The Stardance Trilogy (17 page)

He was not aware of them, of anything external, and Norrey held up a warning hand without meeting my eyes. I put my temper on hold and my back against the wall beside the airlock; the velcro pad between my shoulder-blades held me securely. (The whole sphere is carpeted in “female” velcro; pads of “male” are sewn into our slippers—which also have “thumbs”—our seats, thighs, backs, and the backs of our gloves. Velcro is the cheapest furniture there is.)

Raoul was making magic with common household ingredients. His most esoteric tool was what he referred to as his “hyperdermic needle.” It looked like a doctor’s hypo with elephantiasis: the chamber and plunger were oversized, but the spike itself was standard size. In his hands it was a magic wand.

Tethered to his skinny waist were all the rest of the ingredients: five drinking bulbs, each holding a different colored liquid. At once I identified a source of subconscious unease, and relaxed: I had been missing the vibration of the air conditioner, missing the draft. Twin radial tethers held Raoul at the center of the sphere, in the slight crouch typical of free fall, and he
wanted
still air—even though it severely limited his working time. (Shortly, exhaled carbon dioxide would form a sphere around his head; he would spin gently around his tethers and the sphere would become a donut; by then he must be finished. Or move. I would have to be careful myself to keep moving, spiderlike, as would the others.)

He speared one of the bulbs with his syringe, drew off a measured amount. Apple juice, by the color of it, admixed with water. He emptied the syringe gently, thin knuckly fingers working with great delicacy, forming a translucent golden ball that hung motionless before him, perfectly spherical. He pulled the syringe free, and the ball…shimmered…in spherically symmetrical waves that took a long time to ebb.

He filled his syringe with air, jabbed it into the heart of the ball and squeezed. The bulb filled with a measured amount of air, expanding into a nearly transparent golden bubble, around which iridescent patterns chased each other in lazy swirls. It was about a meter in diameter. Again Raoul disengaged the syringe.

Filling it in turn from bulbs of grape juice, tomato juice and unset lime jello, he filled the interior of the golden bubble with spherical beads of purple, red, and green, pumping them into bubbles as he formed them. They shone, glistened, jostling but declining to absorb each other. Presently the golden bubble was filled with Christmas-tree balls in various sizes from grape to grapefruit, shimmering, borrowing colors from each other. Marangoni Flow—gradients in surface tension—made them spin and tumble around each other like struggling kittens. Occasional bubbles were pure water, and these were rainbow scintillations that the eye ached to fragment and follow individually.

Raoul was drifting for air now, holding the macrobubble in tow with the palm of his hand, to which the whole thing adhered happily. If he were to strike it sharply now, I knew, the whole cluster would
snap
at once into a single, large bubble around the surface of which streaks of colors would run like tears (again, by Marangoni Flow). I thought that was his intention.

The master lighting panel was velcro’d to his chest. He dialed for six tight spots, focusing them on the bubble-jewel with sure fingers. Other lights dimmed, winked out. The room was spangled with colors and with color, as the facets of the manmade jewel flung light in all directions. With a seemingly careless wave of his hand, Raoul set the scintillating globe spinning, and Town Hall swam in its eerie rainbow fire.

Drifting before the thing, Raoul set his Musicmaster for external speaker mode, velcro’d it to his thighs, and began to play.

Long, sustained warm tones first. The globe thrilled to them, responding to their vibrations, expressing the music visually. Then liquid trills in a higher register, with pseudowoodwind chords sustained by memory-loop beneath. The globe seemed to ripple, to pulse with energy. A simple melody emerged, mutated, returned, mutated again. The globe spangled in perfect counterpoint. The tone of the melody changed as it played, from brass to violin to organ to frankly electronic and back again, and the globe reflected each change with exquisite subtlety. A bass line appeared. Horns. I kicked myself free of the wall, both to escape my own exhalations and to get a different perspective on the jewel. The others were doing likewise, drifting gently, trying to become organic with Raoul’s art. Spontaneously we danced, tossed by the music like the glistening jewel, by the riot of color it flung around the spherical room. An orchestra was strapped to Raoul’s thighs now, and it made us free-fall puppets.

