“Imagine a telepathic construction gang,” Harry said, “who never have to eat or rest.”
“Imagine an explosion of art and music,” Raoul said, “raining down on Earth from the heavens, drawing every heart that ever yearned for the stars.”
“Imagine an Earth,” Tom said, “filled with only those who want to be there.”
“And imagine your children-to-be,” Norrey said. “The first children in all history to be raised free of the bitter intergenerational resentments that arise from a child’s utter dependence on his parents. In space, children and parents will relate at eyelevel, in every sense. Perhaps they need not be natural enemies after all.”
“But you are not human!” Chen Ten Li cried. “Why should you give us all this time and energy? What is Man, that you should be mindful of him?”
“Li,” Linda said compassionately, “were we not born of man and woman? Does not the child remember the womb, and yearn for it all his life? Do you not honor your mother, although you may never be part of her again? We would preserve and cherish the Earth, our womb, that it may remain alive and fruitful and bear multiple births to its capacity.”
“That is our only defense,” I said quietly, “against the immense loneliness of being even Homo caelestis in empty space. Six minds isn’t enough—when we have six billion united in undisturbed thought, then, perhaps, we will learn some things. All mankind is our genetic heritage.”
“Besides,” Raoul added cheerfully, “what’s a few centuries of our time? We’re in no hurry.”
“Li,” I went on, “to be human is to stand between ape and angel. To be angel, as are my family and I, is to float between man and the gods, partaking fully of both. Without gravity or a local vertical there can be no false concept of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’: how could we act other than ethically? Immortal, needing nothing, how could we be evil?”
“As a species,” Tom picked up, “we naturally will deal only through the United Nations. Dr. Chen, believe me: we’ve studied this on something faster than computer-time. There is no way for our plans to be subverted, for the symbiote to be hijacked. All the evil men and women on Earth will not stop us, and the days of evil are numbered.”
“But,” I finished, “we need the help and cooperation of you and every man like you, on the globe or off it. Are you up to it, Chen Ten Li?”
He drifted freely, in the partial crouch of complete relaxation, his face slack with thought and his eyes rolled up into his head. At long last his pupils reappeared, and life returned to his features. He met my eyes, and a gentle slight smile tugged at his mouth.
“You remind me greatly,” he said, “of a man I once knew, named Charles Armstead.”
“Dr. Chen,” I said, feeling tension drain away, “Li my friend, I am that man. I am also something else, and you have rightly deduced that I am maintaining my six discrete conversational personas only as a courtesy to you in the same way that I adapt my bodies to your local vertical. It demonstrates clearly that telepathic communion does not involve what you would call ego loss.” Shifting persona as I spoke, so that each of us uttered a single word, I/we said:
“I’m”
“more”
“than”
“human”
“not”
“less.”
“Very well,” Li said, shaking his head. “Together we will bring the millennium to our weary planet.”
“I am with you,” DeLaTorre said simply.
“I too,” Dmirov said.
“Let’s get Bill and Col. Song’s body to sickbay,” six voices said.
And an hour later we six departed for the Starseeders’ location. We didn’t bother with the shuttlecraft, this time. Our suit thrusters held enough for a one-way trip…
Snygamy
I
Saturn burned ocher and brown against an aching blackness so vast it was barely interrupted by the cold light of a billion billion suns.
We danced as we jetted through that blackness, almost without thinking about it. We were leaving human life behind, and we danced our leaving of it. Essentially each of us created our own Stardance, and the great empty cosmic hall rang with Raoul’s last symphony. Each dance was individual and self-complete; each happened to mesh with the other three and with the music, in a kind of second-level statement; and although all of these were conceived without any perceived constraints of time or distance, Harry’s over-awareness saw to it that all five works of art happened to end, together, before the aliens. It was always Harry who made us meet our deadlines.
None of this was taped. Unlike Shara’s Stardance, this was not meant to be witnessed. It was meant to be shared, to be danced.
But it was witnessed. The Starseeders (aliens they were not) writhed in something analogous to applause as we hung before them, gasping for breath, savoring the feel of the last sweat we would ever know.
We were no longer afraid of them.
YOU HAVE MADE YOUR CHOICE?
Yes.
IT WILL BE A FINE BIRTHING.
Raoul hurled his Musicmaster into deep space. Let it begin without delay.
AT ONCE:
There was an excitement in their dance, now, an elemental energy that somehow seemed to contain an element of humor, of suppressed mirth. They began a pattern that we had never seen before, yet seemed to know in some cellular fashion, a pattern that alternated between the simple and the complex, without ever resolving. The Harry part of our mind called it “the naming of pi,” and all of us raptly watched it unfold. It was the most hypnotic pattern ever dreamed, the dance of creation itself, the most essential expression of the Tao, and the stars themselves seemed to pay attention.
And as we stared, transfixed, the semivisible sphere around the Starseeders began for the second time to weep bloody tears.
They coalesced into a thin crimson ring about the immense sphere, then contracted into six orbiting bubbles.
Without hesitation we each jetted to a bubble and plunged inside. Once we were in, we skinned out of our p-suits and flung them at the walls of our bubbles, which passed them out into space. Raoul added his glasses. Then the bubbles contracted around and into and through us.
Things happened on a thousand different levels, then, to all six of me; but it is Charlie Armstead who is telling you this. I felt something cool slide down my throat and up my nostrils, suppressed gag reflex with free-fall training, thought briefly of Chen Ten Li and the ancient Chinese legends of edible gold that brings immortality—felt suddenly and forever a total awareness, knowledge, and control of my entire body and brain. In a frozen instant of timelessness I scanned my life’s accumulation of memories, savored them, transmitted them in a single sending to my family, and savored theirs, Simultaneously I was employing eyes that now registered a wider spectrum to see the universe in greater depth, and simultaneously I was playing the keys of my own internal sensorium, tasting crisp bacon and Norrey’s breast and the sweet taste of courage, smelling woodsmoke and Norrey’s loins and the sweet smell of caring, hearing Raoul’s music and Norrey’s voice and the sweet sound of silence. Almost absentmindedly I healed the damage to my hip, felt complete function return as if it had never been gone.