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 isnot 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 s.p.a.ce-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 (throughall 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 sacrificesnothing 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 asfoolishly 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 c.h.i.n.ks 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 s.p.a.ce itself, free of the womb altogether.

There is less than no future in being a Neo-Neanderthal . . . for thenext evolutionary Jump isalready 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 a.n.a.log 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.

BAEN BOOKS by SPIDER ROBINSON.

The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson) Starmind(with Jeanne Robinson) Deathkiller User Friendly Lifehouse By Any Other Name