And more. Buchi Tenmo was quite right about self-generated reality: I still have Provincetown. I smell it as I write…
In fact, I have P-Town now far more than I ever did before… for now I can see it through the eyes (through all the senses) of Tia Marguerite and Tia Marion and Cousin Tomas and all my relatives and friends, can know it through the perceptions and experiences of every other former resident, nearly everyone living who has ever seen it. If binocular vision creates three-dimensional visual depth, imagine the kind of depth with which I now know my beloved home. Over a hundred years of Provincetown, times millions of people, raised to its own power! I have more of my beloved home than a hundred thousand normal lifetimes could have given me… and I no longer need it. I have much deeper roots, now.
And my husband, who needed the attention of strangers, expressed in dollars, so badly that he tore his heart in half and risked his daughter’s heart for it, has more raw attention available to him than he could ever have imagined… and sacrifices nothing for it… and needs it not at all.
And his brother, who risked his job and thus his art and thus his life, all to be near him, is now with him always. Just as intimately as I am, for the Starmind understands genetics as no human ever did. I carry their child in my womb now… a girl who is already Shaping herself, and will begin dancing soon.
That is the reason why I have chosen to tell my own story through more eyes than my own—right up to the moment when all our viewpoints converged.
Can you see that, if any of those three surviving protagonists in the foregoing comedy had known as much about what was really going on as you did when you read their story, they could not have acted as foolishly and destructively as they did? Can you really want to keep wasting as much time and energy as they all did, blundering through the dark of their lives, squinting through the twin chinks in the bone box and trying to read the hearts of others through theirs?
I/we have also reconstructed Eva’s story, and made it part of mine/ours, partly for the additional perspective it adds, and mostly to show that I/we can. Reb knew her, and so the Starmind does, and always will. No one will ever completely die again… so long as there is one brain in the Starmind that ever knew him or her. I’m teaching the unborn daughter in my belly about Eva right now—since Rand and Jay are going to give her Eva’s name.
“O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, and foolish notion.”
Robert Burns was right. The gift has been given. Take it…
What has happened to our species may seem unprecedented. But it is not. We have made other Jumps of comparable magnitude, up the evolutionary scale. From the sea to the mud to the trees to the mountaintops to the skies… and now to space itself, free of the womb altogether.
There is less than no future in being a Neo-Neanderthal… for the next evolutionary Jump is already in progress. A Starmind of nine and a half billion brains possesses the necessary complexity and depth to begin to make sense of the Cosmic Background Babble. Deep in the Oort Cloud where the comets play, far from the sun, something is presently nearing completion that will help, a thing that has no analog in human experience. The infant is listening, learning to hear; one day it will learn to talk. There are as many stars in this galaxy as there are neurons in a brain: imagine a mind made up of a galaxy of Starminds!
For millions of years, an endless succession of generations of upright, lonely apes have gazed up in dumb yearning at the stars, at the infinite depth and breadth of the universe, at the teasing promise of the other 99.9999+% of reality. Now, at long last, we have come home.
Join us—as soon as you are ready!
I am Rhea Paixao, and my message to you is: the stars are here.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank master roboticist Guy Immega (again!), ace physicist Douglas Beder, and Renaissance man Bob Atkinson for technical assistance in matters both scientific and speculative; K. Eric Drexler, Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit for explaining the nearly infinite potential of nanotechnology with their historic and indispensable book, Unbounding the Future [Quill/William Morrow], a follow-up to Drexler’s classic The Engines of Creation (almost none of what we read there made it into this volume, but we couldn’t have written the first word without all of it); Peter Mathiessen for hipping us to the Kingdom of Lo and the Festival of Impermanence in the quarterly journal Tricycle; Murray Louis for continuing to help us believe that meaningful words can be written about dance; Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi for the inspirational butoh-influenced dance of Kokoro, and Lafcadio Hearn for preserving and translating the eerily appropriate hauta found in Chapter 20.
We also thank Tenshin Zenki (Reb Anderson), Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Herb Varley, Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jon Singer, Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, Greg McKinnon, David Myers, Dr. Thomas O’Regan, Marie Guthrie and all the members of Jeanne’s women’s group for an assortment of things too numerous, blessed, shady, trivial, profound, personal or otherwise unmentionable to mention.
Ongoing thanks go to our beloved agent Eleanor Wood and our editor Susan Allison, without whom all of this would not have been necessary. And we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who voted the original “Stardance” story the Best Novella Hugo in 1977; without you this book would not exist. We might not either.
In addition to all the sources cited in Starmind’s two prequels, Stardance and Starseed, and the ones cited above, we drew upon The Book of Serenity—One Hundred Zen Dialogues; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche; and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Touching Peace. Musical influences this time around included Charles Brown, Stan Getz, Holly Cole, Kenny Loggins, Paul McCartney (“Off the Ground” was a favorite track), Dianne Reeves, the Oscar Peterson Trio, Wynton Marsalis, Jake Thackray and virtually the entire blues and R&B catalogues of Holger Peterson’s Stony Plain Records and Tapes.
Finally, we thank our daughter, Terri Luanna—for this whole saga was begun when she was an infant, for the sole purpose of getting her back home to Canada after we’d gone broke while showing her off to our families back in the Old Country. She is now a twenty-year-old college junior—fully grown and out of the nest… and so at last, more than a quarter of a million words later, is the story she inspired. We two have already agreed between us to collaborate on other books in the future. But this tale is now complete.
—Spider & Jeanne Robinson
Vancouver, British Columbia
24 October 1993