The Stardance Trilogy (47 page)

“Look,” I said, “the timing is lousy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“See, I came here to dance. That’s all, I came here to dance. Anything else comes second. I can’t dance anymore on Earth. If I can’t dance here either, I don’t know if I’m going through with Symbiosis. And I don’t know if I can dance here or not. I thought I could, but I can’t even seem to learn the equivalent of crawling on all fours. Maybe I’m one of the ones who just can’t get it. I can’t give you any kind of an answer until I know. Does that make any sense?”

He thought about it as we reached the midpoint of the room and he led us through our turnover. “It makes me want to teach you everything I can, as fast as possible. What time is good tonight?”

“Did you hear what I—”

“We Chinese are a notoriously patient people.”

I sighed in exasperation.

“Let me help you, as a friend. No obligations. I’ve admired your work for a long time; allow me this honour.”

What the hell can you say to something like that? That evening we spent two hours working out together in “my” gym.

And it was a fiasco.

Early on we identified my major problem: an unconscious, instinctive tendency to select one of the possible local verticals and stubbornly declare it the “correct” one in my mind, so that I became disoriented when out of phase with it. It is the most common problem of a neophyte in free fall. Ten million years of evolution insist on knowing which way “down” is, just in case this weightlessness business should suddenly fail. Even a false answer is preferable to no answer.

Identifying the problem didn’t help solve it at all. Robert was indeed patient, but I must have tried his patience. Finally I thanked him, politely kicked him out, and spent another couple of hours alone, trying to dance.

It wasn’t a
total
disaster. But damn close. In the last ten minutes I managed to put together one eight-second sequence that didn’t stink. The first time I did it was dumb luck, an accident with serendipitous results. But I was able to reproduce it again…and again. About three times out of five. If I didn’t crash into something while I was trying. In playback, it looked good from five of the six camera angles.

But I could not connect that eight seconds up with
anything.
The third time I had to stop to towel away sweat from the middle of my back I said the hell with it, got in and out of the shower bag, and went back to my room. Kirra was out. I climbed into my sleepsack, dimmed the lights, and studied holograms of some of my favorite Stardancer dance pieces, trying to understand how they made what they did look so effortless. I even went back as far as the oldest zero-gee dance there is, Shara Drummond’s
Liberation.
She’d only been dancing in space for three weeks when Armstead recorded it. Until now, I’d never fully appreciated just how good it was.

After a while Kirra came in, humming softly to herself. “Hello, lovey. How’d it go?”

I collapsed the holo. “How’d it go with you? Ben show you any good moves?” She’d gone to his place to learn 3-D chess.

She came and docked with my sleepsack. Her grin was about to split her face. “Benjamin showed me his very best moves,” she said in a dreamy singsong voice.

My eyes widened. “You’re kidding!”

She shook her head, beaming. We squealed together and burst into giggles. “Tell me everything!” I demanded.

“Well, you know, I’d always wondered,” she said, settling into a hug, “what’d it be like? I mean, what’d keep you squished together if not the weight?”

I’d always wondered too. “Right. So?”

“So it turns out it’s as natural as breathin’. You hug with four arms is all, and then you…well, you dance. Nowhere near as hard as the stuff we do in class.” She closed her eyes in reminiscence. “It was lots gentler than it is on Earth. And nicer. He didn’t need to hold himself up, so he could keep on usin’ his hands all the way through.” She squealed and opened her eyes again. “Oh, it was awful nice! Benjamin says we’ll get even better with time.”

I nodded. “Wait’ll you see how good he is in two days’ time,” I said, and made her laugh from deep inside.

She was my friend; I shared her joy. But a part of me was envious. I tried hard to hide it, to make the right noises as she chattered happily on, and thought I succeeded.

Maybe she smelled it. “So how’d you make out with your dancing, love?” she asked finally.

I found myself pouring out my frustrations to her. “And I can’t even
start
to figure out where I stand with him until I know whether or not I can dance in free fall,” I finished, “and I can’t even guess how long it’s going to be before I know.”

She looked thoughtful. “Tell me something.”

“Sure.”

“How’s your back feel?”

