"This is a good spot, mom."
Rhea thought so too. They were at the ocean shore east of Provincetown, just where the upthrust arm of Cape Cod curls its wrist back toward the mainland. Before them was the sea, next stop Europe; behind them to the west, between them and P-Town, lay kilometers of sand dunes. The weather was perfect, and had been since they had watched the sun rise together over the Atlantic several hours ago. It was now almost time for the Hour of Remembrance, and she and Colly were just finishing the food they had brought with them from home.
There were few others here, even on this global holiday. There were too many beaches a P-Towner could reach without having to walk several kilometers of sand, too many boats available to take them out on the water, especially since the fleet was not fishing today. Nonetheless Rhea had never seen this particular stretch of shore so heavily populated. The idea of Courage Day had caught on.
The spot did not feel crowded; there was no rowdiness; the general mood seemed to be a kind of subdued celebration. People spoke less than usual, and in softer voices; those who listened to music or news did not inflict it on their neighbors; even teenage boys were not horsing around. Rhea suspected things would get more festive later, after the Hour was past, but for the moment there was a kind of solemnity in the air that seemed to call for decorum. It had been a long long time since so many saints had been martyred at once.
"Do you feel like Trancing?" Colly asked.
Rhea looked around. There were a few individuals dancing, but no group had formed as yet. She did not see anyone she knew nearby. "Maybe later, hon. After the Hour."
"Okay." Colly liked trance-dancing well enough, but was not as attached to it as Rhea had become in recent months.
"I'm surprised you have the energy," Rhea added idly. Colly had only been back on Earth for a few days after visiting her father in orbit.
"I know," Colly said. "Me too. Yesterday I was tired as galoonies—but today I feel like Waldo. You know what I mean? Like he must feel. Like, I know I'm weak, but I don't feel weak."
It took Rhea a second to get the reference. "Oh, Waldo—your new friend in the Shimizu. I forgot all about him." Come to think of it, Colly hadn't mentioned him once since her return. "How is Waldo?"
Suddenly Colly was a textbook illustration, labeled Nonchalance. "Okay," she said off-handedly, studying her fingernails. "His frog died, and he likes that dopey classic rock music now, and his teacher says he understands calculus." Beat. "And he said he wants to marry me when we're bigger."
Rhea's heart turned over in her chest. She didn't know whether she wanted to laugh or cry, only that she must do neither out loud. And so it begins, she thought. "Oh," she said, with equal casualness. "I'm . . . sorry to hear about his frog."
"Yeah. Hip was cool."
"So, uh . . . what did you tell him? About the marriage thing."
"I said I'd think about it."
"I see. Did that satisfy him for now?"
"I guess." Another pause. "He wanted to kiss me."
Rhea chose her words with care. "How was it?"
Colly had run out of fingernails; she seguéd smoothly to toenails. "Okay, I guess." Suddenly she turned and looked her mother in the eye. "But honestly, Mom, I don't get what the big deal is."
Rhea refused herself permission to smile. It cost her. "You will, baby," she said solemnly. "You will."
"Yeah, but when?"
"You won't miss it," she said. The words made her think of Manuel Brava, and she glanced at her watchfinger. "Hey, it's almost time."
It was about five minutes before the Hour. All up and down the beach, conversations were ending, people were sitting up straighter and facing the sea. Boats out on the water killed their engines, and their passengers came out on deck. Rhea felt a sudden pang of loneliness, the kind that a child's presence does not assuage. Holidays are always the worst time for those with no significant other.
"Mom? We're rich now, right?"
The non sequitur made her smile. "No, dear. But we're richer."
"Well . . . can we afford to call space for an hour?"
Automatically Rhea started to do mental arithmetic . . . then abandoned the equation unsolved. Her daughter had sideswiped her for the second time in less than a minute. "Yes, Colly! That's a great idea! Oh, I hope he's not . . . no, they won't be working in orbit, either." She was already autodialing, half-wishing the car was near so they could have visual too. Space images would have been appropriate during the Hour. Ah well . . .
Rand answered almost at once. "Hi, Rhea! Is Colly there? Of course she is—hi, princess!"
"Hi, Daddy!" Colly called back.
