Stardance

I

The flight from Washington was miserable. How can a man who’s worked in free fall get airsick? Worse, I had awakened that morning with the same stinking cold I had had ever since returning Earthside, and so I spent the whole flight anticipating the knives that would be thrust through my ears when we landed. But I turned down the proffered drink as well as the meal.

I was not even depressed. Too much had happened to me in the last few weeks. I was wrung out, drained, just sort of… on standby, taking disinterested notes while my automatic pilot steered my body around. It helped to be in a familiar place—why, come to think, hadn’t I once thought of Toronto, about a thousand years ago, as “home”?

There were reporters when I got through Customs, of course, but not nearly as many as there had been at first. Once, as a kid, I spent a summer working in a mental hospital, and I learned an extraordinary thing: I learned that anyone, no matter how determined, whom you utterly ignore will eventually stun pestering you and go away. I had been practicing the technique so consistently for the last three weeks that the word had gone out, and now only the most Skinnerian newstapers even troubled to stick microphones in my face. Eventually there was a cab in front of me and I took it. Toronto cabbies can be relied upon not to recognize anybody, thank God.

I was “free” now.

Reentering the TDT studio was a strong deja vu experience, strong enough almost to penetrate my armor. Once, geologic ages ago, I had worked here for three years, and briefly again thereafter. And once, in this building, I had seen Shara Drummond dance for the first time. I had come full circle.

I felt nothing.

Always excepting, of course, the god damned leg. After all the time in free fall it hurt much worse than I’d remembered, more than it had hurt since the original days of its ruining, unimaginably far in the past. I had to pause twice on the way upstairs, and I was soaking with sweat by the time I made the top. (Ever wonder why dance studios are alwaysup at least one flight of stairs? Did you ever try to rent that much square footage at ground level?) I waited on the landing, regularizing my breathing, until I decided that my color had returned, and then a few seconds more. I knew I should feel agitated now, but I was still on standby.

I opened the door, and deja vu smacked at me again. Norrey was across the old familiar room, and just as before she was putting a group of students through their paces. They might have been the same students. Only Shara was missing. Shara would always be missing. Shara was air pollution now, upper atmosphere pollution, much more widely distributed than most corpses get to be.

She had been cremated at the top of the atmosphere, and by it.

But her older sister was very much alive. She was in the midst of demonstrating a series of suspensions on half-toe as I entered, and I just had time to absorb an impression of glowing skin, healthy sweat, and superb muscle tone before she glanced up and saw me. She stiffened like a stop-frame shot, then literally fell out of an extension. Automatically her body tucked and rolled, and she came out of it at a dead run, crying and swearing as she came, arms outstretched. I barely had time to brace the good leg before she cannoned into me, and then we were rocking in each other’s arms like tipsy giants, and she was swearing like a sailor and crying my name. We hugged for an endless time before I became aware that I was holding her clear of the floor and that my shoulders were shrieking nearly as loud as my leg. Six months ago it would have buckled, I thought vaguely, and set her down.

“All right, are you all right, are you all right?” her voice was saying in my ear.

I pulled back and tried to grin. “My leg is killing me. And I think I’ve got the flu.”

“Damn you, Charlie, don’t you dare misunderstand me. Are you all right?” Her fingers gripped my neck as if she intended to chin herself.

My hands dropped to her waist and I looked her in the eyes, abandoning the grin. All at once I realized I was no longer on standby. My cocoon was ruptured, blood sang in my ears, and I could feel the very air impinging on my skin. For the first time I thought about why I had come here, and partly I understood. “Norrey,” I said simply, “I’m okay. Some ways I think I’m in better shape than I’ve been in twenty years.”

The second sentence just slipped out, but I knew as I said it that it was true. Norrey read the truth in my eyes, and somehow managed to relax all over without loosing her embrace. “Oh, thank God,” she sobbed, and pulled me closer. After a time her sobs lessened, and she said, almost petulantly, her voice tiny, “I’d have broken your neck,” and we were both grinning like idiots and laughing aloud. We laughed ourselves right out of our embrace, and then Norrey said “Oh!” suddenly and turned bright red and spun around to her class.

It seemed that we were occupying the only portion of the room that was not intensely fascinating. They knew. They watched TV, they read the papers. Even as we watched, one of the students stepped out in front of the rest. “All right,” she said to them, “let’s take it from the top, I’ll give you three for nothing and—one,” and the whole group resumed their workout. The new leader would not meet Norrey’s eyes, refused to accept or even acknowledge the gratitude there—but she seemed to be smiling gently, as she danced, at nothing in particular.

Norrey turned back to me. “I’ll have to change.”

“Not much, I hope.”

She grinned again and was gone. My cheeks itched, and when I absently scratched them I discovered that they were soaking wet.

The afternoon outdoors struck us both with wonder. New colors seemed to boil up out of the spectrum and splash themselves everywhere in celebration of fall. It was one of those October days of which, in Toronto anyway, one can say either “Gee, it’s chilly” or “Gee, it’s warm” and be agreed with. We walked through it together arm in arm, speaking only occasionally and then only with our eyes. My stuffed head began to clear; my leg throbbed less.

Le Maintenant was still there then, but it looked shabbier than ever. Fat Humphrey caught sight of us through the kitchen window as we entered and came out to greet us. He is both the fattest happy man and the happiest fat man I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen him outdoors in February in his shirt sleeves, and they say that once a would-be burglar stabbed him three times without effect. He burst through the swinging doors and rushed toward us, a mountain with a smile on top. “Mist’ Armstead, Miz Drummond! Welcome!”

“Hey there, Fat,” I called out, removing my filters, “God bless your face. Got a good table?”

“Sure thing, in the cellar somewheres, I’ll bring it up.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“There’s certainly something wrong with your up-bringing,” Norrey agreed drily.

Fat Humphrey laughing aloud is like an earthquake in the Canadian Rockies. “Good to see you, good to see you both. You been away too long, Mist’ Armstead.”

“Tell you about it later, Fat, okay?”

“Sure thing. Lemme see: you look like about a pound of sirloin, some bake’ potato, peas Italian hold the garlic and a bucket of milk. Miz Drummond, I figure you for tuna salad on whole wheat toast, side of slice’ tomatoes and a glass of skim milk. Salad all around. Eh?”

We both burst out laughing. “Right again, as usual. Why do you bother to print menus?”

“Would you believe it? There’s a law. How would you like that steak cooked?”

“Gee, that’d be terrific,” I agreed, and took Norrey’s coat and filtermask. Fat Humphrey howled and slapped his mighty thigh, and took my own gear while I was hanging Norrey’s. “Been missin’ you in this joint, Mist’ Armstead. None of these other turkeys know a straight line when they hear it. This way.” He led us to a small table in the back, and as I sat down I realized that it was the same table Norrey and Shara and I had shared so long ago. That didn’t hurt a bit: it felt right. Fat Humphrey rolled us a joint by hand from his personal stash, and left the bag and a packet of Drums on the table. “Smoke hearty,” he said and returned to the kitchen, his retreating buttocks like wrestling zeppelins.

I had not smoked in weeks; at the first taste I started to buzz. Norrey’s fingers brushed mine as we passed the digit, and their touch was warm and electric. My nose, which had started to fill as we came indoors, flooded, and between toking and honking the joint was gone before a word had been spoken. I was acutely aware of how silly I must look, but too exhilarated to fret about it.

I tried to review mentally all that must be said and all that must be asked, but I kept falling into Norrey’s warm brown eyes and getting lost. The candle put highlights in them, and in her brown hair. I rummaged in my head for the right words.

“Well, here we are,” is what I came up with. Norrey half smiled. “That’s a hell of a cold.”

“My nose clamped down twenty hours after I hit dirt, and I’ve never properly thanked it. Do you have any idea how rotten this planet smells?”

“I’d have thought a closed system’d smell worse.”

I shook my head. “There’s a smell to space, to a space station I mean. And a p-suit can get pretty ripe. But Earth is a stew of smells, mostly bad.”

She nodded judiciously. “No smokestacks in space.”

“No garbage dumps.”

“No sewage.”

“No cow farts.”

“How did she die, Charlie?”

Oof. “Magnificently.”

“I read the papers. I know that’s bullshit, and… and you were there.”

“Yeah.” I had told the story over a hundred times in the last three weeks—but I had never told afriend, and I discovered I needed to. And Norrey certainly deserved to know of her sister’s dying.

And so I told her of the aliens’ coming, of Shara’s intuitive understanding that the beings communicated by dance, and her instant decision to reply to them. I told her of Shara’s slow realization that the aliens were hostile, territorially aggressive, determined to have our planet for a spawning ground. And I told her, as best I could, of the Stardance.

“She danced them right out of the solar system, Norrey. She danced everything she had in her—and she had all of us in her. She danced what we are, what she was, and she scared them silly. They weren’t afraid of military lasers, but she scared ’em right the hell back to deep space. Oh, they’ll be back some day—I don’t know why, but I feel it in my bones. But it might not be in our lifetime. She told them what it is to be human. She gave them the Stardance.”

Norrey was silent a long time, and then she nodded. “Uh huh.” Her face twisted suddenly. “But why did she have to die, Charlie?”

“She was done, honey,” I said and took her hand. “She was acclimated all the way to free fall by then, and it’s a one-way street. She could never have returned to Earth, not even to the one-sixth gee in Skyfac. Oh, she could have lived in free fall. But Carrington owns everything in free fall except military hardware—and she didn’t have any more reason to take anything from him. She’d danced her Stardance, and I’d taped it, and she was done.”

“Carrington,” she said, and her fingers gripped my hand fiercely. “Where is he now?”

“I just found out myself this morning. He tried to grab all the tapes and all the money for Skyfac Incorporated, i.e., him. But he’d neglected to have Shara sign an actual contract, and Tom McGillicuddy found an airtight holograph will in her effects. It leaves everything fifty-fifty to you and me. So Carrington tried to buy a probate judge, and he picked the wrong judge. It would have hit the news this afternoon. The thought of even a short sentence in one gee was more than he could take. I think at the last he convinced himself that he had actually loved her, because he tried to copy her exit. He bungled it. He didn’t know anything about leaving a rotating Ring, and he let go too late. It’s the most common beginner’s error.”

Norrey looked puzzled.

“Instead of becoming a meteorite like her, he was last seen heading in the general direction of Betelgeuse. I imagine it’s on the news by now.” I glanced at my watch. “In fact, I would estimate that he’s just running out of air about now—if he had the guts to wait.”

Norrey smiled, and her fingers relaxed. “Let’s hold that thought,” she purred.

If captured—don’t let them give you to the women.

The salad arrived then. Thousand Islands for Norrey and French for me, just as we would have ordered if we’d thought of it. The portions were unequal, and each was precisely as much as the recipient felt like eating. I don’t know how Fat Humphrey does it. At what point does that kind of empathy become telepathy?

There was further sporadic conversation as we ate, but nothing significant. Fat Humphrey’s cuisine demanded respectful attention. The meal itself arrived as we were finishing the salad, and when we had eaten our fill, both plates were empty and the coffee was cool enough to drink. Slices of Fat’s fresh apricot pie were produced warm from the oven, and reverently dealt with. More coffee was poured. I took some pseudoephedrine for my nose. The conversation reawoke groggily, and there was only one question left for her to ask now so I asked her first.

“So what’s happening with you, Norrey?”

She made a face. “Nothing much.”

Lovely answer. Push.

“Norrey, on the day there is nothing much happening in your life, there’ll be honest government in Ottawa. I hear you stood still, once, for over an hour—but the guy that said it was a famous liar. Come on, you know I’ve been out of touch.”

She frowned, and that was it for me, that was the trigger. I had been thinking furiously ever since I came off standby in Norrey’s arms back at the studio, and I had already figured out a lot of things. But the sight of that frown completed the process; all at once the jumble in my subconscious fell into shape with an almost audible click. They can come that way, you know. Flashes of insight. In the middle of a sentence, in a microsecond, you make a quantum jump in understanding. You look back on twenty years of blind stupidity without wincing, and perceive the immediate future in detail. Later you will marvel—at that instant you only accept and nod. The Sicilians have a thing like it, that they call thethunderbolt. It is said to bring deep calm and great gravity. It made me break up.

“What’s so funny?”

“Don’t know if I can explain it, hon. I guess I just figured out how Fat Humphrey does it.”

“Huh?”

“Tell you later. You were saying....”

The frown returned. “Mostly I wasn’t saying. What’s happening with me, in twenty-five words or less? I haven’t asked myself in quite a while. Maybe too long.” She sipped coffee. “Okay. You know that John Koerner album, the last commercial one he made? Running Jumping Standing Still? That’s what I’ve been doing, I think. I’ve been putting out a lot of energy; doing satisfying things, and I’m not satisfied. I’m… I’m almost bored.”

She floundered, so I decided to play devil’s advocate. “But you’re right where you’ve always wanted to be,” I said, and began rolling a joint.

She grimaced. “Maybe that’s the trouble. Maybe a life’s ambition shouldn’t be something that can be achieved—because what do you do then? You remember Koerner’s movie?”

“Yeah. The Sound of Sleep. Nutball flick, nice cherries on top.”

“Remember what he said the meaning of life was?”

“Sure. ‘Do the next thing.’ ” I suited action to the word, licked it, sealed it and twisted the ends, then lit it. “Always thought it was terrific advice. It got me through some tough spots.”

She toked, held it and exhaled before replying. “I’m ready to do the next thing—but I’m not sure what that is. I’ve toured with the company, I’ve soloed in New York, I’ve choreographed, I’ve directed the whole damn school and now I’m an artistic director. I’ve got full autonomy now; I can even teach a class again if I feel like it. Every year from now until Hell freezes TDT’s repertoire will include one of my pieces, and I’ll always have superb bodies to work with. I’ve been working on childhood dreams all my life, Charlie, and I hadn’t thought ahead any farther than this when I was a kid. I don’t know what ‘the next thing’ is. I need a new dream.”

She toked again, passed it to me. I stared at the glowing tip conspiratorially, and it winked at me. “Any clues? Directions at least?”

