The Stardance Trilogy (40 page)

The football opened along one seam. Inside it was a wad of something. As I stared at it in puzzlement, it swelled like bread-dough, like a backpacker’s raincoat opening up.

“It’s a p-suit!” Kirra said delightedly, shaking out hers.

Sure enough, we had all been issued our real p-suits. Expensive, state of the art, personally customized and form-fitting ones, as opposed to the cheap standardized movie-costumes we’d all worn aboard the Shuttle.

We’d practiced this in Suit Camp. Timing myself, I slid the bottom half on like greased pantyhose, pulled the rest up behind me and around my torso, put my arms in the sleeves, sealed the seam, and pulled the transparent hood down over my head. Elapsed time, twelve seconds. I thought that was pretty good. It went on easier than a body-stocking: while it was snug, the interior had been treated somehow to reduce friction. I didn’t test the radio or any of the other gear, though I should have. Instead I pulled the hood back, and grinned at Kirra and Glenn and the other women. They grinned back.

Our suits were custom tailored to our bodies, and fit like hugs. They were also, we discovered, customized for colour. They came out of the egg transparent, so we could inspect them for fit and flaws, and except for the barely visible tracery of microtubules that carried coolant and such around them, they looked like an extra layer of skin. But when we located the “polarization enabler controls” they’d taught us about in Suit Camp, and opaqued our suits, each of us was, from toes to collarbone, a different—and well chosen—colour. My own suit turned a light shade of burgundy that suited my complexion and hair colour, and Kirra’s suit became a cobalt blue very close to the highlights that normal lighting raised on her dark black skin.

I liked the colours a lot. To me they were among the first signs that artists had had a part in the creative planning of this outfit.

“Any problems?” our unseen friend asked. “No? Then exit the chamber through the green-marked hatch in Wall Four. You’ll be directed from there.”

I looked around for the green-marked hatch. Where the hell was Wall Four? No walls were marked that I could see—at least not with numbers. One of them, to our right (we were all instinctively aligned to the same local vertical, without knowing how we’d selected it) was painted with a large broad red arrow, pointing in the direction we had come from, but that was little help. My companions were looking confused, too, but the unseen woman didn’t cue us.

It took so long to find the hatch that in a few seconds I guessed where it must be. Sure enough, it was “up,” over our heads. People hardly ever look up, for some reason. (Which seems to suggest that we haven’t evolved significantly since before we came down out of the trees, yes?) I nudged Kirra and pointed. She unsealed the hatch and went through. I followed on her heels, and we found ourselves at the bottom of a huge well-lit padded cavern.

I should have been expecting it; I’d seen pictures. But you just don’t expect to step from someplace as clean and sterile and right-angled and high-tech and profoundly artificial as a Decontam module into the Carlsbad Caverns. I nearly lost my grip and fell up into it.

It was about the size of a concert hall and roughly spherical—but the accent was on rough. Rough curves and joins, the rough fractal topography of natural rock, overlaid with some rough surface covering that looked like cheap kitchen sponge stained dark grey. Tunnels departed from the cavern in all directions; their gaping, irregularly sized and shaped mouths were spaced asymmetrically around the chamber. Each tunnel had one or more pairs of slender elastic bungee cords strung criss-cross across its mouth, obviously used to either fling oneself into the tunnel, or catch oneself on the way out; the larger the tunnel, the more cords.

This spheric pressure was half natural and half artificial. It had happened, as much as it had been built. It was a sculpted and padded cave. Perhaps a dozen people (none of them in p-suits; one was naked) were drifting slowly across the vast chamber in different directions. No two of them were using the same local vertical, and none of them used ours. It was like something out of Escher.

No, it
was
something out of Escher.

I remembered to move aside so others could use the hatch. There were lots of handgrips nearby; I worked myself sideways like a crab and “lay on my back” a few inches “above” the bulkhead I’d just come through. As Glenn and the other three women emerged into the cave behind us, they too grabbed handholds, stabilized themselves, and stared.

After a long few moments of silence, Glenn cleared her throat. “Which way to the egress, do you suppose?”

The unseen woman spoke again. “Can all of you see the tunnel that’s blinking green over there, Inboard and One-ish?”

Again I failed to spot any speakers, and realized this time that there were none; her voice was simply homing in on my ears somehow. The last two terms she’d used were meaningless to me, but there was no mistaking the tunnel she meant. Soft green lights around its mouth had suddenly started to flash on and off. “We see it.”

