Starmind

by Spider Robinson

  The jaunt to her side was uncomplicated: the room seemed as starkly furnished as a Zen master's cell, all its fabulous conveniences invisible until they were needed. That was its fourth most expensive feature.

  She rode the turbulence of his arrival expertly, and helped him steady himself into station beside her, just far enough away to allow them both wingroom, all without taking her gaze from the window. She had chosen a local vertical that put Earth in the lower left quadrant of the window. Perhaps a fifth of the planet was visible, a lens-shaped slice of Old Home. The rest of the view was of eternity.

  They shared it in silence for perhaps a minute.

  "Drink with me, Jay," she said then.

  He didn't care much for alcohol as a rule; he hated what it did to his balance and kinesthetic sense. But he did not hesitate. "Name your poison." He told himself that it would anesthetize him against having to talk with Martin later.

  "Jeeves," she called, and her AI shimmered into view, oriented to her local vertical and seeming to be standing on air.

  "Yes, madam?"

  "The good stuff."

  One holographic eyebrow rose half a centimeter. "Very good, madam."

  Both of Jay's eyebrows rose at least that much. This was not going to be a casual conversation. He stopped rehearsing his account of how clever he had been in Kate's office.

  5

  Jeeves moved away without moving his legs, as if he were under gravity and his feet were on wheels, and ceased to exist when he left the humans' peripheral vision. Tugbots delivered an amber bottle, two bulbs and a spherical table to the spot where he had vanished. As they arrived, Jeeves reformed, and picked them all out of the air expertly as he "rolled" back into view. He placed the table between Eva and Jay and told it to stay there, placed a bulb against either side of its velcro surface and the bottle in the center facing them, so that the table looked like a stylized Pinocchio, and shimmied back a pace. Eva thanked and dismissed him; once again he glided out of view before dissolving.

  "I never thought I'd see that again," Jay said respectfully.

  She nodded. The bottle was an ancient quart of Black Bush, about three quarters full. It was something like a century old, and its contents were twelve years older than that, a blend of whiskey so fine that at the time of bottling it could not legally be exported from Ireland. Its source was the oldest distillery on Earth, whose charter-to-distill had been granted in 1608. There probably was not another bottle like it left anywhere in the Solar System. Jay was the only person in the Shimizu besides herself who had ever seen it; they had shared a dram the night Ethan's goodbye message arrived from Terra.

  He steadied her while she poured, a process of pulling the bottle away while chasing it with the open end of the bulb, then pinching off the flow with one thumb while she sealed the bulb with the other. She did it better than the Chief Sommelier in the Hall of Lucullus, losing not a drop of the precious whiskey, fiercely proud of her ability to control her aged fingers. Jay accepted his bulb with thanks. He brought it up past his nose in a slow gentle curve, squeezing slightly so that the nipple dilated and the bouquet came to him. When she had filled her own bulb and replaced the bottle, he raised his in salute, and they drank.

  The silence stretched on.

  "Silly," she said at last. "I'll never get over how silly it is."

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "You could blindfold me, tug me around the hotel enough to confuse me, lead me into any room in the place and dock me in front of its window . . . take off the blindfold and defy me, without looking away from the window, to tell you which Tier I was in. There is no way to tell a real window from a fake one without instruments. And yet this thing is worth every yen it costs me. About the gross annual product of a medium town . . . and I'd pay three times as much if I had to. Why?"

  He seemed to know a rhetorical question when he heard it; he made no reply.

  "Why are they so goddam happy, Jay?" she asked then.

  "Who?"

  She gestured at the Earth. "Them." Her gesture widened to take in orbital space, then widened farther. "All of them. Our species. The human race in this year of Our Lord 2064. I think I know why the Stardancers are happy—but why people too?"

  "I'm not sure exactly what you mean."

  "Exactly. That's what I mean." She squeezed more whiskey into her mouth, rolled it around and swallowed. God, she missed her taste buds sometimes. "They probably don't even seem all that happy to you, do they?"