“Why, not too—oh!”

“How ’bout those knees, then?”

My back did not hurt. My knees did not hurt.

“You worked out more in the last two days than you did in the last year, tell me I’m wrong,” she said. “Have your legs buckled? Got crook back?”

No and no, by God. I was tired and ached in a dozen places, but they were no worse than one should expect when getting back into shape after a long layoff.

“You can do this. Matter of time, that’s all.”

I was thunderstruck. She was absolutely right.
My instrument was working again.
Hell, I had managed to transition from ballet to modern dance once: I could learn this. There was nothing stopping me! Nothing but time and courage. The sense of relief was overwhelming. I felt a surge of elation, and at the same time a delicious tiredness. Moments before I’d been suffering from fatigue; now I was just sleepy.

“Kirra, you’re an angel,” I cried, and hugged her harder, and kissed her. Then we smiled at each other, and she jaunted to her own bed and dimmed the lights. She undressed quickly and slid into the sack. “Night, lovey,” she called softly.

“G’night, Kirra,” I murmured. “I’m happy for you. Ben’s sweet.”

My last thought was
I’m going to sleep sounder tonight than I have in years,
and then almost at once I was deep under—

—and then I was wide awake, saying, “What the hell was that?” aloud, and Kirra said it too and we both listened and heard nothing but silence, total silence, and at last I thought
Silence? In a space dwelling?

The air circulation system in Top Step is whisper quiet—but boy, do you miss that whisper when it stops!

Then a robot was speaking with Teena’s voice, loudly, in my left ear.

In only the one ear, and very slowly, unmistakably Teena’s voice but without any inflections of tone or pitch: she must have been talking to or with nearly every resident of Top Step at once, time-sharing like mad, no bytes to spare for vocal personality or stereo effect. “Attention! Attention! There has been a major system malfunction. There is no immediate cause for alarm, repeat, no cause for alarm. The circulation system is temporarily down. It is being repaired. All personnel are advised to remain in constant motion until further notice. Do not let yourself remain motionless for more than a few moments. If you can reach p-suit or other personal pressure, please do so, calmly.” Not wanting to drain her resources any further, we asked no questions.

A moment later, her voice was superseded by that of Dorothy Gerstenfeld. She explained the nature of the problem, assured us it would be fixed long before it became serious, entreated us all not worry, and sounded so serene and confident herself that I did stop worrying. Her explanation was too technical for me to follow, but her tone of voice said I should be reassured by it, so I was.

The circulation system was only down for half an hour. Nothing to be afraid of: Top Step was immense and a lot of it was pressurized; there was more than enough air on hand to last us all much longer than half an hour in a pinch. The worst of it was nuisance: when the air stops flowing in a space habitat, you
must not
be motionless. If you are, exhaled CO
₂
forms an invisible sphere around your head and slowly smothers you. There are many jobs aboard Top Step for which constant head motion is contraindicated, tracking a large-mass docking, for instance; such people had to find someone to fan their heads, or stop work for the duration. And everyone else had to keep moving. You can’t imagine how annoying that can be until it’s forced upon you. Not that being in motion takes any hard work, in zero gee—it’s just that your natural tendency and subconscious desire is to
stop
moving as much as possible, to stimulate the terrestrial environment you remember as natural, and overcoming that impulse gets wearing very quickly. Especially if you were tired to begin with.

But it was over soon enough. Kirra and I experimented with fanning each other’s faces, and told each other campfire stories, and at last we heard the soft sound of the pumps coming back up to speed. Because I was alert for it, I became consciously aware for the first time of the movement of air on my skin as soon as it resumed.

“The emergency is over,” Teena said, still in robot mode. “Repeat, the emergency is over. There have been zero casualties. Resume normal operations. Thank you.”

“Thank you all for not panicking,” Dorothy’s voice added. “We have everything under control now. Resume your duties. Those of you on sleep shift, try to get back to sleep; you’ve a long day ahead.”

I had surprisingly little difficulty feeling sleepy again, and Kirra was snoring—musically—before I was. As I was fading out again I had a thought. “Teena?” I whispered.

