And further out I sensed things that were as far beyond sentient as I was beyond an idiot. The Fireflies, who had grown all of this from Earthseed, and others greater even than them, beyond all describing or human understanding. Of all, they were furthest removed from my experience, and thus most interesting. I could know them, there was time, there was no-time—
But just as my awareness left Earth to expand and encompass them, began to pass through High Orbit…there was a change.
I became conscious of a level I had missed. It lay roughly halfway between human being and Stardancer, partaking of both. There were only a few of that nature, a tiny fraction of the sons and daughters of Eve—but a fraction that had stayed nearly constant for the last two million years. They were scattered here and there at apparent random, like salt particles in a bland soup, and they were all connected and interconnected by strands of something that has no name. Call them enlightened ones. Call them holy people. Call them the good and wise, or whatever you like. They had no collective name, only collective awareness. All their awareness was collective: none of them suffered from the delusion that they were anything more than neurons in a larger brain, cells in a body, atoms in a molecule. They were intimately connected with the Starmind, though separate from it.
In the same instant I became aware of their antithesis. Call them the destroyers. The truly evil, if you will. The ones who fear everything, and so seek to destroy everything they can reach. It did not surprise me that there were fewer of them by far. Their interconnections were fewer and much feebler. Each fought all the others, even when cooperation would further their aims. They were essentially stupid at their core, but so corrosively destructive in their childish rage that if they’d had numerical parity with their opposites, the human race would have ended long since.
Back in the reality I had left, frozen in the amber of now, one of them sat a few meters from me, waiting politely to kill me.
Ideas are like viruses. They transmit copies of themselves from host mind to host mind, changing themselves slightly in the process, and the ideas which are unfit soon perish, and the ones that survive grow strong. They compete for resources. Christianity competes with Islam for space in the brains of mankind; the idea of capitalism competes with the idea of Marxism, while theocratic monarchy nips at both their heels. The idea of freedom battles with the idea of responsibility, and so on.
On the highest level, the idea of Life competes with the idea of Death. Hope versus cynicism. Yes versus no. Joy versus despair. Enlightenment versus delusion. Conception versus suicide. This happens in all people…but some take sides.
I could see the human avatars of both sides, now. Call them the white magicians and the black, those who loved greatly and those who hated hugely, in awful stasis, terrible balance, like irresistible thrusters straining to move implacable mass. The black haters were far outnumbered, but they would not yield.
And they said nothing, put out nothing but a steady scream of rage and terror. While the others spoke, sang, reached out, reasoned, soothed. I could see them all, hear them all, almost touch them all.
One of them spoke to me from high over my head.
Morgan.
Yes, Reb, I said, with my mind only.
Another sang, from a different direction. Friend of my badundjari—
Yes, Yarra.
Miz McLeod, said the widowed Harry Stein in a third location.
Harry.
Rain, said a fourth, from impossibly far away.
Hello, Shara.
I was connected to their kind by four strands, now. I could see the strands, like spacer’s umbilicals, feel energy pulse along them in both directions.
Reb spoke for all. Cusp approaches. Action is needful.
I’m glad you know. Can you help me?
We shall.
What must I do?
Go within, deep within, and you will know.
I went within.
Deep within my own body, my own skull, my own bones. The knowledge of how to do so came from hundreds of minds, funneled through the four to whom I was connected. I went back past consciousness to preconsciousness. I was a fetus, swimming a warm saline sea, with a two-valved heart like a fish, parasitic on the mother-thing. I invested my limbs, kicked, dreamed. I was born, acquired a four-valved heart and eyes to match my ears, began my long battle with gravity. I was a growing youth, then a dying adult, and my awareness went further inward. I was a cell, absorbing nutrient and preparing to divide. I was a strand of DNA, scheming patiently to take over every speck of matter in the universe, measuring time in epochs.
Suddenly I was a corpuscle, racing through my own bloodstream like a cruise missile, singing at the top of my voice. I shrank down to an atom and roamed through tissue and bone and fluid. In moments I understood my whole body, better than any doctor ever could. I had the autonomic control of a yogi, a Zen master, a firewalker. Absentmindedly I destroyed the bacteria in my teeth, cured an incipient cold, strengthened my bad back and trick knee, began the repair of a lifetime of damage to my heart, lungs and other vital systems. I happened across the swarm of nanoreplicators deep in the vitals of my brain, huge slow clumsy things that moved at speeds measurable in great long picoseconds. I slipped inside one, studied its programming, and told it to become a factory for converting nanoreplicators like itself into norepinephrine, finishing with itself. Then I slipped out and down the medulla to the top of the spinal cord, checked all the skills I had spent a lifetime storing there, upgraded and enhanced them to their optimax. I located the bone I had cracked falling down, in my right ankle, saw that it would take at least half an hour to mend it, worked its limitation into my choreography, and ignored it thereafter. I devoted a huge portion of my body’s emergency reserve energy to enhancing my strength and coordination.
I polished the choreography for an endless time, perhaps as much as a second, with a thousand minds looking over my figurative shoulder and doublechecking me, making suggestions for improvement. My four pipelines, Shara Drummond, Yarra, Harry Stein and Reb Hawkins took a personal interest, and there were a number of other dancers out there in the Starmind who had ideas to offer, in particular an Iranian Muslim named Ali Beheshti who had been a dervish before he accepted Symbiosis, and a former break-dancer from Harlem named Jumping Bean.
There was one last question to be decided. Was it necessary that Chen Hsi-Feng die? Opinion was divided, consensus oscillated.
Fat Humphrey spoke from near at hand. Forget necessary or unnecessary. You know what he wants to drink. Serve him.
The debate was ended.
I was out of full lotus and on my feet before he knew I was moving. The broken ankle made a horrid sound and hurt like blue fury, but I was expecting that, ignored it. I had not danced in a one-gee field for years, had not danced at all in weeks, but it didn’t matter at all, I was now at least briefly capable of anything that any human could do, factory rebuilt from the inside out, in a controlled adrenaline frenzy. I became a dervish, spinning and whirling and leaping.
In my normal state of performance mania I am capable of moving faster than the eye can follow for brief periods. Now I was inspired, exalted. My feet had not kissed the stage in so long! I flashed to and fro before him, must have seemed to have multiple arms and legs, like the goddess Kali. I had no clothes to hinder me; my bare feet gripped the hardwood floor beautifully.