“What exactly do you mean by ‘destroy’?” a woman named Nicole asked. I thought: what a dumb question.
Reb brightened. “A good question.”
“I think so,” Nicole agreed. “I know the odds of failure—I passed the exam like everybody. One percent of those who enter Symbiosis suffer what they called ‘catastrophic mental trauma.’ But I don’t know what that means. I mean, they explained it to me back dirtside—but I need somebody to explain the explanation. Can somebody’s mind really…well, collapse, from having forty thousand other minds suddenly crash in on it?”
There was nervous laughter.
Reb did not smile. “Sometimes,” he said.
The laughter died.
“Those forty thousand minds do not all come crashing in at once…but the significance of their existence does. Some minds find that intolerable.”
“What happens to them?” Nicole asked.
“What happens when a star implodes?” Reb replied.
“Depends on how massive it is,” someone said.
Reb nodded. “It is much the same with a panicked ego. Whether it can survive telepathic union depends on how massive it is.”
“How do you mean?”
“Think of a mind which has never loved,” Reb said. “It knows that it is the center of the Universe, the only thing that is truly real, that matters. Then its body swallows some mysterious red gunk, and WHACK! Suddenly it knows better. The walls of its skull drop away; for the first time ever, it is naked. Observed…no, more; touched…in its most intimate chinks and crannies by forty thousand strangers. Mind sees Starmind, and knows its own true smallness. By all accounts it is a terrifying realization.”
This was exactly what I had been trying to imagine for weeks. Could I live with that much truth? Did I have the courage to be that naked? To let that big audience come swarming over the stage?
“Now sometimes an ego is so entrenched in itself that it refuses to yield the floor, will not love nor be loved. It rejects what it perceives—incorrectly—as a threat to its identity. Mad with fear, it seeks escape, and there is nowhere to go but inward. It implodes like a collapsing star, literally an ego deflating. Most often it shrinks down to a small hard dense core, like a neuron star. Invisible. Invulnerable. It must hurt terribly. Such catatonics can sometimes be saved, healed. With time. With skill. Many wise and compassionate minds work nonstop to do so; so far they have a discouraging success rate.”
He had our total attention.
“But once in a long while, an imploding star is so massive, it collapses past the point where it can exist. It leaves our Universe, becomes a black hole. Similarly, if an ego is massive enough, it may react to telepathic union by collapsing past the point where it can sustain itself. It suicides rather than surrender. It simply…goes away. The flame blows out. You could say it dies. What is left is a very long-lived humanoid with the mind of a plant or a starfish. These few are placed in stable orbits, and they are. . .” He paused. “Uh, ‘cherished’ is closer than ‘mourned,’ I think. By the rest of the Starmind.”
“What’s the ratio of deaths to comas?” Nicole asked.
“About one to a hundred. Roughly the same as the overall ratio of failures to successes.”
You could hear gears grinding as she tried to work out the arithmetic. Several seconds passed. “So out of every thousand people who eat red—”
“Out of every ten thousand who attempt Symbiosis, ninety-nine will go into stasis, and one will die,” he told her. “Approximately. In fact there have been eight deaths, and five hundred and eighty-seven catatonics, of whom fifty-three have been healed so far…and an additional six have died.”
There was a glutinous silence in the room.
Not that many of us, or even any of us, were surprised. Nicole may have been the only person in the room to whom these figures were news. I certainly knew them; it seemed to me that anyone who had come this far without knowing them was an idiot. But they were sobering statistics just the same.
And, it was just dawning on me for the first time that the Starmind, as Reb called it, the telepathic community I was proposing to join, did not discriminate against people I considered idiots. I was dismayed by how dismayed that made me. Me, an intellectual snob? Apparently.
“Look on the bright side,” Reb said. “You are five hundred times more likely to die during training, before you ever get to Symbiosis. Die completely, soul and body, in some EVA accident. And you’re two hundred times more likely to suffer serious mental breakdown and be sent dirtside.”
Now, there were some grim figures. Out of every hypothetical standard class of one hundred, an average of five died before ever attempting Symbiosis…and two went seriously nuts from brooding about it. I’d read about one class, back in the early days of Top Step, where nearly half had died, most of them in a single ghastly accident.
Then there was the drop-out rate to be considered. An average of twelve in every class changed their minds and went home—often at the last minute. Another five balked: when three months were up, they decided not to decide. The Foundation would let you hang around Top Step as long as you wanted…if you were willing to work for your air, and had a job skill they needed at the time. After eleven more months—if you were still alive—your body was permanently, irrevocably adapted to zero gee: you had to either sign on with the Foundation permanently—if they would have you—or else become part of the permanent-transient population of spacers, like Sulke. Or, of course, get off the dime and eat Symbiote.
“But if you survive long enough to attempt Symbiosis,” Reb went on, “your chances of success are much higher than those of, say a pregnant woman to birth successfully. The kind of mind that will collapse when exposed to telepathy tends not to come here to Top Step at all. Either it never applies, or we filter it out in the preselection stage, or it drops out during Suit Camp.”
“So why go through two or three months of preparation?” Nicole asked. “I read that some people have become Stardancers without it.”
“Because experience has shown it eases the transition,” Reb said patiently. “At best, Symbiosis is painful…one Stardancer likened it to a turtle having its shell ripped away…but those who have had the training agree it helps enormously. If you can learn to live without the false distinctions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ you probably can learn to live with the equally false distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘not-me.’ ”
“So why so much free time, why aren’t we working all the time?” Nicole wanted to know.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nicole!” Glenn blurted. By this time I was so annoyed with Nicole’s broken-record questioning myself that I grunted in agreement.
Reb looked at me. “You cannot think Nicole’s question is foolish, Morgan. You asked it yourself a minute ago.”
You blush easier in free fall, and more spectacularly.
“But it is foolish, nonetheless,” he went on gently. “You are working all the time, Nicole. Everyone is, everyone everywhere. You can’t help but keep working. Didn’t you know that?”
She looked confused.
“Nicole, I could have uncommon intuition and insight, and spend every minute of the next two months in your company, and still I would not know a tenth as much as you do about what you need to learn now, and what is the best way for you to learn it. Even Fat Humphrey’s kind of ‘telepathy’ doesn’t go that deep. That’s why we try to make sure you’ll have lots of so-called ‘free’ time here, to work on it without being distracted. There isn’t a lot of time left before you will have to make a big decision, and we don’t want your schooling to get in the way of your education.”