Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson - Starseed.pdf - Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson - widez2

***Acknowledgments

We'd like to thank master roboticist Guy Immega for technical assistance in matters scientific, and

Zoketsu Norman Fischer for technical assistance in matters of Zen. (Any mistakes, however, are

ours, not theirs.) We also thank Dr. Oliver Robinow, Anya Coveney-Hughes, Herb Varley, David

Myers, Evelyn Beheshti, Don H. DeBrandt, Greg McKinnon, Lynn Katey, all the members of

Jeanne's women's group and of course our patient and long-suffering agent, Eleanor Wood of the

Spectrum Agency, for various kinds of aid and comfort without which we might never have finished

this book. And we thank our editors, Susan Allison and Peter Heck

In addition to the sources cited in the Acknowledgments of our original Stardance novel, we drew

upon Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck,

Walkabout Woman by Michaela Roessner. How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space? by William

R. Pogue, Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins, and Zen to Go by Jon Winokur, in completing this

book Further assistance was derived from Kenya AA and Kona Fancy coffee, Old Bushmill's

whiskey, and the music of Johnny Winter (who was playing tar 20 meters away while Jeanne wrote

the Prologue), Ray Charles, Frank Zappa, Harry Connick, Jr., Benjamin Jonah Wolfe, Davey

Graham, Michael Hedges, "Spider" John Koerner, and Mr. Amos Garrett, as well as Co-Op Radio

and all the other jazz and blues FM stations received in Vancouver.

-Vancouver, B.C. 4 August 1990

Prologue

When Buddha transmitted our practice to Maha Kashyapa he just picked up a flower with a smile.

Only Maha Kashyapa understood what meant. No one else there understood. We do not know if this

is a historical event or not-but it means something ..

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

ZEN MIND, BEGINNER'S-MIND (italics added)

I always danced.

Like all babies I was born kicking; I just never stopped. All during my childhood it was that way. In

the 1980s Gambier Island had a permanent population of about sixty, which no more than doubled in

the summer but it sure had a lot of theatres, with proscenium stages. The garden, the livingroom, a

certain clearing in the woods near Aunt Anya's place . . . I danced in them all, and most of all in my

room with the door closed. Sometimes there was thunderous applause; sometimes I danced for no

one but myself; sometimes for intimate friends who vanished at a knock on the door. I remember

clearly the moment I first understood that dancing was what I was going to do with my life.

Near sunset in late summer, 1985. Dinner and chores finished. My feet tickled. I told Dad where I

was going, avoided Mom, and slipped out through the shed without banging the door. It was a

kilometer and a half to the government wharf. The afternoon had been warm and wet-wet enough, I

thought, to keep most of our neighbors indoors, and most boats at anchor. As I came over the last

crest of the road and started down to the wharf I saw I was right: I had the place to myself.

I began to run down the hill, kicking off my shoes and tossing m jacket to the side of the road. At

the far end of the wharf I slowed and carefully descended the swaying gangway to the big dock-float

down at water level. I turned halfway down and scanned the shoreline one more time to be sure. No

one in sight. I circled around the boathouse at the foot of the gangway. The boathouse cut off sight

of the land; there was nothing but me and the sea and the islands in the distance, grey-green

mountains rising from the water. The water was highlit with sparkles of colour from the sun setting

behind me over the forest. A warm mist came and went, invisibly. Even dry clothes are a nuisance

when you dance. My clothes went under the rowboat that lay turtle-backed against the boathouse.

The float's surface was rough enough for safe footing when wet, but soft enough for bare feet.

I turned my back to the land and faced the sea. There are bigger theatres, but not on Earth. My

parents were unreconstructed hippies, quasi-Buddhist; for their sake I bowed to the sea . . . then

waved to it for my own: the sober, dignified wave a serious artist gives her public when she is eleven

years old. A passing gave gull my cue. Ladies and gentlemen, Rain McLeod! The music swelled …

I've become too sophisticated to remember the steps I improvised. They must have been some

mutant amalgamation of what I thought ballet was, and all the Other Kinds of dance I'd felt in my

body but had no names for then. Nomenclature doesn't matter to an eleven-year-old: I danced, and

what was in my heart came out my limbs and torso. I've wished since that I could still dance like that,

but I've lost the necessary ignorance. I do remember that I was very happy. Complete.

Someone in the back row coughed-

Zalophus Californianus. A sea lion. Distinguished from harbor seals, even at that distance, by the

distinct ears. Passing Gambier on his way back home from a day of raiding. Fishermen hate sea

lions, call them pirates of the sea. They'll take one bite from each fish in your net, spoiling the whole

catch . . . then leave with the best one, waving it at you mockingly as they go. I always secretly liked

them.

They always danced: so it seemed to me. Drama and tragedy in the water; slapstick comedy when

they were on land. He was perhaps fifty meters due east of the dock, treading water and staring at

me. He coughed again, sounding very much like Grandfather.

I didn't let him interrupt me. I worked a friendly hello wave into what I was doing, and kept on

dancing. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye from time to time, watching me in apparent

puzzlement, but he was no more distraction than a cloud - or gull would have been-

-until there were two of him.

