The Stardance Trilogy (7 page)

So I crawled into my clothes, decided to grow a beard, and left. Along the way I wondered what I had traded my independence for, and why?

Carrington’s office was oppressively tasteful, but at least the lighting was subdued. Best of all, its filter system would handle smoke—the sweet musk of pot lay on the air. I accepted a macrojoint of “Maoi-Zowie” from Carrington with something approaching gratitude, and began melting my hangover.

Shara sat next to his desk, wearing a leotard and a layer of sweat. She had obviously spent the morning rehearsing for the next dance. I felt ashamed, and consequently snappish, avoiding her eyes and her hello. Panzella and McGillicuddy came in on my heels, chattering about the latest sighting of the mysterious object from deep space, which had appeared this time in the Asteroid Belt. They were arguing over whether or not it displayed signs of sentience, and I wished they’d shut up.

Carrington waited until we had all seated ourselves and lit up, then rested a hip on his desk and smiled. “Well, Tom?”

McGillicuddy beamed. “Better than we expected, sir. All the ratings agree we had about 74 percent of the world audience…”

“The hell with the nielsens,” I snapped. “What did the critics say?”

McGillicuddy blinked. “Well, the general reaction so far is that Shara was a smash. The Times…”

I cut him off again. “What was the less-than-general reaction?”

“Well, nothing is ever unanimous.”

“Specifics. The dance press? Liz Zimmer? Migdalski?”

“Uh. Not as good. Praise yes—only a blind man could’ve panned that show. But guarded praise. Uh, Zimmer called it a magnificent dance spoiled by a gimmicky ending.”

“And Migdalski?” I insisted.

“He headed his review, ‘But What Do You Do for An Encore?’” McGillicuddy admitted. “His basic thesis was that it was a charming one-shot. But the Times…”

“Thank you, Tom.” Carrington said quietly. “About what we expected, isn’t it, my dear? A big splash, but no one’s willing to call it a tidal wave yet.”

She nodded. “But they will, Bryce. The next two dances will sew it up.”

Panzella spoke up. “Ms. Drummond, may I ask you why you played it the way you did? Using the null-gee interlude only as a brief adjunct to conventional dance—surely you must have expected the critics to call it gimmickry.”

Shara smiled and answered. “To be honest, Doctor, I had no choice. I’m learning to use my body in free fall, but it’s still a conscious effort, almost a pantomime. I need another few weeks to make it second nature, and it has to be if I’m to sustain a whole piece in it. So I dug a conventional dance out of the trunk, tacked on a five-minute ending that used every zero-gee move I knew, and found to my extreme relief that they made thematic sense together. I told Charlie my notion, and he made it work visually and dramatically—the whole business of the candles was his, and it underlined what I was trying to say better than any set we could have built.”

“So you have not yet completed what you came here to do?” Panzella asked her.

“Oh, no. Not by any means. The next dance will show the world that dance is more than controlled falling. And the third…the third will be what this has all been for.” Her face lit, became animated. “The third dance will be the one I have wanted to dance all my life. I can’t entirely picture it, yet—but I know that when I become capable of dancing it, I will create it, and it will be my greatest dance.”

Panzella cleared his throat. “How long will it take you?”

“Not long,” she said. “I’ll be ready to tape the next dance in two weeks, and I can start on the last one almost at once. With luck, I’ll have it in the can before my month is up.”

“Ms. Drummond,” Panzella said gravely, “I’m afraid you don’t have another month.”

Shara went white as snow, and I half rose from my seat. Carrington looked intrigued.

“How much time?” Shara asked.

“Your latest tests have not been encouraging. I had assumed that the sustained exercise of rehearsal and practice would tend to slow your system’s adaptation. But most of your work has been in total weightlessness. And I failed to realize the extent to which your body is accustomed to sustained exertion—in a terrestrial environment. There are already signs of Davis’s Syndrome in—”

“How much time?”

“Two weeks. Possibly three, if you spend three separate hours a day at hard exercise in two gravities. We can arrange that by—”

“That’s ridiculous.” I burst out. “Don’t you understand about dancers’ spines? She could ruin herself in two gees.”

