Spider Robinson - Starmind

Starmind

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

1

2

3

PART TWO

4

5

6

PART THREE

7

8

9

PART F0UR

10

11

12

PART FIVE

13

14

15

PART SIX

16

17

18

PART SEVEN

19

20

21

PART EIGHT

22

23

24

PART NINE

25

EPILOGUE

Starmind

Spider & Jeanne Robinson

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-31989-2

Cover art by Patrick Turner

First Baen paperback printing, May 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

This one's for Tia Marguerite Vasques,

Nana (Agnes Meade),

Tenshin Zenki, and all bodhisattvas,

with gratitude, respect

and love

HIGH-ORBIT HIT MAN

Desperate to stop the assassin, Jay left the tech hole at full thruster power. As he came around the curve

he saw the guards he had passed moments earlier, drifting with the air-currents. He wanted to decelerate

to a stop and peer cautiously into the tunnel before entering it—but was traveling so fast he'd have had to

overshoot it and beat back, and he didn't have time. Instead he threw himself into a power turn and

rocketed right into it at max acceleration.

That probably saved his life. The assassin was still in the tunnel, waiting to scrag Jay the moment his head

showed. But Jay arrived like a right hook, smashing solidly into him before he could fire.

The assassin was a very good shot. But Jay was a very good dancer—and fortunately the gun was a

pulse job rather than a continuous-beam laser.

He twisted, arched, feinted, leaped, contracted, and bolts of shining death missed him by centimeters.

But Jay could not hope to close; it was all he could do to stay alive. And any second his luck must run

out.

He had time to realize that he was going to die protecting people he did not like or even respect, and

then the tunnel had a blowout. A jagged hole appeared in its wall with aphuff , the shriek of escaping air

tore at their ears, and pressure began to drop . . .

BAEN BOOKS by SPIDER ROBINSON

The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

Starmind(with Jeanne Robinson)

Deathkiller

User Friendly

Lifehouse

By Any Other Name

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank master roboticist Guy Immega (again!), ace physicist Douglas Beder, and

Renaissance man Bob Atkinson for technical assistance in matters both scientific and speculative; K. Eric

Drexler, Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit for explaining the nearly infinite potential of nanotechnology

with their historic and indispensable book,Unbounding the Future [Quill/William Morrow], a follow-up

to Drexler's classicThe Engines of Creation (almost none of what we read there made it into this

volume, but we couldn't have written the first word without all of it); Peter Mathiessen for hipping us to

the Kingdom of Lo and the Festival of Impermanence in the quarterly journalTricycle; Murray Louis for

continuing to help us believe that meaningful words can be written about dance; Barbara Bourget and Jay

Hirabayashi for the inspirationalbutoh -influenced dance of Kokoro, and Lafcadio Hearn for preserving

and translating the eerily appropriatehauta found in Chapter 20.

We also thank Tenshin Zenki (Reb Anderson), Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Herb Varley, Robert and

Virginia Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jon Singer, Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, Greg McKinnon, David

Myers, Dr. Thomas O'Regan, Marie Guthrie and all the members of Jeanne's women's group for an

assortment of things too numerous, blessed, shady, trivial, profound, personal or otherwise

unmentionable to mention.

Ongoing thanks go to our beloved agent Eleanor Wood and our editor Susan Allison, without whom all

of this would not have been necessary. And we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you

who voted the original "Stardance" story the Best Novella Hugo in 1977; without you this book would

not exist. We might not either.

In addition to all the sources cited inStarmind 's two prequels,Stardance andStarseed , and the ones

cited above, we drew uponThe Book of Serenity—One Hundred Zen Dialogues ;The Tibetan Book

of Living and Dying , by Sogyal Rinpoche; and Thich Nhat Hanh's Touching Peace. Musical influences

this time around included Charles Brown, Stan Getz, Holly Cole, Kenny Loggins, Paul McCartney ("Off

the Ground" was a favorite track), Dianne Reeves, the Oscar Peterson Trio, Wynton Marsalis, Jake

Thackray and virtually the entire blues and R&B catalogues of Holger Peterson's Stony Plain Records

and Tapes.