“That’s where you’re headed for, now.”

“All the bloody way up there?” Kirra squeaked.

“Push off gently, Kirra,” our companion said soothingly. I hadn’t realized she knew our names. She must have a terrific memory. “Be prepared to take a long time getting there. You’ll find that in jaunting long distances, aim is much more important than strength. And you’re not in a hurry. Why don’t you go first?”

“Well…I guess I—bloody hell!”

Kirra had absently let go of her handhold at some point, instinctively trusting to gravity to keep her in place. But there was none. In the twenty seconds or so we’d been here, she’d drifted far enough away from the floor (as I called that wall in my mind, since it had been under my feet when I started) to be unable to touch it again. Her attempts only put her into a tumble from which she couldn’t figure out how to emerge. “Oh my,” she groaned as she spun. “I think I’m gonna be a puke pinwheel in a minute…”

I tried to reach her, but I couldn’t quite do it without letting go with my other hand myself. And the gap between us was slowly widening.

“Make a chain,” our friend said, and one of the women I didn’t know, who was nearest to me, reached and got one of my ankles in a one-handed deathgrip. I let go of my handhold, lunged, and got an equally firm grip on one of Kirra’s ankles as it went by. Her mass tried to tug me sideways as I stabilized her spin, and partially succeeded. The woman holding me reeled us both in, a little too hard: Kirra and I
thumped
firmly together into what I thought of as the floor, and clutched it and each other.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have used up our giggles earlier; we could have used some now.

“I’m right,” Kirra said. “Ta, love…I feel a right idjit.”

“It happens to everyone here, sooner or later,” our unseen friend told her. “Proper etiquette is to lend assistance if needed and otherwise ignore it. Are you ready to jaunt now, Kirra?”

She was game. “Reckon so. Where’s that blinkin’ tunnel? Pun unintended.” She spun round to face the cavern and got her feet under her. “Oh, there it is. See you on the other side, mates—”

She kicked off, gently, and began to rise into the air.

Now we giggled. We couldn’t help it. Her lazy ascension looked
exactly
like a bad special effect. We heard her laughing too, with a child’s delight. She mugged for us as she went, folded her arms and legs into tailor seat, opened out into a swan dive, then tucked and rolled and came out of it making exaggerated swimming motions—in our direction. Any embarrassment she might have felt a moment ago was gone. “I
dreamed
of this,” she sang, her voice high and dreamy, “so many years ago, it’s like a memory—”

I set my feet, let go of the wallbehindme/floorbeneathme bulkhead, took a deep breath, and jaunted after her.

If you’ve done it you know what I mean, and if you haven’t I can’t convey it. All I can say is, mortgage your condo, take the Thomas Cook Getaway Special, and jaunt in free fall once before you die. That way you’ll know your way around Paradise when you get there.

We were all giggling like schoolgirls as we jaunted up through the vast chamber, drawing amused looks from the old hands. “I like it, Morgan,” Kirra called down to me.

“Me, too,” I called back. I was mildly disappointed that this big cave had no perceptible echo. But I suppose the fun of one would have worn off the first time you smacked your head on bare rock, or tried to make yourself understood to someone on the other side of the chamber.

Kirra had followed instructions, jaunted very gently and therefore slowly. My own jaunt had been a little more impulsive: I was gradually overtaking her. “Look out above—here I come!”

She glanced down, rotated on her axis, and opened her arms for me so that I slid up into a hug—one of the oddest, most pleasant experiences of my life! We grinned with delight and embraced.

Looking past her fanny I noticed four p-suited males emerging from a hatch near the one we’d just left. Robert wasn’t among them. Well, what did I care?

At about the mid-point Kirra and I began to think about the other end of the journey, and plan our landing. As we did so, it suddenly dawned on us both that we were not floating
up
—we were upside down, falling. It was as if the whole cave had flipped end over end in an instant. We clutched each other even tighter…and then relaxed, trying to laugh at ourselves. But there was a queasy feeling in my stomach that hadn’t been there before. This “thinking spherically” business they kept talking about at Suit Camp was going to take some work. And time…

I could see, now, why some people just can’t ever get it. For the first time, I seriously wondered whether—dancer or no dancer—I might be one of them. I had automatically assumed that spherical perception would be a snap for any modern dancer, since we do our moving much farther from the vertical axis than ballet dancers…but when I thought about it, weren’t even modern dancers
more
tied into gravity and perpendicularity than ordinary people? A civilian tries to not fall down; a modern dancer tries to move all over the place in odd and interesting ways, and not fall down: therefore she pays more attention, more of the time, to not falling down—pays more heed to gravity. Maybe I had
more
to unlearn than my companions…

But I thrust aside the thought, determined to keep enjoying this magic jaunt, and got Kirra to show me that reversing-your-vertical trick. It turned out to be something like trying to exaggerate a swan dive, if that helps you. I ordered my stomach to settle down.
Fine,
it said,
Define “down.”
I told it “down” was toward my feet, and that seemed to help a little.