“I’ve got to have four weeks,” Shara said.

“Ms. Drummond, I am very sorry.”

“I’ve got to have four weeks.”

Panzella had that same look of helpless sorrow that McGillicuddy and I had had in our turn, and I was suddenly sick to death of a universe in which people had to keep looking at Shara that way. “Dammit,” I roared, “she needs four weeks.”

Panzella shook his shaggy head. “If she stays in zero gee for four working weeks, she may die.”

Shara sprang from her chair. “Then I’ll die,” she cried. “I’ll take that chance. I have to.”

Carrington coughed. “I’m afraid I can’t permit you to, darling.”

She whirled on him furiously.

“This dance of yours is excellent PR for Skyfac,” he said calmly, “but if it were to kill you it might boomerang, don’t you think?”

Her mouth worked, and she fought desperately for control. My own head whirled. Die? Shara?

“Besides,” he added, “I’ve grown quite fond of you.”

“Then I’ll stay up here in space,” she burst out.

“Where? The only areas of sustained weightlessness are factories, and you’re not qualified to work in one.”

“Then for God’s sake give me one of the new pods, the smaller spheres. Bryce, I’ll give you a higher return on your investment than a factory pod, and I’ll…” Her voice changed. “I’ll be available to you always.”

He smiled lazily. “Yes, but I might not want you always, darling. My mother warned me strongly against making irrevocable decisions about women. Especially informal ones. Besides, I find zero-gee sex rather too exhausting as a steady diet.”

I had almost found my voice, and now I lost it again. I was glad Carrington was turning her down—but the way he did it made me yearn to drink his blood.

Shara too was speechless for a time. When she spoke, her voice was low, intense, almost pleading. “Bryce, it’s a matter of timing. If I broadcast two more dances in the next four weeks, I’ll have a world to return to. If I have to go Earthside and wait a year or two, that third dance will sink without a trace—no one’ll be looking, and they won’t have the memory of the first two. This is my only option, Bryce—let me take the chance. Panzella can’t guarantee four weeks will kill me.”

“I can’t guarantee your survival,” the doctor said.

“You can’t guarantee that any of us will live out the day,” she snapped. She whirled back to Carrington, held him with her eyes. “Bryce, let me risk it.” Her face underwent a massive effort, produced a smile that put a knife through my heart. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Carrington savored that smile and the utter surrender in her voice like a man enjoying a fine claret. I wanted to slay him with my hands and teeth, and I prayed that he would add the final cruelty of turning her down. But I had underestimated his true capacity for cruelty.

“Go ahead with your rehearsal, my dear,” he said at last. “We’ll make a final decision when the time comes. I shall have to think about it.”

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hopeless, so…impotent in my life. Knowing it was futile, I said, “Shara, I can’t let you risk your life—”

“I’m going to do this, Charlie,” she cut me off, “with or without you. No one else knows my work well enough to tape it properly, but if you want out I can’t stop you.” Carrington watched me with a detached interest. “Well?” she prodded.

I said a filthy word.

“You know the answer.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

Tyros are transported on the pregnant broomsticks. Old hands hang outside the airlock, dangling from handholds on the outer surface of the spinning Ring (not hard in less than half a gee). They face in the direction of their spin, and when their destination comes under the horizon, they just drop off. Thruster units built into gloves and boots supply the necessary course corrections. The distances involved are small. Still, there are very few old hands.

Shara and I were old hands, having spent more hours in weightlessness than some technicians who’d been working in Skyfac for years. We made scant and efficient use of our thrusters, chiefly in canceling the energy imparted to us by the spin of the Ring we left. We had throat mikes and hearing-aid-sized receivers, but there was no conversation on the way across the void. Being without a local vertical—a defined “up” and “down”—is more confusing and distressing than can possibly be imagined by anyone who has never left Earth. For that very reason, all Skyfac structures are aligned to the same imaginary “ecliptic,” but it doesn’t help very much. I wondered if I would ever get used to it—and even more I wondered whether I would ever get used to the cessation of pain in my leg. It even seemed to hurt less under spin these days.

