The Stardance Trilogy (18 page)

Then
it was that the totality of my stupidity truly did become apparent to me. I was speechless. It was Norrey who said, “We accept,” on behalf of the company, at the same instant that Linda said the same thing for herself. And the snowflake reformed, much smaller in diameter.

Our company was formed.

As to the nature of our dance itself, there is not much to be said that the tapes themselves don’t already say. We borrowed a lot of vocabulary from New Pilobolus and the Contact Improv movement (which had been among the last spasms of inventiveness before that decade-long stasis in dance I mentioned earlier), but we had to radically adapt almost everything we borrowed. Although the Contact Improv people say they’re into “free fall,” this is a semantic confusion:
they
mean “falling freely;”
we
mean “free of falling.” But a lot of their discoveries
do
work, at least in some fashion, in zero gee—and we used what worked.

Linda’s own dance background included four years with the New Pilobolus company: if you don’t know them, or the legendary Pilobolus company they sprang from, they’re sort of Contact Improv without the improv—carefully choreographed stuff. But they too are into “using each other as the set”—dancing on, over, and around one another, cooperating in changing
each other’s
vectors. Dancing acrobats, if you will. We ourselves tried to achieve a balanced blend of both choreographed and spontaneous dance in the stuff we taped.

Linda was able to teach us a lot about mutually inter-reacting masses, hyperfulcrums, and the like—and a lot more about the
attitude
they require. To truly interact with another dancer, to spontaneously create shapes together, you must attempt to attune yourself to them empathically. You must know them—how they dance and how they’re feeling at the moment—to be able to sense what their next move will be, or how they will likely react to yours. When it works, it’s the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever known.

It’s
much
harder with more than one partner, but the exhilaration increases exponentially.

Because free fall requires mutual cooperation, mutual awareness on a spherical level, our dance became an essentially spiritual exercise.

And so, with a company of adequate size and an increasing grasp of what zero-gee dance was really about, we began our second and last season of taping.

I fell through starry space, balanced like an inbound comet on a tail of fluorescent gas, concentrating on keeping my spine straight and my knees and ankles locked. It helped me forget how nervous I was.

“Five,” Raoul chanted steadily, “four, three, two, now,” and a ring of his bright orange “flame” flared soundlessly all around me. I threaded it like a needle.

“Beautiful,” Norrey whispered in my ear, from her vantage point a kilometer away. At once I lifted my arms straight over my head and bit down hard on a contact. As I passed through the ring of orange “flame,” my “tail” turned a rich, deep purple, expanding lazily and symmetrically behind me. Within the purple wake, tiny novae sparkled and died at irregular intervals: Raoul magic. Just before the dye canisters on my calves emptied, I fired my belly thruster and let it warp me “upward” in an ever-increasing curve while I counted seconds.

“Light it up, Harry,” I said sharply. “I can’t see you.” The red lights winked into being
above
my imaginary horizon and I relaxed, cutting the ventral thrust in plenty of time. I was not heading precisely for the camera, but the necessary corrections were minor and would not visibly spoil the curve. Orienting myself by a method I can only call informed writhing, I cut main drive and selected my point.

On Earth you can turn forever without getting dizzy if you select a point and keep your eyes locked on it, whipping your head around at the last possible second for each rotation. In space the technique is unnecessary: once out of a gravity well, your semicirculars fill up and your whole balance system shuts down; you
can’t
get dizzy. But old habit dies hard. Once I had my point star I tumbled, and when I had counted ten rotations the camera was close enough to see and coming up fast. At once I came out of my spin, oriented, and braked
sharply
—maybe three gees—with all thrusters. I had cut it fine: I came to rest relative to the camera barely fifty meters away. I cut all power instantly, went from the natural contraction of high acceleration to full release, giving it everything I had left, held it for a five-count and whispered, “Cut!”

The red lights winked out, and Norrey, Raoul, Tom, and Linda cheered softly (nobody does anything loudly in a p-suit).

“Okay, Harry, let’s see the playback.”

“Coming up, boss.”

