And Buchi Tenmo did not appear to mind talking to a camera rather than a person in a window. She did not need to see Rhea; she already had. She must be used to talking with Duncan this way too.
Insofar as she was used to talking at all. So far Rhea had found it always took the first few minutes of the conversation for Buchi to become even partly comprehensible. That did not surprise Rhea. To temporarily “place on hold” an ongoing conversation with millions of others, and funnel consciousness down to only one or two nontelepathic minds must be a disorienting experience—especially for a spaceborn Stardancer, who had never been such a limited being herself. The wonder was that the trick was possible.
And already Buchi was winding down, only minutes in. She had progressed from incomprehensible polyglot babble to a lock on English—of a sort. Any minute now it would start conveying information.
“—as the world whirls around peg in a square holy cowhide it from yourself-esteem cleaning up your action figures it would be that’s entertainment to tell you but I forgot is a concept by which we measure painting the town read all of your books now, Rhea, and they’re very beautiful… the gostak distims the doshes… eftsoons, and right speedily… don’t blame him for not being careful in the beginning… a straight hook basically seeks fish who turn away from life… there: subject, object, predicate… am I getting there, Rhea? Duncan? Can I hear you, now? Are we having fun yet?”
“You’re getting there,” Rhea agreed. Things always improved dramatically, she had found, once Buchi reinvented the sentence. She found herself asking the question she had suppressed during her previous encounters with the Stardancer. “Buchi? Does it hurt? Doing this, I mean, talking with us—is it hard?”
“It’s fun!” For that moment Buchi sounded remarkably like Colly. “Is it hard to talk with me?”
“A little,” Rhea admitted. “But you’re right, it’s fun. But then, I’m only doing what I do all the time: talking, in my own language. You’re doing all the work.”
“By ‘work’ I understand you in this context to mean ‘energy expenditure regretted or begrudged.’ By that definition I have never worked in my life. Although I’m always busy.”
“I wish I could say the same.” A light dawned somewhere in the back of Rhea’s head. “But you’ve put your finger on something, Buchi. I’ve been thinking about our conversations, and why they haven’t satisfied me, and I think you just gave me a handle on my problem.”
“Problems are better with handles on them?”
“For me they are. Looking back over it, everything I’ve been asking you has been about… has had to do with things that a human supposes would be disadvantages of being a Stardancer. The bad parts. I’ve been asking you about the bad parts—and for each one I come up with, you explain how it’s not a bad part. Some of the explanations I just flat don’t understand—”
“I always have trouble conveying the idea of self generated reality,” Buchi agreed. “To a human it seems a flat contradiction in terms.”
Rhea had asked in her first conversation whether Buchi ever missed being able to “really” walk the surface of a planet, as opposed to “merely” reexperiencing it through the memories of those Stardancers who had lived on Earth before joining the Starmind. Communication had broken down when Buchi insisted that she could, really, walk on Terra any time she wanted—that she could “really” experience things she had never personally experienced—knowing the difference, but unbothered by it. Rhea, who had never confused even the best virtual-reality environments with real-reality, was baffled by this. She had spent most of her own professional life battering at the interface between almost-real and real, trying to make words on a screen sound and smell. She had to tiptoe around the thought that anyone for whom reality and imagination were interchangeable was someone who was not quite sane.
“—but that’s not the problem,” she went on, but Duncan interrupted her.
“It’s like this window, Rhea,” he said, touching her wrist and pointing.
“Huh?”
“You know that to most of the people in this hotel, this window we’re looking out right now isn’t as good as the one you have back in your suite. God knows it costs a lot less. But we’ve talked about it, so I know you agree with me that this one is actually better. It may not be ‘real’—but it can look in any direction you want, or show you anything you want to see, flatscreen anyway. I know yours can do even better, the way Rand has it tricked out now… but most people who pay a premium for one of those windows do it so they can tell themselves that what they’re looking at is ‘real.’ They care a lot about ‘real.’ You and I care a little less. Buchi cares not at all. Think of it as a spectrum rather than a discontinuity.”
Rhea looked at him, surprised and a little impressed by his insight. “I think I see what you mean,” she said.
He flushed and went on. “With total control of her brain and body, reality can mean whatever she wants it to mean. She can experience the touch of someone half a light year away, feel it on her skin. Or feel the touch of someone long dead… as long as someone in the Starmind holds the memory of how it feels to be touched by that person. Not one coffee molecule has ever passed her lips her whole life long, but she’s probably tasted better coffee than you or I ever will.”
“I’m doing it now! ‘Bean around the Solar System…’ ” Buchi let the song parody trail off after a few more hummed bars.
“But with reality that slippery…” Rhea began.
Duncan interrupted. “… how do they make sure they don’t lose track of the one you and I believe in? What do they do for a reality check, you mean?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”
“We are many,” Buchi said. “And we are one. E pluribus unum. Alone/All-one. Consensus reality is very important to us. If we ever lost it, we would come apart. It is the same with your own neurons. We put about as much effort into it as they do. And about as often, we fire randomly—we make things up, we vacation in realities of our own fashioning, singly or in groups. The universe is always there when we return. It is not a problem.”
“Now there,” Rhea said triumphantly, “is my problem. As I started to say before, I can live with the fact that I have trouble grasping your explanations of why assorted aspects of being a Stardancer aren’t problems for you. What’s driving me crazy is that you just… don’t seem to have any problems!
“None of the ones I envisioned. None of them has even triggered mention of any problem you do have. I’m a writer: to me a character is his or her problems; if they don’t have any, they’re no use to me, I’ve got nothing to work with, no way to motivate them. I guess what I’m asking is, don’t you people—you Stardancers—have any problems? I know you never get hungry or thirsty or cold or lonely or lost or have to go to the bathroom at an inappropriate time. But Jesus, Buchi—isn’t there anything you fear? Or miss? Or yearn for? Or regret? Is there anything you lust after? Or mourn?”
“Must your characters always be driven by the lash?”
Rhea thought about it. “Pretty much, yes. That’s what the audience wants to see. How someone like itself reacts under the lash. Because it helps the reader guess and deal with how she would react under the same pressure. The rule of thumb is, the sharper the lash—the tougher the antinomy—the better the story. For us humans, life is suffering, just as the Buddhists say. Is that really not true for you?”