The Stardance Trilogy (38 page)

If a male dancer had done that in the studio, in a lift, I’d have thought nothing of it. But he wasn’t a dancer, and this wasn’t a studio. That’s how I explained my sudden blush to myself.

“Ta,” she called as she slowly sailed away. This time the titters were louder.

No, maybe I would not ask him for lessons in free fall movement.

He turned to me. “Excuse me,” he said politely.

“No, no,” I said, “I understand. If you’d pushed on her feet, she’d have pushed back and spoiled your aim. You’re a spacer, aren’t you?”

Even for a Chinese, his poker face was terrific. “Thank you for the compliment. But no, I’m not.”

“Oh, but you handle yourself so well in free fall—”

“I have spent a little time in space, but I’m hardly a spacer.”

Usually a set of features I can’t read annoys me…but his were at least pleasant to look at while I was trying. Eyes set close, but not too close, together, their long lashes like the spread fins of some small fish, or the fletching of an arrow. Nose slightly, endearingly pugged; mouth almost too small, nearly too full, not quite feminine, chin just strong enough to support that mouth. I caught myself wondering what it would feel like to “Kissing cousin to one at the very least. My name is Morgan McLeod.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Morgan. I’m Robert Chen.”

We shook hands. His grip was warm and strong. The skin of his hand felt horny, calloused—the hand of a martial arts student. That meant that his body would be lean and muscular, his belly hard and “Flattery aside, Robert, you move beautifully. By any chance, have you ever been a dancer?” Definitely not going to ask this one for private movement lessons…

“Not really. I’ve studied some contact improv, but I’ve never performed. And if I’d spent my life at it, I wouldn’t be in your league. I’ve seen you perform, several times. It’s an honour to meet you.”

Well. It is nice to be recognized. And, for a dancer, so rare.

“Thank you, Robert, but I’d say your own performance left little to be desired.” Oh my God, I was speaking in double-entendres. Clumsy ones! “Uh…do you think you could teach me a little about how to move in zero gee?”

Well, hell. I was in space, and I was alive. Within the last hour I had been morbidly depressed, terrified, exalted, very nearly killed, and flattered. I was no longer afraid of anything at all. What harm could there be in a little extracurricular instruction?

The Aborigine returned before Robert could reply, sailing over the seat tops, hands waving comically for balance. When she reached us she stopped herself against her seat, tried to do a one and a half gainer to end up seated, and botched it completely. She managed to kick both me and the man in front of her in the head. “Sorry. Sorry,” she kept chirping. We all smiled. She was like a tumbling puppy. I found myself warming to her. She had the oddest way of carrying off clumsiness gracefully. Since I’d spent my life carrying off gracefulness clumsily, I found it appealing.

Finally she was strapped back in. She grinned infectiously. “I keep lookin’ for the bloody fish,” she said. “Like divin’ the Barrier Reef, y’know? I’nt it marvelous? My name’s Kirra; what’s yours then?”

“Morgan McLeod, Kirra; I’m pleased to meet you. And this is Robert Chen.”

“G’day, mate,” she said to him, “that was good work you done before. You’re fast as a jackrabbit.”

“Thanks, Kirra,” he said. “But I had the same inspiration rabbits do: mortal terror. How’s Mr. Henderson?”

Her face smoothed over; for a moment she could have been her grandmother, or her own remotest ancestor. “Bloke’s in a bad way,” she said. “You could say he’s gone and not be wrong. Oh, his motor’s still turnin’ over, and I reckon it might keep on. Nobody’s at the wheel, but. His mind’s changed forever.” She fingered the thorax of her p-suit absently. I sensed she was looking for an amulet or necklace of some kind that usually hung there. “I tried to sing with him…,” she said softly, in a distant, sing-song voice. “We couldn’t sing the same…was like a bag of notes was broken on the floor.” She sighed, and squared her shoulders. “He needs a better healer than me, that’s sure.”

“They’ll have good doctors at Top Step,” Robert assured her.

She looked dubious, but politely agreed.

“I’m sorry, Morgan,” he said to me. “You asked me a question before, whether I’d work with you on jaunting. I wanted to say—”

The pilot maneuvered without warning.