There was a pause while he rewound, and then a large square section of distant space lit up around the edges. The stars within it rearranged themselves and took on motion. My image came into frame, went through the maneuver I had just finished. I was pleased. I had hit the ring of orange “flame” dead center and triggered the purple smoke at just the right instant. The peelout curve was a little ragged, but it would do. The sudden growth of my oncoming image was so startling that I actually flinched—which is pretty silly. The deceleration was nearly as breathtaking to watch as it had been to do, the pullout was fine, and the final triumphant extension was frankly terrific.

“That’s a take,” I said contentedly. “Which way’s the bar?”

“Just up the street,” Raoul answered. “I’m buying.”

“Always a pleasure to meet a patron of the arts. How much did you say your name was?”

Harry’s massive construction-man’s spacesuit, festooned with tools, appeared from behind and “beneath” the camera. “Hey,” he said, “not yet. Gotta at least run through the second scene.”

“Oh hell,” I protested. “My air’s low, my belly’s empty, and I’m swimming around in this overgrown galosh.”

“Deadline’s coming,” was all Harry said.

I wanted to shower so bad I could taste it. Dancers are all different; the only thing we
all
have in common is that we all sweat—and in a p-suit there’s nowhere for it to go. “My thrusters’re shot,” I said weakly.

“You don’t need ’em much for Scene Two,” Norrey reminded me. “Monkey Bars, remember? Brute muscle stuff.” She paused. “And we are pushing deadline, Charlie.”

Dammit, a voice on stereo earphones seems to come from the same place that the voice of your conscience does.

“They’re right, Charlie,” Raoul said. “I spoke too soon. Come on, the night is young.”

I stared around me at an immense sphere of starry emptiness, Earth a beachball to my left and the Sun a brilliant softball beyond it. “Night don’t
come
any older than this,” I grumbled, and gave in. “Okay, I guess you’re right. Harry, you and Raoul strike that set and get the next one in place, okay? The rest of you warm up in place. Get sweaty.”

Raoul and Harry, as practiced and efficient as a pair of old beat cops, took the Family Car out to vacuum up the vacuum. I sat on nothing and brooded about the damned deadline. It
was
getting time to go dirtside again, which meant it was time to get this segment rehearsed and shot, but I didn’t have to like it. No artist likes time pressure, even those who can’t produce without it. So I brooded.

The show must go on. The show must always go on, and if you are one of those millions who have always wondered exactly why, I will tell you. The tickets have already been sold.

But it’s uniquely hard (as well as foolish) to brood in space. You hang suspended within the Big Deep, infinity in all directions, an emptiness so immense that although you know that you’re falling through it at high speed, you make no slightest visible progress. Space is God’s Throne Room, and so vasty a hall is it that no human problem has significance within it for long.

Have you ever lived by the sea? If so, you know how difficult it is to retain a griping mood while contemplating the ocean. Space is like that, only more so.

Much more so.

By the time the Monkey Bars were assembled, I was nearly in a dancing mood again. The Bars were a kind of three-dimensional gymnast’s jungle, a huge partial icosahedron composed of transparent tubes inside which neon fluoresced green and red. It enclosed an area of about 14,000 cubic meters, within which were scattered a great many tiny liquid droplets that hung like motionless dust motes, gleaming in laserlight. Apple juice.

When Raoul and Harry had first shown me the model for the Monkey Bars, I had been struck by the aesthetic beauty of the structure. By now, after endless simulations and individual rehearsals, I saw it only as a complex collection of fulcrums and pivots for Tom, Linda, Norrey and me to dance on, an array of vector-changers designed for maximal movement with minimal thruster use. Scene Two relied almost entirely on muscle power, a paradox considering the technology implicit in its creation. We would pivot with all four limbs on the Bars and on each other, borrowing some moves from the vocabulary of trapeze acrobatics and some from our own growing experience with free-fall lovemaking, constantly forming and dissolving strange geometries that were new even to dance. (We were using choreography rather than improv techniques: the Bars and their concept were too big for the Goldfish Bowl, and you can’t afford mistakes in free space.)

