a translation of the words, and will not reproduce them as she sang them, because they were in Padhu-Padhu, a secret ritual language known only to Aboriginals, so secret (she explained to me later) that its very existence was unsuspected by Caucasian scholars until the late twentieth century.

And it doesn’t matter, because there were very few words in what she sang. Very little of her song’s information content was verbal. It was the melody itself that was important.

How can I describe that melody to you? I doubt that there is anything in your experience to compare it to. In fact, I doubt that there would have been much in another Aboriginal’s experience to compare it to; I’d heard a number of their Songs from Kirra and this was unlike them in ways I’m not equipped to explain even if you were equipped to understand me. It did not behave like any other melody I’d ever heard, yet somehow without thereby becoming unpleasing to the ear.

It began at the very bottom of her alto register, and arced up in a smooth steady climb that suggested the shuttle flight from Earth. It opened out into a repeated five-tone motif whose majesty and regularity seemed to represent Top Step in its great slow orbit. Then the song changed, became busier. It behaved much like a jaunting Postulant, actually, gliding lazily, then putting itself into tumbles, then straightening out, bouncing off imaginary walls, coming to a halt and then kicking off again. Like a jaunter’s progress, her melody never really stopped, for she had mastered the didgeridu player’s trick of breathing in and out at the same time so that she never had to pause for breath. I closed my eyes as I listened, and the twists and turns her voice took evoked specific places in Top Step powerfully for me. The Great Hall, Solarium Three, a merry little flurry that was unmistakably Le Puis, a slow solemn ululation that was Harry Stein at the window of Solarium One. Somewhere in the middle was a frankly sensual movement that expressed zero gravity lovemaking, explicitly and movingly. Ben’s humour was in it, and Kirra’s mischievousness, and the richness of their love for each other. At the end, the five-tone theme returned, first with little trills of embellishment and then at last in its pure form, slower and slower until she drew out its last note into a drone, and fell silent.

I don’t know how long we all drifted, silent, motionless, like so many sea lions. Reb was the first to shake off stasis and put his hands together, then Ben joined and then me and then the whole room exploded in applause and cheers that lasted for a long time. One of the loudest was Jacques LeClaire, the other musician in the room. She accepted our applause without smiling, as her due—or so I thought.

“It’s called ‘Taruru,’ ” she said when the noise had died down. “That means a lot o’ things, really. ‘Last glow of evening,’ and ‘dying embers,’ and ‘peace o’ mind,’ kinda rolled into one.”

“Teena,” Reb said, “save the Song Kirra just sang to her personal files as ‘Taruru.’ ”

“Yes, Reb.”

“Kirra,” Reb went on, “I think you should send that recording, as is, to your tribe.”

“You think? I can do it again any time, just like that: that’s the point of a Songline Song.”

“I understand. But send that copy. Please. I would be honoured.” Ben and I and others made sounds of vigorous agreement. Jacques called, “Oui! That is a take.”

She nodded. “Right, then. Teena, transmit ‘Taruru’ to my Earthside number, would you?”

“It’s done. Receipt has…just been acknowledged by your phone.”

“What time is it in Queensland now?”

“Five-fourteen PM.”

“Bonzer. Yarra can play it for the Yirlandji Elders tonight after supper. Teena, everybody here can have a copy if they want.”

There were more cheers. Kirra was well liked.

“You’ll void your copyright,” Glenn warned.

Kirra blinked at her. “What copyright? I didn’t make up the bloody thing, mate, I just sang it. It’s the Song of this place, see? It was here before I got here. You can’t copyright the wind.”

Now I understood why she’d heard our applause without smiling. She’d assumed we were applauding the Song, not here performance.

“One suggestion,” Reb said.

“Yes, Reb?”

“Transmit a copy to Raoul Brindle.”

There was a murmur. Brindle had been the most famous living composer for over thirty years. “Oui,” Jacques called again, and several others echoed him. “Da!” “Sí!” “Hai!”

Kirra looked thoughtful. “Be a bloody expensive phonecall, but. He an’ the Harvest Crew aren’t more than halfway back from Titan, it’d have to go by laser.”

