by Spider
“I plan to annihilate them, root and branch.”
“But that’s silly.” Hunt down and kill more than forty thousand individuals in free space, who had low albedo, no waste heat, and nothing bigger than fillings in their teeth to show up on radar? Fat chance. With those huge variable light-sails attached to insignificant mass, they were more maneuverable than any vessel in space could ever be. What he proposed was not merely impossibly expensive, but impossible. “How could you hope to succeed?”
“By raising up an army against them,” he said blandly. “And for that I need a technological edge, an unbeatable one. I need the Symbiote, tamed.”
In my present state, I was incapable of shock. I was only mildly confused. I tightened my grip on the edges of my chair, so that I would not float away. “‘Tamed’?”
“You did not know. Good.” He sat back and lit up a joint. No, a cigarette. My ex-husband had been a diehard smoker too. “By coincidence, it was a resident of Carmel, Sheldon Silverman, who first proposed the concept of a Symbiotic army—less than ten minutes after the existence and nature of the Symbiote was first revealed. It’s in the Titan Transmission. But Charles Armstead pointed out the flaw in the idea. An immortal, telepathic soldier will mutiny the moment he joins the Starmind. He cannot be coerced anymore. I have tried placing spies in the Starmind; all ceased working at the instant of their Symbiosis. Fortunately I had anticipated this; none of them carried knowledge especially dangerous to me.
“But just suppose one could genetically modify the Symbiote, to produce a strain which does not convey telepathy, and has a limited life-span without regular reinfection.”
He had not phrased it as a question, so I could not answer. I did as I was told, just supposed. The drug kept me physically calm, relaxed and at ease—but inside my head a tiny part of me was screaming, beating at the walls of my skull.
The toughest part of having an army is keeping it fed and supplied and in motion. If you had a Symbiotic army, all you’d have to do was issue them lasers and turn them loose. So long as they needed regular fresh doses of false Symbiote to keep breathing vacuum, they would follow orders.
“It would be useful,” he went on, “to further modify the altered Symbiote so that it could survive terrestrial conditions. But I am told that is fundamentally impossible. No matter: who controls space controls the planet, in the final analysis. And the only military force in space that cannot be defended against is naked human beings who never hunger and thirst, an infantry who cannot be seen until it is too late. Do you see a flaw in the plan?”
“How can you genetically modify Symbiote? You can’t get a sample, without giving yourself away.”
Again his mouth grew tiny parentheses. “I have done so. That is precisely why your friends died.”
The Symbiote Mass! Its mass and vector to several decimal places had been public information. Place an explosive of known force near it, trigger it by radio at a predetermined instant, apply a little chaos theory, and when the mass blows to smithereens…you’ll know the projected new vector of the largest smithereens. There’s no way anyone else can track shards of organic matter in open space—but you can happen to have a ship in the right place to intercept some.
I lacked the capacity to be horrified. I appraised the idea dispassionately, like the emotionless Vulcan Jerald in Star Trek: the Third Generation on 3V. The scheme was brilliant, without flaw that I could see. Not only did he have sample Symbiote for his geneticists to experiment on, no one even suspected that. His biggest problem would be making sure no human accidentally touched any of the Symbiote while working with it—but that’s why they make remote-operated waldos; it was nowhere near as complex a problem as coping with dangerous nanoreplicators.
I’d been asked if I saw any flaws in the plan. “Stardancers would still have tactical advantage in combat. Instant, perfect communications.”
He shrugged. “Telepathy is not that much more effective than good radio, at close quarters. I will match my generalship against any component of the Starmind. And they are utterly unarmed.”
“There are a lot of them.”
“Do you have any idea how many men I can put in space in a hurry, if I do not mind heavy losses in transit? At most, the Stardancer population is one ten thousandth of that of the People’s Republic. The outcome is foreordained.” He blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think you are the biggest monster I ever heard of.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
A phone chimed beside him. He answered at once. “Yes?”
Maybe the drug enhanced my hearing. I could make out Robert’s voice. “Is she all right?”
Chen Hsi-Feng frowned slightly. “Did I not promise?”
“Let me speak to her.”
“No.”
“Then I’m coming in. I have to see her once more, before you take her mind.”
His frown deepened…then disappeared. “Of course. Come.”
He put down the phone, and took an object from an inner pocket. My own Gyrojet, it looked like, or one like it. “There is time for one last question,” he said distractedly.
I nodded. “You’re not going to let me live, are you? You lied to him.”
“Yes. I dare not simply wipe your memory. Organic memory differs from electronic in that any erasure can be undone, with enough time and effort. A pity: it will cost me a son.”
So I was going to die. And so was Robert, or Po Chang, or whoever he was today. Interesting. Regrettable. At least I would be forever safe from the things with the leather wings. Or perhaps not; perhaps they came from the land beyond life. No matter. An old traditional blues song went through my head.
One more mile,
Just one more mile to go.
It’s been a long distance journey:
I won’t have to cry no more.
