“Please listen to me and try to be calm. Many of you on Terra may have the idea that what is usually miscalled centrifugal force will send you flying off the planet at high speed. This will not happen. When you go weightless, the net upward force acting on you will not exceed .003 gee. Your clothing should suffice to hold you in place; even shoes will probably be enough. Ask your AI if you don’t believe me; I’ll be releasing it to your control again soon. Nonetheless you will be in free fall, with the usual physiological symptoms most of you know: dizziness, stuffy nose and so forth.
“This period will last for perhaps five minutes. Then machines will turn themselves on. There are three of them. One is buried deep in the core of Terra, one at the heart of Luna, and the third at the core of Mars, though no one is there to be affected by it now. Each is designed to generate antigravitons… a special kind of antigraviton which will only affect altered human tissue.”
The next sentence was delivered slowly, deliberately.
“Like it or not, you will find yourself rising into the sky.”
A wordless cry went up all around the beach—doubtless around the planet—a discordant amalgam of clashing emotions. Shara Drummond seemed to anticipate that, and waited for it to die down.
“DO NOT FEAR,” she said then. “It is not death that waits for you in the sky, but a new kind of life. You will not freeze or suffocate as you climb, I promise you.
“For the last sixty-five years, the Starmind has worked at modifying our Symbiote, in preparation for this day. The gold you see in the sky is the variant we have shaped, a variant designed to survive, for a time, at the interface between Terra and space. It cannot come down to you… but you will find it waiting for you about five kilometers above the ground, just as the air is getting too thin to breathe. Touch it anywhere, drink it, and it will shape itself to you. It will breathe for you, and bring you higher, changing from gold to red as you leave the atmosphere behind.
“This is why the Adepts made their sacrifice. If the Group of Five had gotten their way, all of you would have died this day. The Five knew nothing of this, nor could we tell them. Without a Starmind, you would have suffocated as you left the stratosphere—and would not be hearing me now. But thanks to Tenshin Reb Hawkins and the others, you will live to reach space.
“And we the Starmind will be waiting for you. To show you your new world. Your new home. You will be one with us, and we with you, Homo caelestis forever.”
A vast soundless sound filled the world. Rhea heard it inside her head, as if on headphones. It was music, and she even recognized it: something Rand played all the time, something by Brindle whose name she could not recall. But to her tortured imagination it seemed like the Trump of Doom that Christians believed would signal the Rapture. She found that she was clutching Colly to her fiercely, keening without words. The words that raced through her mind were, she knew, probably shared by millions; indeed, they might have been the final thought of most of the humans who had ever died: Not yet! I wasn’t done yet!
It was a protest the universe had never heeded yet. As she drew in a breath to scream it aloud, Colly spoke against her breast.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” she said. “I didn’t want to come out either, remember?”
Rhea remembered. Colly had been born three weeks overdue. She had stayed stubbornly in the womb… until a pitocin drip induced labor, and forced her out. And Colly had come to like this world.
“It’s okay,” Colly insisted. “We’re gonna go see Daddy now.”
She kept her deathgrip on Colly’s shoulders, but pulled back so she could see her face. Colly was smiling. “Can you feel it?” she asked.
With a thrill of something like horror, Rhea felt her weight leaving her. She tried to hang on to it, but could not. Within a minute it was gone completely. Her sinuses began to fill, and she felt her face reddening as blood redistributed itself evenly throughout her body. She felt mild dizziness too. It was just like climbing to orbit in a shuttle—except that the rest of the world around her continued to observe the law of gravity.
Shara Drummond’s message began repeating.
Colly picked up an uneaten apple, held it out, and let go. Rhea’s body-awareness told her that she was in zero gee, so persuasively that it was jarring to see the apple fall normally. Colly giggled.
Suddenly she squirmed out of Rhea’s grasp, a trick she had perfected at age five. Rhea cried out, but it was too late: Colly had already unfolded her legs from beneath her… causing her to rise into the air.
Without thinking, Rhea sprang after her and caught her like a tackler, hugging the child to her. They found themselves about six or seven meters in the air, sinking with the gentle slowness of a feather beneath the weight of their clothes. This high in the air, Shara’s repeating message was almost inaudible. Others around them were airborne too. A convention of Nijinskis, she thought wildly as she drifted down. Oh, Jay would love this! And Rand…
“I wish Dad and Uncle Jay could see this,” she said aloud.
Colly was grinning, exhilarated. “Just pay attention,” she said. “We can give them an instant replay later.”
They landed gently on sand, a few meters west of their takeoff point. With space-trained instincts and Trancer skill, both let their legs absorb the energy of landing, so they did not bounce away again. For a moment they bobbed there together, poised at the very membrane between earth and sky. They could hear Shara’s voice clearly again, now that they were close to the earth—and many competing sounds too. Some people were screaming, some were laughing, some were yelling contradictory advice; some were flailing helplessly in the air, trying vainly to swim back to earth. And some were finding out how high they could jump. Out on the sea she could see people leaping higher than their masts, moving lazily in the air, like drowners in reverse.
“Let’s Trance, Mom,” Colly said. “We can do it for real, now.”
Rhea had a sudden vivid memory of Manuel Brava, the night she had trance-danced for the first time.
Be ready, he had said. It’s gonna be good.
And this was the Hour of his Remembrance…
Somewhere in Rhea’s heart, something gave way. Without regret, she closed the book that was her life… and began a new one. “All right, Colly.” She released her embrace. “Take my hand, though, okay?”
“Sure,” Colly said. “Here we go!”
They leaped together.
A few minutes later, Rhea admitted to herself that she was having fun. More fun than she had had in a long time. It was a little like trampolining or bungee-jumping in ultraslow motion. It was very much like dreams she had been having all her life. It was, in literal reality, what Trancing had always felt like, except that the moments of breathless exhilaration were not fleeting and transient.
Some others around her were also moving in the characteristic flowing movements of trance-dance, now; she and Colly were not the only Trancers here. Out on the sea, some people were walking on water, with exaggerated steps; she could just hear them laughing.
“—you okay?” Rand’s voice said suddenly from her breast pocket. “Rhea! Colly! Can you hear me? Dammit, are you okay?”