She exhaled carefully, spoke to her hands. “I thought I might like to try working with one of those commune-companies, where everybody choreographs every piece. I’d like to try working with a group-head. But there’s really no one here I could start one with, and the only existing group-head that suits me is New Pilobolus—and for that I’d have to live in America.”

“Forget that.”

“Hell, yes. I… Charlie, I don’t know, I’ve even thought of chucking it all and going out to PEI to farm. I always meant to, and never really did. Shara left the place in good shape, I could… oh, that’s crazy. I don’t really want to farm. I just want something new. Something different. Unmapped territory, something that—Charlie Armstead, what the hell are you grinning about?”

“Sometimes it’s purely magical.”

“What?”

“Listen. Can you hear them up there?”

“Hear who?”

“I oughta tell Humphrey. There’s gonna be reindeer shit all over his roof.”

“Charlie!”

“Go ahead, little girl, tug on the whiskers all you want—they’re real. Sit right here on my lap and place your order. Ho ho ho. Pick a number from one to two.”

She was giggling now; she didn’t know why but she was giggling. “Charlie….”

“Pick a number from one to two.”

“Two.”

“That’s a very good number. A very good number. You have just won one perfectly good factory-fresh dream, with all accessories and no warranty at all. This offer is not available through the stores. A very good number. How soon can you leave town?”

“Leave town! Charlie....” She was beginning to get a glimmer. “You can’t mean—”

“How would you like a half interest in a lot of vacuum, baby? I got plenty o’ nuttin’, or at least the use of it, and you’re welcome to all you want. Talk about being on top of the world!”

The giggle was gone. “Charlie, you can’t mean what I think you—”

“I’m offering you a simple partnership in a commune company—a real commune company. I mean, we’ll all have to live together for the first season at least. Lots of real estate, but a bit of a housing shortage at first. We’ll spring for expenses, and it’s a free fall.”

She leaned across the table, put one elbow in her coffee and the other in her apricot pie, grabbed my turtleneck and shook me. “Stop babbling and tell me straight, dammit.”

“I am, honey, I am. I’m proposing a company of choreographers, a true commune. It’ll have to be. Company members will live together, share equally in the profits, and I’ll put up all the expenses just for the hell of it. Oh yeah, we’re rich, did I tell you? About to be, anyway.”

“Charlie—”

“I’m straight, I tell you. I’m starting a company. And a school. I’m offering you a half interest and a full-time, year-round job, dead serious, and I’ll need you to start right away. Norrey, I want you to come dance in free fall.”

Her face went blank. “How?”

“I want to build a studio in orbit and form a company. We’ll alternate performing with school like so: three months of classes dirtside—essentially auditions—and the graduates get to come study for three months in orbit. Any that are any good, we work into the next three months of performance taping. By then we’ve been in low or no gee for a long time, our bodies are starting to adapt, so we take three months vacation on Earth and then start the process over again. We can use the vacations to hunt out likely talent and recruit ’em—go concert-hopping, in other words. It’ll be fun, Norrey. We’ll make history and money both.”

“How, Charlie? How are you going to get the backing for all this? Carrington’s dead, and I won’t work for his associates. Who else but Skyfac and the Space Command have space capacity?”

“Us.”

“?”

“You and me. We own the Stardance tape, Norrey. I’ll show it to you later, I have a dub in my pouch. At this point maybe a hundred people on Earth and a few dozen in space have seen that tape in its entirety. One of them was the president of Sony. He offered me a blank check.”

“A blank—”

“Literally. Norrey, theStardance may be the single most magnificent artistic utterance of man—irrespective of its historical importance and news value. I would estimate that within five years every sighted person in the solar system will know it. And we own the only tape. And, I own the only existing footage of Shara dancing on Earth, commercial value incalculable. Rich? Hell, we’re powerful! Skyfac Incorporated is so anxious to come out of this looking good that if I phone up to Ring One and ask Tokugawa for the time, he’ll take the next elevator down and give me his watch.”

Her hands dropped from my sweater. I wiped apricot from one limp elbow, dried the other.

“I don’t feel squeamish about profiting from Shara’s death. We made the Stardance, together, she and I; I earned my half and she left you hers. The only thing wrong with that is that it leaves me filthy rich, and I don’t want to be rich—not on this planet. The only way I can think of to piss away that kind of money in a way Shara would have approved is to start a company and a school. We’ll specialize in misfits, the ones who for one reason or another don’t fit into the mold here on Earth. Like Shara. The less than classically perfect dancer’s bodies. That stuff is just irrelevant in space. More important is the ability to open yourself, to learn a whole new kind of dance, to… I don’t know if this will make any sense… to encompass three hundred and sixty degrees. We’ll be making the rules as we go along—and we’ll employ a lot of dancers that aren’t working now. I figure our investment capital is good for about five years. By that time the performing company should be making enough to cover the nut, underwrite the school, and still show a profit. All the company members share equally. Are you in?”

She blinked, sat back, and took a deep breath. “In what? What have you got?”

“Not a damn thing,” I said cheerily. “But I know what I need. It’ll take us a couple of years to get started at the very least. We’ll need a business manager, a stage manager, three or four other dancers who can teach. A construction crew to get started, of course, and an elevator operator, but they’re just employees. My cameras run themselves, by Christ, and I’ll be my own gaffer. I can do it, Norrey—if you’ll help me. Come on—join my company and see the world—from a decent perspective.”

“Charlie, I… I don’t even know if I can imagine free fall dance, I mean, I’ve seen both of Shara’s shows several times of course, and I liked them a lot—but I still don’t know where you could go from there. I can’t picture it.”

“Of course not! You’re still hobbled with ‘up’ and ‘down,’ warped by a lifetime in a gravity well. But you’ll catch on as soon as you can get up there, believe me.” (A year from now my blithe confidence would haunt me.) “You can learn to think spherically, I know you can, and the rest is just recoordination, like getting sea legs. Hell, if I can do it at my age, anybody can. You’ll make agood dancing partner.”

She had missed it the first time. Now her eyes enlarged.

“A good what?”

Norrey and I go back a long time, and I’d have to tell you about most of it to explain how I felt just then. Remember when Alistair Sim, as Scrooge, has just awakened from his nightmare and vowed to make amends? And the more nice things he does, and the more people gape at him in bafflement, the more he giggles? And finally he slaps himself in the face and says, “I don’t deserve to be this happy,” and tries to get properly chaste? And then he giggles again and says, “But I just can’t help myself” and breaks up all over again? That’s how I felt. When a hangup of yours has been a burden to a friend for so many years, and all at once you not only realize that, but know that the burden is lifted, for both of you, there is an exquisite joy in sharing the news.

Remember how Scrooge sprung it on Bob Cratchit, by surprise? “... leaving me no alternative—but to raise your salary!” In the same childish way I had saved this, my real surprise Santa Claus announcement, for last. I intended to savor the moment.

But then I saw her eyes and I just said it flat out.

“The leg is functional in free fall, Norrey. I’ve been working out, hard, every day since I got back dirtside. It’s a little stiff, and I’ll—we’ll—always have to choreograph around it to some extent. But it does everything a weightless dancer needs it to. I can dance again.”

She closed her eyes, and the lids quivered. “Oh my God.” Then she opened them and laughed and cried at once, “Oh my God, Charlie, oh my God, oh my God,” and she reached across the table and grabbed my neck and pulled me close and I got apricot and coffee on my own elbows, and oh her tears were hot on my neck.

The place had gotten busy while we talked; no one seemed to notice us. I held her head in the hollow of my throat, and marveled. The only true measure of pain is relief—only in that moment, as layers of scar tissue sloughed off my heart, did I perceive their true weight for the first time.

Finally we were both cried out, and I pulled back and sought her eyes. “I can dance again, Norrey. It was Shara who showed me, I was too damn dumb to notice, too blocked to see it. It was about the last thing she ever did. I can’t throw that away now; I’ve got to dance again, you see? I’m going to go back to space and dance, on my own property and on my own terms and fucking dance again.

“And I want to dance with you, Norrey. I want you to be my partner. I want you to come dance with me. Will you come?”

She sat up straight and looked me in the eye. “Do you know what you are asking me?”

Hang on—here we go! I took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m asking for a full partnership.”

She sat back in her chair and got a faraway look. “How many years have we known each other, Charlie?”

I had to think. “I make it twenty-four years, off and on.”

She smiled. “Yeah. Off and on.” She retrieved the forgotten joint and relit it, took a long hit. “How much of that time do you estimate we’ve spent living together?”

More arithmetic; I toked while I computed. “Call it six or seven years.” Exhale. “Maybe eight.”

She nodded reflectively and took the joint back. “Some pretty crumby times.”

“Norrey—”

“Shut up, Charlie. You waited twenty-four years to propose to me, you can shut up and wait while I give you my answer. How many times would you estimate I came down to the drunk tank and bailed you out?”

I didn’t flinch. “Too many.”

She shook her head. “One less than too many. I’ve taken you in when you needed it and thrown you out when you needed it and never once said the word ‘love,’ because I knew it would scare you away. You were so damned afraid that anyone might love you, because then they’d have to pity you for being a cripple. So I’ve sat by and watched you give your heart only to people who wouldn’t take it—and then picked up the pieces every time.”

“Norrey—”

“Shut up,” she said. “Smoke this digit and shut up. I’ve loved you since before you knew me, Charlie, before your leg got chopped up, when you were still dancing. I knew you before you were a cripple. I loved you before I ever saw you offstage. I knew you before you were a lush, and I’ve loved you all the years since in the way that you wanted me to.

“Now you come before me on two legs. You still limp, but you’re not a cripple any more. Fat Humphrey the telepath doesn’t give you wine with your meal, and when I kiss you at the studio I notice you didn’t have a drink on the plane. You buy me dinner and you babble about being rich and powerful and you try to sell me some crack-brained scheme for dancing in space, you have the goddam audacity to lay all this on me and never once say the word ‘love’ with your mouth and ask me to be your other half again.” She snatched the roach out of my hand. “God dammit, Cratchit, you leave me no alternative….”

And she actually paused and toked and held it and exhaled before she let the smile begin.

“…but to raise your fucking salary.”

And we were both holding hands in the apricots and grinning like gibbons. Blood roared in my ears; I literally shuddered with emotion too intense to bear. I groped for a cathartic wisecrack. “Who said I was buying dinner?”

A high, nasal voice from nearby said, “I’m buying, Mr. Armstead.”

We looked up, startled to discover that the world still existed around us, and were further startled.

He was a short, slight young man. My first impression was of cascades of ringlets of exceedingly curly black hair, behind which lurked a face like a Brian Froud drawing of a puckish elf. His glasses were twin rectangles of wire and glass, thicker than the glass in airlock doors, and at the moment they were on the end of his nose. He squinted down past them at us, doing his best to look dignified. This was considerably difficult, as Fat Humphrey was holding him a clear foot off the floor, one big sausage-plate fist clutching his collar. His clothes were expensive and in excellent taste, but his boots were splendidly shabby. He was trying, unsuccessfully, not to kick his feet.

“Every time I pass your table I keep steppin’ on his ears,” Humphrey explained, bringing the little guy closer and lowering his voice. “So I figure him for a snoop or a newsie and I’m just givin’ him the bum’s rush. But if he’s talkin’ about buyin’, it’s your decision.”

“How about it, friend? Snoop or newsie?”

Insofar as it was possible, he drew himself up. “I am an artist.”

I queried Norrey with my eyes and was answered. “Set that man down and get him a chair, Fat. We’ll discuss the check later.”

This was done, and the kid accepted the last of the roach, hitching his tunic into shape and pushing his glasses back up.

“Mr. Armstead, you don’t know me, and I don’t know this lady here, but I’ve got these terrific ears and no shame at all. Mr. Pappadopolous is right, I was eavesdropping just great. My name is Raoul Brindle, and—”

“I’ve heard of you,” Norrey said. “I have a few of your albums.”

“I do too,” I agreed. “The next to last one was terrific.”

“Charlie, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Raoul blinked furiously. “No, he’s right. The last one was trash. I owed a pound and paid.”

“Well, I liked it. I’m Norrey Drummond.”

“You’re Norrey Drummond?”

Norrey got a familiar look. “Yes. Her sister.”

“Norrey Drummond of TDT, that choreographed Shifting Gears and danced the Question An Dancer variations at the Vancouver conference, that—” He stopped, and his glasses slid down his nose. “Ohmigod. Shara Drummond is your sister? Ohmigod, of course. Drummond, Drummond, sisters, imbecile.” He sat on his excitement and hitched up his glasses and tried to look dignified some more.

For my money he pulled it off. I knew something about Raoul Brindle, and I was impressed. He’d been a child-genius composer, and then in his college days he’d decided music was no way to make a living and became one of the best special effects men in Hollywood. Right after Time did a half-page sidebar on his work on Children of the Lens—which Imightily admired—he released a video-cassette album composed entirely of extraordinary visuals, laser optics and color effects, with synthesizer accompaniment of his own. It was sort of Yellow Submarine cubed, and it had sold like hell, and been followed by a half dozen more occasionally brilliant albums. He had designed and programmed the legendary million-dollar lightshow system for the Beatles’ reunion as a favor for McCartney, and one of his audio-only tapes followed my deck everywhere it went. I resolved to buy his dinner.

“So how do you know me well enough to spot me in a restaurant, Raoul, and why have you been dropping eaves?”

“I didn’t spot you here. I followed you here.”

“Sonofabitch, I never saw you. Well, what did you follow me for?”

“To offer you my life.”

“Eh?”

“I’ve seen the Stardance.”

“You have?” Iexclaimed, genuinely impressed. “How did you pull that off?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “Large weather we’re having, isn’t it? So I saw the Stardance and I made it my business to find you and follow you, and now you’re going back to space to dance and I’m going with you. If I have to walk.”

“And do what?”

“You said yourself, you’re going to need a stage manager. But you haven’t thought it through. I’m going to create a new art form for you. I’m going to beat my brains to peanut butter for you. I’m going to design free-fall sets and visuals and do the scores, and they’ll both work integrally together and with the dances. I’ll work for coffee and cakes, you don’t even have to use my music if you don’t want to, but Igotta design those sets.”