Rhea adjusted the volume for privacy. "Hi," she said.
"Where are you guys? No, wait—let me guess. Audio only, so you're out in the boonies somewhere. From the sound of the waves, ocean rather than bay side. The Dunes, right?"
How could someone who knew you that well be hundreds of miles away? "That's right."
"Is Uncle Jay around?" Colly asked.
"Right here, cutie," Jay's voice said.
"Hi, Uncle Jay! Hi, Duncan!"
There was the sound of laughter, then, "Hi, Colly," from Duncan.
Rhea monitored herself to see if Duncan's voice caused any internal fluttering. Nothing. She hoped he and Jay would make a success of it. "Where are you guys, anyway? No wait—let me guess." It couldn't be one of the Solariums: Rand and Jay were celebrities. Somewhere private, with a good view . . . got it! "You're all in Eva's window, aren't you?"
"Right," Rand said. "As a matter of fact, I think I can see you from here. Wave, Colly."
She looked skyward and did so. "Here I am, Daddy!"
"I see you," he assured her. "You've got mayonnaise on your chin."
She checked—and burst into giggles when she found he was right.
"We're planning to do some damage to the legacy Eva left me, as soon as the Hour is over," Jay said. "I wish I could send you down a snort."
"Me too!" Rhea said. "Look, I know the Hour's almost here. We don't have to talk or anything—but can we all stay on-line together until it's over?"
"It's something Terrans and spacers should share," Duncan said.
"It was my idea," Colly said proudly.
"And a good one," Rand told her.
"Are you okay, Uncle Jay?" she asked. "Are you sad about Eva?"
His answer was slow in coming. "Let me put it this way, honey," he said at last. "I'm not exactly okay yet—but I know I'm going to be. You know what I mean?"
"I know exactly what you mean," she said solemnly, and Rhea felt a brief stab of guilt. "Daddy, tell him that thing Captain Kirk said."
"Huh?"
"You know, about leaving."
A chuckle. "Oh. Not Captain Kirk, honey: Rahssan Roland Kirk. An Old Millennium jazzman. He said once, `Nobody dies. They just leave here.'"
There was a pause, and then Jay's voice said, "I think that's true. Thank you, Colly."
"Two minutes," Duncan said.
"It feels like we ought to be doing something," Rhea said. "Colly told you we've been Trancing a little, right? Maybe we should all dance or something."
"Well," Jay said, "I figure like this: Reb was Soto Zen. One of his favorite sayings used to be, `Don't just do something—sit there!' Do you guys know how to sit zazen? That's what we were thinking of doing."
"Sure," Colly said with just a hint of scorn. "Duncan taught us once. Well, kukanzen, not zazen, but they're prac'ly the same." She began manipulating sand into an improvised zafu, and Rhea followed her lead. She was cautious about exposing her child to organized religion, but Zen did not meet her definition of a religion. It had no deity, for one thing—but more important, it did not require either killing or converting unbelievers.
"It's okay to get up if you get antsy, Colly," Jay said. "Reb wrote a book once called RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL. Any of those would be appropriate, I think. And there's a walking meditation called kinhin, for groundhogs, anyway. Or you can Trance, if you like. But let's sit a little at first, at least at the start."
"Sure," she agreed.
"I'm the Doan today," Jay said. "The timekeeper. I'll ring a bell three times when the Hour strikes, and again when it's over, and we'll all be silent in between, okay?"
"Are you studying Buddhism now, Jay?" Rhea asked.
"Aw, I've been fiddling with it for years. But yeah, I'm getting into it more lately. It's a lot like drinking Black Bush, only cheaper."
Rhea checked her daughter. "No, honey, like this. You don't have to lace your fingers together in a gee field, remember? Left hand on top of right palm, thumbtips just touching."
Colly corrected her mudra, and straightened her spine. "Are we supposed to look downward?"
"Technically, yes," Jay said. "But for today I think looking up is okay. There's really no wrong way to do it, if your heart's in the right place. Just follow your breath . . . and remember Eva and Reb and all the Adepts."
"Get ready," Duncan said. "It's almost time."
