The Stardance Trilogy (12 page)

“Charlie—”

“I’m straight, I tell you. I’m starting a company. And a school. I’m offering you a half interest and a full-time, year-round job, dead serious, and I’ll need you to start right away. Norrey, I want you to come dance in free fall.”

Her face went blank. “How?”

“I want to build a studio in orbit and form a company. We’ll alternate performing with school like so: three months of classes dirtside—essentially auditions—and the graduates get to come study for three months in orbit. Any that are any good, we work into the next three months of performance taping. By then we’ve been in low or no gee for a long time, our bodies are starting to adapt, so we take three months vacation on Earth and then start the process over again. We can use the vacations to hunt out likely talent and recruit ’em—go concert-hopping, in other words. It’ll be
fun
, Norrey. We’ll make history and money both.”

“
How
, Charlie? How are you going to get the backing for all this? Carrington’s dead, and I won’t work for his associates. Who else but Skyfac and the Space Command have space capacity?”

“Us.”

“?”

“You and me. We
own
the
Stardance
tape, Norrey. I’ll show it to you later, I have a dub in my pouch. At this point maybe a hundred people on Earth and a few dozen in space have seen that tape in its entirety. One of them was the president of Sony. He offered me a blank check.”

“A blank—”

“Literally. Norrey, the
Stardance
may be the single most magnificent artistic utterance of man—irrespective of its historical importance and news value. I would estimate that within five years every sighted person in the solar system will know it. And we own the only tape.
And
, I own the only existing footage of Shara dancing on Earth, commercial value incalculable. Rich? Hell, we’re
powerful!
Skyfac Incorporated is so anxious to come out of this looking good that if I phone up to Ring One and ask Tokugawa for the time, he’ll take the next elevator down and give me his watch.”

Her hands dropped from my sweater. I wiped apricot from one limp elbow, dried the other.

“I don’t feel squeamish about profiting from Shara’s death. We made the
Stardance
, together, she and I; I earned my half and she left you hers. The only thing wrong with that is that it leaves me filthy rich, and I don’t want to be rich—not on
this
planet. The only way I can think of to piss away that kind of money in a way Shara would have approved is to start a company and a school. We’ll specialize in misfits, the ones who for one reason or another don’t fit into the mold here on Earth. Like Shara. The less than classically perfect dancer’s bodies. That stuff is just irrelevant in space. More important is the ability to open yourself, to learn a whole new kind of dance, to…I don’t know if this will make any sense…to encompass three hundred and sixty degrees. We’ll be making the rules as we go along—and we’ll employ a lot of dancers that aren’t working now. I figure our investment capital is good for about five years. By that time the performing company should be making enough to cover the nut, underwrite the school, and still show a profit. All the company members share equally. Are you in?”

She blinked, sat back, and took a deep breath. “In what? What have you got?”

“Not a damn thing,” I said cheerily. “But I know what I need. It’ll take us a couple of years to get started at the very least. We’ll need a business manager, a stage manager, three or four other dancers who can teach. A construction crew to get started, of course, and an elevator operator, but they’re just employees. My cameras run themselves, by Christ, and I’ll be my own gaffer. I can do it, Norrey—if you’ll help me. Come on—join my company and see the world—from a decent perspective.”

“Charlie, I…I don’t even know if I can
imagine
free fall dance, I mean, I’ve seen both of Shara’s shows several times of course, and I liked them a
lot
—but I still don’t know where you could go from there. I can’t picture it.”

“Of course not! You’re still hobbled with ‘up’ and ‘down,’ warped by a lifetime in a gravity well. But you’ll catch on as soon as you can get up there, believe me.” (A year from now my blithe confidence would haunt me.) “You can learn to think spherically, I know you can, the rest is just recoordination, like getting sea legs. Hell, if I can do it at my age, anybody can. You’ll make a
good
dancing partner.”

She had missed it the first time. Now her eyes enlarged.

