The Stardance Trilogy (8 page)

And still I will have told less than nothing. For Shara sought more than freedom—she sought meaning.
Mass
was, above all, a spiritual event—its title pun reflecting its thematic ambiguity between the technological and the theological. Shara made the human confrontation with existence a transitive act, literally meeting God halfway. I do not mean to imply that her dance at any time addressed an exterior God, a discrete entity with or without white beard. Her dance addressed reality, gave successive expression to the Three Eternal Questions asked by every human being who ever lived.

Her dance observed her
self
, and asked,
“How have I come to be here?”

Her dance observed the universe in which
self
existed, and asked,
“How did all this come to be here with me?”

And at last, observing her
self
in relation to its universe,
“Why am I so alone?”

And having asked these questions with every muscle and sinew she possessed, she paused hung suspended in the center of the sphere, her body and soul open to the universe, and when no answer came, she contracted. Not in a dramatic, coiling-spring sense as she had in
Liberation
, a compressing of energy and tension. This was physically similar, but an utterly different phenomenon. It was an act of introspection, a turning of the mind’s (soul’s?) eye in upon itself, to seek answers that lay nowhere else. Her body too, therefore, seemed to fold in upon itself, compacting her mass, so evenly that her position in space was not disturbed.

And reaching within herself, she closed on emptiness.

The camera faded out leaving her alone, rigid, encapsulated, yearning. The dance ended, leaving her three questions unanswered, the tension of their asking unresolved. Only the expression of patient waiting on her face blunted the shocking edge of the non-ending, made it bearable, a small, blessed sign whispering, “To be continued.”

By the eighteenth day we had it in the can, in rough form. Shara put it immediately out of her mind and began choreographing
Stardance
, but I spent two hard days of editing before I was ready to release the tape for broadcast. I had four days until the half-hour of prime time Carrington had purchased—but that wasn’t the deadline I felt breathing down the back of my neck.

McGillicuddy came into my workroom while I was editing, and although he saw the tears running down my face he said no word. I let the tape run, and he watched in silence, and soon his face was wet too. When the tape had been over for a long time he said, very softly, “One of these days I’m going to have to quit this stinking job.”

I said nothing.

“I used to be a karate instructor. I was pretty good. I could teach again, maybe do some exhibition work, make ten percent of what I do now.”

I said nothing.

“The whole damned Ring’s bugged, Charlie. The desk in my office can activate and tap my vidphone in Skyfac. Four at a time, actually.”

I said nothing.

“I saw you both in the airlock, when you came back the last time. I saw her collapse. I saw you bringing her around. I heard her make you promise not to tell Dr. Panzella.”

I waited. Hope stirred.

He dried his face. “I came in here to tell you I was going to Panzella, to tell him what I saw. He’d bully Carrington into sending her home right away.”

“And now?” I said.

“I’ve seen that tape.”

“And you know that the Stardance will probably kill her?”

“Yes.”

“And you know we have to let her do it?”

“Yes.”

Hope died. I nodded. “Then get out of here and let me work.”

He left.

On Wall Street and aboard Skyfac it was late afternoon when I finally had the tape edited to my satisfaction. I called Carrington, told him to expect me in half an hour, showered, shaved, dressed, and left.

A major of the Space Command was there with him when I arrived, but he was not introduced and so I ignored him. Shara was there too, wearing a thing made of orange smoke that left her breasts bare. Carrington had obviously made her wear it, as an urchin writes filthy words on an altar, but she wore it with a perverse and curious dignity that I sensed annoyed him. I looked her in the eye and smiled. “Hi, kid. It’s a good tape.”

“Let’s see,” Carrington said. He and the major took seats behind the desk and Shara sat beside it.

I fed the tape into the video rig built into the office wall, dimmed the lights, and sat across from Shara. It ran twenty minutes, uninterrupted, no soundtrack, stark naked.

It was terrific.

