The Stardance Trilogy (16 page)

“I think he wanted me to just tell Sandra to get lost, just let Security take her away and—”

I gave up. “I’ll see you in the mor…in the afternoon, Linda. Get some sleep; there’s a press conference in the Something-or-other Room at two.”

“Sure. I’m sorry, it must be late, huh?”

I met Raoul in the corridor—the desk had called him right after me, but he woke up slower. I told him that Linda and patient were doing as well as could be expected, and he was relieved. “Cripes, Charlie, her and Tom, you shoulda seen ’em. Cats and dogs, I never would have believed it.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes your best friends just can’t stand each other.”

“Yeah, life’s funny that way.”

On that profundity I went back to bed. Norrey was still out cold when I entered, but as I climbed under the covers and snuggled up against her back she snorted like a horse and said, “Awright?”

“All right,” I whispered, “but I think we’re going to have to keep those two separated for a while.”

She rolled over, opened one eye and found me with it. “Darl’n,” she mumbled, smiling with that side of her mouth, “there’s hope for you yet.”

And then she rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving me smug and fatuous and wondering what the hell she was talking about.

Those first-semester tapes sold like hell anyway, and the critics were more than kind, for the most part. Also, we rereleased
Mass Is A Verb
with Raoul’s soundtrack at that time, and finished our first fiscal year well in the black.

By the second year our Studio was taking shape.

We settled on a highly elongated orbit. At perigee the Studio came as close as 3200 kilometers to Earth (not very close—Skylab was up less than 450 klicks), and at apogee it swung way out to about 80,000 klicks. The point of this was to keep Earth from hogging half the sky in every tape; at apogee Terra was about fist-sized (subtending a little more than 9° of arc), and we spent most of our time far away from it (Kepler’s Second Law: the closer a satellite to its primary, the faster it swings around). Since we made a complete orbit almost twice a day, that gave two possible taping periods of almost eight hours apiece in every twenty-four hours. We simply adjusted our “inner clocks,” our biological cycle, so that one of these two periods came between “nine” and “five” subjective. (If we fudged a shot, we had to come back and reshoot some multiple of eleven hours later to get a background Earth of the proper apparent size.)

As to the Studio complex itself:

The largest single structure, of course, is the Fish-bowl, an enormous sphere for inside work, without p-suits. It is effectively transparent when correctly lit, but can be fitted with opaque foil surfaces in case you don’t
want
the whole universe for a backdrop. Six very small and very good camera mounts are built into it at various places, and it is fitted to accept plastic panels which convert it into a cube within a sphere, although we only used them a few times and probably won’t again.

Next largest is the informal structure we came to call Fibber McGee’s Closet. The Closet itself is only a long “stationary” pole studded with stanchions and line-dispensing reels, but it is always covered with junk, tethered to it for safekeeping. Props, pieces of sets, camera units and spare parts, lighting paraphernalia, control consoles and auxiliary systems, canisters and cans and boxes and slabs and bundles and clusters and loops and coils and assorted disorderly packages of whatever anyone thought it might be handy to have for free fall dance and the taping thereof, all cling to Fibber McGee’s Closet like interplanetary barnacles. The size and shape of the ungainly mass change with use, and the individual components shift lazily back and forth like schizophrenic seaweed at all times.

We had to do it that way, for it is not at all convenient to reenter and exit the living quarters frequently.

Imagine a sledgehammer. A big old roustabout’s stake pounder, with a large, barrel-shaped head. Imagine a much smaller head, coke-can size, at the butt end of the handle. That’s my house. That’s where I live with my wife when I’m at home in space, in a three-and-a-half room walkdown with bath. Try to balance that sledgehammer horizontally across one finger. You’ll want to lay that finger right up near the
other
end, just short of the much massier hammerhead. That’s the point around which my house pivots, and the countermass pivots, in chasing concentric circles, to provide a net effect of one-sixth gee at home. The countermass includes life-support equipment and supplies, power supply, medical telemetry, home computer and phone hardware, and some damn big gyros. The “hammer handle” is quite long: it takes a shaft of about 135 meters to give one-sixth gee at a rotation rate of one minute. That slow a rate makes the Coriolis differential minimal, as imperceptible as it is on a torus the size of Skyfac’s Ring One but without a torus’s vast cubic and inherently inefficient layout (Skyfac axiom: anywhere you want to go will turn out to be all the way round the bend; as, in short order, will you).