The beach was hushed, now, save for the omnipresent whush of waves. The sky was nearly cloudless, baby blue. Rhea felt an electricity in the air. It was awesome to think that at this moment, all over the world, most of the human race was about to do just what everyone here was doing. Had humanity ever acted with anything like this kind of unanimity before? What a pity it took a tragedy to bring it about. But wasn't that always the way? Nothing brought people together like a good disaster. . . .
"Ting. Ting. Ting," said the phone. Rhea composed herself, drew in a measured breath through her nose—
And the sky turned gold.
Not "gold" in any metaphorical or analogous sense, as one can be said to have "red" hair when it is not really red at all. The whole sky was literally golden, the color of burnished 14-karat gold, the color of the wedding ring Rhea had still not been able to bring herself to remove. It happened all at once, seeming to mushroom outward from several sources like a crystal forming in an instant. It was like a translucent gold roof cast suddenly over the world, shimmering and twinkling, backlit by the sun.
Everyone on the beach—very nearly everyone alive—gasped, and stared upward in wonder. Rhea found that she and Colly were clutching each other's hands, mudra be damned. An indescribable sound began to come from the people on the shore. Rhea had once, many years ago, been caught in a riot, and would carry the memory of that indescribable, unmistakable sound to her grave. This was its opposite: a vocal sharing of awe. Perhaps the Israelites had made such a sound when the Red Sea parted.
Some of it seemed to be coming from the phone. "Can you guys see this?" she cried. "It's unbelievable!"
"We see—" Rand began, but she did not get to hear what he saw for some time, because his voice was drowned out by another. It seemed to come from everywhere, yet did not have the echoing quality of loudspeaker broadcast; it was as though every AI on the beach had been co-opted at once.
"This is Shara Drummond, calling the human race. I need your attention."
Rhea knew that her heart should be racing. Shara Drummond—the first Stardancer! Addressing all mankind directly, for the first time since her original Stardance, sixty-five years ago . . .
Yet somehow Rhea felt herself growing calmer. She met Colly's eyes . . . and they resumed formal zazen posture, side by side, but continued to hold hands.
"I have taken over all data channels and AI's in human space to talk to you, because something unprecedented is about to happen. A radical change. It may seem frightening at first, but I promise you it will be all right, if you do as I ask. The Starmind is here to help you through this . . . but you must do your part, and no one can do it for you. The first thing you must do is get everyone on Terra outdoors, and everyone in Luna onto the surface. I mean everyone. Essential services personnel, hospital patients, the dying, the housebound, prisoners in solitary, all human beings. If you know of someone trapped indoors, get them outside now. And hurry! There is no time to lose. I will tell you what I can—but don't stop to listen if you know of some human who needs help getting outdoors; the information will be repeated many times.
"A turning point has come in the history of the human race—one set in motion by the Fireflies on the day they came here for the second time, the day of the Stardance. We Stardancers were created in large part to help you through it."
Rhea thought quickly. Thank God Tia Marguerite and Tia Marion were out on Ti Louie's boat—it was an hour's hard walk back to the car. Everyone else she knew in town was mobile too. Suddenly she missed Rand so much her stomach hurt. "Are you guys hearing this too?" she murmured.
The phone's LED said the circuit was still open, but there was no reply. She thrust it absently into her breast pocket.
"I'm afraid your life is about to change forever. Your old life is over; a new one is about to begin. I know that will not be welcome news for many of you. No baby wants to be born; they all come out crying. But they stop. I'm afraid you have no more choice in the matter than a baby does: the contractions are beginning, and no power in the Solar System could stop them now. All we of the Starmind can do is see that the birth takes place as smoothly and painlessly as possible. We have sacrificed much to that end . . . but today is not our Courage Day, but yours. I can only ask you to trust in me—and in the Fireflies, who refused to let me die in orbit so many years ago.
"On that day, my planet was like a womb whose fetus is overdue for delivery. Such a fetus grows too large for its environment, begins to pollute its ecosystem with its own waste products, begins to degrade its surroundings. In the decades that followed, you—and we, the Starmind—have cooperated to help correct most of the damage to our home planet, using nanotechnology to minimize new wastes and recycle old ones efficiently. The womb is repaired—but it is time for the fetus to leave it behind now."