“Aghast” is a funny word. To make you aghast, a thing must hit you in a place you haven’t armored over with cynicism yet. I seem to have been born cynical; I have been aghast three times that I can remember. The first was when I learned, at the age of three, that there were people who could deliberately hurt kittens. The second was when I learned, at age seventeen, that there were people who could actually take LSD and then hurt other people for fun. The third was when
Mass Is A Verb
ended and Carrington said in perfectly conversational tones, “Very pleasant; very graceful. I like it,” when I learned, at age forty-five, that there were men, not fools or cretins but intelligent men, who could watch Shara Drummond dance and fail to
see
. We all, even the most cynical of us, always have some illusion which we cherish.

Shara simply let it bounce off her somehow, but I could see that the major was as aghast as I, controlling his features with a visible effort.

Suddenly welcoming a distraction from my horror and dismay, I studied him more closely, wondering for the first time what he was doing here. He was my age, lean and more hard bitten than I am, with silver fuzz on top of his skull and an extremely tidy mustache on the front. I’d taken him for a crony of Carrington’s, but three things changed my mind. Something indefinable about his eyes told me that he was a military man of long combat experience. Something equally indefinable about his carriage told me that he was on duty at the moment. And something quite definable about the line his mouth made told me that he was disgusted with the duty he had drawn.

When Carrington went on, “What do you think, Major?” in polite tones, the man paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts and choosing his words. When he did speak, it was not to Carrington.

“Ms. Drummond,” he said quietly, “I am Major William Cox, commander of S.C. Champion, and I am honored to meet you. That was the most profoundly moving thing I have ever seen.”

Shara thanked him most gravely. “This is Charles Armstead, Major Cox. He made the tape.”

Cox regarded me with new respect. “A magnificent job, Mister Armstead.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

Carrington was beginning to understand that we three shared a thing which excluded him. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, Major,” he said with no visible trace of sincerity. “You can see it again on your television tomorrow night, if you chance to be off duty. And eventually, of course, cassettes will be made available. Now perhaps we can get to the matter at hand.”

Cox’s face closed as if it had been zippered up, became stiffly formal. “As you wish, sir.”

Puzzled, I began what I thought was the matter at hand. “I’d like your own Comm Chief to supervise the actual transmission this time, Mr. Carrington. Shara and I will be too busy to—”

“My Comm Chief will supervise the broadcast, Armstead,” Carrington interrupted, “but I don’t think you’ll be particularly busy.”

I was groggy from lack of sleep; my uptake was slow.

He touched his desk delicately. “McGillicuddy, report at once,” he said, and released it. “You see, Armstead you and Shara are both returning to Earth. At once.”

“What?”

“Bryce, you
can’t
,” Shara cried. “You
promised
.”

“Did I? My dear, there were no witnesses present last night. Altogether for the best, don’t you agree?”

I was speechless with rage.

McGillicuddy entered. “Hello, Tom,” Carrington said pleasantly. “You’re fired. You’ll be returning to Earth at once, with Ms. Drummond and Mr. Armstead, aboard Major Cox’s vessel. Departure in one hour, and don’t leave anything you’re fond of.” He glanced from McGillicuddy to me. “From Tom’s desk you can tap any vidphone in Skyfac. From my desk you can tap Tom’s desk.”

Shara’s voice was low. “Bryce, two days. God damn you, name your price.”

He smiled slightly. “I’m sorry, darling. When informed of your collapse, Dr. Panzella became most specific. Not even one more day. Alive you are a distinct plus for Skyfac’s image—you are my gift to the world. Dead you are an albatross around my neck. I cannot allow you to die on my property. I anticipated that you might resist leaving, and so I spoke to a friend in the,” he glanced at Cox, “
higher
echelons of the Space Command, who was good enough to send the Major here to escort you home. You are not under arrest in the legal sense—but I assure you that you have no choice. Something like protective custody applies. Goodbye, Shara.” He reached for a stack of reports on his desk, and I surprised myself considerably.

I cleared the desk entirely, tucked head catching him squarely in the sternum. His chair was bolted to the deck and so it snapped clean. I recovered so well that I had time for one glorious right. Do you know how, if you punch a basketball squarely, it will bounce up from the floor? That’s what his head did, in low gee slow motion.

