The Stardance Trilogy (43 page)

On the other hand, who was I to judge? He wasn’t fleeing defeat, like me. Maybe architecture was as exciting an art as dance; maybe for him it was making elements dance. Maybe space was just an environment he liked.

Maybe there were no shallow reasons to become a Stardancer.

Maybe it didn’t matter what your reasons were.

As all this was going through my mind, Robert went on: “But there’s a little more to it than that. Another part of it is that when I started spending time in space, I found myself watching Earth a lot, thinking about what a mess it’s in, how close it is to blowing itself up. I read somewhere once, Earth is just too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. We’ve got to get more established in space, soon.

“I know you can say Stardancers aren’t part of the human race anymore, but I don’t buy that. They all came from human eggs and sperm, and they’ve done more for Earth than the rest of the race put together. They fixed the hole in the ozone layer, they put the brakes on the greenhouse effect, they built the mirror farms and set up the Asteroid Pipeline, they mad the Safe Lab so we can experiment with nanotechnology without being afraid the wrong little replicator will get loose and turn the world into grey goo—they can afford to be altruistic, because they don’t
need
anything but each other. I think without the Starseed Foundation, there’d have been an all-out nuclear war years ago.

“So I guess I decided it was time I put some back in. From all I can learn, there aren’t many architects in the Starmind, so I think I can be of help. I want to design and build things a little more useful to mankind than another damn factory or dormitory or luxury hotel.”

“And the eternal life without want part doesn’t hurt, does it?” Ben said, grinning, and Robert smiled back. It was the first real smile of his I’d seen. I tend to trust people or not trust them on the basis of their smiles; I decided I trusted Robert.

But I wished he’d smile more often.

How is it possible that mystics 3,000 years ago have plagiarized what we scientists are doing today?

—Karl Pribram

I
COULD WRITE
a whole chapter about my first free fall cafeteria meal, my first free fall sleep, my first free fall pee…but you can get that sort of thing from any traveler’s account. The next event of significance, the morning after our arrival at Top Step, was my first class with Reb Hawkins-roshi.

The course was titled “Beginner’s Mind”—a clue to me that I would like it, since my mother’s battered old copy of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
had been my own introduction to Buddhism. There are as many different flavors of Buddhism—even just of Zen!—as there are flavors of Christianity, and some of them give me hives…but if this Hawkins’s path was even tangent to Suzuki’s, I felt confident I could walk it without too much discomfort.

You couldn’t really have called me a Buddhist. I had no teacher, didn’t even really sit zazen on any regular basis. I’d never so much as been on a retreat, let alone done a five-day
sesshin.
My mother taught me how to sit, and a little of the philosophy behind it, was all. By that point in my life I mostly used Zen as a sort of nonprescription tranquilizer.

Robert, on the other hand, approached it with skepticism. He was not, I’d learned the night before, a Buddhist—it’s silly, I know, but for some reason I kept expecting every Asian I meet to be a Buddhist—but he had mentioned in passing that if he
were
going to be one, he’d follow the Rinzai school of Zen. (A rather harsh and overintellectual bunch, for my taste.) Pretty personal conversation for two strangers, I know; somehow we hadn’t gotten around to less intimate things, like how we liked to have sex. Nonetheless, I was proud of myself: I hadn’t physically touched him even once.

Well, okay: once. But I
hadn’t
kissed him goodnight before returning to my place! (Kirra kissed Ben…)

And I didn’t look for him in the cafeteria crowd during breakfast—and didn’t kiss him good morning when we met accidentally in the corridor on the way to class. I was too irritated: I’d had to stall around for over three minutes to bring about that accidental encounter, and I was mildly annoyed that he hadn’t looked me up during breakfast. God, lust makes you infantile!

But he was adequately pleased to encounter me, so I let him take my arm and show me a couple of jaunting tricks I’d already figured out on the way to breakfast—with the net result that we were nearly late for class, and I arrived in exactly the wrong frame of mind: distracted. So a nice thing happened.