“A good
what?
”

Norrey and I go back a long time, and I’d have to tell you about most of it to explain how I felt just then. Remember when Alistair Sim, as Scrooge, has just awakened from his nightmare and vowed to make amends? And the more nice things he does, and the more people gape at him in bafflement, the more he giggles? And finally he slaps himself in the face and says, “I don’t deserve to be this happy,” and tries to get properly chastened? And then he giggles again and says, “but I just can’t help myself,” and breaks up all over again?
That’s
how I felt. When a hangup of yours has been a burden to a friend for so many years, and all at once you not only realize that, but know that the burden is lifted, for both of you, there is an exquisite joy in sharing the news.

Remember how Scrooge sprung it on Bob Cratchit, by surprise? “…leaving me no alternative—but to raise your salary!” In the same childish way I had saved this, my
real
surprise Santa Claus announcement, for last. I intended to savor the moment.

But then I saw her eyes and I just said it flat out.

“The leg is functional in free fall, Norrey. I’ve been working out, hard, every day since I got back dirtside. It’s a little stiff, and I’ll—we’ll—always have to choreograph around it to some extent. But it does everything a weightless dancer needs it to.
I can dance again
.”

She closed her eyes, and the lids quivered. “Oh my God.” Then she opened them and laughed and cried at once, “Oh my God, Charlie, oh my God, oh my God,” and she reached across the table and grabbed my neck and pulled me close and I got apricot and coffee on my own elbows, and oh her tears were hot on my neck.

The place had gotten busy while we talked; no one seemed to notice us. I held her head in the hollow of my throat, and marveled. The only true measure of pain is relief—only in that moment, as layers of scar tissue sloughed off my heart, did I perceive their true weight for the first time.

Finally we were both cried out, and I pulled back and sought her eyes. “I can dance again, Norrey. It was Shara who showed me, I was too damn dumb to notice, too blocked to see it. It was about the last thing she ever did. I can’t throw that away now; I’ve got to dance again, you see? I’m going to go back to space and dance, on my own property and on my own terms and fucking dance again.

“And I want to dance with
you
, Norrey. I want you to be my partner. I want you to come dance with me. Will you come?”

She sat up straight and looked me in the eye. “Do you know what you are asking me?”

Hang on—here we go!
I took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m asking for a full partnership.”

She sat back in her chair and got a faraway look. “How many years have we known each other, Charlie?”

I had to think. “I make it twenty-four years, off and on.”

She smiled. “Yeah. Off and on.” She retrieved the forgotten joint and relit it, took a long hit. “How much of that time do you estimate we’ve spent living together?”

More arithmetic; I toked while I computed. “Call it six or seven years.” Exhale. “Maybe eight.”

She nodded reflectively and took the joint back. “Some pretty crumby times.”

“Norrey—”

“Shut up, Charlie. You waited twenty-four years to propose to me, you can shut up and wait while I give you my answer. How many times would you estimate I came down to the drunk tank and bailed you out?”

I didn’t flinch. “Too many.”

She shook her head. “One less than too many. I’ve taken you in when you needed it and thrown you out when you needed it and never once said the word ‘love,’ because I knew it would scare you away. You were so damned afraid that anyone might love you, because then they’d have to pity you for being a cripple. So I’ve sat by and watched you give your heart only to people who wouldn’t take it—and then picked up the pieces every time.”

“Norrey—”

“Shut up,” she said. “Smoke this digit and shut up. I’ve loved you since before you knew me, Charlie, before your leg got chopped up, when you were still dancing. I knew you before you were a cripple. I loved you before I ever saw you offstage. I knew you before you were a lush, and I’ve loved you all the years since in the way that you wanted me to.

“Now you come before me on two legs. You still limp, but you’re not a cripple anymore. Fat Humphrey the telepath doesn’t give you wine with your meal, and when I kiss you at the studio I notice you didn’t have a drink on the plane. You buy me dinner and you babble about being rich and powerful and you try to sell me some crack-brained scheme for dancing in space, you have the goddam
audacity
to lay all this on me and
never once say the word ‘love’ with your mouth
and ask me to be your other half again.” She snatched the roach out of my hand. “God dammit, Cratchit, you leave me no alternative…”

And she actually paused and toked and held it and exhaled before she let the smile begin.

“…but to raise your fucking salary.”