Then Cox had hauled me to my feet and shoved me into the far corner of the room. “Don’t,” he said to me, and his voice must have held a lot of that “habit of command” they talk about because it stopped me cold. I stood breathing in great gasps while Cox helped Carrington to his feet.

The multibillionaire felt his smashed nose, examined the blood on his fingers, and looked at me with raw hatred. “You’ll never work in video again, Armstead. You’re through. Finished. Un-em-ployed, you got that?”

Cox tapped him on the shoulder, and Carrington spun on him. “What the hell do you want?” he barked.

Cox smiled. “Carrington, my late father once said, ‘Bill, make your enemies by choice, not by accident.’ Over the years I have found that to be excellent advice. You suck.”

“And not particularly well,” Shara agreed.

Carrington blinked. Then his absurdly broad shoulders swelled and he roared, “Out all of you!
Off my property at once!
”

By unspoken consent, we waited for Tom, who knew his cue. “Mister Carrington, it is a rare privilege and a great honor to have been fired by you. I shall think of it always as a Pyrrhic defeat.” And he half-bowed and we left, each buoyed by a juvenile feeling of triumph that must have lasted ten seconds.

The sensation of falling that you get when you first enter zero gee is literal truth—but it fades rapidly as your body learns to treat it as illusion. Now, in zero gee for the last time, for the half hour or so before I would be back in Earth’s gravitational field, I felt like I was falling. Plummeting into some bottomless gravity well, dragged down by the anvil that was my heart, the scraps of a dream that should have held me aloft fluttering overhead.

The
Champion
was three times the size of Carrington’s yacht, which childishly pleased me until I recalled that he had summoned it here without paying for either fuel or crew. A guard at the airlock saluted as we entered. Cox led us aft to the compartment where we were to strap in. He noticed along the way that I used only my left hand to pull myself along, and when we stopped, he said, “Mr. Armstead, my late father also told me, ‘Hit the soft parts with your hand. Hit the hard parts with a utensil.’ Otherwise I can find no fault with your technique. I wish I could shake your hand.”

I tried to smile, but I didn’t have it in me. “I admire your taste in enemies, Major.”

“A man can’t ask for more. I’m afraid I can’t spare time to have your hand looked at until we’ve grounded. We begin reentry immediately.”

“Forget it. Get Shara down fast and easy.”

He bowed to Shara, did
not
tell her how deeply sorry he was to et cetera, wished us all a comfortable journey, and left. We strapped into our acceleration couches to await ignition. There ensued a long and heavy silence, compounded of a mutual sadness that bravado could only have underlined. We did not look at each other, as though our combined sorrow might achieve some kind of critical mass. Grief struck us dumb, and I believe that remarkably little of it was self-pity.

But then a whole lot of time seemed to have gone by. Quite a bit of intercom chatter came faintly from the next compartment, but ours was not in circuit. At last we began to talk desultorily, discussing the probable critical reaction to
Mass Is A Verb
, whether analysis was worthwhile or the theater really dead, anything at all except future plans. Eventually there was nothing else to talk about, so we shut up again. I guess I’d say we were in shock.

For some reason I came out of it first. “What the hell is taking them so long?” I barked irritably.

Tom started to say something soothing, then glanced at his watch and yelped. “You’re right. It’s been over an hour.”

I looked at the wall clock, got hopelessly confused until I realized it was on Greenwich time rather than Wall Street, and realized he was correct. “Chrissakes,” I shouted, “the whole bloody
point
of this exercise is to protect Shara from overexposure to free fall! I’m going forward.”

“Charlie, hold it.” Tom, with two good hands, unstrapped faster than I. “Dammit, stay right there and cool off. I’ll go find out what the holdup is.”

He was back in a few minutes, and his face was slack. “We’re not going anywhere. Cox has orders to sit tight.”

“What? Tom, what the
hell
are you talking about?”

His voice was all funny. “Red fireflies. More like bees, actually. In a balloon.”

He simply
could not
be joking, which meant he flat out
had
to have gone completely round the bend, which meant that somehow I had blundered into my favorite nightmare, where everyone but me goes crazy and begins gibbering at me. So I lowered my head like an enraged bull and charged out of the room so fast the door barely had time to get out of my way.