As to happenings on a group level, there is not much I can tell you that will mean anything. We made love, again almost absent-mindedly, and we all felt together the yearnings toward life in Linda’s belly, felt the symbiote that shielded her body make the same perception and begin preparing its own mitosis. Quite consciously and deliberately, Norrey and I conceived a child of our own. These things were only incidentals, but what can I tell you of the essentials? On one major level we shared each other’s every memory and forgave each other the shameful parts and rejoiced in all the proud parts. On another major level we began what would become an ongoing lifespan symposium on the meaning of beauty. On another we began planning the last details of the migration of Man into space.
A significant part of us was pure-plant consciousness, a six-petaled flower basking mindlessly in the sunlight.
We were less than a kilometer from the Starseeders, and we had forgotten their very existence.
We were startled into full awareness of our surroundings as the Starseeders once again collapsed into a single molten ball of intolerable brilliance—and vanished without a good-bye or a final sending.
They will be back, in a mere few centuries of realtime, to see whether anybody feels ready to become a firefly.
In shinned surprise we hovered, and, our attention now focused on the external universe, saw what we had missed.
A crimson-winged angel was approaching us from the direction of Saturn’s great Ring. On twin spans of thin red lightsail, an impossible figure came nearer.
Hello, Norrey, Charlie, the familiar voice said in our skulls. Hi Tom, Harry. Linda and Raoul, I don’t know you yet, but you love my loved ones—hello.
Shara! screamed six voiceless brains.
Sometimes fireflies pick up a hitchhiker.
But how—?
I was more like an incubator baby, actually, but they got me to Titan alive. That was my suit and tanks you saw burning up. They were desperate and overeager, just as they said. I’ve… I’ve beenwaiting in the Ring for you to make your decision. I didn’t want to influence its outcome.
The Snowflake that was me groped for “words.”
You have made a good marriage, she said, you six.
Marry us! we cried.
I thought you’d never ask.
And my sister swarmed into me and we are one.
That is essentially the whole of this story.
I—the Charlie Armstead component of “I”—began this work long ago, as an article for magazine and computer-fax sale. So much nonsense had been talked and written about Shara that I was angry, and determined to set the record straight. In that incarnation, this manuscript ended with Shara’s death.
But when I was done, I no longer needed to publish the article. I found that I had written it only to clarify things in my own mind. I withheld it, and hung on to the manuscript with the vague idea of someday using it as a seed for my eventual memoirs (in the same spirit in which Harry had begun his Book: because someone had to and who else was there?). From time to time, over the next three years, I added to it with that purpose in mind, “novelizing” rather than “diarizing” to spare the trouble of altering the manuscript later. I spent a lot of the year of Siegfried’s outward flight in writing and revising the total, bringing the history up to the point where Chen Ten Li took his first space walk, a few weeks out of Saturn.
All of the subsequent material has been written in a single half-day “sitting,” here at the Die’s computer terminal. I have been limited only by the physical speed at which the terminal’s heat-sensitive “keys” can disengage. As I write, other parts of me drift through eternity. We make love. We worship. We sing. We dance. Endlessly we are each other, yet are ourselves. I know it does not seem that this could be: that is why I have chosen to tell my story by completing Charlie’s memoirs (while Sham, approving, reads over my shoulder from a hundred klicks away). I want you to know that Charles Armstead has not been dissolved or diluted into something alien. In no sense have I died. I never will. It would be more accurate to say that I am Charlie Armstead to the seventh power. At long last I have managed to destroy the phone company, and great is my glee. I still choreograph dances with Norrey and Shara and the others, still swap abominable multilevel puns with Raoul (right now he’s singing an old ’40’s love song, “I May Never Come Back to Earth Again”), still taste in my mind (where I always did) the smell of fine coffee, the bite of strong drink, the flavor of good grass. The distance between me and you is only time and changes. Once I was a bitter, twisted cripple, poisoning the air around me; now I know no evil because I know no fear.
I have spent the minuscule fraction of energy to complete this manuscript because Bill Cox is preparing to blast for Terra (he’ll be back) and it must go now if ever.
This news will not fit into any diplomat’s laser message, nor will even those extraordinary men and women be able to express it as I can.
I am Charlie Armstead, and my message to you is: The stars can be even yours.
Acknowledgements
What we’d like to do here is thank all the people without whom this book could not have been finished, as opposed to, but not excluding, that general gang of friends and relatives who kept us alive during its writing; they would have done so anyway, book or no book, and should be thanked in different ways.
Among the former and sometimes the latter are: Ben Bova, Gordon R. Dickson, our agent Kirby McCauley, our editor and friend Jim Frenkel, Joe W. Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D., and Laurence Janifer, all of whom donated information, advice, and assistance above and beyond the call of friendship, all at the cost of working time or leisure or both. It should be clearly understood that none of the above people are to blame for what we have done with their information and aid: any errors are ours.
On a less personal but just as basic level, this book could also never have become what it is without A House In Space, Henry S.F. Cooper’s fascinating account of zero-gee life in Skylab; G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution, which built Skyfac in our minds; the recent works of John Varley and Frank Herbert, who roughly simultaneously pioneered (at least as far as we know) the concept on which the ending of this book depends; Murray Louis’s exquisite and moving columns in Dance Magazine; the books, past advice and present love of Stephen Gaskin; the inspirational dance of Toronto Dance Theatre, Murray Louis, Pilobolus, the Contact Improv Movement, and all of our dancing buddies in Nova Scotia; the lifework of Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Pangborn, and John D. MacDonald; the whiskey of Mr. Jameson, the coffee of Jamaica, and the music of Frank Zappa, Paul Simon, and Yes.