Rhea did not guess what was coming; it was only a shadowy intuition. But it was enough to make her heart sink. She stared around that perfect beach, that eerie golden sky, as if to memorize it, and clutched Colly's hand. At an answering pressure, she met her daughter's eyes—and found them serene, untroubled.
"It's okay, Mom," she said. "It's Courage Day."
Shara Drummond's voice continued:
"You know that the Fireflies seeded this planet with life. You know that much of what you are is written in your DNA. Some of you may know that large segments of the information encoded there appear to be gibberish, and do not express somatically—the so-called junk DNA. These genetic `instructions' are never carried out, because they lack the end-begin codes that would activate them.
"In just a few minutes, a kind of telepathic trigger signal will go out from Titan. There is no way to avoid or shield against it: it will be as unstoppable as a neutrino, and faster. Designed by the same beings who designed DNA in the first place, it will insert end-begin codes in certain introns—and switch them on. Everywhere in the Solar System, the nature of human tissue will change, permanently.
"It will become transparent to gravitons. In plain language, it will become immune to gravity."
Rhea moaned.
"Please listen to me and try to be calm. Many of you on Terra may have the idea that what is usually miscalled centrifugal force will send you flying off the planet at high speed. This will not happen. When you go weightless, the net upward force acting on you will not exceed .003 gee. Your clothing should suffice to hold you in place; even shoes will probably be enough. Ask your AI if you don't believe me; I'll be releasing it to your control again soon. Nonetheless you will be in free fall, with the usual physiological symptoms most of you know: dizziness, stuffy nose and so forth.
"This period will last for perhaps five minutes. Then machines will turn themselves on. There are three of them. One is buried deep in the core of Terra, one at the heart of Luna, and the third at the core of Mars, though no one is there to be affected by it now. Each is designed to generate antigravitons . . . a special kind of antigraviton which will only affect altered human tissue."
The next sentence was delivered slowly, deliberately.
"Like it or not, you will find yourself rising into the sky."
A wordless cry went up all around the beach—doubtless around the planet—a discordant amalgam of clashing emotions. Shara Drummond seemed to anticipate that, and waited for it to die down.
"DO NOT FEAR," she said then. "It is not death that waits for you in the sky, but a new kind of life. You will not freeze or suffocate as you climb, I promise you.
"For the last sixty-five years, the Starmind has worked at modifying our Symbiote, in preparation for this day. The gold you see in the sky is the variant we have shaped, a variant designed to survive, for a time, at the interface between Terra and space. It cannot come down to you . . . but you will find it waiting for you about five kilometers above the ground, just as the air is getting too thin to breathe. Touch it anywhere, drink it, and it will shape itself to you. It will breathe for you, and bring you higher, changing from gold to red as you leave the atmosphere behind.
"This is why the Adepts made their sacrifice. If the Group of Five had gotten their way, all of you would have died this day. The Five knew nothing of this, nor could we tell them. Without a Starmind, you would have suffocated as you left the stratosphere—and would not be hearing me now. But thanks to Tenshin Reb Hawkins and the others, you will live to reach space.
"And we the Starmind will be waiting for you. To show you your new world. Your new home. You will be one with us, and we with you, Homo caelestis forever."
A vast soundless sound filled the world. Rhea heard it inside her head, as if on headphones. It was music, and she even recognized it: something Rand played all the time, something by Brindle whose name she could not recall. But to her tortured imagination it seemed like the Trump of Doom that Christians believed would signal the Rapture. She found that she was clutching Colly to her fiercely, keening without words. The words that raced through her mind were, she knew, probably shared by millions; indeed, they might have been the final thought of most of the humans who had ever died: Not yet! I wasn't done yet!
It was a protest the universe had never heeded yet. As she drew in a breath to scream it aloud, Colly spoke against her breast.
"Don't worry, Mom," she said. "I didn't want to come out either, remember?"
Rhea remembered. Colly had been born three weeks overdue. She had stayed stubbornly in the womb . . . until a pitocin drip induced labor, and forced her out. And Colly had come to like this world.
"It's okay," Colly insisted. "We're gonna go see Daddy now."
