The Stardance Trilogy (62 page)

Shortly after Ben and Kirra had made rendezvous with the returning Harvest Crew, there had been an unexplained catastrophic explosion, cataclysmic enough to disrupt the entire mass of new Symbiote and kill the entire Crew. Raoul Brindle, Ben, Kirra, more than a dozen others, all were dead.

Black and white and red all over.

We die, and we do not die.

—Shunryu Suzuki-roshi,
ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND

T
HE NEWS ROCKED
the Solar System, stunned humans and Stardancers alike.

Credit for the explosion was formally claimed, not by the Gabriel Jihad, but by a much older terrorist group, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. They too were rumored to have ties to the Umayyad Caliphate, though they were based in Trinidad rather than Medina, black Muslims rather than brown. It didn’t seem to make much difference. There was so much outcry and mutual vituperation at the UN that they were forced to suspend all operations of the General Assembly for a week. That didn’t seem to make much difference, either, at least not to those humans in space.

Just how the Jamaat had managed to pull off the bombing, they did not say. Of all the questions the incident raised, that one seemed to me to matter least of all.

But it seemed to fascinate Sulke. “It just couldn’t possibly have been a missile,” she insisted angrily.

We were drinking together in Le Puis, heavily, a few days after the tragedy; I was still in something like a protracted state of shock, and cared not at all for the question, but found myself arguing automatically. “Why not?”

“It’s obvious. Peace missiles only aim down. ASATs only aim sideways, nothing shoots
away
from Earth except lasers and particle beams, and the biggest one there is would have to have been focused on the Symbiote for nearly an hour to burst it. But it was an instantaneous
blam
.”

“Anything with a power plant could be a big slow bomb.”

“Self-propelling hardware in space is
very
carefully monitored, for pretty obvious reasons. There just isn’t anything missing. And besides, if something had left its usual orbit and headed out of cislunar space, it would have been tracked by the Space Command. The screens prove no artifact ever approached the new Symbiote. The Chinese have got some scientific stuff vectoring around out in that general direction, but not within a hundred thousand klicks of the spot where the explosion took place, and they couldn’t have fired off anything big enough to make that big a bang without being seen.”

Janani Luwum, a huge First-Monther truckdriver from Uganda, was at the next table, near enough to eavesdrop, and wedged himself into the conversation. “I don’t understand the ambiguity. Wasn’t the new Symbiote itself being tracked?”

“Yes,” Sulke agreed, “but not very closely or carefully. It wasn’t
doing
anything interesting. They would have started paying more attention in a few days when deceleration began, but as things stand we have nothing better than automatic radar tracking at poor resolution.”

“Then you don’t
know
that there was no incoming missile: you only infer it.”

“From goddam good evidence,” she insisted. “Anything on a closing course would have triggered alarms. That aside, the Stardancers present would have noticed it coming, with that weird radar sense of theirs, and tapes of radio transmissions and reports from Stardancers who were in rapport at the time show no one was expecting trouble right up to the second it went off.”

“Christ,” Janani said, “I wonder what that must be like: being in telepathic rapport with someone while they’re blown to pieces.”

“I don’t know,” Sulke said with a shudder, “but I hear they have more than fifty new catatonics to try and heal.”

“Those were not the first Stardancers ever to die,” Janani’s lover Henning Fragerhøi pointed out.

“No, there’ve been half a dozen accidental deaths since the first Symbiosis,” Sulke said. “But never before have so many died, so suddenly, so savagely. No Stardancer was ever murdered before.”

“But how can you be sure it was murder?” Janani said. “You just finished proving there was no shot fired.”

“That’s right—but there was nothing along with them that could possibly have blown up like that. Nothing but Stardancers and Symbiote.”

“Well, then,” I said, tired of all the chattering, “it didn’t happen. That’s a relief. Thanks, Sulke. Can we get back to some serious drinking, now? Hey, Fat! Oh shit, I mean ‘Pål’. Hey, Pål, we need more balls over here.” We were able to get shitfaced in Le Puis because Fat Humphrey was not on duty; it was said that he’d been locked in his own quarters, drinking himself into a coma, since the disaster had happened. He had loved Kirra almost as much as I had. And he had been a personal friend of Raoul—had been there the day Raoul joined the newly formed Stardancers Incorporated, twenty years before. His relief bartender Pål Bøgeberg didn’t seem to much care if the customers got drunk enough to riot; he brought the balls of booze I ordered without protest.