Finally, we thank our daughter, Terri Luanna—for this whole saga was begun when she was an infant, for

the sole purpose of getting her back home to Canada after we'd gone broke while showing her off to our

families back in the Old Country. She is now a twenty-year-old college junior—fully grown and out of

the nest . . . and so at last, more than a quarter of a million words later, is the story she inspired. We two

have already agreed between us to collaborate on other books in the future. Butthis tale is now

complete.

—Spider & Jeanne Robinson

Vancouver, British Columbia

24 October 1993

PART ONE

1

Provincetown, Massachusetts

1 December 2064

Rhea Paixao was considered odd even by other writers. But some things are universal. Like most of her

colleagues, Rhea got some of her best writing done in the bathroom.

And this was her favorite bathroom. She stopped in the doorway and examined it before entering. She

had known it since earliest childhood, and the passage of time and changing fashions had altered it very

little.

True, it now contained a modern toilet and bath; there was such a thing as carrying quaintness too far.

But the wall opposite her was simply that, a wall, not programmable in any way: it displayed nothing,

could not even become a mirror. An actual silvered-glass mirror hung on the wall, over the sink, its image

speckled and distorted by surface impurities. Between mirror and sink, offset to the left, was a widget

that had once been used to hold toothbrushes and a plastic cup of germ culture. Farther to the left was an

antique cast-iron radiator, unused in decades. The sink itself had mechanical taps, two of them,

completely uncalibrated; one had to adjust the flow-rate and temperature by hand with each use. There

was a depression behind the rim meant to hold a decomposing lump of phosphate soap. And slung

beneath the sink was an antique seldom seen anymore in 2064: a spring-loaded roller intended to hold a

roll of toilet paper. (There was no roll there now, of course—but there had been for years after people

stopped using the horrid stuff. Nana Fish had insisted on it. Even after she had broken down and

accepted modern plumbing, Nana had insisted on keeping a roll of the Stone Age tissue handy, "just in

case." She went back to the days when machinery used to fail all the time.) Every time Rhea saw that

roller, she wanted to giggle.

The room was, in fact, almost a microcosm of the town around it. From its earliest days, Provincetown

had always conceded as little as possible to the passing of years, changing only with the greatest

reluctance and even then pretending not to. That had been the town's—most of Cape Cod's—stock in

trade for centuries now . . . and a good living there was in it, too. Even in these days, when "progress"

was no longer quite as dirty a word as it had once been, there were still people who would pay

handsomely for the illusion of an allegedly simpler time. P-Town, as the natives called it, was tailor-made

for the role.

She stepped into the bathroom and let the door close behind her. No terminal in here, no phone, rotten

ventilation—it was possible to make the mirror steam up—and nothing in the room accepted voice

commands. In here, all three avatars of the house's AI were blind, deaf, mute and impotent. The wind

outside was clearly audible through the walls. Rhea loved this bathroom more than even she suspected.

She had plotted out at least three books here, and worked on a thousand poems, songs, articles and

stories. At age fifteen, she had renounced Catholicism forever in this very room . . . sitting on that same

oaken toilet seat over there!

Just like that, a perfectly good story idea popped into her head—

She gave it a lidded glance, not wanting to seem too interested, and sauntered to the toilet. It followed

her, and her pulse quickened. Studiously ignoring the idea, she urinated, let the commode cleanse and dry

her, and went to the sink. Again it was at her shoulder. She used her dental mouthwash, making a rude

production of it, and spat noisily into the porcelain sink. The idea did not take offense.

She continued to ignore it, studied herself in the mirror. Still a couple of years to go before her fortieth

birthday. Black hair, black eyes that others called "flashing," coffee-with-cream complexion. Exotic

high-cheeked Portuguese features that always reminded Rhea of old 2-D pictures of Nana Fish as a girl,

back in the twentieth century, an impression reinforced by the old-fashioned nightgown and robe she

wore now. She ran water and splashed some on her face, rubbing especially at her eyes and cheeks and

lips as though her makeup could be washed off, a childhood habit so trivial it wasn't worth unlearning.

Colly was asleep, and Rand was not expecting her back in the bedroom any time soon so far as she

knew; there was time to dally at least briefly with the idea. She studied it out of the corner of her eye: a

short-story idea probably, really no more than a situation—but one she knew she could do something

good with.