Norrey cut him off with a gentle, compassionate hand over his mouth. “How do you mean, free-fall sets?” She took her hand away.

“It’s free fall, don’t you understand? I’ll design you a sphere of trampolines, with cameras at the joints, and the framework’ll be tubes of colored neon. For free-space work I’ll give you rings of laser-lit metal flakes, loops of luminous gas, modified fireworks, giant blobs of colored liquid hanging in space to dance around and through—singing Jesus, as a special effects man I’ve been waiting all my life for zero gravity. It—it makes the Dykstraflex obsolete, don’t you see?”

He was blinking hard enough to keep the insides of his glasses swept, glancing rapidly back and forth from Norrey to me. I was flabbergasted, and so was she.

“Look, I’ve got a microcassette deck here. I’ll give it to you, Mister Armstead—”

“Charlie,” I corrected absently.

“—and you take it home and listen. It’s just a few tracks I cut after I saw the Stardance. It’s just audio, just first impressions. I mean, it’s not even the frame of a score, but I thought it… I mean, I thought maybe you’d… it’s completely shitful, here, take it.”

“You’re hired,” I said.

“Just promise me you’ll hired?”

“Hired. Hey, Fat! You got a Betamax in the joint somewhere?”

So we went into the back room where Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous lives, and I fed the Stardance tape into his personal television, and the four of us watched it together while Maria ran the restaurant, and when it was over it was half an hour before any of us could speak.

II

So of course there was nothing to do then but go up to Skyfac.

Raoul insisted on paying for his own passage, which startled and pleased me. “How can I ask you to buy a pig in a poke?” he asked reasonably. “For all you know I may be one of those permanently spacesick people.”

“I anticipate having at least some gravity in the living units, Raoul. And do you have any idea what an elevator costs a civilian?”

“I can afford it,” he said simply. “You know that. And I’m no good to you if I have to stay in the house all day. I go on your payroll the day we know I can do the job.”

“That’s silly,” I objected. “I plan to take carloads of student dancers up, with no more warranty than you’ve got, and they sure as hell won’t be paying for their tickets. Why should I discriminate against you for not being poor?”

He shook his head doggedly, his eyeglasses tattooing the sides of his nose. “Because I want it that way. Charity is for those that need it. I’ve taken a lot of it and I bless the people who gave it to me when I needed it, but I don’t need it any more.”

“All right,” I agreed. “But after you’ve proved out, I’m going to rebate you, like it or not.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and we booked our passage.

Commercial transportation to orbit is handled by Space Industries Corp., a Skyfac subsidiary, and I have to congratulate them on one of the finest natural puns I’ve ever seen. When we located the proper gate at the spaceport, after hours of indiginity at Customs and Medical, I was feeling salty. I still hadn’t fully readapted after the time I’d spent in free fall with Shara, and the most I could pry out of the corporation medicos was three weeks—my “pull” with the top brass meant nothing to the Flight Surgeon in charge. I was busy fretting that it wasn’t enough time and tightening my guts in anticipation of takeoff when I rounded the last corner and confronted the sign that told me I was in the right place.

It said:

I laughed so hard that Norrey and Raoul had to help me aboard and strap me in, and I was still chuckling when acceleration hit us.

Sure enough, Raoul got spacesick as soon as the drive cut off—but he’d been sensible enough to skip breakfast, and he responded rapidly to the injection. That banty little guy had plenty of sand: by the time we were docked at Ring One he was trying out riffs on his Soundmaster. White as a piece of paper and completely oblivious, eyes glued to the outboard video, fingers glued to the Sound-master’s keyboard, ears glued to its earplugs. If elevator-belly ever troubled him again, he kept it to himself.

Norrey had no trouble at all. Neither did I. Our appointment with the brass had been set for an hour hence, just in case, so we stashed Raoul in the room assigned to him and spent the time in the Lounge, watching the stars wheel by on the big video wall. It was not crowded; the tourist trade had fallen off sharply when the aliens came, and never recovered. The New Frontier was less attractive with New Indians lurking in it somewhere.

My attempts to play seasoned old spacehound to Norrey’s breathless tourist were laughably unsuccessful. No one ever gets jaded to space, and I took deep satisfaction in being the one who introduced Norrey to it. But if I couldn’t pull off nonchalance, at least I could be pragmatic.

“Oh, Charlie! How soon can we go outside?”

“Probably not today, hon.”

“Why not?”

“Too much to do first. We’ve got to insult Tokugawa, talk to Harry Stein, talk to Tom McGillicuddy, and when all that’s done you’re going to take your first class in EVA 101—indoors.”

“Charlie, you’ve taught me all that stuff already.”

“Sure. I’m an old spacehound, with all of six months experience. You dope, you’ve never even touched a real p-suit.”

“Oh, welfare checks! I’ve memorized every word you’ve told me. I’m not scared.”

“There in a nutshell is why I refuse to go EVA with you.”

She made a face and ordered coffee from the arm of her chair.

“Norrey. Listen to me. You are not talking about putting on a raincoat and going to stand next to Niagara Falls. About six inches beyond that wall there is the most hostile environment presently available to a human. The technology which makes it possible for you to live there at all is not as old as you are. I’m not going to let you within ten meters of an airlock until I’m convinced that you’re scared silly.”

She refused to meet my eyes. “Dammit, Charlie, I’m not a child and I’m not an idiot.”

“Then stop acting like both.” She jumped at the volume and looked at me. “Or is there any other kind of person who believes you can acquire a new set of reflexes by being told about them?”

It might have escalated into a full-scale quarrel, but the waiter picked that moment to arrive with Norrey’s coffee. The Lounge staff like to show off for the tourists; it increases the tip. Our waiter decided to come to our table the same way George Reeves used to leap tall buildings, and we were a good fifteen meters from the kitchen. Unfortunately, after he had left the deck, committing himself, a gaunt tourist decided to change seats without looking, and plotted herself an intersecting course. The waiter never flinched. He extended his left arm sideways, deploying the drogue (which looks just like the webbing that runs from Spiderman’s elbow to his ribs); tacked around her; brought his hand to his chest to collapse the drogue; transferred the coffee to that hand; extended the other arm and came back on course; all in much less time than it has taken you to read about it. The tourist squawked and tumbled as he went by, landing on her rump and bouncing and skidding a goodly distance thereon; the waiter grounded expertly beside Norrey, gravely handed her a cup containing every drop of coffee he had started out with, and took off again to see to the tourist.

“The coffee’s fresh,” I said as Norrey goggled. “The waiter just grounded.”

It’s one of the oldest gags on Skyfac, and it always works. Norrey whooped and nearly spilled hot coffee on her hand—only the low gee gave her time to recover. That cut her laughter short; she stared at the coffee cup, and then at the waiter, who was courteously pointing out one of the half dozen LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP signs to the outraged tourist.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah.”

“How many classes will I need before I’m ready?”

I smiled and took her hand. “Not as many as I thought.”

The meeting with Tokugawa, the new chairman of the board, was low comedy. He received us personally in what had been Carrington’s office, and the overall effect was of a country bishop on the Pope’s throne. Or perhaps “tuna impersonating a piranha” is closer to the image I want. In the vicious power struggle which followed Carrington’s death, he had been the only candidate ineffectual enough to satisfy everyone. Tom McGillicuddy was with him, to my delight, the cast already gone from his ankle. He was growing a beard.

“Hi, Tom. How’s the foot?”

His smile was warm and familiar. “Hello, Charlie. It’s good to see you again. The foot’s okay—bones knit faster in low gee.”

I introduced Norrey to him, and to Tokugawa as an afterthought.

The most powerful man in space was short, gray, and scrutable. In deference to the custom of the day he wore traditional Japanese dress, but I was willing to bet that his English was better than his Japanese. He started when I lit up a joint, and Tom had to show him how to turn up the breeze and deploy the smoke filter. Norrey’s body language said she didn’t like him, and I trust her barometer even more than my own; she lacks my cynicism. I cut him off in the middle of a speech about Shara and the Stardance that must have used up four ghostwriters.

“The answer is ‘no.’ ”

He looked as though he had never heard the expression before. “—I—”

“Listen, Toke old boy, I read the papers. You and Skyfac Inc. and Lunindustries Inc. want to become our patrons. You’re inviting us to move right in and start dancing, offering to underwrite the whole bloody venture. And none of this has anything to do with the fact that antitrust legislation was filed against you this week, right?”

“Mister Armstead, I’m merely expressing my gratitude that you and Shara Drummond chose to bring your high art to Skyfac in the first place, and my fervent hope that you and her sister will continue to feel free to make use of—”

“Where I come from we use that stuff for methane power.” I took a lingering drag while he sputtered. “You know damn well how Shara came to Skyfac, and you sit in the chair of the man who killed her. He killed her by making her spend so many of her offstage hours in low or no gee, because that was the only way he could get it up. You ought to be bright enough to know that the day Norrey or I or any member of our company dances a step on Skyfac property, a red man with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is going to come up to you and admit that it just froze over.” The joint was beginning to hit me. “As far as I’m concerned, Christmas came this year on the day that Carrington went out for a walk and forgot to come back, and I will be gone to hell before I’ll live under his roof again, or make money for his heirs and assigns. Do we understand each other?” Norrey was holding my hand tightly, and when I glanced over she was grinning at me.

Tokugawa sighed and gave up. “McGillicuddy, give them the contract.”

Pokerfaced, Tom produced a stiff folded parchment and passed it to us. I scanned it, and my eyebrows rose. “Tom,” I said blandly, “is this honest?”

He never even glanced at his boss. “Yep.”

“Not even a percentage of the gross? Oh my.” I looked at Tokugawa. “A free lunch. It must be my good looks.” I tore the contract in half.

“Mister Armstead,” he began hotly, and I was glad that Norrey interrupted him this time. I was getting to like it too much.

“Mr. Tokugawa, if you’ll stop trying to convince us that you’re a patron of the arts, I think we can get along. We’ll let you donate some technical advice and assistance, and we’ll let you sell us materials and air and water at cost. We’ll even give back some of the skilled labor we hire away from you when we’re done with them. Not you, Tom—we want you to be our full-time business manager, if you’re willing.”

He didn’t hesitate a second, and his grin was beautiful. “Ms. Drummond, I accept.”

“Norrey. Furthermore,” she went on to Tokugawa, “we’ll make a point of telling everybody we know how nice you’ve been, any time the subject comes up. But we are going to own and operate our own studio, and it may suit us to put it on the far side of Terra, and we will be independents. Not Skyfac’s in-house dance troupe: independents. Eventually we hope to see Skyfac itself settle into the role of the benevolent old rich uncle who lives up the road. But we don’t expect to need you for longer than you need us, so there will be no contract. Have we a meeting of the minds?”

I nearly applauded out loud. I’m pretty sure he’d never had a personal executive secretary hired right out from under his nose before. His grandfather might have committed seppuku; he in his phony kimono must have been seething. But Norrey had played things just right, grudgingly offering him equals-status if he cared to claim it—and he needed us.

Perhaps you don’t understand just how badly he needed us. Skyfac was the first new multinational in years, and it had immediately begun hurting the others where they lived. Not only could it undersell any industry requiring vacuum, strain-free environment, controlled radiation, or wide-range temperature or energy density gradients—and quite a few profitable industries do—but it could also sell things that simply could not be made on Earth, even expensively. Things like perfect bearings, perfect lenses, strange new crystals—none of which will form in a gravity well. All the raw materials came from space, unlimited free solar energy powered the factories, and delivery was cheap (a delivery module doesn’t have to be a spaceship; all it has to do is fall correctly).

It wasn’t long before the various nationals and multi-nationals who had not been invited into the original Skyfac consortium began to feel the pinch. The week before, antitrust actions had been filed in the US, USSR, China, France, and Canada, and protests had been lodged in the United Nations, the first steps in what would turn out to be the legal battle of the century. Skyfac’s single most precious asset was its monopoly of space—Tokugawa was running scared enough to need any good press he could get.

And the week before that, the tape of the Stardance had been released. The first shock wave was still running around the world; we were the best press Tokugawa was ever likely to get.

“You’ll cooperate with our PR people?” was all he asked.

“As long as you don’t try to quote me as ‘heartbroken’ by Carrington’s death,” I said agreeably. I really had to hand it to him: he almost smiled then.

“How about ‘saddened’?” he suggested delicately. We settled on “shocked.”

We left Tom in our cabin with four full briefcases of paperwork to sort out, and went to see Harry Stein.

We found him where I expected to, in a secluded corner of the metals shop, behind a desk with stacks of pamphlets, journals and papers that would have been improbable in a full gee. He and a Tensor lamp were hunched over an incredibly ancient typewriter. One massive roll fed clean paper into it, another took up the copy. I noted with approval that the manuscript’s radius was two or three centimeters thicker than when last I’d seen it. “Say hey, Harry. Finishing up chapter one?”

He looked up, blinked. “Hey, Charlie. Good to see you.” For him it was an emotional greeting. “You must be her sister.”

Norrey nodded gravely. “Hi, Harry. I’m glad to meet you. I hear those candles in Liberation were your idea.” Harry shrugged. “She was okay.”

“Yes,” Norrey agreed. Unconsciously, instinctively, she was taking on his economical word usage—as Shara had before her.

“I,” I said, “will drink to that proposition.”

Harry eyed the thermos on my belt, and raised an eyebrow in query.

“Not booze,” I assured him, unclipping it. “On the wagon. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, fresh from Japan. Real cream. Brought it for you.” Damn it, I was doing it too.

Harry actually smiled. He produced three mugs from a nearby coffeemaker unit (personally adapted for low gee), and held them while I poured. The aroma diffused easily in low gee; it was exquisite. “To Shara Drummond,” Harry said, and we drank together. Then we shared a minute of warm silence.