She kept her deathgrip on Colly's shoulders, but pulled back so she could see her face. Colly was smiling. "Can you feel it?" she asked.
With a thrill of something like horror, Rhea felt her weight leaving her. She tried to hang on to it, but could not. Within a minute it was gone completely. Her sinuses began to fill, and she felt her face reddening as blood redistributed itself evenly throughout her body. She felt mild dizziness too. It was just like climbing to orbit in a shuttle—except that the rest of the world around her continued to observe the law of gravity.
Shara Drummond's message began repeating.
Colly picked up an uneaten apple, held it out, and let go. Rhea's body-awareness told her that she was in zero gee, so persuasively that it was jarring to see the apple fall normally. Colly giggled.
Suddenly she squirmed out of Rhea's grasp, a trick she had perfected at age five. Rhea cried out, but it was too late: Colly had already unfolded her legs from beneath her . . . causing her to rise into the air.
Without thinking, Rhea sprang after her and caught her like a tackler, hugging the child to her. They found themselves about six or seven meters in the air, sinking with the gentle slowness of a feather beneath the weight of their clothes. This high in the air, Shara's repeating message was almost inaudible. Others around them were airborne too. A convention of Nijinskis, she thought wildly as she drifted down. Oh, Jay would love this! And Rand . . .
"I wish Dad and Uncle Jay could see this," she said aloud.
Colly was grinning, exhilarated. "Just pay attention," she said. "We can give them an instant replay later."
They landed gently on sand, a few meters west of their takeoff point. With space-trained instincts and Trancer skill, both let their legs absorb the energy of landing, so they did not bounce away again. For a moment they bobbed there together, poised at the very membrane between earth and sky. They could hear Shara's voice clearly again, now that they were close to the earth—and many competing sounds too. Some people were screaming, some were laughing, some were yelling contradictory advice; some were flailing helplessly in the air, trying vainly to swim back to earth. And some were finding out how high they could jump. Out on the sea she could see people leaping higher than their masts, moving lazily in the air, like drowners in reverse.
"Let's Trance, Mom," Colly said. "We can do it for real, now."
Rhea had a sudden vivid memory of Manuel Brava, the night she had trance-danced for the first time.
Be ready, he had said. It's gonna be good.
And this was the Hour of his Remembrance . . .
Somewhere in Rhea's heart, something gave way. Without regret, she closed the book that was her life . . . and began a new one. "All right, Colly." She released her embrace. "Take my hand, though, okay?"
"Sure," Colly said. "Here we go!"
They leaped together.
A few minutes later, Rhea admitted to herself that she was having fun. More fun than she had had in a long time. It was a little like trampolining or bungee-jumping in ultraslow motion. It was very much like dreams she had been having all her life. It was, in literal reality, what Trancing had always felt like, except that the moments of breathless exhilaration were not fleeting and transient.
Some others around her were also moving in the characteristic flowing movements of trance-dance, now; she and Colly were not the only Trancers here. Out on the sea, some people were walking on water, with exaggerated steps; she could just hear them laughing.
"—you okay?" Rand's voice said suddenly from her breast pocket. "Rhea! Colly! Can you hear me? Dammit, are you okay?"
He sounded half out of his mind with worry. Rhea took the phone out of her pocket. "We're fine, darling. Hang on—I think we're coming for a visit."
"What the hell do you mean? What's going on down there?"
"Didn't you hear Shara up there?"
"Yeah, but it didn't make much sense. She told us to go EVA, find some Symbiote, and take off our p-suits. But what about you? She said something crazy about immunity to gravity, and gold Symbiote."
"That's right. We're about . . . oh, I'd guess twenty meters above the ground right now. It looks like you win: Colly and I are coming to space after all."
"Oh God—you'll freeze, before you can reach the Symbiote."
"I don't think so," she said. "It's warmer than it should be down here. I think that gold Symbiote is having some kind of lens effect. They've had a long time to think this through."
There was silence on the line. The first to fully absorb the news was Jay. He began to laugh with joy. "Oh, Eva!" he cried, "What a glorious joke on you! Oh, how wonderful!"
"What do you mean, Jay?" Rhea asked.
