The Stardancer was unplugged from the Starmind, thinking with only her own brain. The vast System-wide flow of telepathic information from the millions of Stardancers who made up the Starmind passed through her, but she did not pay any conscious attention to it, and sent nothing back out into the matrix.
A year ago, something she still did not fully understand had told her that she needed to be still and meditate. She had been engaged in the form of meditation that worked best for her—dancing—continuously ever since. This sort of unplugging was not unusual; at any given time, as many as several thousand Stardancers might be out of rapport, dropping in or out of the matrix as suited them, and as they could be spared from ongoing tasks. Having accepted the alien gift of Symbiosis, they were all untroubled by the need to eat, drink or sleep, and were impervious to fatigue. Furthermore they were effectively immortal, or at least very long-lived, which tended to produce a meditative state of mind.
To an observer unfamiliar with Symbiosis, she might have seemed to resemble a human being in an old-fashioned, bulky red pressure suit—without air tanks or thrusters or transparent hood. But she was not human, anymore, and the red covering was literally a part of her; the organic Symbiote with which she had merged forty-four years earlier. Designed by the enigmatic alien Fireflies to be the perfect complement to the human metabolism, Symbiote protected against cold and vacuum, turned waste products into fuel, could be spun out at will into an effective solar sail . . . and conferred telepathy with all others in Symbiosis.
It also required sunlight, of course, like all living things. She was now, orbiting Saturn, almost as far as she could get from Sol without artificial life-support in the form of a photon source. But she did not feel cold . . . any more than she had felt hot when, decades earlier, she had traveled to the other extreme end of her range, the orbit of Mercury.
She had selected an orbit high enough above Saturn's mighty Ring to free her from concerns about navigational safety in that endless river of rock. Her visual field was perhaps the most beautiful the Solar System had to offer, so beautiful that she had almost ceased to see it. And even her harshest critic—herself—could not have said that her presence there detracted from the view, for she had been a gifted dancer even before she had entered Symbiosis. A tape of the past year's dancing would have fetched a high price on Earth. But this was hers and hers alone. As her body flung itself energetically through the near-vacuum, her mind was utterly still; she had long since reached that much-sought state in which one is not even thinking about not thinking. She was pure awareness, fully present yet leaving no trace.
Since she had once been a human being, there was a very primitive part of her mind which was never still for long, and in that part something like daydreaming took place from time to time. Sometimes it reached out across the immensity that engulfed her and touched the similar places in the minds of her most beloved ones, as if to reassure itself that they still existed and that all was well with them. As it went down the list, brushing against each mind, her dance unconsciously changed so as to express them and her relationship with them. Thus an occasionally recurring series of motifs ran through the dance: a sort of kinetic giggle that was her youngest child Gemma, followed by the syncopated, slightly off-rhythm movements that represented Olney Dvorak, the Stardancer she had conceived Gemma with . . . and so on, down to her eldest, forty-three-year-old Lashi, and his human father—
—it was at that point that her back spasmed and she screamed.
Any telepathic scream is strident and shocking enough; when it comes from one who has been in deep meditation for a year, every Stardancer in the Solar System flinches. And comes running to see what is wrong and what must be done about it. At once, the Starmind enfolded her like a womb, probing gently to learn the nature of her hurt.
But even she did not know.
The only clue was the word she had screamed: the name of her first co-parent. I just touched him, she told the others, and suddenly I knew something was wrong. Everything is wrong.
He was in the hookup, of course, and as baffled as she was. He reported that as far as he knew, nothing specific was wrong. He was in a region of great potential danger, but he had been there for half a century now. He was presently engaged in a delicate and complex task, with elements of almost inconceivable danger in it, but as far as he could tell it was shaping correctly.
Since there was absolutely no explanation for her terror, she could not shake it off. Unreasonable fears are the hardest to conquer. She wanted to scan and analyze every second of his memories of the last several weeks at least, looking for clues to the danger, but since he was not a full-fledged Stardancer she could not probe as deeply as she wanted. Their son Lashi joined her, and they probed together.
The results were still ambiguous.
So Lashi turned his attention to his mother. When did you first become aware that something was wrong?
When I screamed.
But how long before that could something have gone wrong? When was the last time you had monitored Father?
She thought about it. Yesterday, I think. And everything was fine then.
And we know what has changed in the last twenty-four hours. So we know where the danger lies.
Lashi's father said, But why are they any more dangerous to me today than they were yesterday?
I don't care, she wanted to say. Can't you get out of there? But she could not ask that, because she already knew the answer.
I don't know, she said instead. But dammit, you be careful!
You know I will, Rain, he replied.