For a few instants there was a faint suggestion of an up and down to the world. A sixth of a gee or so. Coincidentally it was lined up roughly with our seatbacks in one axis, so the effect was to push us gently down into our seats. But if you considered the round bulkhead up front as a clock, “down” was at about 8:30: we all tilted to the right like bus passengers on a long curve. I found my face pressed gently against Robert’s, my weight supported by his strong shoulder, with Kirra’s head on my lap. A few complaints were raised, and one clear, happy, “Wheeee!” came from somewhere aft. His hair smelled good.

“Hang on, people,” the attendant called. “Nothing to worry about.”

In a matter of seconds the acceleration went away, and we drifted freely again. We all waited a few moments for a bang or bump to signal docking. Nothing happened.

As the three of us started to say embarrassment-melting things to each other, thrust returned again—in precisely the opposite direction. I suppose it made sense: first you turn the wheel, and then you straighten the wheel. But even Robert was caught by surprise. This time we were hanging upside down and sideways from our seats, Kirra and I with wrists locked like arm wrestlers and
Robert’s
head in
my
lap. It felt dismayingly good there. Even through a cheap p-suit. Again the thrust went away.

“I wonder how long it’ll be before we—” Kirra began, when an acceleration warning finally sounded, a mournful hooting noise. The attendant had time to call out, “All right, I want everybody to—” Then the big one hit.

Well, maybe a half gee, or a little more. But half a gee is a lot more than none, and it came on fast, and in an unexpected and disturbing direction. The pilot was blasting directly forward, along our axis, as though backing violently away from danger. The whole vessel shuddered. We all fell forward toward the seatbacks in front of us—“below” us now—and held a pushup together for perhaps thirty or forty seconds. There were loud complaints above the blast noise.

The acceleration faded slowly down to nothing again. There were two or three seconds of silence…and then there was a series of authoritative but gentle thumps on the hull, fore and aft, as though men with padded hammers were surreptitiously checking the welds. The seatbacks began flashing PLEASE REMAIN SEATED.

“We’re here,” Robert said. “A very nice docking. A little abrupt, but clean.” I thought he was being ironic but wasn’t sure.

“Keep your seatbelts buckled,” the attendant called. “We’ll disembark after Doctor Kolchar has cleared Mr. Henderson to be moved.”

“That’s it?” Kirra said.

I knew what she’d meant. On TV the docking of spacecraft is always seen from a convenient adjacent camera that gives the metal mating dance a stately Olympian perspective, an elephantine grace. A trip to space—especially one’s first and last—should begin with trumpets, and end with the Blue Danube. This had been like riding a Greyhound bus through an endless tunnel…blowing a tire…riding on the rim for a while…and then running out of gas in the middle of the tunnel.

“That’s it,” Robert agreed. “Even if they’d had the video feed running, it wouldn’t have looked like much up until the very end. To really appreciate a docking you’ve got to speak radar. But we’re here, all right.”

“We truly have reached the Top Step,” I said wonderingly.

“That we have,” Robert said. “Here comes the doctor.” The red light was on over the airlock up front.

The hatch opened explosively, with a popping sound, and the airlock spat out a white-haired man in Bermuda shorts and a loud yellow Hawaiian shirt. His body orientation, fluttering hair and clothes, and the pack affixed somehow to his midsection made him look like a skydiver. The attendant caught him, began to warn him that this pressure was not secure, but he shushed her and began examining Mr. Henderson with various items taken from his belly pack. After a time I heard him say, “Okay, Shannon, let’s move him. You help me with him. We’re going to do it nice and slow.”

“You!” the attendant called up the aisle. “The Chinese spacer in Row Six: you’re in command.” Robert blinked. “Come forward and take over, now. Breathing and digestion are permitted; limited thinking will be tolerated; everything else is forbidden, savvy?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he called forward.

Our eyes met briefly as he was unbuckling. For the first time I was able to see past that impassive expression, guess his thoughts. He was embarrassed, flattered…disappointed? At what?

“To be continued in our next,” he murmured, and vaulted away.

At the interruption of our conversation?

“I hope so,” I heard myself call after him.

Come to think of it, he still hadn’t said whether or not he’d give me lessons in jaunting.

Oh God. What was I doing? What good could possibly come of this? Even for me, this was rotten timing.

“You want to mind that top step, they say,” Kirra said softly, and when I turned to look at her she was grinning.

Two moves equals one fire.