“If it did,” Reb said, “Top Step would pay the cost; Raoul has left specific orders that he wants to hear anything you want to send him. But a laser is not necessary. Since you are willing to release the Song to the public domain, just phone any nearby Stardancer and sing it. Raoul will hear it instantly.”

“Why, sure! I’ll never get used to this telepathy business. Hey, Teena, send that Song to the nearest Stardancer that ain’t busy, addressed to Raoul Brindle, would ya?”

“Transmission in progress,” Teena said. “Routing through Harry Stein, in realtime. Transmission ends in a little over five minutes.”

There was one more round of applause, and then Kirra joined the rest of us and Reb began regular class. But five minutes later, Reb paused in the middle of a sentence.

“Excuse me, friends. Teena has just informed me that there is a phonecall for Kirra from Raoul Brindle. Kirra?”

“Open line, Teena.”

Raoul Brindle said, “Hello, Kirra.”

“G’day, mate,” she said, as though living legends phoned her up all the time.

“I don’t want to interrupt your class. I just wanted to say that your Song has been heard by all members of the Starmind presently in circuit, from the orbit of Venus to that of Uranus. Our response condenses down to: hurry, sister. We await your Graduation. I’d be honoured if you’d sail on out here and meet me once you’re Symbiotic. Oh, and there’s a waiting list of one hundred and eighty-seven Stardancers who’d like to have a child with you if you’re willing. Uh, I’m one of ’em.”

Kirra blinked. “Well, if I’m gonna live forever I suppose I got to do somethin’ with my time. I’m willin’ to discuss it with the lot of you bastards—but the line forms behind me Benjamin here. I think he’s got dibs on the first half dozen or so.”

“No hurry,” Raoul agreed. “I would like to score your Song for didgeridu, mirrimba and walbarra, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh please!” she said. “And send it me, will you? I hated havin’ to leave me instruments behind. Have you really got ’em all out there with you?”

“In my head,” he said. “Once you’re Symbiotic, you’ll find that’s all you really need. But I can reprogram my simulator to make a recording you can hear now.”

“That’d be smashin’. About this comin’ out there to meet you, though…what’s the point? I mean, I’ll be just as near to you if my body’s right here, won’t I?”

“Even for telepaths, touch has special meaning,” he said. “In one sense you’re right…but I’d like to shake your hand sooner, rather than later. It shouldn’t take you more than a few weeks.”

“It would make a lovely honeymoon trip, love,” Ben said. Under her influence he had lately been developing the ability to speak short sentences, and then stop. It was some of the strongest evidence I’d seen yet that Top Step could radically alter character.

She smiled suddenly. “Right, then. We’ll do it—singin’ all the way!”

The room rocked with cheers.

I could not completely suppress a twinge of envy. I wished I were coming along in my art as fast as she was in hers. But I was terribly happy for her.

The next day was Sunday. (I did mention that we used a six-day work week in Top Step, didn’t I?) I spent the whole morning working out with Robert, the whole afternoon rehearsing in my studio, and the whole evening drinking Irish coffee in Le Puis with Robert and Kirra and Ben. Fat Humphrey had solved the zero-gee Irish coffee problem with a custom drinking bulb: a large chamber for coffee and booze, and a smaller one full of whipped cream; you sucked the former through the latter. Micah juggled, and Jacques LeClaire put on a lovely impromptu performance on the house synth. To everyone’s surprise, Glenn jumped in and sang two numbers, very well, in a pure, controlled alto. She was roundly cheered, and blushed deeply. Then Kirra had to sing the Song of Top Step for those who hadn’t heard it. The applause was deafening. So many drinks were credited to her account that she never paid for another dram the whole time she was inboard. It was a memorable night.

Robert kissed me goodnight at my door, not pushing it. I sort of wished he had. But not enough to push it myself.

Monday we all came to class excited—some eager, some anxious. Today a new stage in our training began. We were all dressed in our p-suits, airtanks and all, and we certainly were a colourful bunch. As we entered the room, Reb gave each of us a quick, warm handclasp and a private smile. His p-suit was forest green. The room looked different: all Velcro had been stripped from the chamber; its spherical wall was smooth and shiny.