For a moment I "treaded water" myself, planting my feet so I faced them and dancing only with

torso and arms. They were identical, grey and wet, a few meters apart, their eyes and slick heads

glistening with reflected sunset. The new one gave a cough of its own, softer and higher. Grandfather

and Grandmother Meade. They watched me with no discernible expression at all, giving me their

complete attention, perfect bobbing Buddhas.

So I danced for them.

Well, at them. I made no attempt to "translate" what I was feeling into Sea Lion dance, to mimic the

body-language I'd seen them use, so they could understand better. Even at eleven I was arrogant

enough to be more interested in teaching them my dance language, telling them who I was. When

you're that young, expressing yourself is better than being understood. So I continued to dance in

Human, and for the whole cycloramic world of sea and sunset-but began subtly aiming it at the sea

lions, as though they were the two important critics in a packed theatre, or my actual grandparents

come to see my solo debut.

What luck, to have spent my childhood so far from Vancouver's ballet classes that no one had yet

told me how I was supposed to move. I was still able to move the way I needed to, to invent

anything my heart required. It felt good, that's all this highly trained forty six-year-old can remember.

For a time machine and video gear, you can have anything I own.

The sea lions were twenty meters closer, and there were four of them now.

They were treading water in ragged formation, close enough for me to see whiskers. By logical

extension of my original whimsy, the new arrivals were the paternal grandparents I'd never met, the

McLeods. Ghosts in the audience. It gave an added layer of meaning to what I was doing, as much

awareness of mortality and eternity as an eleven-year-old is capable of. I danced on.

The first breezes of evening found the sweat under my hair and on my chest and chilled them. I

increased my energy output to compensate. I was grinning, spinning.

Seven sea lions. Twenty meters away, faces absolutely blank, staring.

Everything came together-sea, sky, purple clouds of sunset, sea lions-to generate that special magic

always sought and so seldom found. I lost myself; the dance began dancing me. It burst out of me

like laughter or tears, without thought or effort. My legs were strong, wind infinite, ideas came, every

experiment worked and suggested the next. There's a special state of being, the backwards of a

trance, where you transcend yourself and become a part of everything-where you seem to stand still,

while the world dances around and through you. Many dancers never experience it. I'd been to that

level a few times before, for fleeting moments. This time I knew I could stay as long as I wanted.

Time stopped; I went on.

Even an eleven-year-old has limits; every dance has a natural, logical end. Eventually with warm

contentment and mild regret, I left Nirvana and returned to the world of illusion again. I was still,

upright, arms upthrust toward the clouds, reaching for the unseen stars.

The float was ringed by more than a dozen sea lions, the farthest within five meters of me. I looked

round at them all, half-expecting them to clap and bark like cartoon seals. They stared at me.

Bobbing in silent syncopation, seeming to be thinking about what they'd just seen. My first applause.

I bowed, deeply.

And then waved, grandly.

Darkness was falling fast. Sweat dripped from me, my soles tingled, and many muscles announced

their intention to wake up stiff tomorrow. I was perfectly happy.

This, I thought, is what I'm supposed to do, My Thing, as Mom was always calling it: what I would

do with my life. I understood now what I had always sensed, that Mom was going to hate it (though

I didn't yet understand why) ... but that didn't matter anymore.

Maybe that's when you become an adult. When your parents' opinions no longer control.

I kept silent when I returned home that night. But the next day I called Grandmother in Vancouver,

and told her that she had won the tug of war with my mother. I moved into her huge house on the

mainland, and let her enroll me in ballet class, and in normal school, like other kids. Within weeks I

had been teased so much over the name "Rain M'Cloud" (which had never struck anyone on

Gambier Island as odd) that I changed it to Morgan. It seemed to me a much more dignified name

for a ballerina.

It was a long time before I saw Gambier Island again.

I always danced. But from the day of the sea lions, dancing was just about all I did, all I was. For

thirty-two years. Until the day came when my body simply would not do it anymore. The day in

April of 2017 when Doctor Thompson and Doctor Immega told me that even more surgery would

not help, that I could never dance again. My Lower back and knees were spent.

I tried the dancer's classic escape hatches for a few years. Choreography. Teaching. When they

didn't work for me, I tried living without dance. I even tried relationships again. Nothing worked.

Including me. There were lots of trained, experienced professionals looking. for work, as

technological progress made more and more occupational specialties obsolete. There were few job

openings for a forty-six-year-old who couldn't even type. Even the traditional unskilled-labour jobs

were increasingly being done by robots. Sure, I could go back to school, and in only a few years of

drudgery acquire a new profession-ideally, one which would not be obsolete by the time I graduated.

But what for? Nothing interested me.

The salt of the earth had lost its savor.

I went back to Gambier Island. By now it was becoming a suburb of Vancouver; even in winter

there were stores and cars and paved roads and burglaries. There was talk of a condominium

complex. I sat for six months in the cabin where I had been born, waiting for some great answer to

come from out of the sky. I visited my parents' graves frequently. Sat zazen in the woods. Split

cords of wood. Read, the first twenty pages of a dozen books Walked the parts of the Island that

were still wild, by day and night. Nature accepted my presence amiably enough, but offered no

answers. Nothing.

