“But why do they have to be enemies?”
“Morgan, think, won’t you? Think about that hive-mind. That ‘Starmind.’ I know they breed like hamsters up there, but even after twenty years of it, well over half the minds that make up what they call the Starmind started out as human beings, on Earth, yes?”
“Exactly. They’re our brothers and sisters, or at least our cousins.”
“And how many million years old would you say is the human lust for power? For control? For dominance?”
“But there’s none of that in the Starmind.”
“Exactly. What can ‘power’ mean to a member of a telepathic commune? What is there to control? By what means can dominance be asserted? Mental machinery that has served men for countless generations is useless.” He leaned forward and locked eyes with me. “But I ask you to consider this: that a telepathic group consciousness implies a group subconscious too. Submerged in that Starmind are the instincts of thousands of killer apes, the genetic heritage of the most successful predator ever evolved. Maybe competition and aggression aren’t inherited, maybe they’re not instinct but learned behaviour transmitted to each new generation—maybe the Stardancers born in space, who’ve never known want or fear or envy, are gentle creatures, without the Mark of Cain. But the majority of the Starmind comes from a long line of cutthroats. Human beings weren’t built for Utopia, no matter what weird things may happen to their metabolisms. They know the only thing they could possibly need to fear, must fear, is us, is the rage and envy of the irrational human beings they have to share the Solar System with. They know a clash is inevitable one day, and they’re doing their best to see that they’ll win it. By creating a planet full of helpless welfare dependents. By showering us with gifts that lead us to a place where we need their gifts to survive. They’ve read their Sun Tzu. Don’t you see, they’re killing us with kindness!”
I closed my eyes briefly. I remembered one of my old dance-circle acquaintances, an intellectual snob, a sort of Alexander Woolcott/H.L. Mencken/Oscar Wilde wanna-be, saying, when he heard I was about to go to Top Step, “Stardancers? A society with no corruption, no hypocrisy, no neurosis and total respect for art—and worst of all, they’re willing to let me join? How could I not despise them?” And I had laughed with the others, but privately thought he was a cripple, seeking approval of his deformity.
I felt a sense of unreality, a Through-the-Looking-Glass feeling. In my wildest fantasies of this moment, it had gone much like this, with Robert calmly, rationally explaining why he had blown our friends to plasma. Why is he telling me all this? Surely to God he does not expect that I will nod and say, Damn, you’re right, I hadn’t thought it through, Kirra and Ben just got in the line of fire, guess you can’t make an interplanetary omelet without breaking some eggs, what can I do to help fight the menace of gods who have the nerve to be benevolent?
I met his eyes again. “So you acted selflessly. For the good of humanity.”
He didn’t even shrug. “Of course not. Am I a Stardancer? I acted out of intelligent self-interest, like any sane human.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “If our plans bear fruit, the least of the prizes to be won will be my father’s return from exile to unchallenged power over China.”
“So you put death in Kirra’s sweet mouth.” I slid the Gyrojet from the handbag. My thumb caressed the safety catch. Four darts. One for him, one for me, two surplus.
“Morgan, listen to me: for the first time in human history, total planetary domination is a genuine possibility—and it’s only the first step in the forging of a System-wide empire. The tools are nearly at hand! How many lives, how many betrayals is that worth?”
His eyes were boring into mine. “I have a gun aimed at your belly, Chen Po Chang,” I said softly. I hadn’t meant to warn him.
“I know,” he said just as quietly. “But you’re not ready to use it yet.”
“No. No, I’m not. First I want to know why you’re telling me such weighty secrets. Do you think you can persuade me to join you?”
He hesitated before answering. “No. I wish I could. But you’re a romantic. Because Stardancers look like angels, they must be angels. There’s not enough greed in you for your own good.” He looked bleak. “Oh, but I wish I could!”
“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. A woman at an adjacent table looked round; I lowered my voice again. “What the hell do you care? One day you’ll be Emperor of the Galaxy and you can have the hottest concubines your precious race can produce. I’m a broken down forty-six-year-old has-been dancer you screwed for a few weeks once on assignment.”
This was why I wasn’t ready to shoot him yet. Or at least part of it. I needed to know what, if anything, I had been to him.
For the first time his iron control cracked. Pain showed in his eyes. He looked down at the table. “Screwing you was good cover. You were my target’s roommate. Falling in love with you was stupid. So I was stupid.” He finished his Irish coffee in a single gulp. “I was horrified at how hard it was to leave you. That terrorist bombing was the perfect excuse to cut out, just when I needed it…and it took me half an hour to make up my mind to take advantage of it. I knew there was no way I could take you with me—but it killed me to leave you behind. When I heard your voice on the phone, realized you were here on Earth again, there was a whole five or ten seconds there when I…when I…”
“When you got a hard on, wondering how I am in a gravity field. But now you know I know you for what you are, and how I feel about your cause. So I repeat: why are you admitting everything and telling me your secrets? You have a gun on me too, is that it?”
He shook his head. “I’m unarmed. And no one else will try to kill you. That much influence I have.” He ran a hand nervously through his hair, brushing it back from his eyes, a gesture he’d never had in free fall. “I guess I’m telling you…because I have to. Because I wanted you to know.”
