“If that’s true, I’m pretty disgusted with my own species,” Rhea said.
“You need not be. Think of it from a historical perspective. After two millions of years of slaughter, humanity has just learned how to live with itself in peace, and has done so for a time measured in mere years. Can you reasonably expect it to be prepared to deal with a galaxy of unknown strangers? So quickly? I can tell you that we the Starmind tremble at the thought of the Fireflies returning—and we could at least talk with them if they did. Why should you not ‘pretend it never happened’? It seems to me a healthy psychological adjustment for your race at this time.”
Rhea started to reply, but Duncan interrupted her again. “Excuse me, Buchi—I want to backtrack a second. Did you say when the Fireflies left, they made a promise to ‘your father’?”
“Yes.”
That had caught Rhea’s ear too. “Who is your father, Buchi?” she asked.
“Charlie Armstead.”
Rhea’s eyes widened. “And your mother?” she managed to ask.
“Norrey Drummond.”
She heard a singing in her ears, like a Provincetown mosquito. The second and third Stardancers who had ever lived, founders of Stardancers Incorporated, as famous throughout even the human race as Shara Drummond herself! “My God! I never dreamed—”
“Me either,” Duncan said in awed tones. “You never told me that, Booch.”
“You never asked. What’s your father’s name, and why haven’t you told me?”
“It’s ‘Walter.’ But you’re right. His name only comes up if someone finds my name funny and I have to explain the story.”
“I saw the humor in your name the moment you told it to me,” Buchi said. “But I assumed you were tired of explaining its origin, so I did not comment.”
“And bless you,” he said. “It’s just that I keep forgetting you folks don’t use last names to indicate either paternal or maternal descent.”
“There is no need to. We know our lineage, and each of the other’s—it need not be encoded in our names. We choose names purely for their meanings.”
The humming in Rhea’s ears was beginning to diminish. “What does your name mean, Buchi Tenmo?” Rhea asked.
“ ‘Dancing Wisdom Celestial Net,’ ” the Stardancer answered.
“That’s beautiful!” Duncan said… an instant before Rhea could. “I wish I had a name that good.” He turned to Rhea. “Or like yours. ‘Rhea’—‘earth’ or ‘mother,’ two of the most beautiful words there are. And ‘Paixao,’ just as beautifuclass="underline" ‘passion.’ ”
The mosquitos resumed their attack on Rhea’s ears. She could feel the lobes turning red, offering blood. “What does your name mean?” she asked quickly, aware of the significance of his having looked up the meaning of her name, but unwilling to acknowledge it.
He made a face. “I got the booby-prize. ‘Duncan’ means ‘dark-skinned warrior’ ”—Rhea found herself thinking that he was dark-skinned even by Provincetown standards, though he certainly wasn’t muscled like a warrior… and forced herself to pay attention to what he was saying—“and ‘Iowa’… well, there’s the political district in the North American Federation, of course, the province or state or whatever… and at least one writer once confused that with Heaven. But actually it comes from ‘Ioakim’—apparently an official at someplace called Ellis Island made Greatest Grandad change it. It’s Russian Hebrew for ‘God will establish’… which I for one find wishful thinking.”
Rhea found that she wanted to change the subject from Duncan’s name, from Duncan, and suddenly remembered a question that had ghosted through her mind perhaps a dozen times over the course of her life. “The word ‘God’ makes me think of Fireflies again,” she said. “Buchi, there’s one more question I’ve always wondered about. Why did the Fireflies come when they did?”
“They came when it was time.”
“Yes—but why was it time? The generally accepted answer is that they came ‘at the dawn of space travel.’ But it was more like brunchtime. Humanity had been in space—had been established in space—for years when they showed up. We’d been to Luna decades before. Did it take them that long to notice? Or that long to arrive? If we could establish a time-duration for their journey, it might be a clue to where they came from.”
“Their arrival was instantaneous,” Buchi said flatly.
“Then what triggered it? Do you know?”
“The signing of a contract. An agreement between Skyfac Incorporated and Shara Drummond.”
Details from a history lesson came back dimly to Rhea. Sure enough, the way she remembered it, the Fireflies had first been sighted in the Solar System about two weeks before Shara Drummond left Earth to create the Stardance. They had flicked into existence around the orbits of Neptune and Pluto (at that time very close together), the outer limit of the System, and then moved in as far as the orbit of Saturn a couple of weeks later…
…the day Shara reached Skyfac! Where they stayed, until she was on the verge of being sent home again with her dream unfulfilled—then arrived just in time to force the performance of the Stardance…
“They came to us the moment that a human being came to space for the express purpose of creating art,” Buchi said.
The words seemed to echo in Rhea’s skull.
“How they knew of that, even the Starmind cannot yet imagine—but the fact is unmistakable.”
She felt as if her head were cracking. The insight was too immense and powerful to deal with—yet so obvious she could hardly believe no one had worked it out ages ago.
“Thank you, Buchi,” she said quickly. “You’ve been very gracious and helpful, we’ll talk again another time, I hope you’ll excuse me now but I need to get to my typewriter so I can—” She stopped babbling when she noticed that she had already switched off the window.
She turned from it, and there was Duncan.
At once he turned away, which relieved and annoyed her at the same time, and jaunted across the room… but in seconds he was back, bearing a strange and uncouth object, waving it at her as he braked himself to a halt at her side. “I promised I’d show you this, Rhea,” he said.
It was his manner more than anything else which cued her. This had to be the new piece of vacuum sculpture he had mentioned. Resolving to find something polite to say about it, she began to scrutinize it for material to work with.
A timeless time later, she began to experience perceptual distortion, and slowly figured out the cause. Her eyes were beginning to grow tearbubbles…
What it was made of she could not guess. The subtleties of its composition process were a closed book to her. But what it looked like, to her, more than anything else she could think of, was a piece of driftwood she had once brought home from the Provincetown shore. It had a similar shape, twisted on itself, asymmetrically beautiful, and it had the stark bleached color and polished appearance of very old driftwood. Washed up on an alien shore… like herself.