“Right.”
“Okay, on the count of three, hit it—and be sure you’re not in the way of it when it lets go! One, two, three!” He disengaged his fuming wrist thruster at the same instant she released the other one. She and Ben wobbled briefly as the two renegade thrusters blasted off for opposite ends of the galaxy; then they used their remaining six thrusters to recover. By then Sulke had arrived, swearing prodigiously in low German. The three of them jaunted back to us together hand in hand, and Sulke snapped their tethers back on herself.
It was over too quickly for me to have time to be terrified for them—no more than twenty seconds from start to finish.
Sulke finished cursing and paused for breath. “You two—” she began, and took another breath. Reb started to say something, but she overrode him. “—are EVA rated. As far as I’m concerned, you can graduate yourselves whenever you’re ready.”
Ben and Kirra looked at each other. “There’s still a lot you can teach us,” Kirra said.
“Maybe so,” Sulke said, “and I’ll be happy to if you want—but you’ve both got what it takes to survive EVA. Hell, I couldn’t have recovered that fast.”
“That’s just my trick specs,” Ben said. “It’s easier getting out of a spin if you can see everything at once: you don’t have those long gaps when no useful information is coming in.”
“That makes sense. But Kirra was just as quick.”
“I had a secret weapon too,” Kirra said. “I’m in love with the bastard.”
We all broke up. Tension release.
“What the hell went wrong, exactly?” Sulke asked. “Did the palm-switches physically freeze closed?”
“No,” Ben said. “The controls worked fine…they just stopped controlling anything. If I had to guess—and I do, the damn things are halfway to Luna by now—I’d say a passing cosmic ray fried the chip.”
“Possible,” Sulke agreed reluctantly. “Or it could have been a passing piece of space junk, the odds are about the same. Damn bad luck. The rest of you spaceworms take heed. Anything can happen out here. Stay on your toes. Okay, next group—”
Ben and Kirra were even merrier than usual at lunch. But I noticed that they slipped away early, and got to afternoon class late.
“My best advice to you all,” Reb said about five minutes after they arrived, flushed and smiling, “would be to make love as much as you conveniently can during the next three weeks.”
The whole room rippled. There was a murmur made of giggles and gasps and exclamations and one clear, “I heard that,” which provoked more giggles.
“I’m completely serious,” Reb said. “I can think of no better rehearsal for telepathy than making love. If you’re a strict monosexual, now would be an excellent time to try to conquer your prejudice. There are no sexual taboos in Top Step, because there are none in the Starmind. You are preparing to enter a telepathic community, and in a telepathic community, you are naked to everyone. Sexual taboos won’t work there. Even more important, they’re unnecessary there—humans need taboos precisely because humans are not telepathic.”
The room was now in maximum turmoil, as physical touching took on sudden significance. “But what about disease?” someone called.
“If you weren’t healthy when you got to Suit Camp, you are now,” Reb said. “Confirmed at Decontam and guaranteed.”
“What about pregnancy?”
“All methods of contraception are available at the Infirmary. But you have no reason to fear pregnancy. Where you are going, there is no possibility of any child ever wanting for anything, no such thing as an unhappy childhood or a bad parent. All children are raised by everyone.”
That took some thinking about. Finally someone said, “Are you…are you trying to say that all Stardancers spend their time screwing? That this Starmind is some kind of ongoing orgy?”
“In a physical sense, no. Stardancers only physically join when conception is desired. But in a mental and spiritual sense, your description is close to the truth. Telepathic communion cannot be described in words, nor understood until it is experienced—but it is generally agreed that lovemaking is one of the closest analogies in human experience. The most essential parts of lovemaking—liberation from the self, joining with others, being loved and touched and needed and cherished, gaining perspective on the universe by sharing viewpoint—are all a constant part of every Stardancer’s life. Regardless of whether he or she chooses to ejaculate or lubricate at any given moment. Leon, you have a question?”
“What’s zero-gee childbirth like?” asked the man addressed. “Gravity can be kind of handy there.”
“Not for the first nine months,” Glenn called out, and was applauded.
Reb smiled. “In Symbiosis, childbirth is easy and painless. The symbiote assists the process, and so does the child itself.”
Wow! In spite of myself, an idea came to me. I made the finger gesture for attention, and Reb recognized me with a nod. “Reb? How old is too old to birth in Symbiosis?”
“We don’t know yet. No woman has ever reached menopause while in Symbiosis. Those women who’ve entered Symbiosis after menopause resumed ovulating, and Stardancers as old as ninety-two have conceived and birthed successfully. Ask again in fifty years and we may have an answer for you.”
The class went on for quite some time, and a lot of people said a lot of things, but I don’t remember much after that. I spent the rest of class trying to grapple with the fact that a door I had thought closed forever was opening up again, that all of a sudden it wasn’t too late anymore to change my mind and have children. The thought was too enormous to grasp. I had known about this, intellectually, before I had ever left Earth—but somehow I had never let the implications sink in before.
Probably because I had not known anyone whose children I wanted to have…until now.
“Robert,” I said that night in afterglow, “how do you feel about you and me having a child?”
He blinked. “Are we?”
“Not yet. I’ve still got my implant. But I could have it taken out at the Infirmary in five minutes, and be pregnant in ten. What do you think?”
He had sense enough not to hesitate. “I think I would love to make a baby with you. But I also think it would be prudent to wait until after Graduation.”
“Huh. Maybe you’re right.”
“Are you absolutely a hundred percent sure you’re going to go through with Symbiosis? I’m not. And I wouldn’t want a decision either way to be forced on either one of us. If we both do Symbiosis, fine. If we both go back to Earth, fine. But wouldn’t it be awful if we started a child, and then—”
“I guess.” It would be least awful, perhaps, if I stayed in space and Robert went home: a husband/father must be much less essential in a telepathic family than in human society. But Robert had already had to walk away from one child in his life, and still felt grief over it.
And there was another horrid possibility. What if we conceived together—and then one of us was killed in training? It could happen. I didn’t think I could have survived what had happened to Ben that morning, for instance.
“Another month or so, maybe less, and we’ll know. Okay?”
“You’re right.” I was disappointed…but only a little. Morning sickness in a p-suit could be a serious disaster. There was plenty of time.
Without any actual discussion, Kirra started spending most of her time at Ben’s place, leaving our room for Robert and me. They gave the two of us a week to focus on each other and our new love without distraction. Then one day they came by and invited us to join them for drinks at Le Puis, and the four of us reformed and reintegrated our friendship again. Soon it stopped making any difference which room we used, or whether it was already occupied when we got there. Robert was a little more reticent than I about making love with Ben and Kirra present, at first, but he got over it. I could sense that one day, whether before or after Graduation, we four were all going to make love with each other. But there didn’t seem to be any hurry for that, either, and for the present I was just a little too greedy of Robert.