“What I mean,” Silverman said, “if God forbid I were to let this fungus infest me, I would become at least mildly telepathic? As well as immortal and beyond having to go to the bathroom?”
“No sir,” she said politely but firmly. “If you were already mildly telepathic before you entered symbiotic partnership, you would become significantly more so. If, at that time, you happened to be in the field of a fully functioning telepath, you would become exponentially more so.”
“But if I took, say, the average man in the street and put him in a symbiote suit—”
“—you’d get an average immortal who never needed to go to the bathroom and was more empathic than he used to be,” I finished. “Empathy is sort of telepathy’s kid brother,” Linda said. “More like its larval stage,” I corrected.
“But two average guys in symbiote suits wouldn’t necessarily be able to read each other’s minds?”
“Not unless they worked long and hard at learning how that’s done,” I told him, “which they would almost certainly do. It’s lonely in space.”
He fell silent, and there was a pause while the rest of them sorted out their opinions and emotions. It took a while.
I had things to sort out myself. I was still possessed of that same internal certainty that I had felt since I woke up in the Limousine, feeling that almost prescient sense of inevitability, but the cusp was approaching quickly now. What if you should die, at this moment of moments? whispered an animal voice from the back of my skull.
As I had at the moment I confronted the aliens, I felt totally alive.
“Mr. Armstead,” DeLaTorre said, shaking his head and frowning mightily, “it seems to me that you are saying that all human want is coming to an end?”
“Oh no,” I said hastily. “I’m very sorry if we accidentally implied that. The symbiote cannot live in a terrestrial environment. Anything like that kind of gravity and atmosphere would kill it. No, the symbiote will not bring Heaven to Earth. Nothing can. Mohammed must go to the mountain—and many will refuse.”
“Perhaps,” Chen suggested delicately, “terrestrial scientists might be able to genetically modify the aliens’ gift?”
“No,” Harry said flatly. “There is no way you can give symphonies and sunsets to a fetus that insists on staying in the womb. That cloud of symbiote over Titan is every person’s birthright—but first they gotta earn it, by consenting to be born.”
“And to do that,” Raoul agreed, “they have to cut loose of Earth forever.”
“There is an appealing symmetry to the concept,” Chen said thoughtfully.
“Hell, yes,” Raoul said. “We should have expected something like it. The whole business of adaptation to free fall being possible but irreversible… look, at the moment of your birth, a very heavy miracle happened, in a single instant. One minute you were essentially a fish, with a fish’s two-valved circulatory system, parasitic on the womb. Then, all at once, a switch slammed shut. Zippobang, you were a mammal, just like that. Four-valved heart, self-contained—you made a major, irreversible physiological leap, into a new plane of evolution. It was accompanied by pain, trauma, and a flood of data from senses you hadn’t known you possessed. Nearly at once a whole bunch of infinitely more advanced beings in the same predicament began trying to teach you how to communicate. ‘Appealing’? The fucking symmetry is overwhelming! Now do you begin to understand why we screamed? We’re in the very midst of the same process—and all babies scream.”
“I don’t understand,” Dmirov complained. “You would be able to live naked in space—but how could you go anywhere?”
“Light pressure?” Chen suggested.
“The symbiote can deploy itself as a light sail,” I agreed, “but there are other forces we will use to carry us where we want to go.”
“Gravity gradients?”
“No. Nothing you could detect or measure.”
“Preposterous,” Dmirov snorted.
“How did the aliens get here?” I asked gently, and she reddened.
“The thing that makes it so difficult for me to credit your story,” Chen said, “is the improbability factor. So much of your coming here was random chance.”
“Dr. Chen,” I cut him off, “are you familiar with the proverb that says there is a destiny which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will?”
“But any of a thousand things might have conspired to prevent any of this from occurring.”
“Fifty-four things conspired to make it all occur. Super-things. Or did you think that the aliens just happened to appear in this system at the time that Shara Drummond began working at Skyfac? That they just happened to jump to Saturn when she returned to Skyfac to dance? That they just happened to appear outside Skyfac at the moment that Shara was about to return to Earth forever, a failure? Or that this whole trip to Saturn just happened to be feasible in the first place? Me, I wonder what they were doing out Neptune way, that first time they appeared.” I considered it. “I’ll have to go see.”
“You don’t understand,” Chen said urgently, and then controlled himself. “It is not generally known, but six years ago our planet was nearly destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Chance and good fortune saved us—there were no aliens in our skies then.”
Harry spoke up. “Know what a pregnant rabbit does if conditions aren’t favorable for birth? Reabsorbs the fetuses into the womb. Just reverses the process, recycles the ingredients and tries again when conditions are better.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Have you ever heard of Atlantis?”
Chen’s face went the color of meerschaum, and everyone else gaped or gasped.
“It comes in cycles,” I said, “like labor pains building to a peak. They come as close together as four or five thousand years—the Pyramids were built that far back—and as far apart as twenty thousand.”
“Sometimes they get pretty rough,” Harry added. “There used to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.”
“Bojemoi,” Dmirov breathed. “The Asteroid Belt....”
“And Venus is handy in case we screw up altogether,” I agreed, “reducing atmosphere all ready to go, just seed with algae and wait. God, they must be patient.”
Another extensive stunned silence. They believed now, all of them, or were beginning to. Therefore they had to rearrange literally everything they had ever known, recast all of existence in the light of this new information and try to determine just who, in relation to this confusion, they themselves might be. They were advanced in years for this kind of uprooting, their beliefs and opinions deeply ingrained by time; that they were able to accept the information and think at all said clearly that every one of them possessed a strong and flexible mind. Wertheimer had chosen well; none of them cracked, rejected the truth and went catatonic as we had. Of course, they were not out in free space, thinking seriously of removing their p-suits. But then, they had pressures we lacked: they represented a planet.
“Your intention, then,” Silverman said slowly, “is to do this thing?”
Six voices chorused, “Yes.”
“At once,” I added.
“And you are sure that all you have told us is true, that the aliens have told no lies, held out nothing?” Ever so casually he had been separating himself from the other diplomats.