“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 human 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?”
His very neutrality cued her that he was angry. It startled her. She precessed to face him again. “Is that relevant?”
“It’s closer than anything that’s been said since I jaunted in here,” he said. “Let’s cut through all the bullshit about Stardancers and Fireflies and how happy the world is today. You have obviously decided to check out. For some reason you think I need to know that in advance. That means you have some role in mind for me. I’m curious to know what it is. Do you want me to stand by with the ceremonial sword in case you lose your nerve? Am I supposed to talk you out of it? Or just be your witness and hold your hand? Angel’s advocate, enabler, or audience—I can go any way you like, Eva. I’m your friend and I’ll try to give you whatever you need of me, but you’ve got to tell me the steps.”
She let go of her drink and reached toward him with her withered hands. He abandoned his own drink and took them in his own.
“In a month,” she said, “Reb Hawkins will be coming to the Shimizu. I want to talk with him one more time. Immediately after that I plan to go out the airlock.” She gestured toward the window with her chin. “Out there. When I’m ready, my p-suit will kill me, painlessly and not abruptly. I want to die in space. As I die, I would like to watch you dance… if you’re willing.”
He was speechless. He tried to free his hands, and she would not let him. He tried to tear his gaze from hers, and she would not allow that either. “Why me?” he said finally.
“Dance is the only thing humans do that’s only beautiful,” she said. “It’s the only thing we do that speaks even to Fireflies, as far as we can tell. I want to die watching a human being dance. A human, not a Stardancer. You’re the best dancer I know. And you’re my friend. I thought about not putting this on you until the last minute… but I thought you might want some time to choreograph your dance. I know how busy you’ll be once your brother arrives.”
Globules of salt water began to grow from his eyes. Despite sixteen years in free-fall, she still found the sight of zero-gee tears simultaneously hilarious and moving. And contagious. He shook his head, and the droplets flew away. She blinked back her own, and waited.
At last, with difficulty, he smiled. “I am honored, Eva,” he said. He released her hands, plucked his bulb out of the air, and raised his arm in a toast. She reclaimed her own, and they emptied them together. She did not hesitate, spun and threw her bulb as hard as she could, directly at that absurdly expensive window. The bulb shattered musically.
She had startled him. A cannon couldn’t have broken that window—but still, what a gesture! He was game, though: his own bulb burst only a second or two after hers. When they had recovered from their throws, he bowed to her, a Buddhist gassho she suspected he must have learned from his grandmother. She returned it gravely. “Thank you,” she said.
There was nothing left to say. Or too much. After they had watched the tugbots chase and disassemble glass shards for a few moments, he cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got to see Ev Martin before dinner.”
She grinned. “Another argument for suicide. You’re right, you wouldn’t want to talk to him on a full stomach.”
“Not even on a stomach full of hundred-year-old whiskey,” he agreed. “But it’ll help. Thanks for it.”
She made a mental note to leave him the balance of the bottle in her will.
He paused at the door. “Eva?”
“Yes,” she said, without turning.
“Is it all right if I spend the next month trying to get you to change your mind?”
“Yes,” she said. “But don’t be attached to succeeding, Jay. I’ve been thinking about this a long time.”
After a while she heard the door close and seal.