Suddenly the disc exuded some of its mass into the hole in the center, where a globe of red Symbiote grew like a pearl forming within an oyster. It moved away from the disc, coming toward us with infinite slowness. Toward Kirra and Ben. As it did so, the disc broke up into six Stardancers again, and they all braked violently to an instant stop, sudden total motionlessness. The music broke like a wave on a shore and faded to silence, the lights went out.
After several seconds of silence, there was wild applause.
Oh, I know I haven’t conveyed it; dance can’t be described. Look it up for yourself, it’s on the Net. Not a major work by any means, but a moving and lyrical piece, just right for a wedding feast and Graduation. I was terribly pleased on Kirra and Ben’s account.
They thanked me lavishly for the gift, and thanked all twelve of the dancers individually. “That was bloody marvelous,” Kirra said. “Morgan, really, it was special!” She was grinning, but her p-suit hood was full of tear-tendrils.
“Just my version of chocolate chip ice cream from Chile,” I said, grinning back at her. Though it marks a much happier occasion than your gift did. Dammit, I was leaking saline worms too.
“We’re deeply honoured,” Ben said. “Our GraduWedding has become part of dance history. Or almost. Get ready, spice, here it comes!”
Their blob of Symbiote was nearly upon them, a bead of God’s blood.
“I’ll sing at your Graduation, Morgan,” Kirra promised me hastily. “Wait an’ see if I don’t! Goodbye—see you soon—cheerio, all! Let’s go meet it, Benjy: one, two, three…”
They jaunted forward together, hit the Symbiote dead center, passed inside it. They stripped quickly, took the communications gear from their p-suits and hung it around their necks, pushed the suits clear of the Symbiote and joined hands. It contracted in upon them and around and through them, and they were two Stardancers, convulsing with their first shock of telepathic onslaught but still holding hands. Their combined shout of exaltation was picked up by their throat mikes and hurled to the stars.
Then they were silent and adrift, marinating in Symbiosis.
The dancers had already begun tiptoeing away on scarlet butterfly wings of lightsail. The show was over.
Reb took my arm, and we all headed back to Top Step.
They phoned me up five or six days later. They were well on their way out to meet the Harvest Crew returning with new Symbiote from Titan, about a day from rendezvous. It was an odd conversation. They both sounded as though they were very drunk or very stoned. Ben commented giddily that space now looked to him just like a newspaper. Black and white and red all over. They both assured me that Symbiosis was glorious, wonderful, not to be missed, but were quite unable to describe it in any more detail than that, at least in words. They did say they had two new senses, as expected, but could not describe or explain them any better than the instructors back at Suit Camp had. Kirra sang me part of a work in progress. The Song of Symbiosis, and made me promise to send a copy of it to Yarra and the Yirlandji people for her. It was terribly beautiful but very strange, haunting and confounding, hinting at things that even music can’t carry. She said she was collaborating on a Song with Raoul (whom she would be physically meeting in only a few more hours), but did not sing any of it for me. I told them my dance was about two-thirds finished, and they both exhorted me to hurry up and complete it so I could come join them. I assured them I was going as fast as I could, especially since I no longer had any close friends inboard to take up my free time. Kirra, pausing to consult some mathematician I didn’t know, worked out that they would in all likelihood be back with the fresh Symbiote just in time for my Graduation. We agreed to meet then, and I was very pleased to know they would be present for my own last breath.
I was hard at work on the piece the next day, had just solved a tricky and hard-to-describe esthetic problem in the third movement, when Teena said, “Morgan, Reb Hawkins needs to speak to you as soon as possible.”
“Put him on,” I said, brushing sweat from my back, and she did. I can’t reproduce the dialogue and won’t try. He told me the news, and I’m sure he did it as compassionately as it could have been done.
Shortly after Ben and Kirra had made rendezvous with the returning Harvest Crew, there had been an unexplained catastrophic explosion, cataclysmic enough to disrupt the entire mass of new Symbiote and kill the entire Crew. Raoul Brindle, Ben, Kirra, more than a dozen others, all were dead.
Black and white and red all over.
Chapter Twelve
We die, and we do not die.
The news rocked the Solar System, stunned humans and Stardancers alike.
Credit for the explosion was formally claimed, not by the Gabriel Jihad, but by a much older terrorist group, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. They too were rumored to have ties to the Umayyad Caliphate, though they were based in Trinidad rather than Medina, black Muslims rather than brown. It didn’t seem to make much difference. There was so much outcry and mutual vituperation at the UN that they were forced to suspend all operations of the General Assembly for a week. That didn’t seem to make much difference, either, at least not to those humans in space.
Just how the Jamaat had managed to pull off the bombing, they did not say. Of all the questions the incident raised, that one seemed to me to matter least of all.
But it seemed to fascinate Sulke. “It just couldn’t possibly have been a missile,” she insisted angrily.
We were drinking together in Le Puis, heavily, a few days after the tragedy; I was still in something like a protracted state of shock, and cared not at all for the question, but found myself arguing automatically. “Why not?”
“It’s obvious. Peace missiles only aim down. ASATs only aim sideways, nothing shoots away from Earth except lasers and particle beams, and the biggest one there is would have to have been focused on the Symbiote for nearly an hour to burst it. But it was an instantaneous blam.”
“Anything with a power plant could be a big slow bomb.”
“Self-propelling hardware in space is very carefully monitored, for pretty obvious reasons. There just isn’t anything missing. And besides, if something had left its usual orbit and headed out of cislunar space, it would have been tracked by the Space Command. The screens prove no artifact ever approached the new Symbiote. The Chinese have got some scientific stuff vectoring around out in that general direction, but not within a hundred thousand klicks of the spot where the explosion took place, and they couldn’t have fired off anything big enough to make that big a bang without being seen.”
Janani Luwum, a huge First-Monther truckdriver from Uganda, was at the next table, near enough to eavesdrop, and wedged himself into the conversation. “I don’t understand the ambiguity. Wasn’t the new Symbiote itself being tracked?”
“Yes,” Sulke agreed, “but not very closely or carefully. It wasn’t doing anything interesting. They would have started paying more attention in a few days when deceleration began, but as things stand we have nothing better than automatic radar tracking at poor resolution.”