“Sit there and be silent,” he commanded me. He swiveled his chair away, faced the door with his back to me. The door opened and Robert came in. Not Chen Po Chang—my Robert Chen. The door closed behind him, and locked. He registered that at the same instant he saw the gun. His face did not change, but his shoulders hunched the least little bit, then relaxed again. “I have been stupid,” he said.
His father nodded. “When you called her a romantic in the restaurant, I nearly laughed aloud. Do you remember what I told you on your thirteenth birthday?”
“…‘Love is to be avoided, for it causes you to believe not what is so, but what you must believe.’ You were right. You must kill her…and so you must kill me. Pray proceed.”
No!
“I know you do not share my religious views,” Chen Hsi-Feng said. “But I will summon a priest of any denomination you wish.”
Robert grimaced. “No, thank you.”
“You are sure? There is no hurry, and this much I can do for you. Of course, whoever shrives you must die also—I never understood why a good priest should fear death.”
Robert shook his head without speaking.
“Is there anything else you want to do first?”
Robert thought about it. “Cut your throat,” he suggested.
“So sorry,” his father said, and lifted the gun.
I had spent the last seconds, scurrying about inside my skull, recruiting every neuron I could. Now I threw everything I had into a massive last-ditch internal effort, trying desperately to throw off my chemical chains and regain control of my body. The counterrevolution was a qualified disaster. I could not invest the motor centers—or even, equally important to me, regain access to my emotional glandular system—but I managed to briefly retake the speech center. “He…is…your…son,” I said in a slurring drawl.
I succeeded in surprising him. He stiffened slightly, and rolled his chair to one side so that he could watch me without taking his gaze off Robert. Then he answered. “He is my illegitimate son. True, he is worth two of my heirs. But that is exactly why I have not been able to afford him sin
ce the moment he stopped being ruled by self-interest. I can no longer predict his actions. Last words, Po Chang?”
“Fuck you,” Robert said.
His father shot him in the face. The dart worked exactly as the demonstrator slug had worked on the rat. Robert stiffened momentarily, then began to tremble, then fell down and shivered himself to death. Blood ran from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth, then stopped. From the huff of the shot to the end of his death rattle took no more than five or ten seconds. I wished I could scream.
Chen Hsi-Feng spun his chair to me. “Last words?” he said again.
Even without emotions, and with nothing objective left to live for, I was not ready to die. “I would like to…I guess the word is, pray.”
“Do you require a cleric of some kind? I’m afraid I will not go to as much trouble for you as I was prepared to for my son.”
I shook my head. “I just want to sit zazen for a few minutes.”
He nodded at once. “Ah—Zen! An excellent faith. You may have five minutes. Who knows? Perhaps you will attain enlightenment this time.” He composed himself to wait.
I tried to get down from my chair and sit on the floor. But the persistent delusional feeling of being in low gravity threw me off; I fell to the floor with a crash. Distantly I heard the unmistakable sound of a bone cracking—every dancer’s nightmare horror sound—but it didn’t seem important at all. I didn’t even bother identifying which bone it was. I established that I could still force my legs into lotus, with the ease of two months of training. I tried to straighten my spine, but could not get a strong fix on local vertical. “Antidote,” I said. “Partial at least.”
He shook his head. “No. It is not a drug that hinders you, but a team of nanoreplicators. They will completely disassemble themselves when your temperature falls below 20 Celsius, but until then nothing can counteract them. Do the best you can. You have five minutes.”
All that is important is to sit, I had heard Reb say once. And to breathe. Last chance for both.
I closed my eyes and became my breath.
Time stopped, and so, for once, did I.
The state Buddhists call “enlightenment,” or satori, is so elusive, so full of contradiction and paradox, that many outsiders throw up their hands and declare it a chimera, a verbal construct with no referent. You seek to attain thought that is no-thought, feeling that is no-feeling, being that is non-being, and the cosmic catch-22 is that if you try, you cannot succeed. You must free yourself of all attachments, including even your attachment to freeing yourself. This state seems, verbally at least, to be so synonymous with, so identical to, death, that some scholars go so far as to say that everyone becomes enlightened sooner or later in his or her own turn, and there is no problem in the universe. The literature is filled with cases of Buddhists who claimed to have found enlightenment in the moment that they looked certain death in the face. Uyesugi Kenshin once said, “Those who cling to life, die, and those who defy death live.” Taisen Deshimaru said, “Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honour, pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?” And Reb Hawkins had once told Glenn and the rest of us in class, “Looked at from a certain angle, enlightenment is a kind of annihilation—a radical self-emptying.”
Perhaps it was nearness to death, then. Perhaps the microscopic nanoreplicators in my brain actually helped, by switching off emotions, making it impossible for me to feel thalamic disturbance, insulating me from physical aches and restlessness and even boredom. Perhaps it was the brutal fact of my despair—which is not an emotion, but a point of view. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Whatever the reason, all at once I attained satori.
I was one with all sentient beings, and there was nothing that was not sentient in all the universe, not even space, not even chance. Everything that was, was simply quantum probability wavefronts collapsing into phenomena, dancing a teleological dance that was choreographed and improvised at the same time. “I” still existed, but I coexisted with and was identical to everyone/everything else.
