The Stardance Trilogy (24 page)

Norrey was assigned to Dmirov; she spoke up. “I’m not sure I agree, Tom. Oh, she plays chess like a machine, and she sure knows how to be impenetrable—and maybe she
doesn’t
know enough about when and how to turn it off. But she showed me all her son’s baby pictures, and she told me that the
Stardance
made her cry. ‘Weep from the chest,’ she said. I think the compassion’s in there.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “I’ll take your word. And she was one of the ones who pushed hard for a UN Space Command. Without her there just might not be a UN anymore, and space might have become the next Alsace-Lorraine. I’m willing to believe her heart’s in the right place.” He paused again. “Uh, with all due respect, I don’t think I’d be prepared to turn my back on her in the airlock yet. But my mind’s open.

“Now, Li,” he went on, “was also a prime mover in the formation of the Space Command—but I’ll lay odds that it was a chess-player’s move for him. I think he took a cold extrapolative look at the future and decided that if the world
did
blow itself up over the issue of space, it would seriously restrict his political career. He is reputed to be one sharp horse trader and one cold son of a bitch, and they say the road to Hell is paved with the skins of his enemies. He owns a piece of Skyfac Inc. I wouldn’t turn my back on him on live network TV, and Linda, I hope you won’t either.”

“That is certainly the image he has cultivated,” she agreed. “But I must add a few things. He is impeccably polite. He is a philosopher of incredible perception and subtlety. And he is rock steady. Hunger, lack of sleep, danger—none of these will affect his performance or his judgment in any measurable way. Yet I find his mind to be open, to change and to changes. I believe he might well be a real
statesman
.” She broke off, took a deep breath, and finished, “But I don’t think I trust him either. Yet.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Is he a statesman for mankind or for the People’s Republic? Okay, that leaves my own man. Whatever else you can say about the others, they’re probably all statespersons. Sheldon Silverman is a politician. He’s held just about every elective office except President and Vice President. He could have been the latter any time he was silly enough to want to; only some incredibly subtle errors cost him the former. I think he bought or bribed his way onto this trip somehow, as his last chance to earn a whole page in the history books. I think he sees
himself
as the leader of the team, by virtue of being an American. I despise him. He costs Wertheimer the notch that DeLaTorre earned him, as far as I’m concerned.” He shut up suddenly.

“I think you may be holding his past against him,” Linda said.

“Damn right,” he agreed.

“Well—he’s old. Some old people change, quite radically. Zero gee has been working on him; wait and see. We should bring him out here sometime.”

“My love, your fairness is showing.”

“Damn right,” she said, forcing a grin from him. “It sort of has to.”

“Huh?”

“He gives me the
creeps
.”

“Oh. I see. I think.”

“Harry, Raoul,” I said, “you’ve been hanging out with the Space Commandos.”

Raoul took it, of course. “Cox we all know or know about. I’d let him hold the last air bottle while I took a leak. His second-in-command is an old-time NASA science officer type.”

“Jock,” Harry put in.

Raoul chuckled. “You know, she is. Susan Pha Song was a Viet Nam War baby, raised in Nam by her aunt after her father split and her mother got napalmed. Hasn’t got much use for America. Physicist. Military through and through; if they told her to she’d nuke Viet Nam and drop rose petals on Washington. She disapproves of music and dance. And me and Harry.”

“She’ll follow orders,” Harry asserted.

“Yeah. For sure. She’s a chicken colonel as of last week, and in the event Commander Cox drops dead, the chain of command goes to her, then Dmirov, presumably. She’s got pilot training, she’s a space freak.”

“If it comes to that extreme,” I said, “I for one am going free lance.”

“Chen Ten Li has a gun,” Linda said suddenly.

“What?”
Five voices at once.

“What kind?” from Harry.

“Oh, I don’t know. A small handgun, squarish looking. Not much barrel.”

“How did you get a look at it?” I asked.

“Jack-in-the-box effect. Took him by surprise, and he recovered late.”

The jack-in-the-box effect is one of the classic surprises of free fall, predictable but unexpected, and it gets virtually every new fish. Any container, cabinet or drawer you open will spew its contents at you—unless you have thought to velcro them all in place. The practical joke possibilities are nearly inexhaustible. But I smelled a rat. “How about that, Tom?”