For Rhea's kind of writer, plot and theme and even character were always secondary, mere

craftsmanship, constructed as needed to flesh out the story. For her, the heart of a story, the first flash

that impelled and enabled her to dream up all the rest, was always that special suffering called "antinomy."

"Conflict between two propositions which seem equally urgent and necessary," as a professor of hers had

once defined it. The juncture between a rock and some hard place. The place right out at the very tip of

the sharpest point on the horns of a dilemma. Give someone an impossible choice, andthen you had a

story. Once the Muse revealed to you a deliciously impossible choice, you could begin deciding what

sort of person would squirm most revealingly when confronted with it, and from that you could infer your

theme, which gave you your plot.

This idea, for instance . . .

It had been born in that brief flash of recollection she'd had as she first walked into the bathroom, of the

long-ago night when fifteen-year-old Rhea had made up her mind in the privacy of this very room that she

wasn't scared, dammit, Catholicism wasbullshit, therewas no God. As the adult Rhea had remembered

that night, and thought of the Catholic Church for the first time in years, she'd been reminded of an

artistically beautiful tragedy she knew about and had never exploited dramatically before.

Donny—Mr. Hansen—and Patty. She could no longer recall Patty's last name. Mr. Hansen had been

Rhea's Sunday School teacher, twenty-three and gorgeous and devout in his faith, and every girl in the

class had had a crush on him, but they all knew it was hopeless. Donny Handsome (as they called him,

giggling, among themselves) was blatantly and terminally in love with Patty, who was also twenty-three,

and just as gorgeous and devout, and just as clearly daffy about him. Together they were so

beautiful—their love was so beautiful to see—that the girls in Mr. Hansen's class actually forgave her for

existing.

Then, a single week before they were to be married, Patty had announced that God had called her to be

a nun.

Teenage Rhea had been transfixed by Mr. Hansen's dilemma. He was a good Catholic to the soles of his

feet. According to the rules he lived by,he was not even allowed to be sad. Not only could he not argue

with Patty, try to change her mind . . . he was not allowed towant to. It was his spiritual duty to rejoice

for his beloved, and the special grace she had been granted. He had, in the metaphorical terms of his

church, been jilted for Christ, and was expected to smile as he gave away the bride.

That had been the beginning of the end of Rhea's faith: seeing Donny Handsome stumble around

P-Town like a zombie, smiling aimlessly. She had refused to believe that the universe and butterflies could

have been made by so sadistic a God. Now, why hadn't she ever thought to convert such a splendidly

awful antinomy into a story before?

Her craft-mind went to work on the idea now. Just put it down, as it had happened? No, it was always

best to change it in the telling, she found: the way it changed told you what was most important to keep.

Besides, that made it art and not journalism. Did she need the Catholicism angle, for instance? Or could

she change it to some other, equally inflexible faith? With celibate clergy . . . hmmmm, weren't a lot of

those left anymore these days. Weren't a lot of Catholics left, for that matter. Maybe it didn't even need

to have religion in it at all. But if not, what else had that same implacable weight?

She tried an old trick. Refine it all down to a single sentence: the sentence that the suffering protagonist

screams (even if only inside) at the moment that the point enters the belly. Then throw out everything that

doesn't lead inexorably to that scream. Okay, what was Donny Handsome's scream?

My beloved, how can you want to go where I cannot follow?

In the instant of that crystallization, Rhea knew what the story was really about . . . and knew that she

could not write it. No matter how she disguised it dramatically. Not yet. And maybe never.

She told the story idea to get lost. Until she knew what its ending was.

* * *

She went to the window—missing the sudden chill that used to come from December windows when she

was a little girl—and pulled aside the ancient curtain to look out at the night. And was rewarded. In the

distance, above the shadowy housetops of P-Town, the silhouette of the Pilgrim Monument showed

clearly against the night sky, an eighty-five-meter tower of grey granite—and poised beside it, midway up

its length, seeming to be only meters from its crenulated stone windows, was a brilliant crescent moon.

The juxtaposition was weirdly beautiful, quintessential Provincetown magic. Rhea became conscious of

her breath. It swept her mind clear—of the captive story idea and her ongoing concerns and the day's

cares and her self. She watched without thought for a timeless time, long enough for the moon to climb

perceptibly higher up the Monument.