—Mark Twain

W
E DIDN
’
T HAVE
long to wait. Less than a minute after the doctor and attendant left, the lock cycled open again and someone emerged.

The newcomer got our instant attention.

“Afternoon, folks,” she said. “Welcome to Top Step. I’m a Guide, and my name is Chris.”

No one said a word.

“Oh, excuse me.” She courteously turned herself rightside up with respect to us.

It didn’t help much. Even upside down in that confined space, her face had been far enough from the floor to be seen from the last row. And even rightside up she was startling.

Chris’s p-suit had no legs, and neither did Chris.

I know I tried hard not to gape. I’m pretty sure I failed. One person actually gasped audibly. Chris ignored it and continued cheerfully, “I usually make a little speech at this point, but we want to get you out of suspect pressure as quickly as possible, so you’ve got a temporary reprieve. You are now about to do something you probably thought was impossible: leave a plane intelligently. By rows, remaining seated until it’s your turn, and then leaving
at once.
You have no carryons or coats to fumble with, no reason to block the aisle—and good reason not to.

“See, if we cycle you through the airlocks a few at a time it’d take over an hour. But to keep the lock open at both ends and march you all out we have to equalize pressure between this can and Top Step—and there’s no telling if or how long that patch there will take pressure. So we’re going to do this with suits sealed, and we are not going to dawdle. I know you’re all free fall virgins; don’t worry, we’ll set up a bucket brigade and you’ll be fine. One thing: if there’s a blowout as you’re passing through the lock,
get out of the doorway
. It doesn’t matter which direction you pick, just don’t be in the way. Okay? All right, Ev!”

That last was apparently directed to the Captain in the cockpit ahead. My ears began to hurt suddenly. The pressure was rising back toward Earth-normal. Like everybody, I swallowed hard, and watched that pressure patch as I sealed my hood.

“Okay, this side first. No chatter. First person to slow up the line gets assigned to the Reclamation Module for the next two months.” A light over the lock blinked and the door opened. “First row: move!”

Getting up the aisle to the front was easy. Once there were no seatbacks to navigate with, it got trickier. But Chris fielded me like a shortstop and lobbed me to Robert at second, who pivoted and threw me to someone at first for the double play. That must have ended the inning; others tossed me around the infield to celebrate for a while.

I ended up turning slowly end over end in a large pale blue rectangular-box room. Several yellow ropes were strung across it from one biggest-wall to the opposite one. I caught a rope as I sailed past it.

Because I seemed to be drifting light as a feather, I badly underestimated how hard it would be to stop drifting. If that rope hadn’t had some give to it, I might have pulled my arms out of their sockets. I had no weight, but I still had all my mass. I found the experience fascinating and mildly dismaying: in that first intentional vector change I made in space, I knew that some of the zero-gee dance moves I’d envisioned weren’t going to work.

But I was too busy to think about kinesthetics just then. The room was half-full of my shipmates, with more coming at a steady pace. I saw that all of us were treating the biggest-walls as “floor” and “ceiling,” and lining ourselves up parallel to the ropes between them—but there seemed to be considerable silent disagreement as to which way was up. Visual cues were all ambiguous. It was a comical sight.

Finally one side preponderated and the others gradually switched around to that “local vertical.” I was one of the latter group, and as I reached the decision that I was upside down, I realized for the first time that I felt faintly nauseous. The feeling increased as I flipped myself over, diminished a little as the room seemed to snap back into proper perspective again.

The last of us came tumbling in, followed by the last member of the bucket brigade. The latter sealed the hatch, oriented himself upside down to us, let go of the hatch, and floated before it, hands thrust up into his pockets. He looked at us, and we craned our heads at him. A few of us cartwheeled round to his personal vertical again, and before long everyone had done so, with varying degrees of grace.

He seemed to be in his fifties. He wore a p-suit, opaque and deep purple. Compared to the clunky suits we wore, his looked like a second skin. His complexion was coal black, the kind that doesn’t even gleam much under bright light. He was lean and fit, going bald and making no attempt to hide it, frowning and smiling at the same time. He looked relaxed and competent, avuncular. He reminded me a little of Murray, the business manager of one of the companies I’d worked with almost a decade before. Murray did the work of four men, yet
always
seemed perfectly relaxed, even during the week before a performance.