Harry was a fifty-year-old ex-fullback who had kept himself in shape. He was so massive and formidably packed that you could have known him a long time without ever suspecting his intelligence, let alone his genius—unless you had happened to watch him work. He spoke mostly with his hands. He hated writing, but put in two methodical hours a day on The Book. By the time I asked him why, he trusted me enough to answer. “Somebody’s gotta write a book on space construction,” he said. Certainly no one could have been better qualified. Harry literally made the first weld on Skyfac, and had bossed virtually all construction since. There was another guy who had as much experience, once, but he died (his “suit sold out,” as the spacemen say: lost its integrity). Harry’s writing was astonishingly lucid for such a phlegmatic man (perhaps because he did it with his fingers), and I knew even then that The Book was going to make him rich. It didn’t worry me; Harry will never get rich enough to retire.

“Got a job for you, Harry, if you want it.”

He shook his head. “I’m happy here.”

“It’s a space job.”

He damned near smiled again. “I’m unhappy here.”

“All right, I’ll tell you about it. My guess is a year of design work, three or four years of heavy construction, and then a kind of permanent maintenance job keeping the whole thing running for us.”

“What?” he asked economically.

“I want an orbiting dance studio.”

He held up a hand the size of a baseball glove, cutting me off. He took a minicorder out of his shirt, set the mike for “ambient” and put it on the desk between us. “What do you want it to do?”

Five and a half hours later all three of us were hoarse, and an hour after that Harry handed us a set of sketches. I looked them over with Norrey, we approved his budget, and he told us a year. We all shook hands.

Ten months later I took title.

We spent the next three weeks in and around Skyfac property, while I introduced Norrey and Raoul to life without up and down. Space overawed them both at first. Norrey, like her sister before her, was profoundly moved by the personal confrontation with infinity, spiritually traumatized by the awesome perspective that the Big Deep brings to human values. And unlike her sister before her, she lacked that mysteriously total self-confidence, that secure ego-strength that had helped Shara to adjust so quickly. Few humans have ever been as sure of themselves as Shara was. Raoul, too, was only slightly less affected.

We all get it at first, we who venture out into space. From the earliest days, the most unimaginative and stolid jocks NASA could assemble for astronauts frequently came back down spiritually and emotionally staggered, and some adapted and some didn’t. The ten percent of Skyfac personnel who spend much time EVA, who have any way of knowing they’re not in Waukegan besides the low gee, often have to be replaced, and no worker is depended on until his or her second tour. Norrey and Raoul both came through it—they were able to expand their personal interior universe to encompass that much external universe, and came out of the experience (as Shara and I had) with a new and lasting inner calm.

The spiritual confrontation, however, was only the first step. The major victory was much subtler. It was more than just spiritual malaise that washed out seven out of ten exterior construction workers in their first tour. It was also physiological—or was it psychological?—distress.

Free fall itself they both took to nearly at once. Norrey was much quicker than Raoul to adapt—as a dancer, she knew more about her reflexes, and he was more prone to forget himself and blunder into impossible situations, which he endured with dogged good humor. But both were proficient at “jaunting,” propelling oneself through an enclosed space, by the time we were ready to return to Earth. (I myself was pleasantly astonished at how fast unused dance skills came back to me.)

The real miracle was their equally rapid acclimation to sustained EVA, to extended periods outdoors in free space. Given enough time, nearly anyone can acquire new reflexes. But startlingly few can learn to live without a local vertical.

I was so ignorant at that time that I hadn’t the slightest idea what an incredible stroke of good fortune it was that both Norrey and Raoul could. No wonder the gods smile so seldom—we so often fail to notice. Not until the next year did I realize how narrowly my whole venture—my whole life—had escaped disaster. When it finally dawned on me, I had the shakes for days.

That kind of luck held for the next year.

The first year was spent in getting the ball rolling. Endless millions of aggravations and petty details—have you ever tried to order dancing shoes for hands? With velcro palms? So few of the things we needed could be ordered from the Johnny Brown catalog, or put together out of stock space-hardware. Incredible amounts of imaginary dollars flowed through my and Norrey’s right hands, and but for Tom McGillicuddy the thing simply would not have been possible. He took care of incorporating both the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance and the performing company, Star-dancers, Inc., and became business manager of the former and agent for the latter. A highly intelligent and thoroughly honorable man, he had entered Carrington’s service with his eyes—and his ears—wide open. When we waved him like a wand, magic resulted. How many honest men understand high finance?

The second indispensable wizard was, of course, Harry. And bear in mind that during five of those ten months, Harry was on mandatory dirtside leave, readapting his body and bossing the job by extreme long distance phone (God, I hated having phones installed—but the phone company’s rates were fractionally cheaper than buying our own orbit-to-Earth video equipment, and of course it tied the Studio into the global net). Unlike the majority of Skyfac personnel, who rotate dirtside every fourteen months, construction men (those who make it) spend so much time in total weightlessness that six months is the recommended maximum. I figured us Stardancers for the same shift, and Doc Panzella agreed. But the first month and the last four were under Harry’s direct supervision, and he actually turned it in under budget—doubly impressive considering that much of what he was doing had never been done before. He would have beat his original deadline; it wasn’t his fault that we had to move it up on him.

Best of all, Harry turned out (as I’d hoped) to be one of those rare bosses who would rather be working with his hands than bossing. When the job was done he took a month off to collate the first ten inches of copy on his takeup reel into The First Book, sold it for a record-breaking advance and Santa Claus royalties, and then hired back on with us as set-builder, prop man, stage manager, all-around maintenance man, and resident mechanic. Tokugawa’s boys had made astonishingly little fuss when we hired Harry away from them. They simply did not know what they were missing—until it was months too late to do anything about it.

We were able to raid Skyfac so effectively only because it was what it was: a giant, heartless multinational that saw people as interchangeable components. Carrington probably knew better—but the backers he had gotten together and convinced to underwrite his dream knew even less about space than I had as a video man in Toronto. I’m certain they thought of it, most of them, as merely an extremely foreign investment.

I needed all the help I could get. I needed that entire year—and more!—to overhaul and retune an instrument that had not been used in a quarter of a century: my dancer’s body. With Norrey’s support, I managed, but it wasn’t easy.

In retrospect, all of the above strokes of luck were utterly necessary for the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance to have become a reality in the first place. After so many interlocking miracles, I guess I should have been expecting a run of bad cards. But it sure didn’t look like one when it came.

For we truly did have dancers coming out of our ears when we finally opened up shop. I had expected to need good PR to stimulate a demand for the expensive commodity, for although we absorbed the bulk of student expenses (we had to—how many could afford the hundred-dollar-a-kilo elevator fee alone?) we kept it expensive enough to weed out the casually curious—with a secret scholarship program for deserving needy.

Even at those prices, I had to step lively to avoid being trampled in the stampede.

The cumulative effect of Shara’s three tapes on the dance consciousness of the world had been profound and revolutionary. They came at a time when Modern dance as a whole was in the midst of an almost decade-long stasis, a period in which everyone seemed to be doing variations of the already-done, in which dozens of choreographers had beat their brains out trying to create the next New Wave breakthrough, and produced mostly gibberish. Shara’s three tapes, spaced as she had intuitively sensed they must be, had succeeded in capturing the imagination of an immense number of dancers and dance lovers the world over—as well as millions of people who had never given dance a thought before.

Dancers began to understand that free fall meant free dance, free from a lifetime in thrall to gravity. Norrey and I, in our naivete, had failed to be secretive enough about our plans. The day after we signed the lease on our dirtside studio in Toronto, students began literally arriving at our door in carloads and refusing to leave—much before we were ready for them. We hadn’t even figured out how to audition a zero-gee dancer on Earth yet. (Ultimately it proved quite simple: Dancers who survived an elimination process based on conventional dance skills were put on a plane, taken up to angels thirty, dumped out, and filmed on the way down. It’s not the same as free fall—but it’s close enough to weed out gross unsuitables.)

We were sleeping ’em like torpedomen at the dirtside school, feeding them in shifts, and I began having panicky second thoughts about calling up to Harry and putting off our deadline so he could triple the Studio’s living quarters. But Norrey convinced me to be ruthlessly selective and take ONLY the most promising ten—out of hundreds—into orbit.

Thank God—we damned near lost three of those pigeons in two separate incidents, and we conclusively washed out nine. That run of bad cards I mentioned earlier.

Most often it came down to a failure to adapt, an inability to evolve the consciousness beyond dependence on up and down (the one factor skydiving can’t simulate: a skydiver knows which way is down). It doesn’t help to tell yourself that north of your head is “up” and south of your feet is “down”—from that perspective the whole universe is in endless motion (you’re hardly ever motionless in free fall), a perception most brains simply reject. Such a dancer would persistently “lose his point,” his imaginary horizon, and become hopelessly disoriented. Side effects included mild to extreme terror, dizziness, nausea, erratic pulse and blood pressure, the grand-daddy of all headaches and involuntary bowel movement.

(Which last is uncomfortable and embarrassing. P-suit plumbing makes country outhouses look good. Men have the classic “relief tube,” of course, but for women and for defecation in either sex we rely on a strategic deployment of specially treated… oh, hell, we wear a diaper and try to hold it until we get indoors. End of first inevitable digression.)

Even in inside work, in the Goldfish Bowl or Raoul’s collapsible trampoline sphere, such dancers could not learn to overcome their perceptual distress. Having spent their whole professional lives battling gravity with every move they made, they found that they were lost without their old antagonist—or at least without the linear, right-angled perceptual set that is provided: we found that some of them could actually learn to acclimate to weightlessness inside a cube or rectangle, as long as they were allowed to think of one wall as the “ceiling” and its opposite as the “floor.”

And in the one or two cases where their vision was adequate to the new environment, their bodies, their instruments, were not. The new reflexes just failed to jell.

They simply were not meant, any of them, to live in space. In most cases they left friends—but they all left. All but one.

Linda Parsons was the tenth student, the one that didn’t wash out, and finding her was good fortune enough to make up for the run of bad cards.

She was smaller than Norrey, almost as taciturn as Harry (but for different reasons), much calmer than Raoul, and more open-hearted and giving than I will be if I live to be a thousand. In the villainous overcrowding of that first free-fall semester, amid flaring tempers and sullen rages, she was the only universally loved person—I honestly doubt whether we could have survived without her (I remember with some dismay that I seriously contemplated spacing a pimply young student whose only crime was a habit of saying, “There you go” at every single pause in the conversation. There he goes, I kept thinking to myself, there he goes…).

Some women can turn a room into an emotional maelstrom, simply by entering it, and this quality is called “provocative.” So far as I know, our language has no word for the opposite of provocative, but that is what Linda was. She had a talent for getting people high together, without drugs, a knack for resolving irreconcilable differences, a way of brightening the room she was in.

She had been raised on a farm by a spiritual community in Nova Scotia, and that probably accounted for her empathy, responsibility, and intuitive understanding of group-energy dynamics. But I think the single over-riding quality that made her magic work was inborn: she genuinely loved people. It could not have been learned behavior; it was just too clearly intrinsic in her.

I don’t mean that she was a Pollyanna, nauseatingly cheerful and syrupy. She could be blistering if she caught you trying to call irresponsibility something else. She insisted that a high truth level be maintained in her presence, and she would not allow you the luxury of a hidden grudge, what she called “holding a stash on someone.” If she caught you with such psychic dirty laundry, she would haul it right out in public and force you to clean it up. “Tact?” she said to me once. “I always understood that to mean a mutual agreement to be full of shit.”

These attributes are typical of a commune child, and usually get them heartily disliked in so-called polite society—founded, as it is, on irresponsibility, untruth, and selfishness. But again, something innate in Linda made them work for her. She could call you a jerk to your face without triggering reflex anger; she could tell you publicly that you were lying without calling you a liar. She plainly knew how to hate the sin and forgive the sinner; and I admire that, for it is a knack I never had. There was never any mistaking or denying the genuine caring in her voice, even when it was puncturing one of your favorite bubbles of rationalization.

At least, that’s what Norrey or I would have said. Tom, when he met her, had a different opinion.

“Look, Charlie, there’s Tom.”

I should have been fuming mad when I got out of Customs. I felt a little uneasy not being fuming mad. But after six months of extraterrestrial cabin fever, I was finding it curiously difficult to dislike any stranger—even a Customs man.

Besides, I was too heavy to be angry.

“So it is. Tom! Hey, Tom!”

“Oh my,” Norrey said, “something’s wrong.” Tom was fuming mad.

“Hell. What put the sand in his shorts? Hey, where’re Linda and Raoul? Maybe there’s a hassle?”

“No, they got through before we did. They must have taken a cab to the hotel already—”

Tom was upon us, eyes flashing. “So that’s your paragon? Jesus Christ! Fucking bleeding heart, I’ll wring her scrawny neck. Of all the—”

“Whoa! Who? Linda? What?”

“Oh Christ, later—here they come.” What looked like a vigilante committee was converging on us, bearing torches. “Now look,” Tom said hurriedly through his teeth, smiling as though he’d just been guaranteed an apartment in Paradise, “give these bloodsuckers your best I mean your best shot, and maybe I can scavenge something from this stinking mess.” And he was striding toward them, opening his arms and smiling. As he went I heard him mutter something under his breath that began with “Ms. Parsons,” contained enough additional sibilants to foil the shotgun-mikes, and moved his lips not at all.

Norrey and I exchanged a glance. “Pohl’s Law,” she said, and I nodded (Pohl’s Law, Raoul once told us, says that nothing is so good that somebody somewhere won’t hate it, and vice versa). And then the pack was upon us.

“This way Mister when does your next tape come over here please tell our viewers what it’s really believe that this this new artform is a valid passport or did you look this way Ms. Drummond is it true that you haven’t been able to smile for the cameraman for the Stardance, weren’t you going to look this way to please continue or are readers would simply love to no but didn’t you miss Drummond pardon me Miz Drummond do you think you’re as good as your sister Sharon in the profits in their own country are without honor to welcome you back to Earth this way please,” said the mob, over the sound of clicking, whirring, snapping, and whining machinery and through the blinding glare of what looked like an explosion at the galactic core seen from close up. And I smiled and nodded and said urbanely witty things and answered the rudest questions with good humor and by the time we could get a cab I was fuming mad. Raoul and Linda had indeed gone ahead, and Tom had found our luggage; we left at high speed.

