The blue sky turned suddenly to gold. Groups of dancers formed, interacted and broke up with dizzying speed. A quartet would come together, agree on a movement phrase, split apart and bring the phrase to other groups, which made up new phrases to combine with them, then split apart in their turn. Choreographic ideas appeared spontaneously and spread around the stage like heat lightning or rumor. A unison formed by apparent accident among the twelve dissolved, then returned—while in the score, more and more singers reached agreement on a key and rules of harmony, until they too were working together to build something. Dance and music together established a stable base and began to climb higher.
Literally! Clouds came toward Eva, and wind into her face: she and the dancers were rising, leaving unseen Terra behind them. The illusion was utterly convincing, and quite breath-taking. The wind fell away, and they left the clouds below; the golden sky began to darken again—not the turgid dark of the storm, but the pure star-spattered blackness of space.
No, not pure. They traveled through a fine mist of some kind of dust. Red dust. It began to accumulate on the bodies of the dancers, until they were caked with it, coated by it, covered in it, each of them glowing a shade of red: ochre, umber, amber, crimson, scarlet, ruby. It was Symbiote, and they a dozen newborn Stardancers, spreading their wings now, spinning them out into lightsails, joyously learning a new way to dance together, rubbing together like blobs in a lava lamp.
Eva put all of her attention on keeping perfectly still and calm. It was difficult—but Reb had trusted her. Many decades of lucrative poker came to her aid.
Briefly the twelve boiled together at the center of the stage like swarming bees, a “quotation” of the Fireflies who had given mankind the Symbiote—then they opened out again, formed a spherical matrix… and folded gracefully together into the kukanzen posture of those who meditate in space, each facing out from the center, away from all the others. Together they bowed, to the Universe; the music resolved at last into a major chord spanning the entire audible range; dancers and music began to fade away, like Cheshire cats, until there was only silence and infinite space and the burning stars; then they too dwindled and were gone.
Five full seconds of total silence. Then, pandemonium—
One of the many reasons art in space is performed in spherical theaters is acoustics. Applause reinforces itself, just as a person standing in a hemispherical building on Earth can hear with total clarity a whisper from someone standing precisely opposite him. Any ovation in space sounds like a Terran audience going mad; it makes up for the fact that they cannot stand to deliver it. But this ovation would have shaken the walls of the Bolshoi.
Eva let herself glance at Jay and Rand, now, as the house lights came up. They were together at the opposite end of the vip section, unbuckling their belts to join the dancers for the bow. Her eyes were not what they had once been, but she had a century of experience in intrigue: one glance at Jay’s face and she was intuitively certain he didn’t know Reb’s secret. Rand was much harder to read. Ev Martin—hearing that Rand’s wife had left him yesterday, taking his daughter back to Provincetown with her—had spoken with the house physician. The shaper was stoned to his cheeks, smiling beatifically. His eyes were wounds, and he was jaunting like a tourist, but he would pass muster for the media.
Could Rand know something? Unlikely… but then, it was a visual that had shocked her, rather than choreography. Still, perhaps it was just coincidence…
The crowd was merciless in its admiration, demanding eight curtain calls before the exhausted dancers were allowed to go backstage and peel off their soaked costumes. Eva stopped clapping much sooner; her aged hands gave out. Finally the ovation was over, and her companion, Chen Ling Ho, was murmuring, “I liked it very much… despite the ending.”
Again she had recourse to her poker experience. “Wasn’t that blackout section terrific? Where they did the tableaux in the lightning flashes? How do you suppose they got around in the dark without a train wreck?”
“ ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’ ” the trillionaire replied.
“You can’t possibly be old enough to remember that joke—Carnegie Hall was torn down before you were born!”
His eyes twinkled. “I like to think of myself as a student of classical humor.”
She blinked. “ ‘Your money or your life?’ ” she asked, quoting an ancient radio joke.
Chen gave the correct response: dead silence.
She rewarded him with a smile, unbuckled herself with one hand and took his arm with the other. “Let’s head for the reception—I want to congratulate the boys before the crowd beats them stupid.”
Rand and Jay were already glazing over by the time Eva elbowed her way into the receiving line with Chen, but she caught their attention—and managed to fluster them both—when she said, “Lads, somewhere Willem Ngani is smiling tonight.”
“He’d have loved that piece,” Chen agreed, and the two thanked them, both stammering. Then Eva let herself be chivvied away by assistant cronkites—this was the worst possible time and place to probe Rand’s secret thoughts.
She and Chen returned to her suite. He accepted a drink, and they moved to the window. Terra was about a quarter full. The illuminated crescent contained China; twilight in Beijing. They shared silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “You did not respond to my criticism of the ending of Kinergy. Did you like it?”
She felt like she was juggling eggs in a gravity field. “Yes, I did. It resonated for me. What didn’t you like about it?”
“The Stardancer motif.”
“Too obvious?”
He hesitated. “Yes, that.”
“Something else?”
Again he hesitated. “You know my true feelings toward the ones in red.”
“Not really,” she said. “I’m aware that you’re not a major fan—and that you don’t want that publicly known. Given your father’s history with the Starmind, I understand that. But do they really bother you so much that a reference to them spoils a work of art for you?”
“Yes.”
“For heaven’s sake, Ling, why? Personal feelings aside, you of all people must know how much the human race owes them—”
“Precisely. How then can I not resent them?”
“Oh, that’s silly!”
There might not be another person alive privileged to say that to Chen Ling Ho; from Eva he took it. “Gratitude implies obligation. The scale of the obligation is, in this case, horrifying.”
“But there’s almost nothing they want that we have—just trace elements we’ll never miss. The bill will never come due.”
He nodded, and again said, “Precisely. That makes the obligation even more intolerable. It is, on both sides, literally unforgivable.”
She frowned. “There’s more to it than that.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You’re not mankind. Your personal share of the debt… well, with your resources you could probably pay cash. At most, it’s a philosophical abstraction. To spoil a dance, something has to have its roots in your gut, not your head. What really bothers you about the Starmind?”
“Their virtue,” he said.
“Come again?”
For the first time, emotion came into his voice. “They are so damned virtuous! So relentlessly admirable. My instincts tell me to despise and fear anyone who appears above reproach. Their harmlessness disarms us. Again, literally! We allowed them to abolish war for us, allowed them to strengthen the United Nations into a true world government. Perhaps war is not, after all, a truly necessary evil—there are more efficient ways of getting rich now—but we may find one day that it was necessary in ways we do not yet grasp.”