He was kind and sensitive and patient and attentive, and very attractive, and he wanted me. What was I waiting for? I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. I just knew I wasn’t ready.
“Are you ready?” Reb called, making me jump involuntarily. “All right, let’s get back to the simulation.”
Class went on.
Nicole showed up at lunch, looking wan and pale. But she wasn’t at supper that night. She never came to classes again, and within two days she was back Earthside.
I visited her and said goodbye before she left. It was awkward.
We had EVA simulation in Sulke’s class too for the rest of that week—only her simulations included holographic “objects” we had to match vectors with, and for the last two days she installed a real set of monkey bars which we learned to use like zero-gee monkeys. (Part of our training consisted of watching holos of real monkeys bred in free fall. God, they’re fast! They make lousy pets, though: so far only cats and some dogs have ever learned to use a zero-gee litterbox reliably.)
Three more people had dropped out by the end of the week. Their egos were simply not strong enough to handle being dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer size of the Universe.
I asked Reb about that in class one day. “It just seems paradoxical. You need a strong ego to endure raw space—and we’re all here to lose our egos in the Starmind.”
“You are not here to lose your ego,” he corrected firmly. “You’re here to lose your irrational fear of other egos.”
“Irrational?” Glenn said.
“On Earth it is perfectly rational,” Reb agreed. “On Earth, there are finite resources, and so underneath everything is competition for food and breeding rights. All humans have occasional flashes of higher consciousness, in which they see that cooperation is preferable to competition—but as long as the game is zero sum, competition is the rational choice for the long run every time. Read Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, the chapter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.
“But what the Symbiote has done is to change the rules, utterly. A human in Symbiosis has nothing to compete for. Cooperation becomes more than rational and pleasant: it’s inevitable.”
“How long does it take to unlearn a lifetime’s habit of competition?” Glenn asked.
“An average of about three-tenths of a second,” Reb said. “It’s what your heart has always yearned for: to stop fighting and love your neighbor. Once you become telepathic you know, in your bones, without question, that it’s safe to do that now.”
Robert spoke up—unusually; he seldom drew attention to himself in Reb’s class. “Isn’t competition good for a species? What pressure is there on Stardancers to evolve? Or have they evolved as far as they can already?”
“Oh, no,” Reb said. “Charlie Armstead said once, ‘We are infants, and we hunger for maturity.’ Animals improve through natural selection only—the fit survive. Humans improve through natural selection, and because they want to. We did not evolve the science of medicine, we built it, painfully, over thousands of years, to preserve those natural selection would have culled. Stardancers improve because they want to, only. Their brave hope is that intelligence may just be able to do as well at evolution as random chance.”
Robert nodded. “I think I see. It took millions of years for chance to produce human sentience…and then it took that sentience thousands of years to produce civilization. Telepathic sentience, that didn’t have to fight for its living, might do comparable things in a lifetime.”
I signaled for the floor. “I have trouble imagining how a telepathic society evolves.”
Reb smiled. “So does the Starmind. Does it comfort you to know that our current knowledge suggests you’ll have at least two hundred years to think about it?”
I grinned back. “It helps.”
Robert signaled for attention again. “Reb, I’ve heard that a couple of Stardancers have died.”
“Accidental deaths, yes. A total of four, actually.”
“Well…how can a Stardancer die? I mean, each one’s consciousness is spread through more than forty-thousand different minds. So for a Stardancer, isn’t death really no more than having your childhood home burn down? Your self persists, doesn’t it, even if it can’t ever go home again?”
Reb looked sad. “I’m afraid not. It isn’t consciousness that diffuses through the Starmind, but the products of consciousness: thoughts and feelings. Consciousness itself is rooted in the brain, and when a brain is destroyed, that consciousness ends. Telepathy does not transcend death—the Starmind knows no more about what lies beyond death than any human does.”
Robert frowned. “But all the thoughts that brain ever had, remain on record, in the Starmind—and you’ve told us the Starmind’s memory is perfect. Wouldn’t it be possible, given every single thought a person’s mind ever had, to reconstruct it, and maintain it by time-sharing among forty-some thousand other brains?”
“It has been tried. Twice. It is the consensus of the Starmind that it never will be tried again.”
“Why not?”
“What results is something like a very good artificial intelligence package. It has a personality, mannerisms, quirks…but no core. It doesn’t produce new thoughts, or feel new feelings. Both such constructs asked to be terminated, and were.”
“Oh.”
“On the other hand, no Stardancer has yet died of so-called natural causes, and individuals as old as a hundred and ten are as active and vigorous as you are. So I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“I won’t,” Robert agreed. “I just wondered.”
That Sunday there was a small celebration in the Café du Ciel, acknowledging our transition from Postulant to Novice. Phillipe Mgabi attended, the first time most of us had seen him since our arrival, but it was mostly Dorothy’s show. There were no speeches, scant ceremony. Mostly it was tea and conversation and good feelings. Some of us came forward and told of things we had thought or felt since our arrival, difficulties we had overcome. A new marriage was announced, and cheered. To my surprise, no gripes were aired. I think that had a lot to do with Phillipe Mgabi having been too busy to show his face for the past four weeks. I’d never seen such a smoothly running, well-organized anything before, and I knew how much hard work that kind of organization requires.
Under the influence of all this good fellowship, Robert and I reached a new plateau in our relationship, to wit, publicly holding hands and necking. Nothing more serious than friendly cuddling; I think each of us was waiting for the other to make the first move. Well, I don’t really know what he was waiting for.
Come to think of it, I don’t know what I was waiting for either.
And then came the day we’d anticipated for so long. I think it’s safe to say we all woke up with a kids-on-Christmas-morning feeling. Today we would be allowed to leave the house!
Everyone showed up for breakfast, for once, and almost nothing was eaten. The buzz of conversation had its pitch and speed controls advanced one notch apiece past normal. A lot of teeth were showing. Then in the middle of the meal there was a subtle change. The feeling went from kids on Christmas morning to teenagers on the morning of the Chem Final. The laughter came more often, and more shrilly. A restless room in zero gravity is really restless; people bob around like corks in a high sea rather than undulating like seaweed. Smiles became fixed. A bulb of coffee got loose and people flinched away from it.
Kirra began to hum.
Under her breath at first, with a low buzzing tone to it. By the time I was aware of it, I found that I was humming along with her, and recognized the tune we were humming. The Song of Top Step. Ben joined softly in an octave below us. Kirra started to gently tap out the rhythm on the table. Someone two tables over picked up the melody, and that gave all of us the courage to increase our volume. Soon people were chiming in all over the cafeteria, even people from classes before or after ours. Not all of us knew the Song well enough to sing it, but most of us knew at least parts of it, and could join in for those. Those who couldn’t carry a tune kept the rhythm with utensils. Those few who didn’t know the Song at all stopped talking to listen. Even the spacers on the cafeteria staff stopped what they were doing.