“As you know,” he said when we were assembled, “today we begin a week of EVA simulation. We’ve discussed and prepared for it. Some of you may experience disorientation, fear, perhaps even panic. This is normal and nothing to be self-conscious about. If you feel it’s becoming too much, say so and I’ll turn the walls off at once. It may help to take a visual fix, now, on those nearest you.”

I mapped myself in relation to Robert and Reb.

“Close your hoods, now.”

We did so, and there was a soft sighing as my suit air kicked in. It was the only sound: these p-suits had radios that filtered out breathing sounds automatically, and there was no chatter.

“Remember,” Reb’s voice said in my ear then, “please do not use your thrusters until I tell you to. Try to remain still. This is going to be startling enough without having a train wreck. Are you all ready? Teena, begin simulation.”

Top Step went away!

Suddenly we were all floating in raw, empty space. It didn’t matter that we were all expecting it: the transition was as shocking as a roller-coaster plunge. A flurry of involuntary motion went through the room, and my earphones buzzed with the sum of dozens of grunts, gasps, and assorted exclamations—including my own “Dear Christ!” I swallowed hard and clung to my fix on Robert and Reb. If they were all right, I was too.

“Remember your breathing!” Reb called.

Oh yes. Inhale, slowly, hold it for the same interval, exhale completely, hold, feel the breath, follow it, become it…three weeks of training kicked in and I began to calm down, to try and appreciate the incredible sight.

The illusion provided by the spherical holo wall of the classroom was terribly effective. Seeing space through the window of a Solarium is much different than actually being out in it, surrounded on all sides by infinity. Intellectually I knew it was an illusion, but it took my breath away just the same.

Earth was off to my left, turning lazily, Luna above my head, and the Sun was at my back. Top Step did not exist in this simulation, nor the Nanotech Safe Lab nor any of the other factories and modules that surrounded Top Step. All around me was eternal cold dark, and the ancient coals of a billion billion suns. For the first time in my life I began to get an emotional grasp of just how far away they were. In TV scifi the stars are just down the street. It suddenly came home to me just how preposterous was the notion that Man or Stardancer would ever reach them. Me, the whole human race, the whole Starmind: we were all brief, inconsequential flickers in this endless blackness—

The holo was so good that even the shadows were right. That is, the side of anyone that faced the Sun was brightly lit…and the other side seemed not to exist at all, unless it occulted some sunlit object behind it. In space there is no atmosphere to diffuse light and mitigate shadows. Of course there, in the room, there actually was air—we were breathing p-suit air only to maintain the simulation—but the holo corrected for that and fooled our eyes.

I had thought I was used to being in free fall. But I had never had this far to fall. In Top Step the longest you could possibly jaunt in a straight line before docking with something was about a hundred meters, in the Great Hall. But if someone were to give me a mischievous shove now, I would fall for eternity…or so my eyes tried to tell me, and my stomach believed them implicitly. I had no umbilical tether to catch me; in this simulation there was nothing closer than Terra to tether to.

Inhale, hold, exhale…

From Earth all you can see of the Milky Way is a streak in the sky like a washed-out rainbow. I could see the whole stupendous galactic lens edge on, bisecting the Universe. The starfield was so magnificent that for the first time in my life I understood how even some educated people could believe it ruled their destinies.

Reb said nothing further, let us soak in it. Someone was swearing, softly and steadily and devoutly, a female voice. Someone else was weeping, a male. Kirra was humming under her breath, quite unconsciously I think. All at once someone giggled, and then Jacques did too, and then others, and the very idea of giggling in space was so brave and silly that I had to laugh myself, and I think we might have gotten a group belly-laugh going if Nicole hadn’t picked just then to scream. That first split second of it before the radio’s automatic level control damped her volume went through my ears like a hot knife; involuntarily I started and went into a tumble. So did almost everyone else, and a train wreck began—

“Cut!” Reb told Teena calmly, and the illusion vanished at once.