As the door of the classroom silently irised shut behind us, my pulse began to race. What could be more disorienting than being inside your headful of racing thoughts, toying with the tingles of distant horniness—and suddenly finding yourself face to face with a holy man?

He was in his fifties, shaven-headed and clean-shaven, slender and quite handsome, and utterly centered and composed. He was not dressed as a Zen abbot, he wore white shorts and singlet, but his face, body language and manner all quietly proclaimed his office. I think I experienced every nuance of embarrassment there is.

He met my eyes, and his face glowed briefly with the infectious Suzuki-roshi grin that told me he was a saint, and he murmured the single word, “Later,” in a way that told me I was forgiven for being late and I had not given offense and we were going to be good friends as soon as we both had time; meanwhile, lighten up.

All of this in an instant; then his eyes swept past me to Robert, they exchanged an equally information-packed glance which I could not read, and he returned his attention to the group as a whole.

If I hadn’t arrived for class in an inappropriate mental state, it might have taken me minutes to realize how special Reb was.

Most of the spiritual teachers I’ve known had a tendency to sit silently for a minute or two after the arrival of the last pupils, as if to convey the impression that their meditation was so profound it took them a moment to shift gears. But Reb was a genuinely mindful man: he was aware Robert and I were the last ones coming, and the moment we had ourselves securely anchored to one of the ubiquitous bungee cords, he bowed to the group—somehow without disturbing his position in space—and began to speak.

“Hello,” he said in a husky baritone. “My name is Reb Hawkins, and I’ll be your student for the next eight to twelve weeks.”

Inevitably someone spoke up, a New Yorker by her accent. “‘Student’? I thought you were supposed to be the teacher.”

“I am supposed, by many, to be a teacher,” he agreed pleasantly. “Sometimes they are correct. But I am
always
a student.”

“Aah,” said the New Yorker, in the tones of one who has spotted the hook in a commercial.

Reb didn’t seem to notice. “I
am
going to try to teach all of you…specifically, how to enter Titanian Symbiosis without suffering unnecessary pain. Along the way, I will teach you any other lessons I can that you request of me, and from time to time I will offer to teach you other things I think you need to know…but in this latter category you are always privileged to overrule me.”

“If that’s true,” the New Yorker said, “I’m actually impressed.”

I was becoming irritated with the heckling—but Reb was not. “In free fall,” he said, “raising one’s hand for attention does not work well. Would you help me select some other gesture we all can use, Jo?”

Jo, the New Yorker, was so surprised by the question that she thought about it. “How ’bout this?”

Is there a proper name for the four-fingered vee she made? My parents were Star Trek fans, so I think of it as the Spock Hello.

He smiled. “Excellent! Unambiguous…and just difficult enough to perform that one has a moment to reconsider how necessary it really is to pre-empt the group’s attention. Thank you, Jo.” He demonstrated it for those who could not see Jo. “Is there anyone who can’t make this gesture?”

Several of us found it awkward, but no one found it impossible. I was less interested in my manual dexterity than in his social dexterity. Hecklers heckle because they need everyone in the room to know how clever they are. He had given her a chance to make that point, reproved her so gently that she probably never noticed, and I knew he would have no further trouble from her that day. By persuading her not to be his enemy, he had defeated her. I smiled…and saw him notice me doing so. He did not smile back—but I seemed to see an impish twinkle for a moment in his eye.

I like spiritual teachers with an impish twinkle. In fact, I don’t think I like any other kind.

“If any of you happen to be Buddhist, I am an Abbot in the Soto sect. I trace my dharma lineage through Shunryu Suzuki, and will be happy to do
dokusan
with any who wish it in the evenings, after dinner.”

I don’t know how to convey the significance of Reb’s dharma lineage to a non-Soto-Buddhist. Perhaps the rough equivalent might be a Christian monk who had been ordained by one of the Twelve Apostles. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi was one of the greatest Japanese Zen masters to come to America, way back in the middle of the twentieth century—founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the famous Tassajara monastery near Carmel.

