The Stardance Trilogy (44 page)

From this close up, it did not look like terribly attractive real estate. Completely unfurnished. Drafty. No amenities. Ambiguous property lines, unclear title.
Big.
Scary…

How weird, that I was getting my first naked-eye view of space after more than twenty-four hours in space. Those stars were bright, sharp, merciless, horribly far away. It was hard to get my breath.

I wished Earth were in frame; it would have been less scary. This cubic seemed to be on the far side of Top Step. I wondered if there were a similar cubic on the other side, for folks who liked to look at the Old Home. Or did all of Top Step turn its collective back to Terra?

The last of us entered the room behind me and found a space to float in. We all gaped out the huge window together in silence.

Something drifted slowly into view, about ten meters beyond the window. A sculpture of a man, made of cherry Jell-O, waving a baton…

A Stardancer!

A real, live, breathing Stardancer. (No, unbreathing, of course…Stardancers must have some internal process analogous to breathing, but they do not need to work their lungs.) A
Homo caelestis,
a former human being in Titanian Symbiosis: covered, within and without, by the Symbiote, the crimson life-form that grows in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and is the perfect complement to the human metabolism. A native inhabitant of interplanetary space.

Except for the four-centimeter-thick coating of red Symbiote, he was naked. He would never need clothes again. Or, for that matter, air or food or water or a bathroom or shelter. Just sunshine and occasional trace elements. He was at home in space.

Of
course
we’d seen Stardancers before; we’d all come here to
become
Stardancers. We’d seen them hundreds of times…on film, on video, on holo. But none of us had ever actually been this close to one before. Stardancer and Symbiote mate for life, and the Symbiote cannot survive normal terrestrial atmosphere, pressure, moisture or gravity. Stardancers sometimes lived on Luna for short periods, and it was said that one had once survived on Mars for a matter of days…but no Stardancer would ever walk the Earth.

The Symbiote obscured details like eyes and expression, but it was clear that, back when he’d been a human being, he’d been a big, powerful man, heavily muscled…and very well hung, I couldn’t help but notice. He was cartwheeling in slow motion as he came into view, but when he reached the center of the vast window, he made a brief, complex gesture with his magic wand and came to a halt relative to us. From my perspective he was upside down; I tried to ignore it.

With a small thrill, I recognized him, even under all that red Jell-O. I’d seen his picture often enough, his and all the other members of The Six. He was Harry Stein!

The
Harry Stein—designer/engineer of the first free fall dance studio—less than five meters away from me. Others began to recognize him too: a susurrant murmur of, “SteinHarrySteinthat’sHarryStein,” went round the room.

Reb spoke at normal volume, startling us all. “Hello, Harry.”

What happened then startled me even more. I suppose I should have been expecting it: I knew that Teena could project audio directly to my ear, like an invisible earphone—and a voice on
two
earphones sounds like it’s coming from inside your head. Nonetheless I twitched involuntarily when Harry Stein’s voice said, “Hi, Reb. Hi, everybody. My name is Harry,” right in my skull.

What made it even stranger was that I happened to have been looking at his face when he spoke, and even under that faintly shimmering symbiote I was sure his lips had not moved. His suit radio was linked directly to the speech-center of his brain: the speech impulses were intercepted on their way to his useless vocal cords and sent directly. I’d studied all this in Space Camp, but it was something else again to experience it directly.

“Hi, Harry,” several voices chorused raggedly.

“Can’t stay long,” he said. “Got a big job in progress over to spinward. Just wanted to say hi. And so did I.” With that last sentence, there was an odd, inexpressible change in his voice. Not in pitch or tone or timbre—it was still Harry Stein’s voice—but it was not him speaking it. “Hello, everybody, this is Charlie Armstead speaking now.” Armstead himself! “I’m sorry I can’t be there to meet you all personally—as a matter of fact, I’m a few light-hours away as you hear this—but Harry’s letting me use his brain to greet you. I
will
be meeting you all when you graduate, of course—but so will the rest of the gang, all of us at once, and I couldn’t resist jumping the gun. Neither could I— Hi, everyone, Norrey Armstead, here.” Jesus! “I’m out here with Charlie, I guess you’re all a little confused right about now…but don’t let it worry you, okay? Just take your time and listen to what Reb tells you, and everything will be fine. Now I’ll hand you over to Raoul Brindle for a minute. Oh, before I go, I want to say a quick hello to Morgan McLeod—”

I gulped and must have turned almost as red as Harry Stein.

