It did not go totally smoothly, of course. Human beings were involved; at least some chaos and tragedy had to result.
But there never were more than the two choices: evolve or die.
Perhaps it need not have been done as it was, by surprise. Perhaps humanity, forewarned and prepared, might have agreed to leave its ancestral womb forever, peacefully and without panic. The decision not to risk it was irrevocably made on the day the original Six entered Symbiosis and founded the Starmind, back at the turn of the millennium, back when half of the human race was hungry and poor, and pessimism was still the hallmark of intelligence. Once Charlie Armstead elected to leave Courage Day out of the report he sent back to humanity from Saturn in the historic Titan Transmission, it was too late to turn back: the Starmind was committed to secrecy.
If you could somehow establish telepathic contact with a human fetus in its ninth month . . . would it be a kindness for you to tell it everything you know of the birth trauma to come? Would it benefit from the foreknowledge—or panic, jam the birth canal, and kill itself and its mother? After all, less than one percent of the race ever voluntarily chose to go to Top Step and become Stardancers. Being human is a hard habit to break. Shara Drummond, Charlie Armstead and their companions believed—all the Starmind still believes—that humanity might well have died rather than leave Earth, given the choice. So they did not give it the choice until the last possible instant . . . and spent sixty-five years secretly preparing it for that instant.
This cost the Starmind much ethical anguish over those years—and sharp tragedy at the eleventh hour—but right up until the Day of Courage, the overwhelming consensus of the massed brains of the Starmind was that the stakes were just too high to permit any risks. One of the few concrete facts the Fireflies told the Starmind before they left us to work out our own destiny is that Homo sapiens is at least the third sentient race to be raised up in this solar system.
The first sentient race ("sentient" defined as "capable of art") lived eons ago, on a planet some call Lucifer, whose shattered remains are now known as the Asteroid Belt.
The second such race appears to have been somewhat more advanced: they "merely" blew the atmosphere off the next closest planet to the sun, Mars. But they are just as dead.
We appear to have squeaked through to the finish line.
Had we too failed our most final of exams . . . well, there hangs Venus, within the habitable zone, its reducing atmosphere ready to collapse into a viable biosphere at a chemical nudge. . . .
Perhaps when I was a human fetus, I would have consented to be born. But I am glad, all things considered, that I wasn't consulted.
Volumes larger than this one could be—are being—written about the chaotic events of the hours and days that followed the Hour of Remembrance, the countless millions of varying human reactions to Shara Drummond's call.
No volume however large could describe what happened when over six billion minds entered telepathic symphysis in a single great cascading wave, nor will I try even to hint at it here. Suffice it to say that only the presence of a quarter of a million trained and prepared telepaths made it possible at all. Symbiosis is profoundly disorienting in its first onset, and some find it terrifying—Stardancer Postulants used to spend three months in Top Step preparing themselves for the transition. But human beings are tough, when they have to be, and we had to be.
Even now, a month later, the integration process is still ongoing. It might not be too inaccurate to say that the new HyperStarmind has achieved consciousness, and is working—slowly!—toward awareness.
Despite the very best efforts of a quarter of a million linked minds planning for over half a century, a little more than two percent of humanity perished in the mass transcendence to Homo caelestis, most through stubbornness but some from sheer stupidity. No telepathic entity can take lightly the deaths of so many millions of souls—especially needless deaths, on the very verge of immortality. But at least their surviving loved ones know with utter certainty that everything possible was done to save them; there is mourning for them in the Starmind today, but no recrimination. Cells die whenever a baby is born; it is no one's fault. Balancing the sorrow to some extent is the joy of all those who love an autistic or retarded or catatonic or mute person—for now they can communicate with their loved one on a level far deeper than words could ever have reached.
Approximately one half of one percent of humanity were unaffected by the telepathic tocsin from Titan or the subsequent flood of antigravitons: genetic defectives whose DNA had sustained too many nonexpressing mutations over the millennia, whose introns were fatally damaged despite massive redundancy in the coding. But nearly ninety percent of those eventually reached space and joined the Starmind too . . . for there were suddenly spacecraft to spare.
And a little over five percent of the human race flatly and stubbornly refused to go—improvising an astonishing variety of desperate methods to remain near the earth's surface, to remain only human. Within a month, however, their number had shrunk from five percent of the former total to about two.
The present population of Terra, then, consists of a little more than one hundred and sixty million people—on a planet with wealth and technology and room enough for six and a half billion. Most of them are wearing weights. You are one of them, or you would not be reading this. And the odds are that despite your new wealth and lebensraum you are lonely and/or hurt and/or angry and/or afraid.
You do not have to be any of those things. If you insist on staying on Earth, your life need not be hard: we will continue to beam down power, and programs for your nanoassemblers, and other things you will need—or you can make your own way as your forebears did, if that pleases you.
But you do not have to stay.
The golden sky of Earth is blue once more—but there is plenty of red Symbiote in orbit. And even now, Terra holds more than enough resources to send you to join us. Even if you are one of the rare genetic unfortunates—and if you are, we have the resources to heal your introns, once you enter Symbiosis.
That is why I am writing this.
