“Then you don’t know that there was no incoming missile: you only infer it.”
“From goddam good evidence,” she insisted. “Anything on a closing course would have triggered alarms. That aside, the Stardancers present would have noticed it coming, with that weird radar sense of theirs, and tapes of radio transmissions and reports from Stardancers who were in rapport at the time show no one was expecting trouble right up to the second it went off.”
“Christ,” Janani said, “I wonder what that must be like: being in telepathic rapport with someone while they’re blown to pieces.”
“I don’t know,” Sulke said with a shudder, “but I hear they have more than fifty new catatonics to try and heal.”
“Those were not the first Stardancers ever to die,” Janani’s lover Henning Fragerhøi pointed out.
“No, there’ve been half a dozen accidental deaths since the first Symbiosis,” Sulke said. “But never before have so many died, so suddenly, so savagely. No Stardancer was ever murdered before.”
“But how can you be sure it was murder?” Janani said. “You just finished proving there was no shot fired.”
“That’s right—but there was nothing along with them that could possibly have blown up like that. Nothing but Stardancers and Symbiote.”
“Well, then,” I said, tired of all the chattering, “it didn’t happen. That’s a relief. Thanks, Sulke. Can we get back to some serious drinking, now? Hey, Fat! Oh shit, I mean ‘Pål’. Hey, Pål, we need more balls over here.” We were able to get shitfaced in Le Puis because Fat Humphrey was not on duty; it was said that he’d been locked in his own quarters, drinking himself into a coma, since the disaster had happened. He had loved Kirra almost as much as I had. And he had been a personal friend of Raoul—had been there the day Raoul joined the newly formed Stardancers Incorporated, twenty years before. His relief bartender Pål Bøgeberg didn’t seem to much care if the customers got drunk enough to riot; he brought the balls of booze I ordered without protest.
“It fucking well happened, all right,” Sulke said. “But there’s only one fucking way in the System it could have happened.”
“Spontaneous combustion,” I said sourly, and sucked a great gulp of gin.
“Stalking horse,” she said, and squeezed a stream of gin at her own mouth, catching it with the panache of a longtime free fall lush.
“I don’t understand,” said Henning, for whom English was a second language. “ ‘Stocking hose’?”
“Stalking horse. A living mine. One of those Stardancers was boobytrapped. And since they were all telepathic, it had to have been done without their knowledge. Just how it was done, I can’t imagine. My best guess is some kind of very tiny dart carrying seed nanoreplicators. It penetrated somebody’s Symbiote without them noticing, somehow, and then the sneaky little nanoreps used that body’s own materials to construct a bomb. As soon as it was big enough, blooey!”
“More likely the Symbiote itself was injected somehow,” Janani said. “Enough matter there for a really big bomb, without the risk its host would notice it growing. Stardancers monitor their own bodies pretty closely, control even the unconscious systems and so forth: you’d think they’d notice a tumor large enough to explode with so much force.”
“Either could be true,” Sulke said. “There was a helluva lot of Symbiote, but it’s made up of the wrong chemicals to make a really powerful bomb easily, and you’d see discoloration as it formed. But I’ve read in spy thrillers that nanoreplicators could synthesize a very powerful explosive from the materials in an ordinary human body, without disturbing any essential function. It could be hidden in the one large part of the body a Stardancer never pays any attention to.”
“Where’s that?”
“The lungs. Plenty of room, and all the nerves to that area are switched off permanently at Symbiosis, to keep you from panicking when you stop breathing for good.”
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake,” I cried, horrified by the mental picture of death coalescing around someone’s living heart while they jaunted along oblivious.
“The only thing I don’t get is why whoever it was didn’t notice the injection. The seed would have to have mass enough to be perceptible, be at least as big as a pinhead—and Stardancers notice collisions with objects that big. They have to, they live in a world of micrometeorites.”
“If the subject is not changed in the next sentence spoken, I am going to squirt the rest of this gin in your eye,” I said, and held it up threateningly. Sulke was not an easy drunk to intimidate, but maybe there was something in my voice. Her next sentence was a non sequitur that started a different argument, about who was really behind the bombing. It wasn’t a true change of subject, but I let it go.
I don’t remember much of the rest of that night, and what I remember of the next day doesn’t bear repeating. I spent most of it in my sleepsack, moaning, with an icepack at the back of my neck—or rather, shuttling back and forth between there and the john. After an endless time of misery I decided I needed to sweat the pain out of me, and went to my studio.
There I found that my thoughts danced and whirled more than my body ever could.
Sick of this goddam piece. Sick of everything I can think of. Not one close friend left anywhere in the Solar System. More than forty-three thousand new lovers waiting to marry me, but not one goddam friend. Reb’ll be on my back any time now; I’ve cut classes for three days straight. Probably not the only one. Fuck it, there’s nothing more they can teach me now that I need to know. Only thing holding me back is this goddam dance, and I wish I’d never started the frigging thing. Hadn’t been so busy and distracted with it, self-involved, I might have put together a stronger thing with Robert. Jesus, my back hurts. Been hurting quite a bit lately; snuck up on me. Old injury trying to make a comeback. Repair it myself once I eat the Big Red Jell-O. Unless somebody injects me with a teeny little bomb factory. Or already has. No, I’d have noticed. Or would I? Apparently somebody failed to notice it being done to them. How the hell could that be? How do you introduce something the size of a pinhead into someone’s body without them noticing? Slip it in their soup? Awful chancey—might leave the wrong few drops in the container. Aerosol spray? No, the victim might choke on the thing. Damn, that knee’s starting to twinge a bit too. Or am I imagining it? Oh, God damn it all. Everything, everything, everything falling apart at once. Friends gone, lover gone, never again the joyous invasion of my—
I cried out.
“Are you all right, Morgan?” Teena asked with concern.
“Absolutely wonderful,” I snarled.
She was sharp enough to detect pain in a human voice, but not subtle enough for sarcasm. “Sorry I disturbed you.”
“Privacy, Teena. Switch off. Butt out!”
“Yes, Morgan,” she said, and was gone, her monitors on me shut off until I called her again.
I tried to vomit, but there was nothing left in my system to expel. The new thought in my brain was so monstrous, so unthinkable, I wanted to spew it out of me like poison food, but I could find no way to do so even symbolically. I was suffused with horror. I curled up into a fetal ball, trembling violently.
—it can’t be (it could be) it can’t be (it could be) there must be some other way (name one) it can’t be—
All at once I knew a way you could invade someone’s body without them noticing. By concealing the invader in another, larger invasion they were joyfully accepting.
By fucking them.
Literally or figuratively, by sperm in one set of mucous membranes or by saliva in another at the other end, what difference did it make? The pinhead-sized object need not be hard or metallic like a real pinhead, might have been soft and malleable, easily mistaken for a morsel of food politely ignored in a passionate kiss—or unnoticed altogether amid ten ccs of ejaculate.