“—I’ve been a fan of yours for years. I loved your work with Monnaie Dance Group in Brussels, especially your solo in the premiere of Morris’s
Dance for Changing Parts
. I hope we can work together some day.”

“Thank you,” I said automatically—but my voice came out a squeak. People were staring. Robert, Kirra and Ben were smiling.

“Here’s Raoul, now. Howdy, gang! I’m on my way home from Titan with the Harvest Crew, riding herd on about a zillion tons of fresh Symbiote—but I wanted to pass on a personal greeting of my own, to Jacques LeClaire and to Kirra from Queensland; hi, guys! I hope you’ll both make some music for me one day; I’ve heard tapes of your work, and I’d love to jam with both of you when I get back. Or maybe you’ll graduate before then and come meet me halfway. I’ll hand you back to Harry now. So long…”

I don’t think an Aboriginal can blush; Kirra must have been expressing her own embarrassment with body language. Fluently. And it was easy to pick out Jacques LeClaire in the crowd, too.

“Well, like I said,” Harry went on, sounding like himself now—and don’t ask me to explain that. “Work to do. Deadline’s coming. I hope you’ll all be in my family soon. See you later.” He waved his thruster-baton negligently, and began drifting out of our field of view.

Not a word was spoken until he was gone. Then someone tried for irony. “What, Shara Drummond was too busy to say hello?” Some of us giggled.

“Yes,” Harry’s voice said, and the giggle trailed off. “Oh,” the joker said, chastened.

There was another long silence. Then Kirra said softly, “Spirituality without religion—”

There was a subdued murmur of agreement.

“Lemme see if I’ve got this straight, Reb,” she said. “If I needed to talk to one of that mob—”

“Just call them on the phone, like you would anyone else in space,” Reb agreed. “If you really need an
instantaneous
response, you can ask for a telepathic relay through some other Stardancer whose brain happens to be near Top Step—but bear in mind that you will almost certainly be distracting their attention from something else. Don’t do so frivolously. But if you don’t mind waiting for both ends of the conversation to crawl at lightspeed, by radio, you can chat any time with any Stardancer who’ll answer, anytime. Yes, Kirra.”

“What was that Raoul said about a harvest crew?”

“When Armstead and The Six originally came back from Titan after entering Symbiosis, they brought an enormous quantity of the Symbiote back with them, using the
Siegfried
to tow it. But that was about thirty years ago, and Top Step has graduated a lot of Stardancers since then. It’s becoming necessary to restock…so an expedition was sent out three or four years ago to mine more from Titan’s upper atmosphere. They’re on their way back right now, with gigatonnes of fresh Symbiote. Some of you in this class will be partaking of it. Yes, Jo?”

Jo was using her Teacher-May-I gesture, I noticed. “Is there, like, a directory of their phone numbers, or what?”

“You just say, ‘Teena, phone…’ and the name of the Stardancer you want, just like calling anyone else in Top Step. If there are no Stardancers nearby with attention to spare to relay for you, she’ll tell you, and ask if you want her to contact your party directly, by radio. Glenn, what’s bothering you?”

Glenn did have a frown. “This business of telepathy being instantaneous. It just doesn’t seem natural.”

“Where you come from, it is not especially natural, occurs rarely and often requires decades of training and practice. Where you are going, it is far more natural than that discarded old habit, breathing.”

“But everything else in the universe is limited to lightspeed. Why should telepathy be different?”

“Why should you ask that question?” Reb asked.

Glenn fell silent…but her frown deepened.

A thin professorial-looking man gestured for attention. “Yes, Vijay?” Reb said.