Improv only; not up to concert standard. Simple group exercises, luxuriating in the sheer physical
comfort
of free fall and sharing that awareness. Singing around the campfire, if you will, trying to out unfamiliar harmonies on each other’s favorite songs. Only Harry abstained, drifting somehow “to one side” with the odd, incongruous grace of a polar bear in the water. He became thereby a kind of second focus of the dance, became the camera eye toward which Raoul aimed his creation, and we ours. (Raoul and Harry had become the fastest of friends, the chatterbox and the sphinx. They admired each other’s hands.) Harry floated placidly, absorbing our joy and radiating it back.

Raoul tugged gently on a line, and a large expandable wire loop came to him. He adjusted it to just slightly larger than the bubblejewel, captured that in the loop and expanded the loop rapidly at once. Those who have only seen it masked by gravity have no idea how powerful a force surface tension is. The bubblejewel became a concave lens about three meters in diameter, within which multicolored convex lenses bubbled, each literally perfect. He oriented it toward Harry, added three low-power lasers from the sides, and set the lens spinning like the Wheel of Kali. And we danced.

After a while the knock-knock light went on beside the airlock. That should have startled me—we don’t get much company—but I paid no mind, lost in zero-gee dance and in Raoul’s genius, and a little in my own in hiring him. The lock cycled and opened to admit Tom McGillicuddy—which should have startled the hell out of me. I had no idea he was thinking of coming up to visit, and since he hadn’t been on the scheduled elevator I’d just put Yeng and DuBois on, he must have taken a
very
expensive special charter to get here. Which implied disaster.

But I was in a warm fog, lost in the dance, perhaps a little hypnotized by the sparkling of Raoul’s grape-juice, tomato-juice and lime-jello kaleidoscope. I may not even have nodded hello to Tom, and I know I was not even remotely surprised by what he did, then.

He joined us.

With no hesitation, casting away the velcro slippers he’d brought from the airlock’s dressing chamber, he stepped off into thick air and joined us within the sphere, using Raoul’s guy wires to position himself so that our triangle pattern became a square. And then he danced with us, picking up our patterns and the rhythm of the music.

He did a creditable job. He was in damned good shape for someone who’d been doing all our paperwork—but infinitely more important (for terrestrial physical fitness is so
useless
in space), he was clearly functioning without a local vertical, and enjoying it.

Now I
was
startled, to my bones, but I kept pokerfaced and continued dancing, trying not to let Tom catch me watching. Across the sphere Norrey did likewise—and Linda, above, seemed genuinely oblivious.

Startled? I was flabbergasted. The single factor that had washed out sixteen students out of seventeen was the same thing that washed out Skyfac construction men, the same thing that had troubled eight of the nine Skylab crewmen back when the first experiments with zero-gee life had been made: inability to live without a local vertical.

If you bring a goldfish into orbit (the Skylab crew did), it will flounder helplessly in its globe of water. Show the fish an
apparent
point of reference, place a flat surface against its water-sphere (which will then form a perfect hemisphere thereon quite naturally), and the fish will decide that the plane surface is a stream bed, aligning its body perpendicularly. Remove the plate, or add a second plate (no local vertical or too many), and the goldfish will soon die, mortally confused. Skylab was purposely built to have three
different
local verticals in its three major modules, and eight out of nine crewmen faithfully and chronically adjusted to a module’s local vertical as they entered it, without conscious thought. Traveling all the way through all three in one jaunt gave them headaches; they hated the docking adapter which was designed to have no local vertical at all. It is physically impossible to get dizzy in zero gee, but they said they
felt
dizzy any time they were prevented from coming into focus with a defined “floor” and “walls.”

All of them except one—described as “one of the most intelligent of the astronauts, as well as one of the most perverse.” He took to the docking adapter—to life without up and down—like a duck to water. He was the only one of nine who made the psychological breakthrough.
Now
I knew how lucky I had been that Norrey and Raoul had both turned out to be Stardancer material. And how few others ever could be.

But Tom was unquestionably one of them. One of us. His technique was raw as hell, he thought his hands were shovels and his spine was all wrong, but he was trainable. And he had that rare, indefinable
something
that it takes to maintain equilibrium in an environment that forbids equilibration. He was at home in space.