“Bleeding Christ, Tom,” I said as the cab pulled away, “next time schedule a press conference for the next day, will you?”

“God damn it,” he blazed, “you can have this job back any time you want it!”

His volume startled even the cabbie. Norrey grabbed his hands and forced him to look at her.

“Tom,” she said gently, “we’re your friends. We don’t want to yell at you; we don’t want you to yell at us. Okay?”

He took an extra deep breath, held it, let it out in one great sigh and nodded. “Okay.”

“Now I know that reporters can be hard to deal with. I understand that, Tom. But I’m tired and hungry and my feet hurt like hell and my body’s convinced it weighs three hundred and thirteen kilos and next time could we maybe just lie to them a little?”

He paused before replying, and his voice came out calm. “Norrey, I am really not an idiot. All that madness to the contrary, I did schedule a press conference for tomorrow, and I did tell everybody to have a heart and leave you alone today. Those jerks back there were the ones who ignored me, the sons of—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Then why the hell did we give them a command performance?”

“Do you think I wanted to?” Tom growled. “What the hell am I going to say tomorrow to the honorable ones who got scooped? But I had no choice, Charlie. That dizzy bitch left me no choice. I had to give those crumbs something, or they’d have run what they had already.”

“Tom, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Linda Parsons, that’s what I’m talking about, your new wonder discovery. Christ, Norrey, the way you went on about her over the phone, I was expecting… I don’t know, anyway a professional.”

“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?” I suggested.

Tom snorted. “First she calls me a tight-ass. Practically the first words out of her mouth. Then she says I’m ignorant, and I’m not treating her right. Treating her right, for Christ’s sake. Then she chews me out for having reporters there—and Charlie, I’ll take that from you and Norrey, Ishould’ve had those jerks thrown out, but I don’t have to take that crap from a rookie. So I start to explain about the reporters, and then she says I’m being defensive. Christ on the pogie, if there’s anything I hate it’s somebody that comes on aggressive and then says you’re being defensive, smiling and looking you right in the eye and trying to rub my fucking neck!”

I figured he’d let off enough steam by now, and I was losing count of the grains of salt. “So Norrey and I made nice for the newsies because they taped you two squabbling in public?”

“No!”

We got the story out of him eventually. It was the old Linda magic at work again, and I can offer you no more typical example. Somehow a seventeen-year-old girl had threaded her way through the hundreds of people in the spaceport terminal straight to Linda and collapsed in her arms, sobbing that she was tripping and losing control and would Linda please make it all stop? It was at that point that the mob of reporters had spotted Linda as a Stardancer and closed in. Even considering that she weighed six times normal, had just been poked full of holes by Medical and insulted by Immigration, and was striking large sparks off of Tom, I’m inclined to doubt that Linda lost her temper; I think she abandoned it. Whatever, she apparently scorched a large hole through that pack of ghouls, bundled the poor girl into it and got her a cab. While they were getting in, some clown stuck a camera in the girl’s face and Linda decked him.

“Hell, Tom, I might have done the same thing myself,” I said when I got it straight.

“God’s teeth, Charlie!” he began; then with a superhuman effort he got control of his voice (at least). “Look. Listen. This is not some four-bit kids’ game we are playing here. Megabucks pass through my fingers, Charlie, megabucks! You are not a bum any more, you don’t have the privileges of a bum. Do you—”

“Tom,” Norrey said, shocked.

“—have any idea how fickle the public has become in the last twenty years? Maybe I’ve got to tell you how much public opinion has to do with the existence of that orbiting junkheap you just left? Or maybe you’re going to tell me that those tapes in your suitcase are as good as the Stardance, that you’ve got something so hot you can beat up reporters and get away with it. Oh Jesus, what a mess!”

He had me there. All the choreography plans we had brought into orbit with us had been based on the assumption that we would have between eight and twelve dancers. We had thought we were being pessimistic. We had to junk everything and start from scratch. The resulting tapes relied heavily on solos—our weakest area at that point—and while I was confident that I could do a lot with editing, well... .

“It’s okay, Tom. Those bums got something their editors’ll like better than a five-foot lady making gorillas look like gorillas—they worry a little about public opinion, too.”

“And what do I tell Westbrook tomorrow? And Mortie and Barbara Frum and UPI and AP and—”

“Tom,” Norrey interrupted gently, “it’ll be all right.”

“All right? How it is all right? Tell me how it’s all right.”

I saw where she was going. “Hell, yeah. I never thought of that, hon, of course. That pack o’jackals drove it clean out of my mind. Serves ’em right.” I began to chuckle. “Serves ’em bloody right.”

“If you don’t mind, darling.”

“Huh? Oh. No… no, I don’t mind.” I grinned. “It’s been long enough coming. Let’s do it up.”

“Will somebody please tell me what the hell is—”

“Tom,” I said expansively, “don’t worry about a thing. I’ll tell your scooped friends the same thing I told my father at the age of thirteen, when he caught me in the cellar with the mailman’s daughter.”

“What the hell is that?” he snapped, beginning to grin in spite of himself and unsure why.

I put an arm around Norrey. “ ‘It’s okay, Pa. We’re gettin’ married tomorrow.’ ”

He stared at us blankly for several seconds, the grin fading, and then it returned full force.

“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” he cried. “Congratulations! That’s terrific, Charlie, Norrey, oh congratulations you two—it’s about time.” He tried to hug us both, but at that moment the cabbie had to dodge a psychopath and Tom was flung backwards, arms outstretched. “That’s tremendous, that’s… you know, I think that’ll do it—I think it’ll work.” He had the grace to blush. “I mean, the hell with the reporters, I just—I mean—”

“You may always,” Norrey said gravely, “leave these little things to us.”

The desk phoned me when Linda checked in, as I had asked them to. I grunted, hung the phone up on thin air, stepped out of bed and into a hotel wastebasket, cannoned into the bedside table destroying table and accompanying lamp, and ended up prone on the floor with my chin sunk deep into the pile rug and my nose a couple of centimeters from a glowing clockface that said it was 4:42. In the morning. At the moment that I came completely awake, the clock expired and its glow went out.

Now it was pitch dark.

Incredibly, Norrey still had not awakened. I got up, dressed in the dark, and left, leaving the wreckage for the morning. Fortunately the good leg had sustained most of the damage; I could walk, albeit with a kind of double limp.

“Linda? It’s me, Charlie.”

She opened up at once. “Charlie, I’m sorry—”

“Skip it. You done good. How’s the girl?” I stepped in.

She closed the door behind me and made a face. “Not terrific. But her people are with her now. I think she’s going to be okay.”

“That’s good. I remember the first time a trip went sour on me.”

She nodded. “You know it’s going to stop in eight hours, but that doesn’t help; your time rate’s gone eternal.”

“Yeah. Look, about Tom—”

She made another face. “Boy, Charlie, what a jerk.”

“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?”

“I just tried to tell him that he was being too uptight, and he came on like he couldn’t imagine what I was talking about. So I told him he wasn’t as ignorant as he gave himself credit for, and asked him to treat me like a friend instead of a stranger—from all you told me about him, that seemed right. ‘Okay,’ he says, so I ask him as a friend to try and keep those reporters off of us for a day or so and he blows right up at me. He was so defensive, Charlie.”

“Look, Linda,” I began, “there was this screwup that—”

“Honestly, Charlie, I tried to calm him down, I tried to show him I wasn’t blaming him. I—I was rubbing his neck and shoulders, trying to loosen him up, and he, he pushed me away. I mean, really, Charlie, you and Norrey said he was so nice and what a creep.”

“Linda, I’m sorry you didn’t get along. Tom is a nice guy, it’s just—”

“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.

III

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 sledge-hammer 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 overall 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 the Betamax people 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.

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 shoulderblades 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 sub-conscious 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, ad-mixed 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 macro-bubble 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 hell out of me. I’d 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 with-out up and down—like a duck to water. He was the only one of nine who made the psychological breakthrough. Now Iknew 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 almost 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 shortly. “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.”

Then it was that the totality of my stupidity truly did become apparent to me. I was speechless. It was Norrey who said, “We accept,” on behalf of the company, at the same instant that Linda said the same thing for herself. And the snowflake reformed, much smaller in diameter.

Our company was formed.

As to the nature of our dance itself, there is not much to be said that the tapes themselves don’t already say. We borrowed a lot of vocabulary from New Pilobolus and the Contact Imnrov movement (which had been among the last spasms of inventiveness before that decade-long stasis in dance I mentioned earlier), but we had to radically adapt almost everything we borrowed. Although the Contact Improv people say they’re into “free fall,” this is a semantic confusion: they mean “falling freely”; we mean “free of falling.” But a lot of their discoveries do work, at least in some fashion, in zero gee—and we used what worked.

Linda’s own dance background included four years with the New Pilobolus company: if you don’t know them, or the legendary Pilobolus company they sprang from, they’re sort of Contact Improv without the improv—carefully choreographed stuff. But they too are into “using each other as the set”—dancing on, over, and around one another, cooperating in changing each other’s vectors. Dancing acrobats, if you will. We ourselves tried to achieve a balanced blend of both choreographed and spontaneous dance in the stuff we taped.

Linda was able to teach us a lot about mutually interreacting masses, hyperfulcrums, and the like—and a lot more about the attitude they require. To truly interact with another dancer, to spontaneously create shapes together, you must attempt to attune yourself to them empathically. You must know them—how they dance and how they’re feeling at the moment—to be able to sense what their next move will be, or how they will likely react to yours. When it works, it’s the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever known.

It’s much harder with more than one partner, but the exhilaration increases exponentially.

Because free fall requires mutual cooperation, mutual awareness on a spherical level, our dance became an essentially spiritual exercise.

And so, with a company of adequate size and an increasing grasp of what zero-gee dance was really about, we began our second and last season of taping.

IV

I fell through starry space, balanced like an inbound comet on a tail of fluorescent gas, concentrating on keeping my spine straight and my knees and ankles locked. It helped me forget how nervous I was.

“Five,” Raoul chanted steadily, “four, three, two, now,” and a ring of his bright orange “flame” flared soundlessly all around me. I threaded it like a needle.

“Beautiful,” Norrey whispered in my ear, from her vantage point a kilometer away. At once I lifted my arms straight over my head and bit down hard on a contact. As I passed through the ring of orange “flame,” my “tail” turned a rich, deep purple, expanding lazily and symmetrically behind me. Within the purple wake, tiny novae sparkled and died at irregular intervals: Raoul magic. Just before the dye canisters on my calves emptied, I fired my belly thruster and let it warp me “upward” in an ever-increasing curve while I counted seconds.

“Light it up, Harry,” I said sharply. “I can’t see you.” The red lights winked into being above my imaginary horizon and I relaxed, cutting the ventral thrust in plenty of time. I was not heading precisely for the camera, but the necessary corrections were minor and would not visibly spoil the curve. Orienting myself by a method I can only call informed writhing, I cut main drive and selected my point.

On Earth you can turn forever without getting dizzy if you select a point and keep your eyes locked on it, whipping your head around at the last possible second for each rotation. In space the technique is unnecessary: once out of a gravity well, your semicirculars fill up and your whole balance system shuts down; you can’t get dizzy. But old habit dies hard. Once I had my point star I tumbled, and when I had counted ten rotations the camera was close enough to see and coming up fast. At once I came out of my spin, oriented, and braked sharply—maybe three gees—with all thrusters. I had cut it fine: I came to rest relative to the camera barely fifty meters away. I cut all power instantly, went from the natural contraction of high acceleration to full release, giving it everything I had left, held it for a five-count and whispered, “Cut!”

The red lights winked out, and Norrey, Raoul, Tom, and Linda cheered softly (nobody does anything loudly in a p-suit).

“Okay, Harry, let’s see the playback.”

“Coming up, boss.”

There was a pause while he rewound, and then a large square section of distant space lit up around the edges. The stars within it rearranged themselves and took on motion. My image came into frame, went through the maneuver I had just finished. I was pleased. I had hit the ring of orange “flame” dead center and triggered the purple smoke at just the right instant. The peelout curve was a little ragged, but it would do. The sudden growth of my oncoming image was so startling that I actually flinched—which is pretty silly. The deceleration was nearly as breathtaking to watch as it had been to do, the pullout was fine, and the final triumphant extension was frankly terrific.

“That’s a take,” I said contentedly. “Which way’s the bar?”

“Just up the street,” Raoul answered. “I’m buying.”

“Always a pleasure to meet a patron of the arts. How much did you say your name was?”

Harry’s massive construction-man’s spacesuit, festooned with tools, appeared from behind and “beneath” the camera. “Hey,” he said, “not yet. Gotta at least run through the second scene.”

“Oh hell,” I protested. “My air’s low, my belly’s empty, and I’m swimming around in this overgrown galosh.”

“Deadline’s coming,” was all Harry said.

I wanted to shower so bad I could taste it. Dancers are all different; the only thing we all have in common is that we all sweat—and in a p-suit there’s nowhere for it to go. “My thrusters’re shot,” I said weakly.

“You don’t need ’em much for Scene Two,” Norrey reminded me. “Monkey Bars, remember? Brute muscle stuff.” She paused. “And we are pushing deadline, Charlie.”

Dammit, a voice on stereo earphones seems to come from the same place that the voice of your conscience does.

“They’re right, Charlie,” Raoul said. “I spoke too soon. Come on, the night is young.”

I stared around me at an immense sphere of starry emptiness, Earth a beachball to my left and the Sun a brilliant softball beyond it. “Night don’t come any older than this,” I grumbled, and gave in. “Okay, I guess you’re right. Harry, you and Raoul strike that set and get the next one in place, okay? The rest of you warm up in place. Get sweaty.”

Raoul and Harry, as practiced and efficient as a pair of old beat cops, took the Family Car out to vacuum up the vacuum. I sat on nothing and brooded about the damned deadline. It was getting time to go dirtside again, which meant it was time to get this segment rehearsed and shot, but I didn’t have to like it. No artist likes time pressure, even those who can’t produce without it. So I brooded.