We were back in our familiar classroom. The transition was just as wrenching as it had been in the other direction; we seemed to have been instantaneously teleported into the heart of Top Step. We floundered about like new chums, and gaped at each other. Reb flashed to Nicole’s side and held her until she stopped screaming and began to cry softly against his chest. He summoned her roommate with his eyes, and had Nicole conducted from the room, sobbing feebly.

I found that Robert was by my side, and that I was glad he was there, and indeed was clutching tightly to his strong arm. Somehow he mentally integrated up our separate masses and vectors and used his wrist and ankle thrusters to bring us to a dead stop together, in a spot where no one else was on a collision course.

“Wow!” he said hoarsely.

“It still gets to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘still’? I’ve been in space many times, yes—but that was my first time EVA. In simulation that good, I mean.”

It surprised me a little, I’d sort of assumed a space architect would have to go outdoors to check on details of a job in progress. But it warmed me toward Robert to find him as moved and shaken as I was by the experience.

He was kind and sensitive and patient and attentive, and very attractive, and he wanted me. What was I waiting for? I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. I just knew I wasn’t ready.

“Are you ready?” Reb called, making me jump involuntarily. “All right, let’s get back to the simulation.”

Class went on.

Nicole showed up at lunch, looking wan and pale. But she wasn’t at supper that night. She never came to classes again, and within two days she was back Earthside.

I visited her and said goodbye before she left. It was awkward.

We had EVA simulation in Sulke’s class too for the rest of that week—only her simulations included holographic “objects” we had to match vectors with, and for the last two days she installed a real set of monkey bars which we learned to use like zero-gee monkeys. (Part of our training consisted of watching holos of real monkeys bred in free fall. God, they’re fast! They make lousy pets, though: so far only cats and some dogs have ever learned to use a zero-gee litterbox reliably.)

Three more people had dropped out by the end of the week. Their egos were simply not strong enough to handle being dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer size of the Universe.

I asked Reb about that in class one day. “It just seems paradoxical. You need a strong ego to endure raw space—and we’re all here to lose our egos in the Starmind.”

“You are not here to lose your ego,” he corrected firmly. “You’re here to lose your irrational fear of other egos.”

“Irrational?” Glenn said.

“On Earth it is perfectly rational,” Reb agreed. “On Earth, there are finite resources, and so underneath everything is competition for food and breeding rights. All humans have occasional flashes of higher consciousness, in which they see that cooperation is preferable to competition—but as long as the game is zero sum, competition is the rational choice for the long run every time. Read Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, the chapter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

“But what the Symbiote has done is to change the rules, utterly. A human in Symbiosis has nothing to compete for. Cooperation becomes more than rational and pleasant: it’s inevitable.”

“How long does it take to unlearn a lifetime’s habit of competition?” Glenn asked.

“An average of about three-tenths of a second,” Reb said. “It’s what your heart has always yearned for: to stop fighting and love your neighbor. Once you become telepathic you know, in your bones, without question, that it’s safe to do that now.”

Robert spoke up—unusually; he seldom drew attention to himself in Reb’s class. “Isn’t competition good for a species? What pressure is there on Stardancers to evolve? Or have they evolved as far as they can already?”

“Oh, no,” Reb said. “Charlie Armstead said once, ‘We are infants, and we hunger for maturity.’ Animals improve through natural selection only—the fit survive. Humans improve through natural selection, and because they want to. We did not evolve the science of medicine, we built it, painfully, over thousands of years, to preserve those natural selection would have culled. Stardancers improve because they want to, only. Their brave hope is that intelligence may just be able to do as well at evolution as random chance.”

Robert nodded. “I think I see. It took millions of years for chance to produce human sentience…and then it took that sentience thousands of years to produce civilization. Telepathic sentience, that didn’t have to fight for its living, might do comparable things in a lifetime.”

I signaled for the floor. “I have trouble imagining how a telepathic society evolves.”

Reb smiled. “So does the Starmind. Does it comfort you to know that our current knowledge suggests you’ll have at least two hundred years to think about it?”

I grinned back. “It helps.”

Robert signaled for attention again. “Reb, I’ve heard that a couple of Stardancers have died.”

“Accidental deaths, yes. A total of four, actually.”