I should have remembered. He had been ever since I’d known him. It seemed to me in that moment that I perceived all at once the totality of my bloody blind stupidity—but I was wrong.

The impromptu jam session wound down eventually; Raoul’s music frivolously segued into the closing bars of
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
and as that last chord sustained, he stabbed a rigid hand through his lens, shattering it into a million rainbow drops that dispersed with the eerie grace of an expanding universe.

“Hoover that up,” I said automatically, breaking the spell, and Harry hastened to kick on the air scavenger before Town Hall became sticky with fruit juice and jello. Everyone sighed with it, and Raoul the magician was once again a rabbity little guy with a comic-opera hypo and a hula hoop. And a big wide smile. The tribute of sighs was followed by a tribute of silence; the warm glow was a while in fading.
I’ll be damned,
I thought,
I haven’t made memories this good in twenty years.
Then I put my mind back in gear.

“Conference,” I said briefly, and jaunted to Raoul. Harry, Norrey, Linda and Tom met me there, and we grabbed hands and feet at random to form a human snowflake in the center of the sphere. This left our faces every-which-way to each other, of course, but we ignored it, the way a veteran DJ ignores the spinning of a record label he’s reading. Even Tom paid no visible mind to it. We got right down to business.

“Well, Tom,” Norrey said first, “what’s the emergency?”

“Is Skyfac bailing out?” Raoul asked.

“Why didn’t you call first?” I added. Only Linda and Harry were silent.

“Whoa,” Tom said. “No emergency. None at all, everybody relax. Businesswise everything continues to work like a ridiculously overdesigned watch.”

“Then why spring for the chartered elevator? Or were you stowing away in the regular that just left?”

“No, I had a charter, all right—but it was a taxi. I’ve been in free fall as long as you have. Over at Skyfac.”

“Over at—” I thought things through, with difficulty. “And you went to the trouble of having your calls and mail relayed so we wouldn’t catch on.”

“That’s right. I’ve spent the last three months working out of our branch office aboard Skyfac.” That branch office was a postal address somewhere in the lower left quadrant of Tokugawa’s new executive secretary’s desk.

“Uh huh,” I said.
“Why?”

He looked at Linda, whose left ankle he happened to be holding, and chose his words. “Remember that first week after we met, Linda?” She nodded. “I don’t think I’ve been so exasperated before in my whole life. I thought you were the jackass of the world. That night I blew up at you in Le Maintenant, that last time that we argued religion—remember? I walked out of there that night and took a copter straight to Nova Scotia to that damned commune you grew up in. Landed in the middle of the garden at three in the morning, woke half of ’em up. I raved and swore at them for over an hour,
demanding
to know how in the hell they could have raised you to be such a misguided idiot. When I was done they blinked and scratched and yawned and then the big one with the really improbable beard said, ‘Well, if there’s that much juice between you, we would recommend that you probably ought to start courting,’ and gave me a sleeping bag.”

The snowflake broke up as Linda kicked free, and we all grabbed whatever was handiest or drifted. Tom reversed his attitude with practiced ease so that he tracked Linda, continued to speak directly to her.

“I stayed there for a week or so,” he went on steadily, “and then I went to New York and signed up for dance classes. I studied dance when I was a kid, as part of karate discipline; it came back, and I worked hard. But I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with zero-gee dance—so I sneaked up to Skyfac without telling any of you, and I’ve been working like hell over there ever since, in a factory sphere I rented with my own money.”

“Who’s minding the store?” I asked mildly.

“The best trained seals money can buy,” he said softly. “Our affairs haven’t suffered. But I have. I hadn’t intended to tell you
any
of this for another year or so. But I was in Panzella’s office when the Termination of Monitoring notices came in on Yeng and DuBois. I knew you were hurting for bodies. I’m self-taught and clumsy as a pig on ice and on Earth it’d take me another five years to become a fourth-rate dancer, but I think I can do the kind of stuff you’re doing here.”

He wriggled to face me and Norrey. “I’d like to study under you. I’ll pay my own tuition. I’d like to work with you people, besides just on paper, and be part of your company. I think I can make a Stardancer.” He turned back to Linda. “And I’d like to start courting you, by your customs.”