“It fucking well happened, all right,” Sulke said. “But there’s only one fucking way in the System it could have happened.”

“Spontaneous combustion,” I said sourly, and sucked a great gulp of gin.

“Stalking horse,” she said, and squeezed a stream of gin at her own mouth, catching it with the panache of a longtime free fall lush.

“I don’t understand,” said Henning, for whom English was a second language. “‘Stocking hose’?”

“Stalking horse. A living mine. One of those Stardancers was boobytrapped. And since they were all telepathic, it had to have been done without their knowledge. Just how it was done, I can’t imagine. My best guess is some kind of very tiny dart carrying seed nanoreplicators. It penetrated somebody’s Symbiote without them noticing, somehow, and then the sneaky little nanoreps used that body’s own materials to construct a bomb. As soon as it was big enough,
blooey!
”

“More likely the Symbiote itself was injected somehow,” Janani said. “Enough matter there for a really big bomb, without the risk its host would notice it growing. Stardancers monitor their own bodies pretty closely, control even the unconscious systems and so forth: you’d think they’d notice a tumor large enough to explode with so much force.”

“Either could be true,” Sulke said. “There was a helluva lot of Symbiote, but it’s made up of the wrong chemicals to make a really powerful bomb easily, and you’d see discoloration as it formed. But I’ve read in spy thrillers that nanoreplicators could synthesize a very powerful explosive from the materials in an ordinary human body, without disturbing any essential function. It could be hidden in the one large part of the body a Stardancer never pays any attention to.”

“Where’s that?”

“The lungs. Plenty of room, and all the nerves to that area are switched off permanently at Symbiosis, to keep you from panicking when you stop breathing for good.”

“Shut
up
, for Christ’s sake,” I cried, horrified by the mental picture of death coalescing around someone’s living heart while they jaunted along oblivious.

“The only thing I don’t get is why whoever it was didn’t notice the injection. The seed would have to have mass enough to be perceptible, be at least as big as a pinhead—and Stardancers notice collisions with objects that big. They have to, they live in a world of micrometeorites.”

“If the subject is not changed in the next sentence spoken, I am going to squirt the rest of this gin in your eye,” I said, and held it up threateningly. Sulke was not an easy drunk to intimidate, but maybe there was something in my voice. Her next sentence was a
non sequitur
that started a different argument, about who was
really
behind the bombing. It wasn’t a true change of subject, but I let it go.

I don’t remember much of the rest of that night, and what I remember of the next day doesn’t bear repeating. I spent most of it in my sleepsack, moaning, with an icepack at the back of my neck—or rather, shuttling back and forth between there and the john. After an endless time of misery I decided I needed to sweat the pain out of me, and went to my studio.

There I found that my thoughts danced and whirled more than my body ever could.

Sick of this goddam piece. Sick of everything I can think of. Not one close friend left anywhere in the Solar System. More than forty-three thousand new lovers waiting to marry me, but not one goddam friend. Reb’ll be on my back any time now; I’ve cut classes for three days straight. Probably not the only one. Fuck it, there’s nothing more they can teach me now that I need to know. Only thing holding me back is this goddam dance, and I wish I’d never started the frigging thing. Hadn’t been so busy and distracted with it, self-involved, I might have put together a stronger thing with Robert. Jesus, my back hurts. Been hurting quite a bit lately; snuck up on me. Old injury trying to make a comeback. Repair it myself once I eat the Big Red Jell-O. Unless somebody injects me with a teeny little bomb factory. Or already has. No, I’d have noticed. Or would I? Apparently
some
body failed to notice it being done to them. How the hell could that be? How do you introduce something the size of a pinhead into someone’s body without them noticing? Slip it in their soup? Awful chancey—might leave the wrong few drops in the container. Aerosol spray? No, the victim might choke on the thing. Damn, that knee’s starting to twinge a bit too. Or am I imagining it? Oh, God damn it all. Everything, everything, everything falling apart at once. Friends gone, lover gone, never again the joyous invasion of my—

I cried out.