All you have to do is find a phone. Shara Drummond is accepting collect calls, and will tell you how to reach the nearest functioning spacecraft. We're waiting for you.
Some of the oldest Chinese legends speak of a mysterious "edible gold," one taste of which confers immortality. It seems unlikely the ancient Chinese could have had any direct knowledge of the Fireflies or of Symbiote—it may simply be that, given enough time, any prophecy will eventually come true.
For millions of years, loneliness has cascaded down through the millennia, an ever-expanding wave of loneliness, powered by itself, by its own terrible self-creating hunger. Confined in bone boxes, we sought solace by rubbing our meat-mounts against one another, and so made more prisoners of bone and flesh to replace us and keep loneliness alive and expanding across the ages.
Now loneliness is only an option, rather than a sentence. Your sentence has been commuted: you are released, not on, but upon, your own cognizance. The cell door is open at last: you can walk out any time you are ready. You have been ready since you were born.
And it is safe now. You can leave your cell without fear, without shame, without self-doubt. No matter what horrors you flatter yourself lie uniquely in your skull, no matter what unforgivable deficiencies you claim to yourself, you will find understanding and total acceptance in the Starmind. Everyone else did. One of the nicest things about living in zero gravity is that it is no longer possible for one person to look down on any other. There is no rank, no class, in the Starmind. There is no obsession, for there is no need for it. Yet paradoxically, somehow I can look up to many of my fellow Stardancers—and look into any who consent. All of them, sooner or later.
To join us is not to "lose your ego." It is to gain nine billion more. Love on that scale has never been imagined, in all the ages of the world. I tell you that it is better than you can imagine.
There is a reason why I have been chosen—out of more than nine billion!—to tell you this story of the final days. And the reason is not because I used to practice the writer's trade, although that has proved helpful.
This task fell to me because fate placed me in a unique position. I yearned to live out the rest of my days on Terra so badly that I tore my heart in half, and risked the heart of my daughter, to stay there. Yet I live in the Starmind now, and will live out the rest of my days in space—and am deeply joyous. I have lost nothing . . . and gained the stars.
And more. Buchi Tenmo was quite right about self-generated reality: I still have Provincetown. I smell it as I write . . .
In fact, I have P-Town now far more than I ever did before . . . for now I can see it through the eyes (through all the senses) of Tia Marguerite and Tia Marion and Cousin Tomas and all my relatives and friends, can know it through the perceptions and experiences of every other former resident, nearly everyone living who has ever seen it. If binocular vision creates three-dimensional visual depth, imagine the kind of depth with which I now know my beloved home. Over a hundred years of Provincetown, times millions of people, raised to its own power! I have more of my beloved home than a hundred thousand normal lifetimes could have given me . . . and I no longer need it. I have much deeper roots, now.
And my husband, who needed the attention of strangers, expressed in dollars, so badly that he tore his heart in half and risked his daughter's heart for it, has more raw attention available to him than he could ever have imagined . . . and sacrifices nothing for it . . . and needs it not at all.
And his brother, who risked his job and thus his art and thus his life, all to be near him, is now with him always. Just as intimately as I am, for the Starmind understands genetics as no human ever did. I carry their child in my womb now . . . a girl who is already Shaping herself, and will begin dancing soon.
That is the reason why I have chosen to tell my own story through more eyes than my own—right up to the moment when all our viewpoints converged.
Can you see that, if any of those three surviving protagonists in the foregoing comedy had known as much about what was really going on as you did when you read their story, they could not have acted as foolishly and destructively as they did? Can you really want to keep wasting as much time and energy as they all did, blundering through the dark of their lives, squinting through the twin chinks in the bone box and trying to read the hearts of others through theirs?
I/we have also reconstructed Eva's story, and made it part of mine/ours, partly for the additional perspective it adds, and mostly to show that I/we can. Reb knew her, and so the Starmind does, and always will. No one will ever completely die again . . . so long as there is one brain in the Starmind that ever knew him or her. I'm teaching the unborn daughter in my belly about Eva right now—since Rand and Jay are going to give her Eva's name.
"O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, and foolish notion."
Robert Burns was right. The gift has been given. Take it . . .
What has happened to our species may seem unprecedented. But it is not. We have made other Jumps of comparable magnitude, up the evolutionary scale. From the sea to the mud to the trees to the mountaintops to the skies . . . and now to space itself, free of the womb altogether.
There is less than no future in being a Neo-Neanderthal . . . for the next evolutionary Jump is already in progress. A Starmind of nine and a half billion brains possesses the necessary complexity and depth to begin to make sense of the Cosmic Background Babble. Deep in the Oort Cloud where the comets play, far from the sun, something is presently nearing completion that will help, a thing that has no analog in human experience. The infant is listening, learning to hear; one day it will learn to talk. There are as many stars in this galaxy as there are neurons in a brain: imagine a mind made up of a galaxy of Starminds!
For millions of years, an endless succession of generations of upright, lonely apes have gazed up in dumb yearning at the stars, at the infinite depth and breadth of the universe, at the teasing promise of the other 99.9999+% of reality. Now, at long last, we have come home.
Join us—as soon as you are ready!
I am Rhea Paixao, and my message to you is: the stars are here.