Linda was shaking her head. “So wrong, Li, so wrong, you’re a Confucian Legalist looking at the Tao—”
“I’m part of a terrified womb,” Chen said firmly, “and it is my judgment that birth now would kill the mother. I have decided that the womb must reabsorb the fetus of Homo caelestis. Perhaps at the peak of the next cycle the human race will be mature enough to survive parturition—it is not now. My responsibility must be to the womb—for it is all the world I know or can know.”
It had begun at the instant that I asked him his intentions, knowing them already.
It had happened before, briefly and too late, at the moment of showdown with Silverman. It had faded again unnoticed by the humans in the room. There had been nothing visible to notice: our only action had been to darken the room. We had been afraid then—and a person had died.
But this threat was not to our freedom but to our existence as a species. For the second time in fifteen minutes, my family entered rapport.
Time spiraled down like an unwound Victrola. Six viewpoints melded into one. More than six camera angles: the 360° visual integration was merely useful. Six viewpoints combined, six lifetimes’ worth of perceptions, opinions, skills, and insights impinged upon each other and coalesced like droplets of mercury into a single entity. Since the part of us that was Linda knew Li best, we used her eyes and ears to monitor his words and his energy in realtime, while beneath and around them, we contemplated how best to bring tranquility to our cousin. At his only pause for breath, we used Linda’s words to try and divert his energies, but were unsurprised to fail. He was too blind with pain. By the time the monitor fragment of her awareness reported that his finger was tensing to reach for the “Execute” key, the whole of us was more than ready with our plan.
All six of us contributed choreography to that dance, and polished it mentally until it filled our dancers’ souls with joy. The first priority was the tapeworm program; the second was the laser. It was Tom the martial-arts expert who knew precisely where and how to strike so as to cause Chen’s muscles to spasm involuntarily. It was Raoul the visual-effects specialist who knew where Chen’s optical “blind spot” was, and knew that Norrey would be in at the critical instant. Norrey knew the position of the racked Frisbees behind her because Harry and I could see them peripherally from where we were. And it was Linda who supplied me with the only words that might have captured Chen’s attention in that moment, fixing his gaze on me and his blind spot on Norrey.
“And what of your grandchildren, Chen Ten Li?”
His tortured eyes focused on me and widened. Norrey reached behind her with both arms, and surrendered control of them. Harry, who was our best shot, used her right arm to throw the Frisbee that yanked Chen’s right hand away from the terminal in uncontrollable pain reflex. Raoul, who was left-handed, used her left arm to throw the Frisbee that ruined the laser and smashed it out of the crook of Chen’s left arm. Both missiles arrived before he knew they had been launched; even as they struck, Tom had kicked Song’s corpse between Linda and the line of fire in case of a miss, and Norrey had grabbed two more Frisbees on the same chance. And I was already halfway to Chen myself: I was intuitively sure that he knew one of the ways to suicide barehanded.
It was over in less than a second of realtime. To the eyes of DeLaTorre and Dmirov we must have seemed to… flicker and then reappear in new relative positions, like a frightened school of fish. Chen was crying out in pain and rage and shame, and I was holding him in a four-limbed hammerlock, conspicuously not hurting him. Harry was waiting for the ricocheting Frisbees, retrieving them lazily; Raoul was by the computer, wiping Chen’s program.
The dance was finished. And correctly this time: no blood had been spilled. We knew with a guiltless regret that if we had yielded to rapport more freely the first time, Song would not be dead and Bill wounded. We had been afraid, then, yielded only tentatively and too late. Now the last trace of fear was gone; our hearts were sure. We were ready to be responsible.
“Dr. Chen,” I said formally, “do I have your parole?”
He stiffened in my grip, and then relaxed totally. “Yes,” he said, his voice gone empty. I released him, and was stunned by how old he looked. His calendar age was fifty-six.
“Sir,” I said urgently, trying to hold him with my eyes, “your fears are groundless. Your pain is needless. Listen to me: youare not a use-less by-product of Homo caelestis. Youare not a failed gamete. You are one of the people who personally held our planet Earth together, with your bare hands, until it could birth the next stage. Does that rob your life of meaning, diminish your dignity? You are one of the few living statesmen who can help ease Earth through the coming transition—do you lack the self-confidence, or the courage? You helped open up space, and you have grandchildren—didn’t you mean for them to have the stars? Would you deny them now? Will you listen to what we think will happen? Can happen? Must happen?”
Chen shook his head like a twitching cat, absently massaging his right arm. “I will listen.”
“In the first place, stop tripping over analogies and metaphors. You’re not a failed gamete, or anything of the kind, unless you choose to be. The whole human race can be Homo caelestis if it wants to. Many of ’em won’t, but the choice is theirs. And yours.”
“But the vast majority of us cannot perceive spherically,” Chen shouted.
I smiled. “Doctor, when one of my failed students left for Earth he said to me, ‘I couldn’t learn to see the way you do if I tried for a hundred years.’ ”
“Exactly. I have been in free space, and I agree.”
“Suppose you had two hundred years?”
“Eh?”
“Suppose you entered symbiosis, right now. You’d have to have a tailored environment of right angles to stay sane, at first. But you’d be immortal. With absolutely nothing better to do, could you not unlearn your gravitic bias in time?”
“There’s more,” Linda said. “Children born in free space will think spherically from infancy. They won’t have to unlearn a life-time of essentially false, purely local information about how reality works. Li, in free fall you are not too old to sire more children. You can learn with them, telepathically—and inherit the stars together!”
“All mankind,” I went on, “all that wants to, can begin preparing at once, by moving to Trojan-point O’Neill Colonies and entering symbiosis. The colonization of space can begin with this generation.”
“But how is such a migration to be financed?” he cried.
“Li, Li,” Linda said, as one explaining to a child, “the human race is rich, as of now. The total resources of the System are now available to all, for free. Why haven’t L-5 colonies gotten off the ground, or the asteroid mining that would support them? Silverman said it ten minutes ago: The biggest single component of expense has always been life support, and elaborate attempts to prevent the crew from adapting to free fall by simulating gravity. If all you need is a set of right angles that will last for a few centuries, you can build cities out of aluminum foil, haul enormous quantities of symbiote from Titan to Terra.”