She became aware of herself then, and let the curtain fall closed. She felt a sudden close connection with

the child she had once been in this room, in this house, in this town. More than that, deeper than that—a

connection with the family that had raised her here, and with their forebears, fishermen and fishermen's

wives, back seven or eight generations to old Frank Henrique Paixao, who had gone over the side of a

Portuguese whaler in a two-man dory off Newfoundland one cold day in 1904. He and his partner Louis

Tomaz had successfully gotten themselves lost in the fog, miraculously survived to reach Glace Bay in

Cape Breton, landed there without formalities or paperwork, and somehow made their way overland

across the border and down the coast to Massachusetts, eventually fetching up in P-Town. The cod

fishing there was as good as they had heard. After five years or so, both men had sent for their families

back in Portugal, and settled down to founding dynasties in the New World—just as the Pilgrim

Monument was being raised.

Rhea felt that Frank's wife Marion must have seen the Monument and moon looking just like this more

than once, and could not help listening for the echo of her ancestor's thoughts. She heard only the sighing

of night winds outside.

She sighed in accompaniment, went to the mirror and ran a brush through her hair. She was ready to join

Rand in bed. A month he'd been home already, and she was just getting used to having him around again.

Every home should have a husband. She shut off the light with a wall switch and left the bathroom,

walked down the short hallway to the bedroom. In her mind's eye she was still seeing the slow dance of

Monument and moon in the crisp cold starlight as she opened the bedroom door and stepped into the

New Mexico desert at high noon. * * *

Rhea was so startled she closed the door by backing into it. The sudden sense ofdistance, of vast

expanse, was as staggering as the sudden brightness. The horizon was unimaginably far away; she saw a

distant dark smudge, bleeding purple from beneath onto the ground below, and realized it was a

thunderstorm large enough to drench a county. Between her and the horizon were endless miles of

painted desert, broken occasionally by foothills and jagged rock outcroppings; close at hand were scrub

hills and cacti and a dry wash. Right before her was an oasis, a natural watering hole. Beside it was an

old-fashioned wooden bedframe with a curved solid oak headboard and a thick mattress. On the bed

reclined one of Rhea's favorite holostars, dressed only in black silk briefs. He was nearly two meters tall,

as dark as her, and glistening with perspiration or oil. He was holding out a canteen toward her, smiling

invitingly.

She discovered she was thirsty. Hot in this desert. She stepped forward and accepted the canteen. The

hand that offered it was warm. He was real, then. Icy cold water, sweet and pure. He looked even better

up close. She handed back the canteen. He moved over to make room. She let the robe fall from her

shoulders and drop to the sand. His eyes went up and down her slowly, as she took off the nightgown

and dropped that too. She stepped out of her slippers; the sand felt strangely furry. She spun around

once, taking in the vast silent desert that receded into infinity in all directions, and leaped into the bed.

That started it bouncing, and it did not stop for some time.

She nearly drifted into sleep afterward, the desert sun warm on her back and buttocks and legs. But an

inner voice caused her to rouse herself and nudge her celebrity companion. Might as well get it over with.

"That was really wonderful, darling," she said sleepily. "All of it. But really—purple rain?"

His famous features melted and ran, becoming the familiar face of her husband. His hair lightened to red

and his complexion to fair. "No, honest—I've seen it, outside of Santa Fe. Near the pueblos. Just that

color. I've wanted to show it to you." Rand reached out a lazy arm, did something complicated to nothing

at all in mid-air, and the desert sun diminished sharply in brightness without leaving the center of the sky.

The effect was of a partial eclipse: twilight with the shadows in the wrong places. Power of suggestion

made the temperature seem to drop, or perhaps he had dialed that, too; they slid under the covers

together.

"I'm glad you did," she said, snuggling. "It's lovely." She looked around at the dusky desert, noting small

excellences of detail. An eagle to the east, gliding majestically. Intricate cactus flowers, no two quite

alike. Ripples on the surface of the water in the oasis, seeming to be wind-driven. Microfilaments of

lightning, convincingly random, flickering in that distant purple rain. "This is the best one yet. Is the music

this far along too?"

He shook his head. "Just some ideas, so far. But having the basic visual will help."

