This cost the Starmind much ethical anguish over those years—and sharp tragedy at the eleventh hour—but right up until the Day of Courage, the overwhelming consensus of the massed brains of the Starmind was that the stakes were just too high to permit any risks. One of the few concrete facts the Fireflies told the Starmind before they left us to work out our own destiny is that Homo sapiens is at least the third sentient race to be raised up in this solar system.
The first sentient race (“sentient” defined as “capable of art”) lived eons ago, on a planet some call Lucifer, whose shattered remains are now known as the Asteroid Belt.
The second such race appears to have been somewhat more advanced: they “merely” blew the atmosphere off the next closest planet to the sun, Mars. But they are just as dead.
We appear to have squeaked through to the finish line.
Had we too failed our most final of exams… well, there hangs Venus, within the habitable zone, its reducing atmosphere ready to collapse into a viable biosphere at a chemical nudge…
Perhaps when I was a human fetus, I would have consented to be born. But I am glad, all things considered, that I wasn’t consulted.
Volumes larger than this one could be—are being—written about the chaotic events of the hours and days that followed the Hour of Remembrance, the countless millions of varying human reactions to Shara Drummond’s call.
No volume however large could describe what happened when over six billion minds entered telepathic symphysis in a single great cascading wave, nor will I try even to hint at it here. Suffice it to say that only the presence of a quarter of a million trained and prepared telepaths made it possible at all. Symbiosis is profoundly disorienting in its first onset, and some find it terrifying—Stardancer Postulants used to spend three months in Top Step preparing themselves for the transition. But human beings are tough, when they have to be, and we had to be.
Even now, a month later, the integration process is still ongoing. It might not be too inaccurate to say that the new HyperStarmind has achieved consciousness, and is working—slowly!—toward awareness.
Despite the very best efforts of a quarter of a million linked minds planning for over half a century, a little more than two percent of humanity perished in the mass transcendence to Homo caelestis, most through stubbornness but some from sheer stupidity. No telepathic entity can take lightly the deaths of so many millions of souls—especially needless deaths, on the very verge of immortality. But at least their surviving loved ones know with utter certainty that everything possible was done to save them; there is mourning for them in the Starmind today, but no recrimination. Cells die whenever a baby is born; it is no one’s fault. Balancing the sorrow to some extent is the joy of all those who love an autistic or retarded or catatonic or mute person—for now they can communicate with their loved one on a level far deeper than words could ever have reached.
Approximately one half of one percent of humanity were unaffected by the telepathic tocsin from Titan or the subsequent flood of antigravitons: genetic defectives whose DNA had sustained too many nonexpressing mutations over the millennia, whose introns were fatally damaged despite massive redundancy in the coding. But nearly ninety percent of those eventually reached space and joined the Starmind too… for there were suddenly spacecraft to spare.
And a little over five percent of the human race flatly and stubbornly refused to go—improvising an astonishing variety of desperate methods to remain near the earth’s surface, to remain only human. Within a month, however, their number had shrunk from five percent of the former total to about two.
The present population of Terra, then, consists of a little more than one hundred and sixty million people—on a planet with wealth and technology and room enough for six and a half billion. Most of them are wearing weights. You are one of them, or you would not be reading this. And the odds are that despite your new wealth and lebensraum you are lonely and/or hurt and/or angry and/or afraid.
You do not have to be any of those things. If you insist on staying on Earth, your life need not be hard: we will continue to beam down power, and programs for your nanoassemblers, and other things you will need—or you can make your own way as your forebears did, if that pleases you.
But you do not have to stay.
The golden sky of Earth is blue once more—but there is plenty of red Symbiote in orbit. And even now, Terra holds more than enough resources to send you to join us. Even if you are one of the rare genetic unfortunates—and if you are, we have the resources to heal your introns, once you enter Symbiosis.
That is why I am writing this.
All you have to do is find a phone. Shara Drummond is accepting collect calls, and will tell you how to reach the nearest functioning spacecraft. We’re waiting for you.
Some of the oldest Chinese legends speak of a mysterious “edible gold,” one taste of which confers immortality. It seems unlikely the ancient Chinese could have had any direct knowledge of the Fireflies or of Symbiote—it may simply be that, given enough time, any prophecy will eventually come true.
For millions of years, loneliness has cascaded down through the millennia, an ever-expanding wave of loneliness, powered by itself, by its own terrible self-creating hunger. Confined in bone boxes, we sought solace by rubbing our meat-mounts against one another, and so made more prisoners of bone and flesh to replace us and keep loneliness alive and expanding across the ages.
Now loneliness is only an option, rather than a sentence. Your sentence has been commuted: you are released, not on, but upon, your own cognizance. The cell door is open at last: you can walk out any time you are ready. You have been ready since you were born.
And it is safe now. You can leave your cell without fear, without shame, without self-doubt. No matter what horrors you flatter yourself lie uniquely in your skull, no matter what unforgivable deficiencies you claim to yourself, you will find understanding and total acceptance in the Starmind. Everyone else did. One of the nicest things about living in zero gravity is that it is no longer possible for one person to look down on any other. There is no rank, no class, in the Starmind. There is no obsession, for there is no need for it. Yet paradoxically, somehow I can look up to many of my fellow Stardancers—and look into any who consent. All of them, sooner or later.
To join us is not to “lose your ego.” It is to gain nine billion more. Love on that scale has never been imagined, in all the ages of the world. I tell you that it is better than you can imagine.
There is a reason why I have been chosen—out of more than nine billion!—to tell you this story of the final days. And the reason is not because I used to practice the writer’s trade, although that has proved helpful.
This task fell to me because fate placed me in a unique position. I yearned to live out the rest of my days on Terra so badly that I tore my heart in half, and risked the heart of my daughter, to stay there. Yet I live in the Starmind now, and will live out the rest of my days in space—and am deeply joyous. I have lost nothing… and gained the stars.