“Are you all right, Morgan?” Teena asked with concern.

“Absolutely wonderful,” I snarled.

She was sharp enough to detect pain in a human voice, but not subtle enough for sarcasm. “Sorry I disturbed you.”

“Privacy, Teena. Switch off. Butt out!”

“Yes, Morgan,” she said, and was gone, her monitors on me shut off until I called her again.

I tried to vomit, but there was nothing left in my system to expel. The new thought in my brain was so monstrous, so unthinkable, I wanted to spew it out of me like poison food, but I could find no way to do so even symbolically. I was suffused with horror. I curled up into a fetal ball, trembling violently.

—it can’t be (it could be) it can’t be (it could be) there must be some other way (name one) it can’t be—

All at once I knew a way you could invade someone’s body without them noticing. By concealing the invader in another, larger invasion they were joyfully accepting.

By fucking them.

Literally or figuratively, by sperm in one set of mucous membranes or by saliva in another at the other end, what difference did it make? The pinhead-sized object need not be hard or metallic like a real pinhead, might have been soft and malleable, easily mistaken for a morsel of food politely ignored in a passionate kiss—or unnoticed altogether amid ten ccs of ejaculate.

It made no sense for Ben to have infected Kirra, or the other way around: they had died together.

But Robert had made love with both of them.

(And left for Earth the very next day. Without inviting me to accompany him.)

And I was the only living person who knew that…

—it can’t be, he couldn’t (he could) he wouldn’t (how the hell do you know) why would he, why would he, WHY WOULD HE DO SUCH A THING? (he’s Chinese, they hate Stardancers) He’s Chinese-
American,
not from China (who says so, and so what) no, I just can’t believe it (oh you can believe it, all right, you just don’t know for sure) I don’t
want
to believe it, I don’t want to
know,
it isn’t true (there’s only one good way to find out) it can’t be—

In my blind drifting, I contacted the studio wall. And screamed.

Perhaps—no, certainly—I should have gone right to Reb with what I had figured out. Or to Dorothy Gerstenfeld, or Phillipe Mgabi…or all three. I had an urgent need to share my terrible hypothesis with
someone.
For all I knew, I was carrying a bomb inside
me.

But I did not go to Reb, or anyone else. In fact, I stayed there in my studio, fetal and moaning, until I had recovered sufficiently that I thought I could keep the sick horror out of my face—at least well enough to fool shipboard acquaintances.

Part of it might have been reticence to share a sexual secret of my friends, whose permission I could no longer seek. But I don’t think so. No sexual behaviour was scandalous in Top Step, and I did not think either Kirra or Ben would have considered it a secret.

No, what stopped me was simply that my theory was just that. A theory. I just could not make an accusation of such ghastly magnitude against a man I had loved, without the slightest shred of proof. The accusation alone would be so utterly damning—and how could a man possibly defend himself against such a charge if he were innocent? If I opened my mouth, and were wrong, and Robert were torn to pieces down on Earth by an angry mob of Stardancer-lovers…

But when I thought back, I realized that I could not recall any time Reb had expressed an opinion of Robert as a person—or of our relationship. And when we broke up, he’d said only that he was sorry I was sad. Had that hyperintuitive man sensed something about Robert that I had missed? I could not bring myself to ask him.

I had to know. For myself, for sure. And as soon as physically possible. No shilly-shallying around, like I’d been doing about Symbiosis; it was time to get off the dime and make a move,
now.
I might be carrying a second bomb, and who knew when it might go off?

It took me an hour or so to get my lines together and rehearse them until I could make them sound truthful. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it. But I’ve always been a trouper. When I had it right, I called Reb and told him I was quitting.

He wanted to talk about it, of course, but I cut it as short as I could. In essence I claimed that Kirra’s and Ben’s deaths had soured space for me; it was no longer a place I wanted to go. There was enough truth in it for me to sound plausible, I guess: he bought it, reluctantly. He sounded sad, but made no real effort to argue, simply making sure my mind was made up.