"I'm sure it will. It was a beautiful gift, really. The setand the sex. Thank you."

He grinned. "You're welcome. I'm glad you liked it."

"Verymuch. So . . . what's the catch?"

"Catch?" he asked innocently.

The reason she knew there was a catch was because it was not possible for her husband to conceal

something important from her, not while making love. But she could not let him know that, so she made

up a logic-chain. "It's not our anniversary. It's not my birthday. I don't keep score, but I don'tthink I've

been unusually nice to you lately. You're not having an affair; you haven't hadtime. It was a wonderful

present and I thank you for it, and"—she grinned and poked him in the ribs—"what is it going to cost

me?"

He opened his mouth as if to say something, changed his mind, and reached out into the empty air beside

the bed again, typing new commands onto his invisible keyboard. The desert went away. So did

everything, except the bed and themselves. All at once they were in space, surrounded by blackness and

blazing stars, tumbling slowly end over end. High Orbit: the Earth swam into their field of view, huge and

blue and frosted with clouds. The illusion was so powerful that Rhea felt herself clutching at the bed to

keep from drifting away from it, even though she knew better. All at once the rotating universe burst into

song. Rand's fourth symphony, of course, as familiar to her as her name. He muted the sound with a

gesture after a few bars, left the visual running.

It was her heart plummeting; that was what made the illusion of free-fall seem so real. "But—but you're

not going up again for another eight months—"

"Things have changed, love," he said. "I mean, really changed. Sit down."

"Sit down? I'mlying down, what the hell do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

She lay back. "Okay, I'm `sitting down.' Go on."

"My brother called. While I was down at the shore a while ago."

"Oh? How is Jay? Cancel that, I don't give a damn how he is: what did he say?"

"Pribhara bombed. Big-time. She hates space, the customers hate her—even the company hates her

new work. But most important of all, she says she just can't adapt. She's a born perpendicular. So she's

thrown in the towel . . . a few seconds before they would have yanked it out of her hand."

Rhea was confused. She knew there was a booby-trap in this somewhere, but couldn't find one big

enough to justify all this buildup yet. "So that's good news, right? Now there are only three of you

competing—"

"It goes beyond that," he said, looking uncomfortable. He dithered with his invisible controls until their

shared rotation in space slowed and stopped. The starry universe stabilized around them.

She took a deep breath. "Tell me."

"The competition is over," he said. "I won."

"What?" she cried in dismay. "Youwon?"

It was only that: a misplaced emphasis. Had she said, "Youwon ?"there might not have been a quarrel at

all. That night, at least.

Rand had been one of four competitors for a plum position: Co-Artistic Director and Resident

Shaper/Composer at the legendary Shimizu Hotel, the first hotel in High Earth Orbit and still by far the

grandest. The creator and first holder of that position had held it with great distinction for fifty

years—then a year ago, both he and his heir apparent had been killed in the same freak blowout while

vacationing off Luna. Replacing an artist of Willem Ngani's stature overnight had been a daunting task: the

management of the hotel had narrowed the field to four candidates, and then found itself unable to reach

a final decision. It had elected instead to postpone the question for a three-year trial period. The first year

of that period was nearly over: each of the four candidates in turn had gone to space for a three-month

residency at the Shimizu. Rand had drawn the third shift, and had only returned from his own highly

successful season a month earlier; the fourth and final composer, Chandra Pribhara, was supposed to be

just now entering the second month of her own first residency.

But Pribhara had turned out to be a "perpendicular"—one of those rare unfortunates who simply cannot

adapt to space, who cannot make the mental readjustment that allows a human being to retain her sanity

in a sustained zero-gravity environment. She had abruptly canceled her contract after only a single month

in free-fall, accepting the huge penalties and creative disgrace, and returned to Earth early.

This left the Shimizu's management with a quick decision to make. A hotel must have entertainment. The

show must go on. The Resident Choreographer—Rand's half-brother Jay Sasaki—needed a Shaper to

collaborate with.Someone had to replace Pribhara, fast. They might have simply advanced the rotation

schedule, summoned Wolfgar Mazurski back to orbit two months earlier than he was expecting, and

continued from there on a three-shift rotation while they pondered their final decision. But Mazurski had

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