I went down to the wharf and consulted the sea lions, as I had many times. They had nothing to

say. They just looked at me, as if waiting for me to begin dancing.

After enough days of that, "nothing" started to look good to me. I filled out the Euthanasia

application I had brought with me, putting down "earliest possible" for Date and leaving the space

for Reason blank. I'd have a response within a week or two; by the end of the month, unless I

changed my mind, my problems would be over.

In my bones, I was a dancer, And I couldn't dance anymore.

Not anywhere on Earth ...

That very night I was lying in the hammock behind the house, watching the stars, when my eye was

caught by a large bright one. It moved relative to the other stars, so it was a satellite. It moved

roughly north to south, and was quite largee: it had to be Top Step. Funny I'd never thought of it

before. The House the Stardance Built, as the media called it. Transplanted asteroid, parting gift of

alien gods the place where they made angels out of people. Hollow stone cigar, phallic womb in High

Orbit. Gateway to immortality, to the stars, to freedom from every kind of human . fear or need there

was . . . and all it cost was everything you had, forever.

Dancers say, you go where the work is. Suddenly, at age forty-six, I had nowhere to go but up.

Chapter 1

What shall it harm a man

If he loseth the whole world,

Yet gaineth his soul?

-Linda Parsons

14th Epistle to the Corinthians

And Anyone Else Who Might Be Listening;

transmission received 8 May 2005

Hundreds of thoughts ran through my head as the Valkyrie song of the engines began to rise in

pitch. But most of them seemed to be variations on a single theme, and the name of the theme was

this: Farewell-Forever-to Weight.

So many different kinds of weight!

Physical weight, of course. I had been hauling around more than fifty kilos of muscle and . bone for

the better part of four decades-and like all dancers, cursing every gram, even after I switched from

ballet to modern. (That's 110 pounds, if you're an American. Any normal person would have

considered me bone-thin, but the ghost of Balanchine, damn his eyes, has haunted dancers for over

half a century.)

Soon I would have no weight for the first time in my life, and for the rest of it-only my mass would

remain to convince me I existed. A purist, they had told us at Suit Camp, will insist that there is no

such thing as zero gravity, anywhere in the universe . . . only degrees of gravity, from micro to

macro. But where I was going-any now-I would experience microgravity too faint to be perceived

without subtle instruments, so it would be zero as far as I was concerned.

It should have been a dancer's finest moment. To leap so high that you never come down again . . .

wasn't that what all of us wanted? Why did I feel such a powerful impulse to bolt for the nearest exit

while I still could?

Weight had always been my shame, and my secret friend, and my necessary enemy-the thing I

became beautiful in the act of defying. In a sense, to an extent, weight had defined me.

In the end it had beaten me. I could try to kid myself that I was outmaneuvering it ... but what I was

doing was escaping it, leaving the field of battle in defeat, conceding victory.

But the physical weight was probably least in my thoughts as I sat there in my comfortable seat, on

my way to a place where the concept of a comfortable seat had no meaning.

Do you have any idea how many kinds of weight each human carries? Even the most fortunate of

us?

The weight of two million years of history and more ...

Until this century, all the humans that had ever lived walked the earth, worked to stay erect, strove

to eat and drink and to get food and drink for their children, sought shelter from the elements,

yearned to acquire wealth, struggled to be understood. Everyone's every ancestor needed to

eliminate their wastes and feared their deaths: Every one of its lived and died alone, locked in a bone

cell, plagued by need and fear and hunger and thirst and loneliness and certainty of pain and death.

That long a heritage of sorrow is a weight, whose awful magnitude you can only begin to sense with

the prospect of its ending.

And in a time measurable in months, all that weight was going to leave me, (if) when I entered

Symbiosis. Allegedly forever, or some significant fraction thereof I would never again need food or

drink or shelter, never again be alone or afraid.

On the other hand, I could never again return to Earth. And some people maintained that I would no

longer be a human being ...

Now tell me: isn't that a kind of dying?

Not to mention the small but unforgettable possibility that joining a telepathic community might burn

out my brain-no, more accurately and more horribly: burn out my mind.

Then there was the weight of my own personal emotional and spiritual baggage. Perhaps that should

have been as nothing beside the weight of two million years, but it didn't feel that way. I was forty-six

and my lifework was irrevocably finished, and I was the only person in all the world to whom that

mattered. Why not go become a god? Or at least some kind of weird red angel ...

Somewhere in there, among all my tumbling thoughts, was a little joke about the extremes some

women will go to in order to lose weight, but no matter how many times that joke went throumy

head-and it was easily dozens-it refused to be funny, even once.

The Completist's Diet: you give up everything. That was another.

There were quite a few jokes in that cascade of last-minute thoughts, but none of them was funny,

and I knew that none of my seventy-one fellow passengers wanted to hear them. There was a

compulsive joker aboard, at the back of the cabin and to my right, loudly telling jokes, but no one

was paying the slightest bit of attention to him. He didn't seem to mind. Even he didn't laugh at any

of his witticisms.

The engine song which was the score for my thoughts reached a crescendo, and the joker shut up

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