“The organism is not hopelessly deformed. It trembles on the verge of birthing, yearns to live even as it feels itself dying. It may yet succeed. On the verge of extinction, Man gropes for the stars, and now less than a century after the first man left the surface of Earth in powered flight, we gather here in the orbit of Saturn to decide whether our race’s destiny should now be extended or cut short.
“Our womb is nearly filled with our poisonous by-products. The question before us is: Are we or are we not going to outgrow our neurotic dependence on planets—before it destroys us?”
“What is this crap,” Silverman snarled, “some more of your Homo caelestis horseshit? Is that your next evolutionary step? McGillicuddy was right, it’s a goddam evolutionary dead end! Youcouldn’t be self-supporting in fifty years from a standing start, the speed you recruit. If the Earth and Moon blew up tomorrow, God forbid, you would be dead within two or three years at the outside. You’re parasites on your evolutionary inferiors, Armstead, exiled parasites at that. You can’t live in your new environment without cell walls of steel and slashproof plastic, essential artifacts that are manufactured only back there in the womb.”
“I was wrong,” Tom said softly. “We’re not an evolutionary dead end. I couldn’t see the whole picture.”
“What did you miss?” Silverman screamed.
“We have to change the analogy now,” Linda spoke up. “It starts to break down.” Her warm contralto was measured and soothing; I saw Silverman begin to relax as the magic worked on him. “Think of us now not as sextuplets, or even as a kind of six-personed fetus. Think of the Earth not as a uterus but as an ovary—and the six of us as a single ovum. Together we carry half of the genes for a new kind of being.
“The most awesome and miraculous moment of all creation is the instant of syngamy, the instant at which two things come together to form so infinitely much more than the sum or even the product of their parts: the moment of conception. That is the cross-roads, with phylogeny behind and ontogeny ahead, and that is the crossroads at which we are poised now.”
“What is the sperm cell for your ovum?” Chen asked. “The alien swarm, I presume?”
“Oh, no,” Norrey said. “They’re something more like the yin/yang, male/female over mind that produces the syngamy, in response to needs of its own. Change the analogy again: Think of them as the bees they so resemble, the pollinators of a gigantic monoclinous flower we call the Solar System. It is a true hermaphrodite, containing both pistil and stamen within itself. Call Earth the pistil, if you will, and we Stardancers are its combined ovule and stigma.”
“And the stamen?” Chen insisted. “The pollen?”
“The stamen is Titan,” Norrey said simply. “That red organic matter the aliens’ balloon gave off was some of its pollen.”
Another stunned silence.
“Can you explain its nature to us?” DeLaTorre asked at last. “I confess my incomprehension.”
Raoul spoke now, tugging his glasses out from the bridge of his nose and letting the elastic pull them back. “The stuff is essentially a kind of superplant itself. The aliens have been growing it in Titan’s upper atmosphere for millennia, staining the planetoid red. Upon contact with a human body, a kind of mutual interaction takes place that can’t be described. Energy from another… from another plane infuses both sides. Syngamy takes place, and perfect metabolism begins.”
“Perfect metabolism?” DeLaTorre echoed uncertainly.
“The substance is a perfect symbiotic complement to the human organism.”
“But—but… but how—?”
“You wear it like a second skin, and you live naked in space,” he said flatly. “It enters the body at mouth and nostrils, spreads a million microtendrils throughout the system, emerges to rejoin itself at the anus. It covers you inside and out, becomes a part of you, in total metabolic balance.”
Chen Ten Li looked poleaxed. “Aperfectsymbiote....” he breathed.
“Right down to the trace elements,” Raoul agreed. “Planned that way a billion years ago. It is our Other Half.”
“How is it done?” he whispered.
“Just enter a cloud of the stuff and open your hood. The escaping air is their chemical cue: they home in, swim upstream and spawn. From the moment they first contact bare flesh until the point of total absorption and adsorption, complete synthesis, is maybe three seconds. About a second and a half in, you cease being human, forever.” He shivered. “Do you understand why we screamed?”
“No,” Silverman cried. “No, I do not. None of this makes sense! So the red crap is a living spacesuit, a biologically tailored what you said, you give it carbon dioxide it gives you oxygen, you give it shit it gives you strawberry jam. Very lovely: you’ve just eliminated all your overhead except for fuel and leisure aids. Very nice fellows, these aliens. How does it make you inhuman? Does the crap take over your mind or what?”
“It has no ‘mind’ of its own,” Raoul told him. “Oh, it’s remarkably sophisticated for a plant, with awareness above the vegetable. There are some remarkably complex tropisms but you couldn’t call it sentient. It sort of sets up partnership with the medulla, and rarely gets even as preconscious as a reflex. It just performs its function, in accordance with its biological programming.”
“What would make you inhuman then?”
My voice sounded funny, even to me. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know. We would never die, Silverman. We would never again hunger or thirst, never need a place to dispose of our wastes. We would never again fear heat or cold, never fear vacuum, Silverman; we would never fear anything again. We would acquire instant and complete control of our autonomic nervous systems, gain access to the sensorium keyboard of the hypothalamus itself. We would attain symphysis, telepathic communion, become a single mind in six immoral bodies, endlessly dreaming and never asleep. Individually and together we would become no more like a human than a human is like a chimpanzee. I don’t mind telling you that all six of us used our diapers out there. I’m still a little scared.”
“But you are ready…” Chen said softly.
“Not yet,” Linda said for all of us. “But we will be soon. That much we know.”
“This telepathy business,” Silverman said tentatively. “This ‘single mind’ stuff—is that for sure?”
“Oh, it’s not dependent on the aliens,” Linda assured him. “They showed us how to find that plane—but the capacity was always there, in every human that ever lived. Every holy man that ever got enlightened came down off the mountain saying, ‘We’re all one’—and every damn time the people decided it must be a metaphor. The symbiote helps us some, but—”
“How does it help?” Silverman interrupted.
“Well, the distraction factor, mostly. I mean, most people have flashes of telepathic ability, but there are so many distractions. It’s worse for a planet dweller, of course, but even in the Studio we got hungry, we got thirsty and horny and bored and tired and sore and angry and afraid. ‘Being in our heads,’ we called it. The animal part of us impeding the progress of the angel. The symbiote frees you from all animal needs—you can experience them, at whim, but never again are you subject to their arbitrary command. The symbiote does act as a kind of mild amplifier of the telepathic ‘wave band,’ but it helps much more by improving the ‘signal-to-noise ratio’ at the point of origin.”