The show must go on. The show must always go on, and if you are one of those millions who have always wondered exactly why, I will tell you. The tickets have already been sold.

But it’s uniquely hard (as well as foolish) to brood in space. You hang suspended within the Big Deep, infinity in all directions, an emptiness so immense that although you know that you’re falling through it at high speed, you make no slightest visible progress. Space is God’s Throne Room, and so vasty a hall is it that no human problem has significance within it for long.

Have you ever lived by the sea? If so, you know how difficult it is to retain a griping mood while contemplating the ocean. Space is like that, only more so.

Much more so.

By the time the Monkey Bars were assembled, I was nearly in a dancing mood again. The Bars were a kind of three-dimensional gymnast’s jungle, a huge partial icosahedron composed of transparent tubes inside which neon fluoresced green and red. It enclosed an area of about 14,000 cubic meters, within which were scattered a great many tiny liquid droplets that hung like motion-less dust motes, gleaming in laserlight. Apple juice.

When Raoul and Harry had first shown me the model for the Monkey Bars, I had been struck by the aesthetic beauty of the structure. By now, after endless simulations and individual rehearsals, I saw it only as a complex collection of fulcrums and pivots for Tom, Linda, Norrey and me to dance on, an array of vector-changers designed for maximal movement with minimal thruster use. Scene Two relied almost entirely on muscle power, a paradox considering the technology implicit in its creation. We would pivot with all four limbs on the Bars and on each other, borrowing some moves from the vocabulary of trapeze acrobatics and some from our own growing experience with free-fall lovemaking, constantly forming and dissolving strange geometries that were new even to dance. (We were using choreography rather than improv techniques: the Bars and their concept were too big for the Goldfish Bowl, and you can’t afford mistakes in free space.)

Though I had taught individual dancers their parts and rehearsed some of the trickier clinches with the group, this would be our first full run-through together. I found I was anxious to assure myself that it would actually work. All the computer simulation in the world is no substitute for actually doing it; things that look lovely in compsim can dislocate shoulders in practice.

I was about to call places when Norrey left her position and jetted my way. Of course there’s only one possible reason for that, so I turned off my radio too and waited. She decelerated neatly, came to rest beside me, and touched her hood to mine.

“Charlie, I didn’t mean to crowd you. We can come back in eleven hours and—”

“No, that’s okay, hon,” I assured her. “You’re right: ‘Deadline don’t care.’ I just hope the choreography’s right.”

“It’s just the first run-through. And the simulations were great.”

“That’s not what I mean. Hell, I know it’s correct. By this point I can think spherically just fine. I just don’t know if it’s anygood.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s exactly the kind of choreography Shara would have loathed. Rigid, precisely timed, like a set of tracks.”

She locked a leg around my waist to arrest a slight drift and looked thoughtful. “She’d have loathed it for herself,” she said finally, “but I think she’d really have enjoyed watching us do it. It’s agood piece, Charlie—and you know how the critics love anything abstract.”

“Yeah, you’re right—again,” I said, and put on my best Cheerful Charlie grin. It’s not fair to have a bummer at curtain time; it brings the other dancers down. “In fact, you may have just given me a better title for this whole mess: Synapstract.”

There was relief in her answering grin. “If it’s got to be a pun, I like ImMerced better.”

“Yeah, it does have a kind of Cunningham flavor to it. Bet the old boy takes the next elevator up after he sees it.” I squeezed her arm through the p-suit, added “Thanks, hon,” cut in my radio again. “All right, boys and girls, ‘let’s shoot this turkey.’ Watch out for leg-breakers and widowmakers. Harry, those cameras locked in?”

“Program running,” he announced. “Blow a gasket.” It’s the Stardancer’s equivalent of “Break a leg.”

Norrey scooted back into position, I corrected my own, the lights came up hellbright on cameras 2 and 4, and we took our stage, while on all sides of us an enormous universe went about its business.

You can’t fake cheerfulness well enough to fool a wife like Norrey without there being something real to it; and, like I said, it’s hard to brood in space. It really was exhilarating to hurl my body around within the red and green Bars, interacting with the energy of three other dancers I happened to love, concentrating on split-second timing and perfect body placement. But an artist is capable of self-criticism even in the midst of the most involving performance. It’s the same perpetual self-scrutiny that makes so many of us so hard to get along with for any length of time—and that makes us artists in the first place. The last words Shara Drummond ever said to me were, “Do it right.”

And even in the whirling midst of a piece that demanded all my attention, there was still room for a little whispering voice that said that this was only the best I had been able to do and still meet my deadline.

I tried to comfort myself with the notion that every artist who ever worked feels exactly the same way, about nearly every piece they ever do—and it didn’t help me any more than it ever does any of us. And so I made the one small error of placement, and tried to correct with thrusters in too much of a hurry and triggered the wrong one and smacked backward hard into Tom. His back was to me as well, and our air tanks clanged and one of mine blew. A horse kicked me between the shoulder blades and the Bars came up fast and caught me across the thighs, tumbling me end over end. I was more than twenty meters from the set, heading for forever, before I had time to black out.

Happening to smack into the Bars off center was a break. It put me into an acrobat’s tumble, which centrifuged air into my hood and boots, and blood to my head and feet, bringing me out of blackout quicker. Even so, precious seconds ticked by while I groggily deduced my problem, picked my point and began to spin correctly. With the perspective that gave me I oriented myself, still groggy, figured out intuitively which thrusters would kill the spin, and used them.

That done, it was easy to locate the Bars, a bright cubist’s Christmas tree growing perceptibly smaller as I watched. It was between me and the blue beachball I’d been born on. At least life would not be corny enough to award me Shara’s death. But Bryce Carrington’s didn’t appeal to me much more.

My thighs ached like hell, the right one especially, but my spine hadn’t begun to hurt yet—I hadn’t yet worked out that it ought to. There were voices in my headphones, urgent ones, but I was still too fuzzy to make any sense out of what they were saying. Later I could spare time to retune my ears; right now figures were clicking away in my mind and the answers kept getting worse. There’s much more pressure in an air tank than in a thruster. On the other hand, I had ten aimable thrusters with which to cancel the velocity imparted by that one diffused burst. On the third hand, I had started this with badly depleted thrusters... .

Even as I concluded that I was dead I was doing what I could to save my life: one by one I lined up my thrusters on the far side of my center of mass and fired them to exhaustion. Left foot, fore and aft. Right foot, likewise. Belly thruster. My back began to moan, then cry, then shriek with agony; not the localized knifing I’d expected but a general ache. I couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or bad. Back thruster, clamping my teeth against a whimper. Left hand, fore and aft—

—Save a little. I reserved my right hand pair for last minute maneuvers, and looked to see if I’d done any good.

The Monkey Bars were still shrinking, fairly rapidly.

I was almost fully conscious now, feeling that my brains were just catching up with me. The voices in my headphones began to make sense at last. The first one that I identified, of course, was Norrey’s—but she wasn’t saying anything, only crying and swearing.

“Hey, honey,” I said as calmly as I could, and she cut off instantly. So did the others. Then—

“Hang on, darling. I’m coming!”

“That’s right, boss,” Harry agreed. “I’ve been tracking you with the radar gun since you left, and the computer’s doing the piloting.”

“She’ll get you,” Raoul cried. “The machine says ‘yes.’ With available fuel, it can get her to you and then back here, Charlie, it says ‘yes.’ ”

Sure enough, just to the side of the Bars I could see the Family Car, nose-on to me. It was not shrinking as fast as the Bars were—but it did appear to be shrinking. That had been a hell of a clout that can of air fetched me.

“Boss,” Harry said urgently, “is your suit honest?”

“Yeah, sure, the force of the blast was outwards, didn’t even damage the other can.” My back throbbed just thinking about it, and yes, damn it, the Car’s visible disk was definitely shrinking, not a whole lot but certainly not growing, and at that moment of moments I recalled that the warranty on that computer’s software had expired three days ago.

Say something heroic before you moan.

“Well, that’s settled,” I said cheerfully. “Remind me to sue the bas—hey! How’s Tom?”

“We got it patched,” Harry said briefly. “He’s out, but telemetry says he’s alive and okay.”

No wonder Linda was silent. She was praying.

“Is there a doctor in the house?” I asked rhetorically. “I called Skyfac. Panzella’s on his way. We’re proceeding home on thrusters to get Tom indoors now.”

“Go, all three of you. Nothing you can do out here. Raoul, take care of Linda.”

“Yah.”

Silence fell, except of course for the by now unheard constants of breathing and rustling cloth. Norrey began to cry again, briefly, but controlled it. The disc that was her and the Car was growing now, I had to stare and measure with my thumb but yes, it was growing.

“Attaway, Norrey, you’re gaining on me,” I said, trying to keep it light.

“That I am,” she agreed, and when the rate of the Car’s growth had just reached a visibly perceptible crawl, the corona of her drive flame winked out. “What the—?”

Visualize the geometry. I leave the Monkey Bars at a hell of a clip. Maybe a full thirty seconds elapse before Norrey is in the saddle and blasting. Ideally the computer has her blast to a velocity higher than mine, hold it, then turnover and begin decelerating so that she will begin to return toward the Bars just as our courses intersect. A bit tricky to work out in your head, but no problem for a ballistic computer half as good as ours.

The kicker was fuel.

Norrey had to cut thrust precisely halfway through projected total fuel consumption. She had used up half the content of her fuel tanks; the computer saw that at these rates of travel rendezvous could be accomplished eventually; it cut thrust with a computer’s equivalent of a smile of triumph. I did primitive mental arithmetic, based on guesswork and with enormous margins for errors, and went pale and cold inside my plastic bag.

The second kicker was air.

“Harry,” I rapped, “run that projection through again for me, but include the following air supply data—”

“Oh Jesus God,” he said, stunned, and then repeated back the figures I gave him. “Hold on.”

“Charlie,” Norrey began worriedly, “Oh my God, Charlie!”

“Wait, baby. Wait. Maybe it’s okay.”

Harry’s voice was final. “No good, boss. You’ll be out of air when she gets there. She’ll be damn low when she gets back.”

“Then turn around and start back now, hon,” I said as gently as I could.

“Hell no,” she cried.

“Why risk your neck, darling? I’m already buried—buried in space. Come on now—”

“No.”

I tried brutality. “You want my corpse that bad?”

“Yes.”

“Why, to have it hanging around the Closet?”

“No. To ride with.”

“Huh?”

“Harry, plot me a course that’ll get me to him before his air runs out. Forget the round trip: Give me a minimum-time rendezvous.”

“No!” I thundered.

“Norrey,” Harry said earnestly, “there’s nothing else to come get you with. There’s not a ship in the sky. You blast any more and you’ll never even get started back here, you’ll never even stop leaving. You’ve got more air than him, but both your air combined wouldn’t last one of you ’til help could arrive, even if we could keep tracking you that long.” It was the longest speech I’d ever heard Harry make.

“I’m damned if I want to be a widow,” she blazed, and cut in acceleration on manual override.

She was as dead as me, now.

“Goddammit,” Harry and I roared together, and then “Help her, Harry!” I screamed and “I am!” he screamed back and an endless time later he said sadly, “Okay, Norrey, let go. The new course is locked in.” She was still dead, had been from the moment she overrode the computer. But at least now we’d go together.

“All right, then,” she said, still angry but mollified. “Twenty-five years Iwanted to be your wife, Armstead. I will be damned if I’ll be your widow.”

“Harry,” I said, knowing it was hopeless but refusing to accept, “refigure, assuming that we leave the Car when it runs out of juice and use all of Norrey’s suit thrusters together. Hers aren’t as low as mine were.”

It must have been damned awkward for Harry, using two fingers to keep himself headed for home at max thrust, holding the big computer terminal and pushing keys with the rest. It must have been even more awkward for Raoul and Linda, towing the unconscious Tom between them, watching their patch job leak.

“Forget it, boss,” Harry said almost at once. “There’s two of you.”

“Well then,” I said desperately, “can we trade off breathing air for thrust?”

He must have been just as desperate; he actually worked the problem. “Sure. You could start returning, get back here in less than a day. But it’d take all your air to do it. You’re dead, boss.”

I nodded, a silly habit I’d thought I’d outgrown. “That’s what I thought. Thanks, Harry. Good luck with Tom.”

Norrey said not a word. Presently the computer shut down her drive again, having done its level best to get her to me quickly with the fuel available. The glow around the Car (now plainly growing) winked out, and still she was silent. We were all silent. There was either nothing to say or too much, no in-between. Presently Harry reported docking at home. He gave Norrey her turnover data, gave her back manual control, and then he and the others went off the air.

Two people breathing makes hardly any noise at all.

She was a long long time coming, long enough for the pain in my back to diminish to the merely incredible. When she was near enough to see, it took all my discipline to keep from using the last of my jump-juice to try and match up with her. Not that I had anything to save it for. But matching in free space is like high-speed high-way merging—one of you had better maintain a constant velocity, two variables are too many. Norrey did a textbook job, coming to a dead stop relative to me at the extreme edge of lifeline range.

The precision was wasted. But you don’t stop trying to live just because a computer says you can’t.

At the same split second that she stopped decelerating she fired the lifeline. The weight at the end tapped me gently on the chest: very impressive shooting, even with the magnet to help. I embraced it fiercely, and it took me several seconds of concentrated effort to let go and clip it to my belt. I hadn’t realized how lonely and scared I was.

As soon as she was sure I was secure, she cut the drag and let the Car reel me in.

“Who says you can never get a cab when you need one?” I said, but my teeth were chattering and it spoiled the effect.

She grinned anyhow, and helped me into the rear saddle. “Where to, Mac?”

All of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. If the Car’s fuselage hadn’t been reinforced, I’d have crushed it between my knees. “Wherever you’re going,”

I said simply, and she spun around in her saddle and gave it the gun.

It takes a really sensitive hand to pilot a tractor like the Family Car accurately, especially with a load on. It’s quite difficult to keep the target bubble centered, and the controls are mushy—you have to sort of outguess her or you’ll end up oscillating and throw your gyro. A dancer is, of course, better at seat-of-the-pants mass balancing than any but the most experienced of Space Command pilots, and Norrey was the best of the six of us. At that she outdid herself.