“Well…how can a Stardancer die? I mean, each one’s consciousness is spread through more than forty-thousand different minds. So for a Stardancer, isn’t death really no more than having your childhood home burn down? Your self persists, doesn’t it, even if it can’t ever go home again?”

Reb looked sad. “I’m afraid not. It isn’t consciousness that diffuses through the Starmind, but the products of consciousness: thoughts and feelings. Consciousness itself is rooted in the brain, and when a brain is destroyed, that consciousness ends. Telepathy does not transcend death—the Starmind knows no more about what lies beyond death than any human does.”

Robert frowned. “But all the thoughts that brain ever had, remain on record, in the Starmind—and you’ve told us the Starmind’s memory is perfect. Wouldn’t it be possible, given every single thought a person’s mind ever had, to reconstruct it, and maintain it by time-sharing among forty-some thousand other brains?”

“It has been tried. Twice. It is the consensus of the Starmind that it never will be tried again.”

“Why not?”

“What results is something like a very good artificial intelligence package. It has a personality, mannerisms, quirks…but no core. It doesn’t produce new thoughts, or feel new feelings. Both such constructs asked to be terminated, and were.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand, no Stardancer has yet died of so-called natural causes, and individuals as old as a hundred and ten are as active and vigorous as you are. So I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“I won’t,” Robert agreed. “I just wondered.”

That Sunday there was a small celebration in the Café du Ciel, acknowledging our transition from Postulant to Novice. Phillipe Mgabi attended, the first time most of us had seen him since our arrival, but it was mostly Dorothy’s show. There were no speeches, scant ceremony. Mostly it was tea and conversation and good feelings. Some of us came forward and told of things we had thought or felt since our arrival, difficulties we had overcome. A new marriage was announced, and cheered. To my surprise, no gripes were aired. I think that had a lot to do with Phillipe Mgabi having been too busy to show his face for the past four weeks. I’d never seen such a smoothly running, well-organized anything before, and I knew how much hard work that kind of organization requires.

Under the influence of all this good fellowship, Robert and I reached a new plateau in our relationship, to wit, publicly holding hands and necking. Nothing more serious than friendly cuddling; I think each of us was waiting for the other to make the first move. Well, I don’t really know what he was waiting for.

Come to think of it, I don’t know what I was waiting for either.

And then came the day we’d anticipated for so long. I think it’s safe to say we all woke up with a kids-on-Christmas-morning feeling. Today we would be allowed to leave the house!

Everyone showed up for breakfast, for once, and almost nothing was eaten. The buzz of conversation had its pitch and speed controls advanced one notch apiece past normal. A lot of teeth were showing. Then in the middle of the meal there was a subtle change. The feeling went from kids on Christmas morning to teenagers on the morning of the Chem Final. The laughter came more often, and more shrilly. A restless room in zero gravity is really restless; people bob around like corks in a high sea rather than undulating like seaweed. Smiles became fixed. A bulb of coffee got loose and people flinched away from it.

Kirra began to hum.

Under her breath at first, with a low buzzing tone to it. By the time I was aware of it, I found that I was humming along with her, and recognized the tune we were humming. The Song of Top Step. Ben joined softly in an octave below us. Kirra started to gently tap out the rhythm on the table. Someone two tables over picked up the melody, and that gave all of us the courage to increase our volume. Soon people were chiming in all over the cafeteria, even people from classes before or after ours. Not all of us knew the Song well enough to sing it, but most of us knew at least parts of it, and could join in for those. Those who couldn’t carry a tune kept the rhythm with utensils. Those few who didn’t know the Song at all stopped talking to listen. Even the spacers on the cafeteria staff stopped what they were doing.

We went through it three times together. The third was the best; by then almost everyone had it down. It was the kind of tune that’s easy to learn quickly; even to ears raised on different musical convenience, it was hummable. Kirra held the final note, then let her voice tumble slowly down to the bottom of her range and die out. There was no applause. There was not a sound. Not a cough. Still bodies.

“Let’s do it, then,” Kirra said, and the stasis was ended. We went off to school together calmly, joyfully, quietly, as one.