Even falling in love couldn’t distract me completely from dance. After our first few days together, I resumed working for a few hours every evening. Sometimes Robert watched and helped; sometimes he stayed back in the room and designed support structures for asteroid mining colonies, or wrote letters to his son in Minneapolis. I slowly began to evolve a piece of choreography, which I took to calling Do the Next Thing.
Kirra too made progress in her art. In the middle of the week, while we were all outside in class, she sang her second song for us, the Song of Polar Orbit. I had to get my p-suit radio overhauled that night—the applause overloaded it—and so did others. Raoul Brindle phoned more congratulations and repeated his invitation to Kirra. Within a few days, Teena reported that the recording had been downloaded by over eighty percent of the spacer community, and that audience response was one hundred percent positive. Kirra told me privately that she was tickled to death; she had never before received so much approval from non-Aboriginals and whitefellas for her singing. And according to her Earthside mentor Yarra, the Yirlandji people were equally pleased. Ben, for his part, was fiercely proud of her.
On Sunday afternoon the four of us took a field trip together, to watch a Third-Monther enter Symbiosis. I cleared it with Reb; he had no objection. “As long as Ben and Kirra and Robert are along, you can’t get into too much trouble. They’re pretty much spacers already. But you be sure to stay close to them,” he cautioned with a smile. I smiled back and agreed that we could probably manage that.
We left, not via the Solarium, but by a smaller personnel airlock closer to the docking end of Top Step. It was about big enough to hold three comfortably, but we left in pairs, as couples, holding hands.
The Symbiote mass floated in a slightly higher orbit than Top Step, because Top Step routinely exhausted gases that, over a long period of time, could have damaged or killed it. I can’t explain the maneuvering we had to do to get there without using graphics prefaced by a boring lecture on orbital ballistics; just take my word for it that, counterintuitive as it might seem, to reach something ahead of you and in a higher orbit, you decelerate. Never mind: with Ben astrogating, we got there. It took a long lazy time, since we didn’t have a whole lot of thruster pressure to waste on a hurried trip.
My parents used to have an antique lava lamp, which they loved to leave on for hours at a time. The Symbiote mass looked remarkably like a single globule of its contents: a liquid blob of softly glowing red stuff, that flexed and flowed like an amoeba. Years ago there had been so much of it that you could see it with the naked eye from Top Step. So many Stardancers had graduated since then that the remaining mass was not much bigger than an oil tanker. (That was why the Harvest Crew was fetching more from Titan.) But it was hard to tell size by eye, without other nearby objects of known size to give perspective—a common problem in space.
As we got nearer, we picked out such objects: half a dozen Stardancers, their solar sails retracted. We came to a stop relative to the Symbiote mass, and saw perhaps a dozen p-suited humans approaching it from a slightly different angle than us. One of them had to be Bronwyn Small, the prospective graduate, and the rest her friends come to wish her well. By prior agreement, we maintained radio silence on the channel they were using, so as not to intrude. We had secured Bronwyn’s permission to be present, through Teena, but there can be few moments in anyone’s life as personal as Symbiosis.
The p-suited figures made rendezvous with the six Stardancers. We approached, but stopped about a kilometer or so distant.
I guess I had been expecting some sort of ceremony, the speechmaking with which humans customarily mark important events. There was none. Bronwyn said short goodbyes to her friends, hugged each of them, and then turned toward the nearest of the Stardancers and said, “I’m ready.”
“Yes, you are,” the Stardancer agreed, and I recognized the voice: it was Jinsei Kagami. She did nothing that I could see—but all at once the Symbiote extended a pseudopod that separated from the main mass, exactly the way the blob in a lava lamp will calve little globular chunks of itself. The shimmering crimson fragment homed in on Bronwyn somehow, stopped next to her, and expanded into a bubble about four meters in radius, becoming translucent, almost transparent.
Without another word, Bronwyn jaunted straight into the bubble and entered it bodily. Within it, she could be seen to unseal her p-suit and remove it. She removed its communications gear, hung it around her neck, and then pushed the suit gently against the wall of the bubble that contained her. The Symbiote allowed the suit to emerge, sealed again behind it, and at once began to contract.
We were too far away to see clearly, but I knew that the red stuff was enfolding her and entering her at every orifice, meeting itself within her, becoming part of her.
She cried out, a wordless shout of unbearable astonishment that made the cosmos ring, and then was silent. She seemed to shudder and stiffen, back arched, arms and legs trembling as if she were having a seizure. She began turning slowly end over end.
There was silence for perhaps a full minute.
Then Jinsei said to Bronwyn’s friends, “You may leave whenever you choose. Your friend will not be aware of her immediate surroundings again for at least another day…and it might be as much as one more day before you will be able to converse with her. She has a great deal to integrate.”
“Is she all right?” one of them asked, sounding dubious.
“ ‘All right’ is inadequate,” Jinsei said, with that smile in her voice. “ ‘Ecstatic’ is literally correct—and even that does not do it justice. Yes, she has achieved successful Symbiosis.”
Bronwyn’s friends expressed joy and relief at the news, and left as a group, talking quietly amongst themselves.
Ben gestured for our attention and pointed at his ear. We four all switched to a channel on which we could chatter privately.
“Not much of a show,” he said.
“I dunno,” Kirra said dreamily. “I thought it was lovely.”
“Me too,” I said. “I could almost feel it happening to her. That moment of merging.”
“So did I,” Ben said. “I don’t know, I guess I expected there to be more to it.”
“More what?”
“Ceremony. Speeches. Hollywood special effects. Fanfares of trumpets. Moving last words.”
“You men and your speechmaking,” I said. “All those things ought to happen too every time a sperm meets an egg…but they don’t.”
“And I thought those were moving last words,” Kirra said. “She said, ‘I’m ready.’ Can’t get much more movin’ than that.”
“You’re pretty quiet, darling,” I said to Robert. “What did you think?”
He was slow in answering. “I think I feel a little like Bronwyn: it’s going to take me at least a week to integrate everything well enough to talk about it.”
“Too right,” Kirra agreed. “I’ve had enough o’ words for a while. But I could use a little nonverbal communication. Come on, Benjamin, let’s go on home an’ root until sparrowfart.”
(If you ever spend time in Oz, don’t speak of rooting for your favorite team; “root” is their slang term for “fuck.” Whether this is a corruption of “rut,” or an indication that Aussies are fond of oral sex, I couldn’t say. And “sparrowfart” is slang for “dawn.”)