  "I never really thought about—"

  "Trust me. I've been watching the human race a long time. At this point we ought to be more traumatized than ever before in our history. The Curve of Change is almost vertical by now, like a goosing finger—you do know about the Curve?"

  "Sure."

  Of course he did—as a dry old chestnut from a history lesson. For millennia the curve of human social and technological progress had trended upward, but so slowly as to be almost imperceptible . . . then all at once it had passed some critical threshold and begun climbing sharply. Ever more sharply, the rate of increase itself accelerating steadily, until the race lurched from covered wagons to spaceships, from kingdoms and fiefs to planetary government, from chronic global poverty to staggering near-universal wealth, in a single century. Remarkable. Inexplicable. Where would it all end? And so on.

  But Eva had been born into the middle of that century. Just about the time it was beginning to dawn on humanity just how oddly the Curve was behaving. And humanity's general response had been to run a high fever . . .

  "I don't mean trivial things, like conquering cancer. I mean substantive changes in the map of reality. When I was a girl, the phrase `New World' still meant North America. Now it means Mars. The Old World—that one right there—is just about unrecognizable, if you look at it any closer than this. The population has more than doubled since I was born, and look at that planet: it's still green. All the most fundamental axioms of politics, of economics, of industry, have all come apart since the turn of the millennium, obsoleted by new technology. We seem to have a handle on pollution, for God's sake! After half a century of holding my breath, I'm prepared to admit that it looks like we really may have outgrown war. Thanks to nanotechnology, I'm even getting ready to concede that a day may even come when we'll have outgrown money . . . a day when no one alive has to work to earn her living, when nobody will remember—or care—what a `salary' was, or why people gave up a third of their lives to get one."

  "And you wonder why people are happy?"

  "Yes! Two axioms I cling to are that change is painful and that humans react poorly to pain. Change that radical and fundamental has to hurt, to confuse, to anger. For the first seventy years of my life, I watched my species grow ever more neurotic, more sullen, more despairing, more bitter. You know what I'm talking about."

  "Well, I've read about it, seen records, old flatscreens and so forth—"

  "They don't convey it. Believe what I'm about to tell you: when I was forty-five years old, ninety-five percent of the intelligent, thoughtful university-educated people I knew believed as an article of faith that technology and change were dooming the planet, and that some of us would live to see the Last Days. Just about every one of them had a different candidate for what specifically was going to get us. Nuclear Winter was the big one until the Soviet Union went broke. Within about fifteen minutes, fifty other Ends Of Everything had moved in to replace it: global warming, ice age, the ozone layer, overpopulation, deforestation, dwindling resources, pollution, energy shortage—I can't even remember them all anymore. Pestilence, famine and plague were evergreen favorites, and you could always find someone who was putting his money on a runaway comet. If you had a taste for the exotic, you could be terrified of flying saucers and empires of alien cattle-mutilators. But just about every adult I knew clutched some form of Ultimate Paranoia to his or her breast. Almost without exception they chose to believe that the End of All Meaning was just over the horizon. If you didn't know
that, you were too stupid or naive to be worth talking to.

  "I'm overstating it slightly, because the sample I'm talking about consisted almost exclusively of affluent North Americans. But only slightly. In 1991 a major poll asked average Americans if they would like to live five hundred years, assuming that could be accomplished cheaply and comfortably. Only half of them said yes. Fully half of that society was looking forward to dying."

  Jay frowned and took a drink of his whiskey, forgetting to savour it. "How weird it must have been. To live in an age when the best and brightest worshipped Henny Penny. When the crew of Starship Earth, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, were on the verge of mutinous panic . . ."