Though I had taught individual dancers their parts and rehearsed some of the trickier clinches with the group, this would be our first full run-through together. I found I was anxious to assure myself that it would actually work. All the computer simulation in the world is no substitute for actually doing it; things that look lovely in compsim can dislocate shoulders in practice.

I was about to call places when Norrey left her position and jetted my way. Of course there’s only one possible reason for that, so I turned off my radio too and waited. She decelerated neatly, came to rest beside me, and touched her hood to mine.

“Charlie, I didn’t mean to crowd you. We can come back in eleven hours and—”

“No, that’s okay, hon,” I assured her. “You’re right: ‘Deadline don’t care.’ I just hope the choreography’s right.”

“It’s just the first run-through. And the simulations were great.”

“That’s not what I mean. Hell, I know it’s
correct
. By this point I can think spherically just fine. I just don’t know if it’s
any good
.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s exactly the kind of choreography Shara would have loathed. Rigid, precisely timed, like a set of tracks.”

She locked a leg around my waist to arrest a slight drift and looked thoughtful. “She’d have loathed it for herself,” she said finally, “but I think she’d really have enjoyed watching us do it. It’s a
good
piece, Charlie—and you know how the critics love anything abstract.”

“Yeah, you’re right—again,” I said, and put on my best Cheerful Charlie grin. It’s not fair to have a bummer at curtain time; it brings the other dancers down. “In fact, you may have just given me a better title for this whole mess:
Synapstract
.”

There was relief in her answering grin. “If it’s got to be a pun, I like
ImMerced
better.”

“Yeah, it does have a kind of Cunningham flavor to it. Bet the old boy takes the next elevator up after he sees it.” I squeezed her arm through the p-suit, added “Thanks, hon,” cut in my radio again. “All right, boys and girls, —
let’s shoot this turkey
. Watch out for leg-breakers and widowmakers. Harry, those cameras locked in?”

“Program running,” he announced. “Blow a gasket.” It’s the Stardancer’s equivalent of “Break a leg.”

Norrey scooted back into position, I corrected my own, the lights came up hellbright on cameras 2 and 4, and we took our stage, while on all sides of us an enormous universe went about its business.

You can’t fake cheerfulness well enough to fool a wife like Norrey without there being something real to it; and, like I said, it’s hard to brood in space. It really was exhilarating to hurl my body around within the red and green Bars, interacting with the energy of the other dancers I happened to love, concentrating on split-second timing and perfect body placement. But an artist is capable of self-criticism even in the midst of the most involving performance. It’s the same perpetual self-scrutiny that makes so many of us so hard to get along with for any length of time—and that makes us artists in the first place. The last words Shara Drummond ever said to me were, “Do it right.”

And even in the whirling midst of a piece that demanded all my attention, there was still room for a little whispering voice that said that this was only the best I had been able to do and still meet my deadline.

I tried to comfort myself with the notion that every artist who ever worked feels exactly the same way, about nearly every piece they ever do—and it didn’t help me any more than it ever does any of us. And so I made the one small error of placement, and tried to correct with thrusters in too much of a hurry and triggered the wrong one and smacked backward hard into Tom. His back was to me as well, and our air tanks
clanged
and one of mine blew. A horse kicked me between the shoulder blades and the Bars came up fast and caught me across the thighs, tumbling me end over end. I was more than twenty meters from the set, heading for forever, before I had time to black out.

Happening to smack into the Bars off center was a break. It put me into an acrobat’s tumble, which centrifuged air into my hood and boots, and blood to my head and feet, bringing me out of blackout quicker. Even so, precious seconds ticked by while I groggily deduced my problem, picked my point and began to spin correctly. With the perspective that gave me I oriented myself, still groggy, figured out intuitively which thrusters would kill the spin, and used them.

That done, it was easy to locate the Bars, a bright cubist’s Christmas tree growing perceptibly smaller as I watched. It was between me and the blue beachball I’d been born on. At least life would not be corny enough to award me Shara’s death. But Bryce Carrington’s didn’t appeal to me much more.