“Eh?”

“If Chen Ten Li has been one of the major forces behind intelligent use of space, wouldn’t he know about jack-in-the-box?”

Tom’s voice was thoughtful. “
Huh
. Not necessarily. Li is one of those paradoxes, like Isaac Asimov refusing to fly. For all his understanding of the issues of space, this is the first time he’s been further off-planet than a jetliner goes. He’s a groundlubber at heart.”

“Still,” I objected, “jack-in-the-box is standard tourist anecdote. He’s only need to have spoken with one returned spacegoer, for any length of time.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Raoul said, “but there was a lot about zero gee that I knew about intellectually, that I still tripped over when I got there. Besides, what motive could Li have for letting Linda see a gun?”

“That’s what bothers me,” I admitted. “I can think of two or three reasons offhand—and they all imply either great clumsiness or great cunning. I don’t know which I’d prefer. Well…anyone else see any heat?”

“I haven’t seen a thing,” Norrey said judiciously, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ludmilla has a weapon of some kind.”

“Anybody else?”

Nobody responded. But each of the diplomats had fetched a sizable mass of uninspected luggage.

“Okay. So the upshot is, we’re stuck in a subway with three rival gangleaders, two cops and a nice old man. This is one of the few times I’ve ever been grateful that the eyes of the world are upon us.”

“Much more than the eyes of the world,” Linda corrected soberly.

“It’ll be okay,” Raoul said. “Remember: a diplomat’s whole function is to maintain hostilities short of armed conflict. They’ll all pull together at the showdown. Most of ’em may be chauvinists—but underneath I think they’re all
human
chauvinists, too.”

“That’s what I mean,” Linda said. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”

Startled silence, then, “What do you mean, darling? We’re not human?” from Tom.

“Are we?”

I began to understand what she was driving at, and I felt my mind accelerate to meet her thought.

What does it mean to be human? Considering that the overwhelming mass of the evidence has been taken from observation of humans under one gravity, pinned against a planet? By others in the same predicament?

“Certainly,” Tom said. “Humans are humans whether they float or fall.”

“Are you sure?” Linda asked softly. “We are different from our fellows, different in basic ways. I don’t mean just that we can never go back and live with them. I mean spiritually, psychologically. Our thought patterns change, the longer we stay in space—our brains are adapting just like our bodies.”

I told them what Wertheimer had said to me the week before—that we choreographed as well as humans but not like humans.

“That’s John Campbell’s classic definition of ‘alien,’” Raoul said excitedly.

“Our souls are adapting, too,” Linda went on. “Each of us spends every working day gazing on the naked face of God, a sight that groundhogs can only simulate with vaulting cathedrals and massive mosques. We have more perspective on reality than a holy man on the peak of the highest mountain on Earth. There are no atheists in space—and
our
gods make the hairy thunderers and bearded paranoids of Earth look silly. Hell, you can’t even make out Olympus from the Studio—much less from here.” The distant Earth and Moon were already smaller than we were used to.

“There’s no denying that space is a profoundly moving place,” Tom maintained, “but I don’t see that it makes us other than human. I
feel
human.”

“How did Cro-Magnon know he was different from Neanderthal?” Raoul asked. “Until he could assess discrepancies, how would he know?”

“The swan thought he was an ugly duckling,” Norrey said.

“But his
genes
were swan,” Tom insisted.

“Cro-Magnon’s genes started out Neanderthal,” I said. “Have you ever examined yours? Would you know a really subtle mutation if you saw one?”

“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this silliness, Charlie?” Tom asked irritably. “Do you feel inhuman?”

I felt detached, listening with interest to the words that came out of my mouth. “I feel other than human. I feel like more than a new man. I’m a new thing. Before I followed Shara into space, my life was a twisted joke, with too many punchlines. Now I am alive. I love and can be loved. I didn’t leave Earth behind. I put space ahead.”

“Aw, phooey,” Tom said. “Half of that’s your leg—and I know what the other half is because it happened to me, at Linda’s family’s place. It’s the city-mouse-in-the-country effect. You find a new, less stressful environment, get some insights, and start making better, more satisfying decisions. Your life straightens out. So something must be magic about the place. Nuts.”