And we were both holding hands in the apricots and grinning like gibbons. Blood roared in my ears; I literally shuddered with emotion too intense to bear. I groped for a cathartic wisecrack. “Who said I was buying dinner?”

A high, nasal voice from nearby said, “I’m buying, Mr. Armstead.”

We looked up, startled to discover that the world still existed around us, and were further startled.

He was a short, slight young man. My first impression was of cascades of ringlets of exceedingly curly black hair, behind which lurked a face like a Brian Froud drawing of a puckish elf. His glasses were twin rectangles of wire and glass, thicker than the glass in airlock doors, and at the moment they were on the end of his nose. He squinted down past them at us, doing his best to look dignified. This was considerably difficult, as Fat Humphrey was holding him a clear foot off the floor, one big sausage-plate fist clutching his collar. His clothes were expensive and in excellent taste, but his boots were splendidly shabby. He was trying, unsuccessfully, not to kick his feet.

“Every time I pass your table I keep steppin’ on his ears,” Humphrey explained, bringing the little guy closer and lowering his voice. “So I figure him for a snoop or a newsie and I’m just givin’ him the bum’s rush. But if he’s talkin’ about buyin’, it’s your decision.”

“How about it, friend? Snoop or newsie?”

Insofar as it was possible, he drew himself up. “I am an artist.”

I queried Norrey with my eyes and was answered.

“Set that man down and get him a chair, Fat. We’ll discuss the check later.”

This was done, and the kid accepted the last of the roach, hitching his tunic into shape and pushing his glasses back up.

“Mr. Armstead, you don’t know me, and I don’t know this lady here, but I’ve got these terrific ears and no shame at all. Mr. Pappadopolous is right, I was eavesdropping just great. My name is Raoul Brindle, and—”

“I’ve heard of you,” Norrey said. “I have a few of your albums.”

“I do too,” I agreed. “The next to the last one was terrific.”

“Charlie, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Raoul blinked furiously. “No, he’s right. The last one was trash. I owed a pound and paid.”

“Well, I liked it. I’m Norrey Drummond.”

“You’re Norrey
Drummond
?”

Norrey got a familiar look. “Yes. Her sister.”

“Norrey Drummond of TDT, that choreographed
Shifting Gears
and danced the
Question An Dancer
variations at the Vancouver conference, that—” He stopped, and his glasses slid down his nose. “Ohmigod. Shara Drummond is your
sister
? Ohmigod, of course. Drummond. Drummond, sisters, imbecile.” He sat on his excitement and hitched up his glasses and tried to look dignified some more.

For my money he pulled it off. I knew something about Raoul Brindle, and I was impressed. He’d been a child-genius composer, and then in his college days he’d decided music was no way to make a living and became one of the best special effects men in Hollywood. Right after
Time
did a half-page sidebar on his work of
Children of the Lens
—which I mightily admired—he released a video-cassette album composed entirely of extraordinary visuals, laser optics and color effects, with synthesizer accompaniment of his own. It was sort of
Yellow Submarine
cubed, and it had sold like hell and been followed by a half dozen more occasionally brilliant albums. He had designed and programmed the legendary million-dollar lightshow system for the Beatles’ reunion as a favor for McCartney, and one of his audio-only tapes followed my deck everywhere it went. I resolved to buy
his
dinner.

“So how do you know me well enough to spot me in a restaurant, Raoul, and why have you been dropping eaves?”

“I didn’t spot you here. I followed you here.”

“Sonofabitch, I never saw you. Well, what did you follow me for?”

“To offer you my life.”

“Eh?”

“I’ve seen the
Stardance
.”

“You
have
?” I exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “How did you pull that off?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “Large weather we’re having, isn’t it? So I saw the
Stardance
and I made it my business to find you and follow you, and now you’re going back to space to dance and I’m going with you. If I have to walk.”

“And do what?”

“You said yourself, you’re going to need a stage manager. But you haven’t thought it through. I’m going to create a new art form for you. I’m going to beat my brains to peanut butter for you. I’m going to design free-fall sets and visuals and do the scores, and they’ll both work integrally together and with the dances. I’ll work for coffee and cakes, you don’t even have to use my music if you don’t want to, but I
gotta
design those sets.”