He sounded half out of his mind with worry. Rhea took the phone out of her pocket. “We’re fine, darling. Hang on—I think we’re coming for a visit.”
“What the hell do you mean? What’s going on down there?”
“Didn’t you hear Shara up there?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t make much sense. She told us to go EVA, find some Symbiote, and take off our p-suits. But what about you? She said something crazy about immunity to gravity, and gold Symbiote.”
“That’s right. We’re about… oh, I’d guess twenty meters above the ground right now. It looks like you win: Colly and I are coming to space after all.”
“Oh God—you’ll freeze, before you can reach the Symbiote.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s warmer than it should be down here. I think that gold Symbiote is having some kind of lens effect. They’ve had a long time to think this through.”
There was silence on the line. The first to fully absorb the news was Jay. He began to laugh with joy. “Oh, Eva!” he cried, “What a glorious joke on you! Oh, how wonderful!”
“What do you mean, Jay?” Rhea asked.
“I get it now—I see it—I know why she wanted to die—and why she was dragging her feet—the stubborn old biddy was holding out for meaning… and she got it, bless her selfish heart—damn, she got the prize—oh, I’ll bet she died smiling—”
“I don’t understand,” Rhea said. “Rewind and start over—slower.”
“I’ll try. Look, at age one hundred, Eva was done with life. So she went into sixteen years of life review… and found no meaning in anything she’d done. During a century of living as hard as she knew how, Eva converted X cubic tonnes of food and water into excrement and offspring; she pushed Y megabucks from one imaginary place to another; she experienced Z increments of pleasure or pain; once done, she could find no real significance in any of it. So her last hope for meaning was her death: she spent sixteen years hoping, irrationally, to find a meaningful death, an opportunity to give up her life for something. That’s why she kept postponing her suicide for so long—why, even after she gave up and made up her mind to die, she stalled long enough to let Reb arrive, and give her a convincing reason to wait just a little longer. The reason was: to live to see this historic day.”
“It’s a shame she missed it, then,” Colly said.
“No, no that’s the best part, don’t you see?” Jay said. “It is a shame she didn’t live to see it with her own eyes, sure. But I’m sure she got to see it through the Starmind’s eyes before she died—and more important, she got something even better. She got what she’d wanted in the first place, what she’d already given up on when Reb told her about today: a meaningful death. Think about it: how many humans—how many creatures, in the wide universe—had ever been privileged to sacrifice their lives to save two intelligent species?”
Colly was the first to see it. “Wow, yeah,” she said wonderingly. “If it hadn’t been for her and Reb and the Adepts, all the Stardancers would have got killed, and there wouldn’t be any of that gold simmy-oat up there waiting for us. All us people would have died today…”
“She got the most meaningful death there ever was,” Rhea said. She giggled suddenly. “Every damn time humanity goes through some kind of birthing, there seems to be an Eve around.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Rand asked. “You sound sort of giddy.”
She laughed out loud. “Let’s just say a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. We don’t have to be apart anymore, baby. Not ever again. Hang in there—we’ll be along directly.”
“What should I do?” he cried, his voice agonized.
“What Shara said. And don’t be afraid. I’m not. I was, but I’m not anymore. It’s gonna be good.”
“But—”
“Go ahead. I’ve got to hang up now, I don’t want to miss this. We’ll be there soon, love.” She let go of the phone, and watched it fall away.
She and Colly were slowly moving away from the ocean, into the dunes. With each leap they came down farther to the west, for the earth went on without them all around them. They were sweating with exertion, now, and the sweat behaved the way it did in free-fall, as content to drip up as down. In her mind’s eye Rhea saw the whole human race doing this. Hovering. Tottering on the brink. Trembling on the verge.
The ground was coming up again. You didn’t even have to look: when you could hear Shara clearly again, it was time to prepare for your landing.
“Colly!” she cried. “Want to go for the big one?”
“Sure,” her daughter said.
Rhea began undoing her clothing. Colly got the idea at once and skinned out of her own clothes. They let go, watched their clothes fall. This time, when they hit the earth and rebounded, they kept on rising.
They kept dancing for a while as they rose, but the view was simply too distracting to concentrate; after a time they stopped moving in space and just gawked, letting the wind do with them as it would, turning end over end. The earth moved slowly and majestically beneath them. Soon Provincetown was below them. It was weird, inexpressibly weird, to see P-Town with hardly a soul on the streets. The beaches were full of hopping fleas, and the sky was starting to fill with naked people. It reminded Rhea of news footage of hot-air balloon regattas in the desert.
“Look,” Colly said, pointing. “There’s our old house.”
Rhea saw it. For a moment it filled her heart, and called her back. Her beloved widow’s walk. Below that, the tower room in which her unfinished novel waited, and below that the bedroom into which she had been born. Kicking and screaming.
“Goodbye,” she said to it. “I’ll never forget you.”
“’Course not,” Colly said. “Me either.”
Suddenly they were rising faster, as though propelled by a great wind from below. It felt surprisingly like surfing vertically.
“Hang on,” Rhea cried.
“Here we come, Daddy!” Colly called.
And they rose up forever, going for the gold.
EPILOGUE
High Earth Orbit
22 July 2065
It did not go totally smoothly, of course. Human beings were involved; at least some chaos and tragedy had to result.
But there never were more than the two choices: evolve or die.
Perhaps it need not have been done as it was, by surprise. Perhaps humanity, forewarned and prepared, might have agreed to leave its ancestral womb forever, peacefully and without panic. The decision not to risk it was irrevocably made on the day the original Six entered Symbiosis and founded the Starmind, back at the turn of the millennium, back when half of the human race was hungry and poor, and pessimism was still the hallmark of intelligence. Once Charlie Armstead elected to leave Courage Day out of the report he sent back to humanity from Saturn in the historic Titan Transmission, it was too late to turn back: the Starmind was committed to secrecy.
If you could somehow establish telepathic contact with a human fetus in its ninth month… would it be a kindness for you to tell it everything you know of the birth trauma to come? Would it benefit from the foreknowledge—or panic, jam the birth canal, and kill itself and its mother? After all, less than one percent of the race ever voluntarily chose to go to Top Step and become Stardancers. Being human is a hard habit to break. Shara Drummond, Charlie Armstead and their companions believed—all the Starmind still believes—that humanity might well have died rather than leave Earth, given the choice. So they did not give it the choice until the last possible instant… and spent sixty-five years secretly preparing it for that instant.