  She nodded. "And then right at the turn of the millennium, just as the worst thing possible happened and the wildest of all those paranoid fantasies came true . . . just as actual aliens appeared in the sky, changed our destiny for us in great and incomprehensible ways, and vanished again before we could ask them any questions . . . everybody calmed down. The Curve kept on rising faster than ever, and somehow everybody on Earth seemed to heave a great sigh, and kick back, and relax. Not right away, no, not all at once—but the damn planet has been getting slowly and steadily saner for over sixty years now. And it's driving me crazy!"

  He swirled whiskey around in his bulb, stared through and past the oscillating golden liquid to the planet they both had left forever. "It doesn't seem all that sane to me," he said.

  "No, I'm sure it doesn't, to someone your age," she agreed. "It isn't all that sane. But it's sane-er. Do you know that at one time the United States had ten percent of its population imprisoned? Justly? As the best solution they could devise to problems they didn't begin to understand? Every year the papers told you the crime rate was rising. It's been falling for over twenty years, now . . . and somehow that never makes the headlines. The media just aren't geared up to report good news. You have to dig that out for yourself."

  "I think it has to do with the Curve you were talking about," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The latest spike in the Curve. The Nanotechnological Revolution. Molecular-scale machines and computers. It's qualitatively different from the Industrial Revolution or the Silicon Revolution or any of those. For once we got a new technology that cleans up its own wastes, doesn't despoil anything we cherish, and produces so much new wealth nobody could steal it all. Our first healing revolution. Take the revolution you grew up with, Eva: nuclear fission. They told everyone it would produce power too cheap to meter. Then it turned out the plants were big kludges, and nobody's power bill seemed to go down a dollar. No wonder they stopped trusting people in lab coats. But this generation got a technology that delivered on its promises." He sipped his drink again, appreciating it this time. "And come to think of it, that was mostly thanks to the Stardancers. Without them and their Safe Lab, we'd still be skirting the edges of nanotechnology, too scared of someone getting a monopoly on it, or scared of the wrong little nanoassembler getting loose and turning all the iron to peanut butter or something."

  "Or we might have destroyed the planet in a war for possession of the new technology," she agreed. "Instead we've got a UN that means something—and a repaired ozone layer and a healthy ecosystem and nonpolluting industry and a world so fat and rich it hasn't had even a serious local war for thirty years."

  "The Stardancers kept us honest," he said. "Thanks to the Fireflies, we had a precious resource: people we could trust to be above human greed and avarice, people with nothing to gain, people who could not be bribed or coerced."

  "Bodhisattvas," she said.

  "If you like," he said. "Fair witnesses, anyway."

  "No wonder there used to be terrorists trying to kill them. A fair witness can be infuriating."

  "Yeah, maybe—but the last serious attempt was about the time I was born. Even a fanatic reactionary can see they're just too valuable to the race now: they can live full time in space with no life support, and space is the only safe place to develop little artificial viruses, the only sensible place to collect solar power. Humanity got lucky. We got just what we needed, just when we needed it."

  "Luck, hell," she snarled. He recoiled at her force. "You just said it yourself. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was those damned Fireflies: they saved our bacon for us, brought us the moon-full of Symbiote that makes a human a Stardancer, and gave it to us, for free. I could kill them for that!"

  She could see that she had shocked him. She waited, to see how he would handle it. "This is what you really wanted to talk about," he said finally.

  She smiled. "Pour for us, please, Jeeves."

  When the AI had refreshed their bulbs, she turned to face him directly. He copied her, and they joined a hand to steady themselves in the new attitude. She held on.

  "Jay," she said, "I'm old. I was old enough to vote when the first tourist littered the moon. I was spending a fortune on cosmetic camouflage the year the Fireflies showed up and Shara Drummond danced the Stardance for them. I've had a five-cent Coca Cola, and watched the first television set on my block. Flatscreen, monochrome. I've owned 78 RPM phonograph records and a hand-cranked Victrola. I've buried three husbands, three children and two grandchildren. One of my great-grandchildren in Canada is dying, and I have to keep asking Jeeves her name. Jeeves, what is my dying great-grandchild's name?"