Since only a Tokugawa can afford the energies required to start and stop spinning masses in space on a whim, there are only two ways to leave the house. The axis of spin aims toward Fibber McGee’s Closet and Town Hall (about which more later); one can merely go out the “down” airlock (“the back door”) and let go at the proper time. If you’re not an experienced enough spacehand, or if you’re going somewhere on a tangent to the axis of rotation, you go out the “up” lock or front door, climb up the runged hammer handle to the no-weight point and step off, then jet to where you want to go. You
always
come home by the front door; that’s why it’s a walkdown. The plumbing is simplicity itself, and habitual attention must be paid to keep the Closet and Hall from being peppered with freeze-dried dung.

(No, we don’t save it to grow food on, or any such ecological wizardry. A closed system the size of ours would be too small to be efficient. Oh, we reclaim most of the moisture, but we give the rest to space, and buy our food and air and water from Luna like everybody else. In a pinch we could haul ’em up from Terra.)

We went through all those hoops, obviously, to provide a sixth-gee home environment. After you’ve been in space for long enough, you find zero gee much more comfortable and convenient. Any gravity at all seems like an arbitrary bias, a censorship of motion—like a pulp writer being required to write only happy endings, or a musician being restricted to a single meter.

But we spent as much time at home as we could manage. Any gravity at all will slow your body’s mindless attempt to adapt irrevocably to zero gee, and a sixth-gee is a reasonable compromise. Since it is local normal for both Lunar surface and Skyfac, the physiological parameters are standard knowledge. The more time spent at home, the longer we could stay up—and our schedule was fixed. None of us wanted to be marooned in space. That’s how we thought of it in those days.

If we slipped, if physicals showed one of us adapting too rapidly, we could compensate to some degree. You go out the back door, climb into the exercise yoke dangling from the power winch, and strap yourself in. It looks a little like one of those Jolly Jumpers for infants, or a modified bosun’s chair. You ease off the brake, and the yoke begins to “descend,” on a line with the hammer handle since there’s no atmospheric friction to drag you to one side. You lower away, effectively increasing the length of your hammer handle and thus your gee force. When you’re “down” far enough, say at a half gee (about 400 meters of line), you set the brake and exercise on the yoke, which is designed to provide a whole-body workout. You can even, if you want, use the built-in bicycle pedals to pedal yourself back up the line, with a built-in “parking brake” effect so that if it gets too much for you and you lose a stroke, you don’t break your legs and go sliding down to the end of your tether. From low-enough gee zones you can even hand-over-hand your way up, with safety line firmly snubbed—but below half-gee level you do not unstrap from the yoke for
any
reason. Imagine hanging by your hands at, say, one gravity over all infinity, wearing a snug plastic bag with three hours’ air.

We all got pretty conscientious about…er…watching our weight.

The big temptation was Town Hall, a sphere slightly smaller than the Goldfish Bowl. It was essentially our communal living room, the place where we could all hang out together and chew the fat in person. Play cards, teach each other songs, argue choreography, quarrel choreography (two different things), play 3-D handball, or just appreciate the luxury of free fall without a p-suit or a job to do. If a couple happened to find themselves alone in Town Hall, and were so inclined, they could switch off half the external navigation lights—signifying “Do Not Disturb”—and make love.

(One-sixth gee sex is nice, too—but zero gee is
different
. Nobody’s on top. It’s a wholehearted cooperative effort or it just doesn’t happen [I can’t imagine a free-fall rape]. You get to use
both
hands, instead of just the one you’re not lying on. And while a good half of the Kama Sutra goes right out the airlock, there are compensations. I have never cared for simultaneous oral sex, the classic “69,” because of the discomfort and distraction. Free fall makes it not only convenient, but logical, inevitable. End of second inevitable digression.)