“But this is not a class in Zen,” he went on, “and you need not have any interest in Buddha or his Eightfold Path. What we’re going to attempt to do in this class is to discuss spirituality without mentioning religion. The former can often be discussed by reasonable people without anger; the latter almost never can.”

Glenn made the Spock Hello; he returned it, to mean she had the floor. “What
is
‘spirituality without religion,’ sir?”

“Please call me ‘Reb,’ Glenn. It is the thing people had, before they invented religion, which caused them to gape at sunsets, to sing while alone, or to smile at other people’s babies. And other things which defy rational explanation, but are basic to humanity.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“By happy coincidence, practically the next thing in the syllabus is an example of what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to take a short field trip in just a few minutes, to see something spiritual. Can you wait, Glenn?”

“Of course, Reb.”

“Good. Now: one of the main things we need to do is to begin dismantling the
patterns
in which you think. Some of you may think that you’ve never given much thought to spirituality—but in fact you’ve thought too much about it, in patterns and terms that were only locally useful. Space adds dimensions unavailable to any terrestrial. It’s time you started getting used to the fact that you live in space now. So I’d like you all to unship all those bungee cords, and pass them to me.”

I began to see what he was driving at. The cords, to which we were all loosely clinging, imposed a strictly arbitrary local vertical, the same one Reb had been using since I’d entered. But as we followed his instruction, “up” and “down” went away…and he began (without any visible muscular effort) to tumble slowly and gracefully in space. His face was always toward us, but seldom “upright,” and as some of us unconsciously tried to match his spin—and failed—there was suddenly no consensus as to which way was up. We had to stop trying to decide. Soon we were all every which way, save that we all at least tried to face Reb. I found it oddly unsettling to pay attention to someone who was spinning like a Ferris wheel—which was his point.

I noticed something else. He had positioned himself roughly at the center of the wall behind him—and the majority of us, myself included, had unconsciously oriented ourselves, not only “vertical” with respect to him…but “below” him as well. He was the teacher, so most of us wanted to “look up to him.” Several of the exceptions looked like people who’d pointedly if subconsciously fought that impulse. (Robert was one of them.) Now the “upper” portion of the room was starting to fill up, as we redistributed ourselves more…well, more equally. Which again, I guess, was his point.

“That’s more like it,” he said approvingly as he stowed the bungee cords in a locker. “When you’ve been in free fall a while longer, you’ll find the sight of a roomful of people aligned like magnets amusing—because in this environment it is.”

An uneasy chuckle passed around the room.

“It’s possible,” he went on, continuing to rotate, “for a normal terrestrial to enter Symbiosis without permanent psychic damage; it has happened. But
any
spacer will find it enormously easier. Now for that field trip.”

He reached behind himself without looking, caught the hatch handle on the first try, pivoted on it while activating it, and lobbed himself out of the room. His other hand beckoned us to follow.

We left the room smoothly and graciously, with no jostling for position or unnecessary speech. This man was having an effect on us.

We proceeded as a group down winding, roughly contoured corridors of Top Step. The image that came to my mind, unbidden, was of a horde of corpuscles swimming single file through some sinuous blood vessel. Whoever it belonged to needed to cut down on her cholesterol.

I glanced back past my feet, saw that Robert had managed to take up position immediately behind me. He smiled at me. My mental image of our group changed, from corpuscles to spermatozoa. I looked firmly forward again and tried to keep my attention on spirituality—and on not jaunting my skull into the foot of Kirra in front of me.

In a few minutes we had reached our destination. To enter, we had to go through an airlock, big enough for ten people at once—but it was open at both ends: there was pressure beyond it. I wondered what the airlock was for, then. As I passed through it I heard a succession of gasps from those exiting before me; despite this foreknowledge, as I cleared the inner hatch, I gasped too. It was not the largest cubic in Top Step—not even the largest I’d seen so far; you could have fit maybe three of it in that big cavern where I’d met Teena the talking computer—but its largest wall was transparent, and on the other side of it was infinity.

We were at Top Step’s very skin, gazing at naked space, at vacuum and stars. At the place where all of us hoped to live, one day soon…