“I think I understand Glenn’s dilemma. To be confronted with empirical proof that there is more to reality than the physical universe…how is one supposed to deal with that? It’s—”

“—terrifying, yes. There might be a God lurking around out there, armed with thunderbolts, demanding insane proofs of love, inventing Purgatories and Hells. There are techniques for helping with that fear. You were taught some back at Suit Camp. Sitting correctly. Breathing correctly. I’ll teach others to you, and they’ll help a lot. But the only way to really beat that fear—or the other, perfectly reasonable fear many of you have, that you’ll lose your ego when you join the Starmind—is to keep on confronting it. If you retreat from it, suppress it, try to put it out of your mind, you make it harder for yourself.” He was looking at Glenn as he said that sentence, and she slowly nodded. Reb smiled. “All right, now we’re going to learn the first technique of Kûkan Zen. Namely, how to sit zazen…in zero gee.”

“I thought you said, ‘without religion,’” Glenn complained.

He looked surprised. “But Zen isn’t a religion—not in the usual sense, at least.”

“It isn’t? I thought it was a sect of Buddhism. Buddhism’s a religion. It’s got monks and temples and doctrines and all of that.”

Reb nodded. “But it has no dogmas, no articles of faith, no God. It has nothing to do with telling other people how they ought to behave. There has never been a Buddhist holy war…except intellectual war between differing schools of thought. You can be a Catholic Buddhist, a Muslim Buddhist, an atheist Buddhist. So although it may be religious, in the sense that it’s about what’s deepest in us, it’s not a religion.”

“What is it, then?”

“It is simply an agreement to sit, and look into our actual nature.”

The very first chapter of Suzuki-roshi’s
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
concerns correct sitting posture: that should be a clue to how important he considered it.

On Earth the classic full lotus position is something a Soto Zen Buddhist may take or leave alone, as his joints and ligaments allow. But in Kûkan Zen (I learned later that Reb coined the term:
kûkan
is Japanese for “space”), the lotus posture becomes both more important and less difficult. It is fundamental in “sitting” kûkanzen, the space equivalent of sitting zazen.

In the absence of weight, if you
don’t
tuck your feet securely under the opposite knees, any “sitting” posture you assume will require considerable muscular effort, impossible to maintain for any length of time. When you relax, you end up in the Free Fall Crouch, the body’s natural rest position, halfway between sitting and standing.

What’s wrong with that? you may ask. Well, the idea is that Sitting, in the Zen sense, is something you do with full and powerful awareness. It requires some effort to do properly. Sitting zazen on Earth is not like sitting in a chair or standing or lying down or squatting or anything else humans do as a matter of course. It is a special posture you assume for the purpose of meditation, and after enough self-conditioning, just assuming that posture will make you begin to enter a meditative state.

And terrestrial zazen posture involves total relaxation
in the midst of total attention.
If relaxation alone were the goal, you would meditate lying down. The attempt to maintain a specific, defined posture (spine straight, chin down, hands just so) involves just enough effort and attention to make you see that you are, in a way, accomplishing something although you’re merely sitting. It’s one of those paradoxes—like using your mind to become so mindful you can achieve no-mind—that lie at the heart of Zen.

Reb felt it necessary to maintain that paradox, even in an environment where it’s more difficult to maintain anything but Free Fall Crouch. Full lotus position is stressful for most beginners, in gravity—but it becomes quite tolerable in zero gee. Even for someone a lot less limber than I am: over the next few days I saw senior citizens who hadn’t touched their toes in decades spend time in lotus. The worst part is getting unfolded again.

Similarly, Reb was forced to modify hand arrangement. Suzuki’s “cosmic mudra”—left hand on top of right, middle joints of middle fingers aligned, thumb tips touching—tends to come apart without gravity’s help. Reb interlaced the fingers to compensate.

And of course the
zafu
(round pillow), and the slanted wooden meditation bench used by other Eastern religions, are useless in space. In their place Kûkan Zen uses one of the most ubiquitous items of space hardware, as humble and commonplace as a pillow on Earth: the Velcro belt.

If you simply drift freely while meditating, you will naturally drift in the direction of airflow, and sooner or later end up bumping against the air-outgo grille. Distracting. But if you temporarily shut down the room’s airflow to maintain your position, in a short time your exhalations will generate a sphere of carbon dioxide around your head and suppress your breathing reflex. Even more distracting.

So you leave the airflow running…and stick the back of your Velcro belt to the nearest convenient wall. People can tell you’re meditating, rather than just hanging around, because your legs are tucked up in lotus and your hands are clasped.