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Starmind

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART F0UR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

PART EIGHT

PART NINE

EPILOGUE

Starmind

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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

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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.

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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 a phuff , 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 classic The 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 journal Tricycle; Murray Louis for

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

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

and translating the eerily appropriate hauta 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 in Starmind 's two prequels, Stardance and Starseed , and the ones

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

of Living and Dying , by Sogyal Rinpoche; and Thich Nhat Hanh's T ouching Peace . Musical

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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. But this tale is now

complete.

—Spider & Jeanne Robinson

Vancouver, British Columbia

24 October 1993

PART ONE

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

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