“Yes, Morgan?” Her reply was also whispered, but I could tell this was the old, fully human-sounding Teena again, so it was all right to bother her now.

“What caused the circulation system to go down?”

She almost seemed to hesitate. Silly, of course; computers don’t hesitate. “A component was improperly installed through carelessness. It has been replaced.”

“Oh. Glad it wasn’t anything serious. A meteor or something. That reminds me: how is Mr. Henderson, the Chief Steward on my flight up here?”

“I’m sorry to say he died about four hours ago, without regaining consciousness.”

“Oh.” No one had needed to fan his head while the air was down.

“Good night. Morgan.”

“G’night.”

My last drifting thought was something about how lucky I’d been lately. Two life-threatening emergencies in forty-eight hours, and I’d lived through them both.

There weren’t any more for
weeks.

Tom Seaver: What time is it, Yogi?

Yogi Berra: You mean now?

A
COMPANY MANAGER
I toured Nova Scotia with once summed up that province as follows: “Too many churches; not enough bars.” I’m afraid the same could be said of Top Step.

That overgrown cigar had churches and temples of almost every possible kind in its granite guts, over three dozen, including three different
zendos;
if I had wanted to do nothing but kûkanzen “sitting” or Rinzai chanting with my free time, I could have. But I’d never been all that committed as a Buddhist—I’d never been fully committed to
anything
except the dance—and somehow it felt wrong to spend all of my last three months as a human being pursuing no-thought. I intended to do a
lot
of thinking, before I stepped outdoors and jaunted into a big glob of red goo and opened up my p-suit. I still wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to go through with this.

I tended to spend my free time in one of four places: Solarium Three, Le Puis, my room, and the gym I came to think of as my studio.

Sol Three was a popular hangout for just about everyone in my class, and for some from the two classes ahead of us and some of the staff as well. Not Sol One, where I’d met Harry Stein and three others of The Six: this Solarium was, as its number indicates, all the way round the other side of Top Step. An accidental pun, for that’s the side facing Earth: Sol Three overlooking Sol III. It was more commonly and informally known as the Café du Ciel—a reference I understood the first time I saw its spectacular view.

Have you ever been to New Orleans, to the old French Quarter? Do you know the Café du Monde? You sit outdoors and sip chicoried café au lait, and eat fresh hot beignets smothered with so much powdered sugar you mustn’t inhale while biting, and you watch the world go by. Look one way, and there’s the Mississippi, Old Man River himself, just rolling along. Look another and you’re seeing Jackson Square, another and you’re looking at the French Market. Street buskers play alto sax, or vibes, or clarinet, very well. They say if you sit in the Café du Monde long enough, sooner or later you’ll see everyone you know pass by.

The same is said of the Café du Ciel—and it’s literal truth.

It tended to have a lot of people in it, and it tended to be rather quiet, although there was no rule about noise. There were no buskers there. There were no beignets available either—powdered sugar isn’t practical in free fall—but you could bring a bulb of coffee from the cafeteria. What made the Solarium reminiscent of the Café du Monde was the view.

The scenery was so majestic it was like being in some great cathedral. When the Fireflies originally whisked Top Step from the asteroid belt into High Earth Orbit as their final parting gift to humanity, they picked a polar orbit concentric to the day/night terminator, to keep the big stone cigar in perpetual sunlight. So the Earth we saw from Solarium Three was always half in sunlight and half in darkness, an immense yin-yang symbol. Our orbit was high enough that you could just see the entire globe at once. The slow grandeur of the dance it did I cannot describe, spinning end-on when we were passing over one of the Poles, then seeming to lurch crazily sideways as our orbit flung us toward the Equator and the opposite Pole. A whole planet endlessly executing the same arabesque turn. If you haven’t got graphic software that’ll simulate it, get an old-fashioned globe and see it for yourself, it’s the grandest roller coaster I know, endlessly absorbing. We all felt its pull: there in the big window was everything we were about to say goodbye to.

Second-month Postulants generally seemed to graduate into being attracted more by Solariums One and Four, which faced raw empty space: everything they were about to say hello to. I visited those cubics a few times; they had even more of that cathedral-hush feel. Too much for me, then.