We grounded, with much less force than a skydiver does, on the surface of the new studio. It was an enormous steel globe, studded with sunpower screens and heat losers, tethered to three more spheres in various stages of construction on which Harry Stein’s boys were even now working. McGillicuddy had told me that the complex when completed would be used for “controlled density processing,” and when I said, “How nice,” he added, “Dispersion foaming and variable density casting,” as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. Right at the moment, it was Shara’s studio.

The airlock led to a rather small working space around a smaller interior sphere some fifty meters in diameter. It too was pressurized, intended to contain a vacuum, but its locks stood open. We removed our p-suits, and Shara unstrapped her thruster bracelets from a bracing strut and put them on, hanging by her ankles from the strut while she did so. The anklets went on next. As jewelry they were a shade bulky—but they had twenty minutes’ continuous use each, and their operation was not visible in normal atmosphere and lighting. Zero-gee dance without them would have been enormously more difficult.

As she was fastening the last strap I drifted over in front of her and grabbed the strut. “Shara. . ..”

“Charlie, I can beat it. I’ll exercise in three gravities, and I’ll sleep in two, and I’ll make this body last. I know I can.”

“You could skip Mass Is A Verb and go right to the Stardance.”

She shook her head. “I’m not ready yet—and neither is the audience. I’ve to lead myself and them through dance in a sphere first—in a contained space—before I’ll be ready to dance in empty space, or they to appreciate it. I have to free my mind, and theirs, from just about every preconception of dance, change all the postulates. Even two stages is too few—but it’s the irreducible minimum.” Her eyes softened. “Charlie—I must.”

“I know,” I said gruffly and turned away. Tears are a nuisance in free fall—they don’t
go
anywhere, just form silly-looking expanding spherical contact lenses, in which the world swims. I began hauling myself around the surface of the inner sphere toward the camera emplacement I was working on, and Shara entered the inner sphere to begin rehearsal.

I prayed as I worked on my equipment, snaking cables among the bracing struts and connecting them to drifting terminals. For the first time in years I prayed, prayed that Shara would make it. That we both would.

The next twelve days were the toughest half of my life. Shara worked as hard as I did. She spent half of every day working in the studio, half of the rest in exercise under two and a quarter gravities (the most Dr. Panzella would permit), and half of the rest in Carrington’s bed, trying to make him contented enough to let her stretch her time limit. Perhaps she slept in the few hours left over. I only know that she never looked tired, never lost her composure or her dogged determination. Stubbornly, reluctantly, her body lost its awkwardness, took on grace even in an environment where grace required enormous concentration. Like a child learning how to walk, Shara learned how to fly.

I even began to get used to the absence of pain in my leg.

What can I tell you of
Mass
, if you have not seen it? It cannot be described, even badly, in mechanistic terms, the way a symphony could be written out in words. Conventional dance terminology is by its built-in assumptions, worse than useless, and if you are at all familiar with the new nomenclature you
must
be familiar with
Mass Is A Verb
, from which it draws
its
built-in assumptions.

Nor is there much I can say about the technical aspects of
Mass
. There were no special effects; not even music. Raoul Brindle’s superb score was composed
from the dance
, and added to the tape with my permission two years later, but it was for the original, silent version that I was given the Emmy. My entire contribution, aside from editing and installing the two trampolines, was to camouflage batteries of wide-dispersion light sources in clusters around each camera eye, and wire them so that they energized only when they were out-of-frame with respect to whichever camera was on at the time—ensuring that Shara was always lit from the front, presenting two (not always congruent) shadows. I made no attempt to employ flashy camera work; I simply recorded what Shara danced, changing POV only as she did.

No,
Mass Is A Verb
can be described only in symbolic terms, and then poorly. I can say that Shara demonstrated that mass and inertia are as able as gravity to supply the dynamic conflict essential to dance. I can tell you that from them she distilled a kind of dance that could only have been imagined by a group-head consisting of an acrobat, a stunt-diver, a skywriter and an underwater ballerina. I can tell you that she dismantled the last interface between herself and utter freedom of motion, subduing her body to her will and space itself to her need.