—Performing arts groups all across the planet began premiering new works. Not a single one was depressing. An inordinate percentage incorporated images or subtexts of space, or of floating, or of flying.
—Pursuant to the last will and testament of Eva Hoffman, a glass quart bottle of Old Bushmill’s Black Bush, about half full, was delivered to Jay Sasaki. Later that evening, he and Duncan Iowa lightened its mass by another two ounces, and became lovers.
—The estate of Evelyn Martin formally filed suit against the Shimizu Hotel, its Board of Directors and citizens Duncan Iowa, Rand Porter and Jay Sasaki, alleging wrongful death, loss of consort, slander and assorted other torts and seeking a billion dollars damages from each and every defendant; suit dismissed with prejudice when trial software determined that the estate and the deceased had been married for a total of four days and had not seen one another in the ensuing twenty-seven years.
—Rhea Paixao increased her trance-dancing to three days a week, and began taking her daughter along.
—The Nanotechnology Lab near Top Step announced the commencement of a major new research effort. Its stated purpose was so abstruse that the cronkites gave up and took refuge in repeating the words as if they understood them. No one caught them at it.
—The Right Honorable George Kiku, Undersecretary of Revenue for the United Nations and Assistant Chairman of the Committee on Fiscal Anomalies, took early retirement under his burnout clause, and resumed a long-interrupted study of the guitar. It came back hard, but he took to soaking the fingertips of his left hand in cold tea, and eventually the calluses returned.
—Alert Space Command software noted that an unusually high number of Stardancers were in the close vicinity of Terra, and that many more seemed to be vectoring earthward. But since it did not classify Stardancers as either threat or navigational hazard it did not notify any human beings.
Noteworthy Events in May 2065
—The last Stardancer was successfully disinfected of her submicroscopic bomb, and shielded against reinfection. A misty disk of death still spun about the Sun, but it could now be ignored until it was convenient to clean it up.
—Colly Porter received a vacuum sculpture by courier. It was called “Puffball,” and pleased her mightily. Her mother liked it too, and placed it in a prominent place in the living room, beside one by the same sculptor called “Driftglass.”
—A dancer named John DeMarco, realizing his dream of a lifetime, was invited to join Toronto Dance Theatre as a principal dancer, largely on the strength of a particularly inspired performance at the Drummond four months earlier. His former Artistic Director never forgave him for accepting, and made a point of telling him (mendaciously) that she had faked every single orgasm.
—LaToya Dai Woo, Assistant Director of the US Internal Revenue Service, resigned under a cloud having to do with inexplicable anomalies in that year’s data; while the antiquated computer system was torn apart and rebuilt, she moved to the Shimizu Hotel and took up recreational sex.
—The New Orleans self-renovation phenomenon began occurring in ghettos, slums and eyesores around the planet. One economist calculated that even given the immense cost-effectiveness of nanotechnology, several trillions of dollars had to have been spent by rapturists worldwide. Hardly anyone believed him; he was, after all, an economist.
—Gunter Schmidt finally recovered from the bronchitis which had followed upon his stroll through ice water in Nepal, and succeeded in suing his travel agent into bankruptcy. He then returned to Nepal to catch the May Tiji Festival—and learned on arrival that since the Kali Gandaki had in fact returned, the festival had been declared redundant. The Lo were too busy planting crops.
—Unnoticed by anyone, Admiral Cox slipped out a maintenance airlock and entered Symbiosis. The p-suit he removed in order to do so eventually burned up in the upper atmosphere, flaring as the air tanks went up. Since his bills continued to be paid and his room and AI reported no medical emergency, his absence went unnoted until late June.
—The rising wave of “cheerful art” reached such a crest worldwide that even critics began to notice it. Certain conspiracy theorists among the media began to smell a rat, and whispered along the E-mail byways of “rapturist conspiracy”—ideally some kind of immense digital fraud. To their annoyance, investigation kept indicating that the money funding all this new art was real. And anonymous. So they went public with the old standbys, thinly veiled suspicion and unsubstantiated rumor—and would have gone on to entirely baseless allegations in turn, if they hadn’t noticed that nobody seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to them. Everyone was too busy attending performances that sent them home feeling good.
—The mammoth new mass of Symbiote reached Earth Orbit, was calved into six chunks, and each was inserted into a stable orbit. The reason for the subdivision was not known, but it aroused little curiosity. Few humans were of a mind to pester the Starmind with nosey questions these days.
—Colly Porter, having been back on Terra for the recommended three months, returned to High Orbit to spend a month with her father in the Shimizu Hotel. Shortly after her arrival she stated the opinion that hugging was more fun when you could use your legs too. This caused her father to blush (humans seldom go pale in free-fall, but they can still blush), and begin rehearsing a speech he had been meaning to deliver for a couple of years now. But in the end he managed to stall just long enough, and was spared the necessity.
—A peculiar glitch began to show up in automobiles—all automobiles, regardless of place or date of manufacture. Changing lanes without signalling at least five seconds in advance appeared to cause total CPU failure. Fortunately, the “crashless crash” safety feature hardwired into the guidance system usually brought the offending vehicle safely to the side of the road. No one claimed credit for the innovation, and public opinion split: some attributed it to rapturists, while others blamed a much older, half forgotten group called “hackers.” But the prevailing response of humanity at large was glee, and no one tried too hard to crack the case.
At the end, there, everything seemed to happen at once.
PART NINE
25
The Dunes East of Provincetown
22 June 2065
Courage Day
“This is a good spot, mom.”
Rhea thought so too. They were at the ocean shore east of Provincetown, just where the upthrust arm of Cape Cod curls its wrist back toward the mainland. Before them was the sea, next stop Europe; behind them to the west, between them and P-Town, lay kilometers of sand dunes. The weather was perfect, and had been since they had watched the sun rise together over the Atlantic several hours ago. It was now almost time for the Hour of Remembrance, and she and Colly were just finishing the food they had brought with them from home.
There were few others here, even on this global holiday. There were too many beaches a P-Towner could reach without having to walk several kilometers of sand, too many boats available to take them out on the water, especially since the fleet was not fishing today. Nonetheless Rhea had never seen this particular stretch of shore so heavily populated. The idea of Courage Day had caught on.