When I’d kicked off to follow Kirra, she’d been a near target, so I’d aimed well enough to jaunt right into her embrace. But the target she’d been aimed at was much farther away, and docking with me had probably further disturbed her course. We landed close to the tunnel mouth we wanted, but not very. About ten seconds later Glenn threaded it like a needle, spinning around the bungee cord like a high-bar gymnast, and those of us who could applauded. The others did no better than Kirra and I. We all met at the tunnel mouth.

“Not bad at all,” our woman friend said. “And Glenn, that was excellent.”

I understood that she was monitoring us from some remote location—but it seemed odd that she was still giving us her attention. Surely there were other women coming out of Decontam after us. Yes, there was one now: I could see her “up” there, emerging upside down from the hatch we’d left, gaping up at us…

The penny dropped.

Now how did one phrase this? “Uh…excuse me?”

“Yes, Morgan?” she said.

“…are you organic?”

There was a smile in her voice now. “Elegantly put, dear. No, as you’ve guessed, I’m an AI program in Top Step’s master computer.”

“And a bloody clever one you are,” Kirra said delightedly. “I never sussed. What’s your name, love?”

“I’m generally known as Teena. If you think of a name you like better, tell me and I’ll answer to that with you. At the moment I have one hundred and sixty-seven names. But if you want to refer to me, to another person, call me Teena.”

I’d been crabwalking my way to the tunnel mouth with the others, but suddenly I paused. “Uh…Teena?” I began, pitching my voice too low for the others to hear. “…do you—I mean, is there any way to—”

“May I try to guess your questions, Morgan?” she murmured in my ear. “Yes, I will be monitoring you every minute you’re in or near Top Step, while you’re feeding the felcher or making love or just trying to be alone. No, there is no way to switch me off. But there’s only a very limited sense in which I can even metaphorically be said to be
thinking about
what I perceive. In a very real sense, there is no me, save when I am invoked. My short-term memory is much less than a second, I don’t save anything that is not relevant to health, safety or your direct commands, and even that can be accessed by only eight people in Top Step—to all of whom you gave that specific right when you sighed your contract. So please don’t think of me as a Peeping Teena, all right?”

“I’ll try,” I said, resuming my journey to the tunnel mouth. “It’s just that…well, I’ve heard AIs before—but you’re so good I’d swear you’re sentient.” Glenn heard that last and said, “Me too.”

“Artificial sentience may be possible,” Teena said, “but it won’t be silicon-based.”

One of the women I didn’t know said something in Japanese.

“Why not?” Glenn translated.

“The map is not the territory,” Teena said—and apparently the Japanese woman heard the answer in her own language. What a marvelous tool Teena was!

Glenn seemed disposed to argue, but Teena went on, “It’s time we got you six to your quarters. Follow me—”

A group of little green LED lights along the tunnel wall began twinkling at us, then moved slowly away into the tunnel like Tinkerbell.

One at a time, we put our soles against the bungee cord and jaunted after them.

The tunnel itself was laser-straight, though its walls were roughly sculpted. There were numbered hatches let into the padded rock at odd intervals, and other, smaller tunnels intersected at odd intervals and angles. The main corridor was about eight or ten meters in cross section, with rungs spiraling along its length so that you could never be far from one. These came in handy as we progressed; we were to learn that a perfect tunnel-threading jaunt is almost impossible, even for free fall veterans. Old hands boast of their low CPH, or Contact-Per-Hectometer rate. (If you’re a diehard American, a hectometer, a hundred meters, is the rest of humanity’s name for about a hundred yards.) We soon began to pick up the trick of slinging ourselves along with minimal waste effort. No matter how fast or slow we progressed, the blinking lights that we followed stayed exactly five meters ahead of the foremost one of us, like one of those follow-from-in-front tails you see cops or spies do in the movies.