She even outdid the computer. Which is not too astonishing—there’s always more gas than it says on the gauge—and of course it wasn’t nearly enough to matter. We were still dead. But after a time the distant red and green spheroid that was the Bars stopped shrinking; instruments confirmed it. After a longer time I was able to convince myself that it was actually growing some. It was, naturally, at that moment that the vibration between my thighs ceased.

All the time we’d been accelerating I’d been boiling over with the need to talk, and had kept my mouth shut for fear of distracting Norrey’s attention. Now we had done all we could do. Now we had nothing left to do in our lives but talk, and I was wordless again. It was Norrey who broke the silence, her tone just precisely right.

“Uh, you’re not going to believe this… but we’re out of gas.”

“The hell you say. Let me out of this car; I’m not that kind of boy.” Thank you, hon.

“Aw, take it easy. It’s downhill from here. I’ll just put her in neutral and we’ll coast home.”

“Hey listen,” I said, “when you navigate by the seat of your pants like that, is that what they call a bum steer?”

“Oh Charlie, I don’t want to die.”

“Well, then don’t.”

“I wasn’t finished yet.”

“Norrey!” I grabbed her shoulder from behind. Fortunately I used my left hand, triggering only empty thrusters.

There was a silence.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last, still facing away from me. “I made my choice. These last minutes with you are worth what I paid for them. That just slipped out.” She snorted at herself. “Wasting air.”

“I can’t think of anything I’d rather spend air on than talking with you. That you can do in p-suits, I mean. I don’t want to die either—but if I’ve got to go, I’m glad I’ve got your company. Isn’t that selfish?”

“Nope. I’m glad you’re here too, Charlie.”

“Hell, Icalled this meeting. If I wasn’t here, nobody would be.” I broke off then, and scowled. “That’s the part that bothers me the most, I think. I used to try and guess, sometimes, what it would be that would finally kill me. Sure enough, I was right: my own damn stupidity. Spacing out. Taking my finger off the number. Oh dammit, Norrey—”

“Charlie, it was an accident.”

“I spaced out. I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about the god damned deadline, and I blew it.” (I was very close to something, then; something bigger than my death.)

“Charlie, that’s cheating. At least half of that guilt you’re hogging belongs to the crook that inspected that air tank at the factory. Not to mention the flaming idiot who forgot to gas the Car this morning.”

It’s a rotating duty. “Who was that idiot?” I asked, before I could think better of it.

“Same idiot who took off without grabbing extra air. Me.”

That produced an uncomfortable silence. Which started me trying to think of something meaningful or useful to say. Or do. Let’s see, I had less than an eighth of a can of air. Norrey maybe a can and a quarter: she hadn’t used up as much in exercise. (Space Command armor, like the NASA Standard suits before them, hold about six hours’ air. A Stardancer’s p-suit is good for only half as much—but they’re prettier. And we always have plenty of air bottles—strapped to every camera we use.) I reached forward and unshipped her full tank, passed it silently over her shoulder. She took it, as silently, and got the first-aid kit out of the glove compartment. She took a Y-joint from it, made sure both male ends were sealed, and snapped it onto the air bottle. She got extension hoses from the kit and mated them to the ends of the Y. She clipped the whole assembly to the flank of the Car until we needed it, an air soda with two straws. Then she reversed herself in the saddle, awkwardly, until she was facing me.

“I love you, Charlie.”

“I love you, Norrey.”

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that hugging in p-suits is a waste of time. Hugging is never awaste of time. It hurt my back a lot, but I paid no attention.

The headphones crackled with another carrier wave: Raoul calling from Tom and Linda’s place. “Norrey? Charlie? Tom’s okay. The doctor’s on his way, Charlie, but he’s not going to get here in time to do you any good. I called the Space Command, there’s no scheduled traffic near here, there’s just nothing in the neighborhood, Charlie, just nothing at all what the hell are we going to do?” Harry must have been very busy with Tom, or he’d have grabbed the mike by now.

“Here’s what you’re going to do, buddy,” I said calmly, spacing my words to slow him down. “Push the ‘record’ button. Okay? Now put the speakers on so Harry and Linda can witness. Ready? Okay. ‘I, Charles Armstead, being of sound mind and body—’ ”

“Charlie!”

“Don’t spoil the tape, buddy. I haven’t got time for too many retakes, and I’ve got better things to do. Charles Armstead—’ ”

It didn’t take very long. I left everything to the Company—and I made Fat Humphrey a full partner. Le Maintenant had closed the month before, strangled by bureaucracy. Then it was Norrey’s turn, and she echoed me almost verbatim.

What was there to do then? We said our good-byes to Raoul, to Linda, and to Harry, making it as short as possible. Then we switched off our radios. Sitting backwards in the saddle was uncomfortable for Norrey; she turned around again and I hugged her from behind like a motorcycle passenger. Our hoods touched. What we said then is really none of your damned business.

An hour went by, the fullest hour I had ever known. All infinity stretched around us. Both of us being ignorant of astronomy, we had given names of our own to the constellations on our honeymoon. The Banjo. The Leering Gerbil. Orion’s Truss. The Big Pot Pipe and the Little Hash Pipe. One triplet near the Milky Way quite naturally became the Three Musketeers. Like that. We renamed them all, now, re-evoking that honeymoon. We talked of our lost plans and hopes. In turns, we freaked out and comforted each other, and then we both freaked out together and both comforted each other. We told each other those last few secrets even happily-marrieds hold out. Twice, we agreed to take off our p-suits and get it over with. Twice, we changed our minds. We talked about the children we didn’t have, and how lucky it was for them that we didn’t have them. We sucked sugar water from our hood nipples. We talked about God, about death, about how uncomfortable we were and how absurd it was to die uncomfortable—about how absurd it was to die at all.

“It was deadline pressure killed us,” I said finally, “stupid damned deadline pressure. In a big hurry. Why? So we wouldn’t get marooned in space by our metabolisms. What was so wrong with that?” (I was very close, now.) “What were we so scared of? What has Earth got that we were risking our necks to keep?”

“People,” Norrey answered seriously. “Places. There aren’t many of either up here.”

“Yeah, places. New York. Toronto. Cesspools.”

“Not fair. Prince Edward Island.”

“Yeah, and how much time did we get to spend there? And how long before it’s a bloody city?”

“People, Charlie. Good people.”

“Seven billion of ’em, squatting on the same disintegrating anthill.”

“Charlie, look out there.” She pointed to the Earth. “Do you see an ‘oasis hanging in space’? Does that look crowded to you?”

She had me there. From space, one’s overwhelming impression of our home planet is of one vast, godforsaken wilderness. Desert is by far the most common sight, and only occasionally does a twinkle or a miniature mosaic give evidence of human works. Man may have polluted hell out of his atmosphere—seen edge-on at sunset it looks no thicker than the skin of an apple—but he has as yet made next to no visible mark on the face of his planet.

“No. But it is, and you know it. My leg hurts all the time. There’s never a moment of real silence. It stinks. It’s filthy and germ-ridden and riddled with evil and steeped in contagious insanity and hip-deep in despair. I don’t know what the hell I ever wanted to go back there for.”

“Charlie!” I only realized how high my volume had become when I discovered how loud she had to be to out-shout me. I broke off, furious with myself. Again you want to freak out? The last time wasn’t bad enough?

I’m sorry, I answered myself, I’ve never died before. I understand it’s been done worse. “I’m sorry, hon,” I said aloud. “I guess I just haven’t cared much for Earth since Le Maintenant closed.” It started out to be a wisecrack, but it didn’t come out funny.

“Charlie,” she said, her voice strange.

You see? There she goes now, and we’re off and running again. “Yeah?”

“Why are the Monkey Bars blinking on and off?”

At once I checked the air bottle, then the Y-joint, hoses, and joins. No, she was getting air. I looked then, and sure as hell the Monkey Bars were blinking on and off in the far distance, a Christmas-tree bulb on a flasher circuit. I checked the air again, carefully, to make sure we weren’t both hallucinating, and returned to our spoon embrace.

“Funny,” I said, “I can’t think of a circuit malf that’d behave that way.”

“Something must have struck the sunpower screen and set it spinning.”

“I guess. But what?”

“The hell with it, Charlie. Maybe it’s Raoul trying to signal us.”

“If it is, to hell with him indeed. There’s nothing more I want to say, and I’m damned if there’s anything I want to hear. Leave the damn phone off the hook. Where were we?”

“Deciding Earth sucks.”

“It certainly does—hard. Why does anybody live there, Norrey? Oh, the hell with that too.”

“Yeah. It can’t be such a bad place. We met there.”

“That’s true.” I hugged her a little tighter. “I guess we’re lucky people. We each found our Other Half. And before we died, too. How many are that lucky?”

“Tom and Linda, I think. Diane and Howard in Toronto. I can’t think of anybody else I know of, for sure.”

“Me either. There used to be more happy marriages around when I was a kid.” The Bars began blinking twice as fast. A second improbable meteor? Or a chunk of the panel breaking loose, putting the rest in a tighter spin? It was an annoying distraction; I moved until I couldn’t see it. “I guess I never realized just how incredibly lucky we are. A life with you in it is a square deal.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she cried, moving in my arms. Despite the awkwardness she worked around in her saddle to hug me again. My p-suit dug into my neck, the earphone on that side notched my ear, and her strong dancer’s arms raised hell with my throbbing back, but I made no complaint. Until her grip suddenly convulsed even tighter.

“Charlie!”

“Nnngh.”

She relaxed her clutch some, but held on. “What the hell is that?”

I caught my breath. “What the hell is what?” I twisted in my seat to look. “What the hell is that?” We both lost our seats on the Car and drifted to the ends of our hoses, stunned limp.

It was practically on top of us, within a hundred meters, so impossibly enormous and foreshortened that it took us seconds to recognize, identify it as a ship. My first thought was that a whale had come to visit.

Champion, said the bold red letters across the prow. And beneath, United Nations Space Command.

I glanced back at Norrey, then checked the air line one more time. “ ‘No scheduled traffic,’ ” I said hollowly, and switched on my radio.

The voice was incredibly loud, but the static was so much louder that I knew it was off-mike, talking to someone in the same room. I remember every syllable.

“pid fucking idiots are too God damned dumb to turn on their radios, sir. Somebody’s gonna have to tap ’em on the shoulder.”

Further off-mike, a familiar voice began to laugh like hell, and after a moment the radioman joined in. Norrey and I listened to the laughter, speechless. A part of me considered laughing too, but decided I might never stop.

“Jesus Christ,” I said finally. “How far does a man have to go to have a little privacy with his wife?”

Startled silence, and then the mike was seized and the familiar voice roared, “You son of a bitch!”

“But seeing you’ve come all this way, Major Cox,” Norrey said magnificently, “we’ll come in for a beer.”

“You dumb son of a bitch,” Harry’s voice came from afar. “You dumb son of a bitch.” The Monkey Bars had stopped winking. We had the message.

“After you, my love,” I said, unshipping the air tank, and as I reached the airlock my last thruster died. Bill Cox met us at the airlock with three beers, and mine was delicious.

The two sips I got before the fun started.

Like Phillip Nolan, I had renounced something out loud—and had been heard.

V

I took those two sips right away, and made them last. Officers and crew were frankly gaping at Norrey and me. At first I naturally assumed they were awed by anyone dumb enough to turn off their radios in an emergency. Well, I hadn’t thought of being dead as an emergency. But on the second sip I noticed a certain subtle classification of gaping. With one or two exceptions, all the female crew were gaping at me and all the male crew were gaping at Norrey. I had not exactly forgotten what we were wearing under our p-suits; there was almost nothing to forget. We were “decently” covered by sanitary arrangements, but just barely, and what is commonplace on a home video screen on Earth is not so in the ready room of a warship.

Bill, of course, was too much of a gentleman to notice. Or maybe he realized there was not one practical thing to do about the situation except ignore it. “So reports of your demise were exaggerated, eh?”

“On the contrary,” I said, wiping my chin with my glove. “They omitted our resurrection. Which by me is the most important part. Thanks, Bill.”

He grinned, and said a strange thing very quickly. “Don’t ask any of the obvious questions.” As he said it, his eyes flickered slightly. On Earth or under acceleration they would have flicked from side to side. In free fall, a new reflex controls, and he happened to be oriented out of phase to my local vertical: his pupils described twin circles, perhaps a centimeter in diameter, and returned to us. The message was plain. The answers to my obvious next questions were classified information. Wait.

Hmmm.

I squeezed Norrey’s hand hard—unnecessarily, of course—and groped for a harmless response.

“We’re at your disposal,” is what I came up with.

He flinched. Then in a split second he decided that I didn’t mean whatever he’d thought I meant, and his grin returned. “You’ll want a shower and some food. Follow me to my quarters.”

“For a shower,” Norrey said, “I will follow you through hell.” We kicked off.

There was my second chance to gawk like a tourist at the innards of a genuine warship—and again I was too busy to pay any attention. Did Bill really expect his crew to believe that he had just happened to pick us up hitchhiking? Whenever no one was visibly within earshot, I tried to pump him—but in Space Command warships the air pressure is so low that sounds travel poorly. He outflew my questions—and how much expression does a man wear on the soles of his feet?

At last we reached his quarters and swung inside. He backed up to a wall and hung facing us in the totally relaxed “spaceman’s crouch,” and tossed us a couple of odd widgets. I examined mine: it looked like a wrist-watch with a miniature hair dryer attached. Then he tossed us a pair of cigarettes and I got it. Mass priorities in military craft differ from those of essentially luxury operations like ours or Skyfac’s: the Champion’s air system was primitive, not only low-pressure but inefficient. The widgets were combination aircleaner/ashtrays. I slipped mine over my wrist and lit up.

“Major William Cox,” I said formally, “Norrey Armstead. Vice versa.”

It is of course impossible to bow when your shoulders are velcro’d to the wall, but Bill managed to signify. Norrey gave him what we call the free-fall curtsy, a movement we worked out idly one day on the theory that we might someday give curtain calls to a live audience. It’s indescribable but spectacular, as frankly sexual as a curtsy and as graceful.