I had been here before, for brief instants in my life, up until I gave my life to cynicism in my twenties—and then again, for a scattered few seconds, in Top Step, during a long period of kûkanzen. One of the things that had subconsciously held me back from entering Symbiosis, I now saw, had been a desire to experience it again for more than seconds, one last time the “natural” way, before I gave up and ate it prepackaged. A kind of spiritual pride.
It happened now, since I no longer yearned for it. Once again I was little Rain M’Cloud dancing on a floating dock, and was bobbing sea lions, and was the dance that connected us, all at the same time. And then I was not even that.
Sentient beings are numberless, says the Great Vow. I became one with that numberless number. And being one, we perceived ourself, with great clarity.
First, the things called no-thing. Vacuum, space, time, gravity, entropy, the void.
Next, the things called nonliving matter. Rock. Water. Gases. Plasma. Endless reshuffled combinations of hydrogen and the various ashes of its fusion.
Next, the things called living. The film of life that crawled and swam and flew and ran through and ultimately sank back into the surface of the Earth. I was all the viruses that swam in the soup of the world, all the grasses that grew, insects and reptiles and birds and fish and mammals, all striving to make ever-better copies of themselves. I seemed to be a part of all that lived, without being distinct from that which did not.
Then the things called sentient. I could see sentience as if it were a fire burning in the darkness. A tapestry of cool fires that was the dolphins and the orcas. Every dull selfish glow that was the consciousness of a cat. Every hot coal of fear and self-loathing that was a human being. I could pick out every Buddhist among them, tell the adepts from the students. There were all the Christians, and there the Muslims, those were the superstitious atheists and those all the lonely agnostics. I knew everyone on Earth who was happy, and everyone who was in agony. High overhead, and scattered about the Solar System from the orbit of Mercury to the fringes of the Oort Cloud, I saw/felt/was every Stardancer and all Stardancers, the Starmind—for the first time I began to understand it, what it was and what it was trying to become, I knew that it was a Starseed, and that if/when it finally bore fruit, there would be joy among the stars, and on Earth.
And further out I sensed things that were as far beyond sentient as I was beyond an idiot. The Fireflies, who had grown all of this from Earthseed, and others greater even than them, beyond all describing or human understanding. Of all, they were furthest removed from my experience, and thus most interesting. I could know them, there was time, there was no-time—
But just as my awareness left Earth to expand and encompass them, began to pass through High Orbit…there was a change.
I became conscious of a level I had missed. It lay roughly halfway between human being and Stardancer, partaking of both. There were only a few of that nature, a tiny fraction of the sons and daughters of Eve—but a fraction that had stayed nearly constant for the last two million years. They were scattered here and there at apparent random, like salt particles in a bland soup, and they were all connected and interconnected by strands of something that has no name. Call them enlightened ones. Call them holy people. Call them the good and wise, or whatever you like. They had no collective name, only collective awareness. All their awareness was collective: none of them suffered from the delusion that they were anything more than neurons in a larger brain, cells in a body, atoms in a molecule. They were intimately connected with the Starmind, though separate from it.
In the same instant I became aware of their antithesis. Call them the destroyers. The truly evil, if you will. The ones who fear everything, and so seek to destroy everything they can reach. It did not surprise me that there were fewer of them by far. Their interconnections were fewer and much feebler. Each fought all the ot
hers, even when cooperation would further their aims. They were essentially stupid at their core, but so corrosively destructive in their childish rage that if they’d had numerical parity with their opposites, the human race would have ended long since.
Back in the reality I had left, frozen in the amber of now, one of them sat a few meters from me, waiting politely to kill me.
Ideas are like viruses. They transmit copies of themselves from host mind to host mind, changing themselves slightly in the process, and the ideas which are unfit soon perish, and the ones that survive grow strong. They compete for resources. Christianity competes with Islam for space in the brains of mankind; the idea of capitalism competes with the idea of Marxism, while theocratic monarchy nips at both their heels. The idea of freedom battles with the idea of responsibility, and so on.
On the highest level, the idea of Life competes with the idea of Death. Hope versus cynicism. Yes versus no. Joy versus despair. Enlightenment versus delusion. Conception versus suicide. This happens in all people…but some take sides.
I could see the human avatars of both sides, now. Call them the white magicians and the black, those who loved greatly and those who hated hugely, in awful stasis, terrible balance, like irresistible thrusters straining to move implacable mass. The black haters were far outnumbered, but they would not yield.
And they said nothing, put out nothing but a steady scream of rage and terror. While the others spoke, sang, reached out, reasoned, soothed. I could see them all, hear them all, almost touch them all.
One of them spoke to me from high over my head.
Morgan.
Yes, Reb, I said, with my mind only.
Another sang, from a different direction. Friend of my badundjari—
Yes, Yarra.
Miz McLeod, said the widowed Harry Stein in a third location.
Harry.
Rain, said a fourth, from impossibly far away.
Hello, Shara.
I was connected to their kind by four strands, now. I could see the strands, like spacer’s umbilicals, feel energy pulse along them in both directions.