“The Mountain is magic,” Linda said gently. “Why is magic a dirty word for you?” At that stage of their relationship, it suited Tom and Linda to maintain a running pseudodisagreement on matters spiritual. Occasionally they realized what was obvious to the rest of us: that they almost never actually disagreed with each other on anything but semantics.

“Tom,” I said insistently. “This is
different
. I’ve
been
to the country. I’m telling you that I’m not an improved version of the man I was—I’m something altogether different now. I’m the man I could never have been on Earth, had lost all hope of being. I—I believe in things that I haven’t believed in since I was a kid. Sure I’ve had some good breaks, and sure, opening up to Norrey has made my life more than I ever thought it could be. But my whole makeup has changed, and no amount of lucky breaks will do that. Hell, I used to be a drunk.”

“Drunks smarten up every day,” Tom said.

“Sure—if they can find the strength to maintain cold turkey for the rest of their lives. I take a drink when I feel like it. I just hardly ever feel like it. I stopped
needing
booze, just like that. How common is that? I smoke less these days, and treat it less frivolously when I do.”

“So space grew you up in spite of yourself?”

“At first. Later I had to pitch in and work like hell—but it started without my knowledge or consent.”

“When did it begin?” Norrey and Linda asked together.

I had to think. “When I began to learn how to see spherically. When I finally learned to cut loose of up and down.”

Linda spoke. “A reasonably wise man once said that anything that disorients you is good. Is instructive.”

“I know that wise man,” Tom sneered. “Leary. Brain-damage case if I ever heard of one.”

“Does that make him incapable of having ever been wise?”

“Look,” I said, “we are all unique. We’ve all come through a highly difficult selection process, and I don’t suppose the first Cro-Magnon
felt
any different. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that our talent is not a normal human attribute.”

“Normal people can live in space,” Norrey objected. “Space Command crews. Construction gangs.”

“If they’ve got an artificial local vertical,” Harry said. “Take ’em outdoors, you gotta give em straight lines and right angles or they start going buggy. Most of ’em. S’why we get rich.”

“That’s true,” Tom admitted. “At Skyfac a good outside man was worth his mass in copper, even if he was a mediocre worker. Never understood it.”

“Because you are one,” Linda said.

“One
what
?” he said, exasperated.

“A Space Man,” I said spacing it so the capitals were apparent. “Whatever comes after
Homo habilis
and
Homo sapiens
. You’re space-going Man. I don’t think the Romans had the concept, so
Homo novis
is probably the best you can do in Latin. New Man. The next thing.”

Tom snorted. “
Homo excastra
is more like it.”

“No, Tom,” I said forcefully, “You’re wrong. We’re
not
outcasts. We may be literally ‘outside the camp,’ ‘outside the fortress’—but the connotation of ‘exile’ is all wrong. Or are you regretting the choice you made?”

He was a long time answering. “No. No, space is where I want to live, all right. I don’t feel exiled—I think of the whole solar system as ‘human territory.’ But I feel like I’ve let my citizenship in its largest nation lapse.”

“Tom,” I said solemnly, “I assure you that that is the diametric opposite of a loss.”

“Well, the world does look pretty rotten these days, I’ll grant you that. There isn’t a
lot
of it I’ll miss.”

“You miss my point.”

“So explain.”

“I talked about this with Doc Panzella some, before we left. What is the normal lifespan for a Space Man?”

He started to speak twice, stopped trying.

“Right. There’s no way to frame a guess—it’s a completely new ball game. We’re the first. I asked Panzella and he told me to come back when two or three of us had died. We may all die within a month, because fatigue products refuse to collect in our feet or our corns migrate to our brains or something. But Panzella’s guess is that free fall is going to add at
least
forty years to our lifespans. I asked him how sure he was and he offered to bet cash.”

Everyone started talking at once, which doesn’t work on radio. The consensus was, “Say
what
?” The last to shut up and drop out was Tom. “—possibly
know
a thing like that, yet?” he finished, embarrassed.

“Exactly,” I said. “We won’t
know
’til it’s too late. But it’s
reasonable
. Your heart has less work to do, arterial deposits seem to diminish—”