  "Charlotte, madam," Jeeves murmured from somewhere nearby.

  "I have been a success in three professions," she went on, "and a failure in two. It's not that most of my life is behind me. All of my life is behind me, receding. I always said I was going to check out when and if my clock showed three figures . . . and I came here to the Shimizu for that purpose. I stopped controlling my cosmetic age the day I moved into this suite, as a sign that I was withdrawing from human affairs. I've been saying goodbye for the last sixteen years. You know most of this."

  He nodded and sipped the Irish whiskey, still holding her hand.

  "Haven't you ever wondered what's taking me so long?"

  He shook his head. "Not once. I figure saying goodbye to life could take me, oh, seventeen years, easy."

  "You'll find out," she said. "Old age is not for sissies. I had all my goodbyes said years ago."

  "All right," he said agreeably. "I'll play Mr. Interlocutor. Why are you still using up air, Ms. Hoffman?"

  "Sheer annoyance," she said. "I'd always expected to live to see the world end. I planned to watch humanity die of its own stupidity and meanness, and chortle at the irony of it all. I expected to enjoy it immensely."

  "I can understand that," he said slowly.

  "Long before I came up here, I'd admitted to myself that it just isn't going to happen any time soon. Okay: I didn't insist on doom . . . as so many of my contemporaries had. I would have settled for watching us come through in the clutch, reach deep inside ourselves and pull out the best of us and solve our damned problems." She glanced down at her bulb, found too much whiskey there and corrected the problem. "What I wasn't prepared for was to have big red Fireflies drop in and fix things for us . . . and then scamper off to wherever the hell they came from without telling us why!"

  She looked into his eyes for understanding, and did not find it. He was too young for questions like this to be troubling in anything but an abstract sense. And he had grown up in a world where telepathic Stardancers—and the mysterious alien Fireflies who had appeared out of nowhere, created the Stardancers and their collective Starmind, and then vanished back into deep space—were prosaic history, something that had happened sixteen years before he was born. She saw him try to understand, and fail.

  She broke eye contact and sculled around to face the window and the world again. "Anyway, it's come to me in the last few days that what I've been doing . . . what I've been waiting for . . . has been for the damned Fireflies to come back from wherever they went and tell us what's going on. Or for me to cleverly deduce it for myself. The most important philosophical question the h
uman race has faced since the aliens dropped in and out again is, `What the hell was that?' In sixty-four years we haven't made a dent in it.

  "Realizing that has forced me to face the fact that I'm wasting my time. If nobody else can figure it out, I probably can't either. Available evidence indicates the Fireflies drop by once every couple of thousand years at best. I can't wait that long. And this steady diet of unearned good news lately has just got me baffled."

  "Are you sure it's unearned?" he said. "Stardancers start as human beings, however different they may become after Symbiosis. The scientific name for them is Homo caelestis. Humanity birthed them: the Fireflies were just midwives."

  "Stardancers do not suffer from fear or hunger or poverty or lust or loneliness," Eva said. "Thanks to their Symbiote, they're immortal, effectively invulnerable, and perpetually loved. As far as I'm concerned, that means they're not human anymore. And if things keep going the way they are, it's conceivable that one day nobody on Earth may be hungry or cold or oppressed. If that day comes, by my lights there won't be any human beings anymore."

  "So you want to leave while things are still miserable," he said.

  She frowned at her drink.

  "No," she said. "That's my point. Everybody's happy now. I personally think that in time the hangover will arrive, and people will find out that even nanotechnology has hidden costs. No matter how many miracles we come up with, I believe there are always limits to growth. I have a friend named Ling who says he can prove it—I can't follow his math, but it sounds convincing. But meanwhile there is peace on the world . . . maybe it's only temporary, but nobody can know that yet. So maybe this is a good time to leave, and I should stop dragging my feet."

  He kept his face expressionless. "How do you plan to do it?"