“Pardon me,” a kindly voice said.
A large heavily bearded stranger in a charcoal grey suit was standing at my side, hearty and jovial and avuncular. If they ever remade Miracle on 34th Street with an all-Asian cast, he’d be a finalist for the role of Kris Kringle. “I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing you…but are you Morgan McLeod, the dancer?”
I had danced in San Francisco hundreds of times, had actually achieved more fame here than in Vancouver, where I was “only a local.” “Yes, but I’m afraid this isn’t a good—”
“I won’t disturb you. But please—would you?” He held out a scrap of paper and a pen. “Your work with Morris meant a lot to me.”
The quickest way to get rid of him was to indulge him. I left the Gyrojet on my lap, concealed by the handbag, and signed the stupid autograph. As I handed it back, he took my hand, bent to kiss it—and just as he did so, he turned my hand over, so that instead of kissing the back of it, his full warm moist lips pressed my palm. I felt his tongue flicker momentarily between them. It was an odd, vaguely erotic thing for a man his age to do, with an escort sitting right there across from me. I retrieved my hand hastily. “Thank you very much; you’re very kind. Please excuse us.”
“Of course, Ms. McLeod. Thank you. I have always loved your work.” He turned away.
I turned back to Robert. No, to Po Chang. “All right,” I tried to say to him, “Now I know. Now what?”
It came out, “All eyes down the put go, legs. Blower?”
I blinked and tried again. “Didn’t dog core stable imagine? Both pressure.”
A zipper appeared under his Adam’s apple. It peeled down to his diaphragm, splitting his sternum and spreading his ribs, exposing his pink wet chest cavity. A tiny Negro in a clown suit was clinging desperately to the top of his heart, fighting to stay aboard as it beat and surged beneath him. As I watched, fascinated, he managed to get to his feet and wedge himself into equilibrium between the lungs. He opened a door in the left lung and showed me something awful inside. I turned away in shame. The stranger was still standing there, but he stood ten meters tall now on rippling rainbow legs. His beard was made of worms. I knew he wanted to see me dance, but there wasn’t enough room on the table and the damned local vertical kept changing and there weren’t enough pens.
A little corner of my mind, way in the back, understood what was happening. I had forgotten that these people could kill with their kiss.
Chen Po Chang’s voice came from the far side of the universe, metallic and atonal. “The first one was just chemical. Call it truth serum. But the second one was a nanobandit.”
I reached for my lap, and it wasn’t where I had left it. Everything I found seemed to bend in the wrong directions; some of it felt wet and some of it was sticky to my questing fingers.
“Absorbed through the palm,” he was saying, “one heartbeat to the brain, another second to crack the blood-brain barrier, then it starts secreting.”
I had to find my lap—that was where I had left my gum! Gum? That wasn’t right. Gub? I couldn’t read my own goddamn handwriting. Where the hell was my fucking p-suit? Mist was closing in from all sides—
I beat at the mist, fought for control of my mind. I knew what I had to do. It was necessary to yell as loud and as clearly as possible, “Help me! I have been drugged and they’re going to take me out of here and kill me.” My old friend the waiter would then come and slap them both to death. My body was made of taffy, but I summoned all my will, directed all my desperate energy to making my mouth and tongue firm enough to function, obedient to my command.
“Productive marbles. Didn’t to bite wonder-log with it, the palaces. Curt! Curt!”
The waiter was back. There were four of him. “I’m very sorry, sir,” they all said slyly. “She had quite a few of those Irish coffees before you arrived. Maybe you’d better take her home. Can I call you a cab?”
“No, thank you,” Kris Kringle said. “We have a car outside. We’ll get her home.”
“Both of you? My.” Four eyebrows arched.
“Gunders,” I said, smiling to show I was in mortal danger. “S’ab.”
“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Robert/Po Chang said. His chest was closed up again now, but his face was melting. Never a dull moment with Chen Po Chang. It ran down his chest and formed an oily pool on the table. I tilted my head to see my reflection in it, and suddenly the local gravity changed. The spaceplane was taking evasive action. “Down” was that way. No, that way! No—
Lap dissolve.
Horrid dreams, that went on forever. My body was made of putty, which I twisted into the ugliest shapes I could devise. I butchered an infant, grew an enormous steel penis and raped a child, skinned and ate a living cat, burned a city, strangled a bird, poisoned a planet, masturbated with someone’s severed hand, stepped on a galaxy out of sheer malice, gutted God, gathered everything anywhere that had ever been good or beautiful and defecated on it. My laughter killed flowers, my gaze boiled steel, my touch made the Sun grow cold. I tortured my parents to death, brought them back to life and killed them again, and again, and again. I danced on Grandmother’s face with razor feet for days on end. Throughout all this, horrid little things with leathery wings at the edges of my peripheral vision watched and chittered and cheered me on. A snail kept oozing past, leaving a greasy trail, offering arch aphorisms in a language I could almost understand. My old shrink Alma appeared once, in a hockey uniform, and told me that my trouble was I kept everyone at arm’s length; I needed to open up and let someone love me. I vomited acid on her until she went away, and then cried carbonated tears.
Peace came at last, when the last star in the Universe burned out and the blessed darkness fell all around, like warm black snow in summer.