The answer was almost a full minute in coming. It was the first time Rhea could remember Buchi hesitating even slightly in responding. Two or three times she began to speak, but each time decided to wait for an answer.
“The Starmind suffers,” Buchi said at last, “as sharply, as deeply, as keenly, as you yourself. But in different ways… for different reasons… and I cannot explain them to you. No terrestrial language contains words that will convey the necessary concepts: you do not have the concepts. Every human language contains the implicit assumption that individual minds have bone walls around them. It would be much easier for me to convey color to a blind man.”
Rhea was frustrated… but if there was anything her work had prepared her to believe, it was that some things simply could not be put into words. “What are you all doing?”
“What are you asking?”
“What is the Starmind doing? Are you doing anything? Did those Fireflies have any purpose in creating your kind? Are you all working toward something together… or just floating around like the red blobs in a lava lamp, marveling at the Solar System and unscrewing the inscrutable?”
“You know hundreds of things we do. I can download a summary list to your AI if you wish. It runs about a terabyte.”
“Then I’ve seen most of it. Well, scanned it.” Even that was an absurd claim. “All right, I’ve scanned the superindex, tiptoed through some of the subindices, and jumped in at random here and there a few hundred places. And one thing I noticed.”
“Yes?”
“Most of the things you do come down, in the long run, to helping us. Helping humans. Helping Terra. Some of it benefits us directly, like nanotechnology, and some it just seems to happen to work out to our benefit way down the line, like that Belt-map hobby of yours that kept us from getting clobbered by Lucifer’s Hammer in ’32. Even the ‘pure-science’ researches you’re engaged in always seem to benefit us more than they benefit you, when the dust settles.”
“Can we ignore suffering at our own heart, at our roots? We may not be of humanity… but we are from humanity.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m just asking: is that what you Stardancers do for problems? Borrow ours?” She had an image of the human race as endearingly dopey pets, who could be relied upon to produce fascinating but trivial problems, supply life’s necessary irritant. “If some cosmic disaster wiped us all out… would the Starmind go crazy from boredom? Or would you still have things to do?”
Another pause. This one was only ten seconds or so. “We would still have a nearly infinite number of things to do. And again, I despair of finding words that will successfully hint at their nature.” Another five seconds. “One subset may perhaps be intelligibly outlined, at least. You are aware, are you not, that the Starmind is not alone in the Universe?”
“Huh? Sure. So what?” It was a classic insoluble problem. Within a few years of its initial formation, the Starmind had reported to humanity that it was receiving telepathic broadcasts from numberless other Starminds throughout the Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds—a potential source of inconceivable wealth in any terms. But it came in all at once, at the same “volume,” from all quarters—and none of it appeared to be in any known or decipherable language or concept-system. The Starmind did not even know how to say, “Quiet, please—one at a time!” The best it had managed, according to all reports, was to learn to ignore the useless infinity of treasure, as a geiger counter suppresses its “awareness” of normal background radiation. “What good does that do you if you can’t communicate with anybody?” Rhea asked. “You can’t, right?” She knew the answer—but from books and media accounts, and knew how much that was worth.
“No, we cannot,” Buchi agreed. “But that may not always be so.”
“You think the problem might actually be solvable?” Duncan said excitedly.
“Our seed has been awake for less than seven decades,” Buchi said. “There are yet far fewer of us Stardancers than there are neurons in even the most limited brain. Yet our numbers grow—and the Starmind grows wiser every nanosecond. It is certain that we live longer than you, and we do not waste a third of our lives in stupor and another third working at life-support. We have time. Time has us. We use tools you cannot understand to build tools you cannot conceive to solve problems we ourselves cannot name. It is not a thing to trouble yourself over.”
“Do you know anything at all about where it’s all going?” Rhea asked. “That you can explain?”
“Yes. Wonderful things are going to happen.”
Rhea blinked. “But what?”
The silence went on until she realized no answer would be forthcoming. “When?” she tried then.
That answer came at once, startling her.
“Soon.”
“How soon?” she blurted.
Again, silent seconds ticked by.
“Within my lifetime?” she tried.
“I cannot be certain, but I believe so.”
“Will you be able to explain these things to us humans when they happen?”
“When they happen, you will know.”
“And you can’t give me any idea what it will be like?”
More silence.
“Why doesn’t anybody else know about this?” Rhea said irritably. “I’ve read—scanned—everything I could get my hands on about you Stardancers. This is the first hint I’ve heard that the galactic signal-to-noise problem might be susceptible of solution. Is it a secret, or what?”
“Would I have burdened you with a secret without warning you? The reason you have not heard of this before is that you are the first to have asked about this in many decades, the first since we began to be sure of it ourselves.”
“Really?” Rhea asked. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Rhea, answer me two questions. First, regarding the Fireflies, who made us: is there any characteristic commonly associated with the term ‘gods’ that they lack?”
Rhea thought hard. Apparently omniscient, apparently omnipotent, apparently benevolent but absolutely unknowable… long gone and not expected back soon… “No,” she admitted. “Wait: two. They seem to have no desire at all to be worshipped… and they haven’t instructed anyone to kill anyone else in their name.”
“You anticipate my second question: do you know of any religion on or off Terra which worships them?”
It startled her. “Why, no. There are cults who worship you… at least one large one. And up until forty-odd years ago there was a small one trying to kill you. But I don’t know of any Firefly-worshippers, now that you mention it.”
“Rhea, humanity can just barely live with the mere memory of the Fireflies. They are too vast to think about. From the human point of view, the best thing about them is that they were in the vicinity of Terra for a matter of hours, at the orbit of Saturn for a matter of months, and left promising my father not to return for a matter of centuries. We Stardancers are tolerated, for all our alienness, because we were once and still partially are human. Beneath my Symbiote are flesh and blood, born of woman. But of all the things we are asked—and we are asked many things by many humans—we are rarely asked about the Fireflies… and almost never about other Starminds, circling other stars. Your governments and philosophers were overjoyed to learn that the galactic surround is incomprehensible to us, and have been happy to tiptoe around the sleeping dragon ever since.”