For one reason and another, then, it was tempting to hang out overlong at Town Hall—and so many standard daily chores
must
be done there that the temptation had to be sharply curbed. Extensive physiological readouts on all of us were sent twice daily to Doc Panzella’s medical computer aboard Skyfac: as with air, food, and water, I was prepared to deal elsewhere if Skyfac ever lost its smile, but while I could have them I wanted Panzella’s brains. He was to space medicine what Harry was to space construction, and he kept us firmly in line, blistering us by radio when we goofed, handing out exercise sessions on the Jolly Jumper like a tough priest assigning novenas for penance.

We originally intended to build five sledge hammers, for a maximum comfortable population of fifteen. But we had rushed Harry, that first year; when the first group of students got off the elevator, it was a miracle that as many as three units were operational. We had to dismiss Harry’s crew early with thanks and a bonus: we needed the cubic they were using. Ten students, Norrey, Raoul, Harry, and me totals fourteen bodies. Three units totals nine rooms. It was a hell of a courtship…but Norrey and I came out of it
married
; the ceremony was only a formality.

By the second season we had completed one more three-room home, and we took up only seven new students, and everybody had a door they could close and crouch behind when they needed to, and all seven of them washed out. The fifth hammer never got built.

It was that run of bad cards I mentioned earlier, extending itself through our second season.

Look, I was just beginning to become a Name in dance, and rather young for it, when the burglar’s bullet smashed my hip joint. It’s been a long time, but I remember myself as having been pretty damn good. I’ll never be that good again, even with the use of my leg back. A few of the people we washed out were better dancers than I
used
to be—in dirtside terms. I had believed that a really good dancer almost automatically had the necessary ingredients to learn to think spherically.

The first season’s dismal results had shown me my error, and so for the second semester we used different criteria. We tried to select for free-thinking minds, unconventional minds, minds unchained by preconception and consistency. Raoul described them as “science-fiction-reader types.” The results were ghastly. In the first place, it turns out that people who can question even their most basic assumptions intellectually can not necessarily do so physically—they could imagine what needed doing, but couldn’t do it. Worse, the free-thinkers could not cooperate with other free-thinkers, could not work with
anyone’s
preconception consistently. What we wanted was a choreographer’s commune, and what we got was the classic commune where no one wanted to do the dishes. One chap would have made a terrific solo artist—when I let him go, I recommended to Sony that they finance him to a Studio of his own—but we couldn’t work with him.

And two of the damned idiots killed themselves through thoughtlessness.

They were all
well
coached in free-fall survival, endlessly drilled in the basic rules of space life. We used a double-buddy system with every student who went EVA until they had demonstrated competence, and we took every precaution I could or can think of. But Inge Sjoberg could not be bothered to spend a whole hour a day inspecting and maintaining her p-suit. She managed to miss all six classic signs of incipient coolant failure, and one sunrise she boiled. And nothing could induce Alexi Nikolski to cut off his huge mane of brown hair. Against all advice he insisted on tying it back in a kind of doubled-up pony tail, “as he had always done.” The arrangement depended on a
single hairband
. Sure as hell it failed in the middle of a class, and quite naturally he gasped. We were minutes away from pressure; he would surely have drowned in his own hair. But as Harry and I were towing him to Town Hall he unzipped his p-suit to deal with the problem.

Both times we were forced to store the bodies in the Closet for a gruesomely long time, while next-of-kin debated whether to have the remains shipped to the nearest spaceport or go through the legal complication of arranging for burial in space. Macabre humor saved our sanity (Raoul took to calling it Travis McGee’s Closet), but it soured the season.

And it wasn’t much more fun to say good-bye to the last of the live ones. On the day that Yeng and DuBois left, I nearly bottomed out. I saw them off personally, and the “coitus with a condom” imagery of shaking hands with p-suits on was just too ironically appropriate. The whole semester, like the first, had been coitus with a condom—hard work, no product—and I returned to Town Hall in the blackest depression I had known since…since Shara died. By association, my leg hurt; I wanted to bark at someone. But as I came in through the airlock Norrey, Harry and Linda were watching Raoul make magic.