"I get it now—I see it—I know why she wanted to die—and why she was dragging her feet—the stubborn old biddy was holding out for meaning . . . and she got it, bless her selfish heart—damn, she got the prize—oh, I'll bet she died smiling—"
"I don't understand," Rhea said. "Rewind and start over—slower."
"I'll try. Look, at age one hundred, Eva was done with life. So she went into sixteen years of life review . . . and found no meaning in anything she'd done. During a century of living as hard as she knew how, Eva converted X cubic tonnes of food and water into excrement and offspring; she pushed Y megabucks from one imaginary place to another; she experienced Z increments of pleasure or pain; once done, she could find no real significance in any of it. So her last hope for meaning was her death: she spent sixteen years hoping, irrationally, to find a meaningful death, an opportunity to give up her life for something. That's why she kept postponing her suicide for so long—why, even after she gave up and made up her mind to die, she stalled long enough to let Reb arrive, and give her a convincing reason to wait just a little longer. The reason was: to live to see this historic day."
"It's a shame she missed it, then," Colly said.
"No, no that's the best part, don't you see?" Jay said. "It is a shame she didn't live to see it with her own eyes, sure. But I'm sure she got to see it through the Starmind's eyes before she died—and more important, she got something even better. She got what she'd wanted in the first place, what she'd already given up on when Reb told her about today: a meaningful death. Think about it: how many humans—how many creatures, in the wide universe—had ever been privileged to sacrifice their lives to save two intelligent species?"
Colly was the first to see it. "Wow, yeah," she said wonderingly. "If it hadn't been for her and Reb and the Adepts, all the Stardancers would have got killed, and there wouldn't be any of that gold simmy-oat up there waiting for us. All us people would have died today . . ."
"She got the most meaningful death there ever was," Rhea said. She giggled suddenly. "Every damn time humanity goes through some kind of birthing, there seems to be an Eve around."
"Are you sure you're okay?" Rand asked. "You sound sort of giddy."
She laughed out loud. "Let's just say a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. We don't have to be apart anymore, baby. Not ever again. Hang in there—we'll be along directly."
"What should I do?" he cried, his voice agonized.
"What Shara said. And don't be afraid. I'm not. I was, but I'm not anymore. It's gonna be good."
"But—"
"Go ahead. I've got to hang up now, I don't want to miss this. We'll be there soon, love." She let go of the phone, and watched it fall away.
She and Colly were slowly moving away from the ocean, into the dunes. With each leap they came down farther to the west, for the earth went on without them all around them. They were sweating with exertion, now, and the sweat behaved the way it did in free-fall, as content to drip up as down. In her mind's eye Rhea saw the whole human race doing this. Hovering. Tottering on the brink. Trembling on the verge.
The ground was coming up again. You didn't even have to look: when you could hear Shara clearly again, it was time to prepare for your landing.
"Colly!" she cried. "Want to go for the big one?"
"Sure," her daughter said.
Rhea began undoing her clothing. Colly got the idea at once and skinned out of her own clothes. They let go, watched their clothes fall. This time, when they hit the earth and rebounded, they kept on rising.
They kept dancing for a while as they rose, but the view was simply too distracting to concentrate; after a time they stopped moving in space and just gawked, letting the wind do with them as it would, turning end over end. The earth moved slowly and majestically beneath them. Soon Provincetown was below them. It was weird, inexpressibly weird, to see P-Town with hardly a soul on the streets. The beaches were full of hopping fleas, and the sky was starting to fill with naked people. It reminded Rhea of news footage of hot-air balloon regattas in the desert.
"Look," Colly said, pointing. "There's our old house."
Rhea saw it. For a moment it filled her heart, and called her back. Her beloved widow's walk. Below that, the tower room in which her unfinished novel waited, and below that the bedroom into which she had been born. Kicking and screaming.
"Goodbye," she said to it. "I'll never forget you."
"'Course not," Colly said. "Me either."
Suddenly they were rising faster, as though propelled by a great wind from below. It felt surprisingly like surfing vertically.
"Hang on," Rhea cried.
"Here we come, Daddy!" Colly called.
And they rose up forever, going for the gold.