Bill blinked, but recovered. “I am honored, Ms. Armstead. I’ve seen all the tapes you’ve released, and—well, this will be easy to misunderstand, but you’re her sister.”

Norreysmiled. “Thank you, Major—”

“Bill.”

“—Bill. That’s high praise. Charlie’s told me a lot about you.”

“Likewise, one drunken night when we met dirtside. Afterwards.”

I remembered the night—weeks before I had consciously realized that I was in love with Norrey—but not the conversation. My subconscious tells me only what it thinks I ought to know.

“Now you must both forgive me,” he went on, and I noticed for the first time that he was in a hurry. “I’d like nothing better than to chat, but I can’t. Please get out of your p-suits, quickly.”

“Even more than a shower, I’d like some answers, Bill,” I said. “What the hell brings you out our way, just in the nicotine like that? I don’t believe in miracles, not that kind anyway. And why the hush?”

“Yes,” Norrey chimed in, “and why didn’t your own Ground Control know you were in the area?”

Cox held up both hands. “Whoa. The answer to your questions runs about twenty minutes minimum. In—” he glanced at his watch, “less than three we accelerate at two gravities. That’s why I want you out of those suits—my bed will accommodate air tank fittings, but you’d be uncomfortable as hell.”

“What? Bill, what the hell are you talking about? Accelerate where? Home is a couple o’ dozen klicks that-away.”

“Your friends will be picked up by the same shuttle that is fetching Dr. Panzella,” Cox said. “They’ll join us at Skyfac in a matter of hours. But you two can’t wait.”

“For what?” I hollered.

Bill arm-wrestled me with his eyes, and lost. “Damn it,” he said, then paused. “I have specific orders not to tell you a thing.” He glanced at his chronometer. “And I really do have to get back to the Worry Hole. Look, if you’ll trust me and pay attention, I can give you the whole twenty minutes in two sentences, all right?”

“I—yeah. Okay.”

“The aliens have been sighted again, in the close vicinity of Saturn. They’re just sitting there. Think it through.”

He left at once, but before he cleared the doorway I was halfway out of my p-suit, and Norrey was reaching for the straps on the right half of the Captain’s couch.

And we were both beginning to be terrified. Again.

Think it through, Bill had said.

The aliens had come boldly knocking on our door once, and been met by a shotgun blast named Shara. They were learning country manners; this time they had stopped at the fence gate, shouted “hello the house,” and waited prudently. (Saturn was just about our fence gate, too—as I recalled, a manned expedition to Saturn was being planned at that time, for the usual obscure scientific reasons.) Clearly, they wanted to parley.

Okay, then: if you were the Secretary General, who would you send to parley? The Space Commando? Prominent politicians? Noted scientists? A convention of usedcopter salesmen? You’d most likely send your most seasoned and flexible career diplomats, of course, as many as could go.

But would you omit the only artists in human space who have demonstrated a working knowledge of pidgin Alien?

I was drafted—at my age.

But that was only the first step in the logic chain. The reason that Saturn probe story had made enough of a media splash to attract even my attention was that it was a kind of kamikaze mission for the crew. Whose place we were assuming.

Think it through. Whatever they planned to send us to Saturn on, it was sure to take a long time. Six years was the figure I vaguely recalled hearing mentioned. And any transit over that kind of distance would have to be spent almost entirely in free fall. You could rotate the craft to provide gravity at either end—but one gee’s worth of rotation of a space that small would create so much Coriolis differential that anyone who didn’t want to puke or pass out would have to stay lying down for six years. Or hang like bolas from exercise lines on either end—not much more practical.

If we didn’t dodge the draft, we would never walk Earth again. We would be free-fall exiles, marooned in space. Our reward for serving as mouthpieces between a bunch of diplomats and the things that had killed Shara.

Assuming that we survived the experience at all.

At any other time, the implications would have been too staggering for my brain to let itself comprehend; my mind would have run round in frightened circles. Unless I could talk my way out of this with whoever was waiting for us at Skyfac (why Skyfac?), Norrey and I had taken our last walk, seen our last beach, gone to our last concert. We would never again breathe uncanned air, eat with a fork, get rained on, or eat fresh food. We were dead to to world (S.I.C. TRANSIT: gloria mundi, whispered a phantom memory that had been funny enough the first time). And yet I faced it squarely, calmly.

Not more than an hour ago I had renounced all those things.

And resigned myself to the loss of a lot of more important things, that it looked like I was now going to be able to keep. Breathing. Eating. Sleeping. Thinking. Making love. Hurting. Scratching. Bowel movements. Bitching. Why, the list was endless—and I had all those things back, at least six years’ worth! Hell, I told myself, there were damned few city dwellers any better off—few of them ever got walks, beaches, concerts, uncanned air or fresh food. What with airlocks and nostril filters, city folk might as well be in orbit for all the outdoors they could enjoy—and how many of them could feel confident of six more years? I couldn’t begin to envision the trip to Saturn, let alone what lay at the end of it—but I knew that space held no muckers, no muggers, no mad stranglers or crazed drivers, no tenement fires or fuel shortages or race riots or blackouts or gang wars or reactor meltdowns…

How does Norrey feel about it?

It had taken me a couple of minutes to get this far; as I turned my head to see Norrey’s face the acceleration warning sounded. She turned hers, too; our noses were scant centimeters apart, and I could see that she too had thought it through. But I couldn’t read her reaction.

“I guess I don’t mind much going,” I said.

“Iwant to go,” she said fervently.

I blinked. “Phillip Nolan was the Man Without A Country,” I said, “and he didn’t care for it. We’ll be the Couple Without A Planet.”

“I don’t care, Charlie.” Second warning sounded. “You seemed to care back there on the Car, when I was bum-rapping Earth.”

“You don’t understand. Those flickers killed my sister. I want to learn their language so I can cuss them out.”

It didn’t sound like a bad idea.

But thinking about it was. Two gees caught us both with our heads sideways, smacking our cheeks into the couch and wrenching our necks. An eternity later, turnover gave us just enough time to pop them back into place, and then deceleration came for another eternity.

There were “minor” maneuvering accelerations, and then “acceleration over” sounded. We unstrapped, both borrowed robes from Bill’s locker, and began trading neckrubs. By and by Bill returned. He glanced at the bruises we were raising on opposite sides of our faces and snorted. “Lovebirds. All right, all ashore. Powwow time.” He produced off-duty fatigues in both our sizes, and a brush and comb.

“With who?” I asked, dressing hastily.

“The Security-General of the United Nations,” he said simply.

“Jesus Christ.”

“If he was available,” Bill agreed.

“How about Tom?” Norrey asked. “Is he all right?”

“I spoke with Panzella,” Bill answered. “McGillicuddy is all right. He’ll look like strawberry yoghurt for a while, but no significant damage—”

“Thank God.”

“—Panzella’s bringing him here with the others, ETA—” he checked his chronometer pointedly—“five hours away.”

“All of us?” I exclaimed. “How big is the bloody ship?” I slipped on the shoes.

“All I know is my orders,” Bill said, turning to go. “I’m to see that the six of you are delivered to Skyfac, soonest. And, I trust you’ll remember, to keep my damn mouth shut.” Why Skyfac? I wondered again.

“Suppose the others don’t volunteer?” Norrey asked.

Bill turned back, honestly dumbfounded. “Eh?”

“Well, they don’t have the personal motivations Charlie and I have.”

“They have their duty.”

“But they’re civilians.”

He was still confused. “Aren’t they humans?” She gave up. “Lead us to the Secretary-General.” None of us realized at the time that Bill had asked a good question.

Tokugawa was in Tokyo. It was just as well; there was no room for him in his office. Seven civilians, six military officers. Three of the latter were Space Command, the other three national military; all thirteen were of high rank. It would have been obvious had they been naked. All of them were quiet, reserved; none of them spoke an unnecessary word. But there was enough authority in that room to sober a drunken lumberjack.

And it was agitated authority, nervous authority, faced not with an issue but a genuine crisis, all too aware that it was making history. Those who didn’t look truculent looked extremely grave. A jester facing an audience of lords in this mood would have taken poison.

And then I saw that all of the military men and one of the civilians were trying heroically to watch everyone in the room at once without being conspicuous, and I put my fists on my hips and laughed.

The man in Carrington’s—excuse me, in Tokugawa’s chair looked genuinely startled. Not offended, not even annoyed—just surprised.

There’s no point in describing the appearance or recounting the accomplishments of Siegbert Wertheimer. As of this writing he is still the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and his media photos, like his record, speak for themselves. I will add only that he was (inevitably) shorter than I had expected, and heavier. And one other, entirely subjective and apolitical impression: in those first seconds of appraisal I decided that his famous massive dignity, so beloved by political cartoonists, was intrinsic rather than acquired. It was the cause of his impressive track record, I was certain, and not the result of it. He did not seem like a humorless man—he was simply astounded that someone had found some humor in this mess. He looked unutterably weary.

“Why is it that you laugh, sir?” he asked mildly, with that faintest trace of accent.

I shook my head, still grinning uncontrollably. “I’m not sure I can make you see it, Mr. Secretary-General.” Something about the set of his mouth made me decide to try. “From my point of view, I’ve just walked into a Hitchcock movie.”

He considered it, momentarily imagining what it must be like to be an ordinary human thrust into the company of agitated lions, and grinned himself. “Then at least we shall try to make the dialogue fresh,” he said. A good deal of his weariness seemed to be low-gee malaise, the discomfort of fluids rising to the upper body, the feeling of fullness in the head and the vertigo. But only his body noticed it. “Let us proceed. I am impressed by your record, Mr.—” He glanced down, and the paper he needed was not there. The American civilian had it, and the Russian general was looking over his shoulder. Before I could prompt him, he closed his eyes, jogged his memory, and continued, “—Armstead. I own three copies of the Stardance, and the first two are worn out. I have recently viewed your own recordings, and interviewed several of your former students. I have a job that needs doing, and I think you and your troupe are precisely the people for that job.”

I didn’t want to get Bill in trouble, so I hung a dumb look on my face and waited.

“The alien creatures you encountered with Shara Drummond have been seen again. They appear to be in a parking orbit around the planet Saturn. They have been there for approximately three weeks. They show no sign of any intention to move, nearer to or farther from us. Radio signals have been sent, but they have elicited no response. Will you kindly tell me when I come to information that is new to you?”

I knew I was caught, but I kept trying. In low gee, you chase spilled milk—and often catch it. “New to me? Christ, all of it’s—”

He smiled again. “Mr. Armstead, there is a saying in the UN. We say, ‘There are no secrets in space.’ ”

It is true that between all humans who choose to live in space, there is a unique and stronger bond than between any of them and anyone who spends all his life on Earth. For all its immensity, space has always had a better grapevine than a small town. But I hadn’t expected the Secretary-General to know that.

Norrey spoke while I was still reevaluating. “We know that we’re going to Saturn, Mr. Secretary-General. We don’t know how, or what will happen when we get there.”

“Or for that matter,” I added, “why this conference is taking place in Skyfac cubic.”

“But we understand the personal implications of a space trip that long, as you must have known we would, and we know that we have to go.”

“As I hoped you would,” he finished, respectfully. “I will not sully your bravery with words. Shall I answer your questions, then?”

“One moment,” I interjected. “I understand that you want our entire troupe. Won’t Norrey and I do? We’re the best dancers—why multiply your payload?”

“Payload mass is not a major consideration,” Wertheimer said. “Your colleagues will be given their free choice—but if I can have them, I want them.”

“Why?”

“There will be four diplomats. I want four interpreters. Mr. Stein’s experience and proven expertise are invaluable—he is, from his record, unique. Mr. Brindle can help us learn the aliens’ response to visual cues designed by computers which have seen the Stardance tapes—the same sort of augmentation he provides for you now. A sort of expanded vocabulary. He will also provide a peaceful excuse for us to judge the aliens’ reaction to laser beams.”

His answer raised several strong objections in my mind, but I decided to reserve them for later. “Go on.”

“As to your other questions. We are guests of Skyfac Incorporated because of a series of coincidences that almost impels me to mysticism. A certain ballistic transfer is required in order to get a mission to Saturn at all expediently. This transfer, called Friesen’s Transfer, is best begun from a 2:1 resonance orbit. Skyfac has such an orbit. It is a convenient outfitting base unequalled in space. And by chance Siegfried, the Saturn probe which was just nearing completion, is in a precessing ellipse orbit which brought it within the close vicinity of Skyfac at the right time. An incredible coincidence. On a par with the coincidence that the launch window for Saturn opened concurrent with the aliens’ appearance there.

“I do not believe in good fortune of that magnitude. I suspect personally that this is some kind of intelligence and aptitudes test—but I have no evidence beyond what I have told you. My speculations are as worthless as anyone’s—we must have more information.”

“How long does that launch window remain open?” I asked.

Wertheimer’s watch was as Swiss as he, exquisite and expensive but so old fashioned that he had to look at it. “Perhaps twenty hours.”

Oof. Now for the painful one. “How long is the round trip?”

“Assuming zero time in negotiation, three years. Approximately one year out and two back.”

I was pleasurably startled at first: three years instead of twelve to be cooped up in a canful of diplomats. But then I began to grasp the acceleration implied—in an untested ship built by a government on low-bid contracts. And it was still more than enough time for us all to adapt permanently to zero gee. Still, they obviously had something special and extraordinary up their sleeves. I grinned again. “Are you going?”

A lesser man would have said, “I regret that I cannot,” or something equally self-absolutory—and might have been completely honest at that. Secretary-Generals don’t go chasing off to Saturn, even if they want to.

But all he said was, “No,” and I was ashamed that I had asked the question.

“As to the question of compensation,” he went on quietly, “there is of course none adequate to the sacrifice you are making. Nevertheless, should you, upon your return, elect to continue performing, all your operating costs will be covered in perpetuity by the United Nations. Should you be disinclined to continue your careers, you will be guaranteed unlimited lifetime transport to and from, and luxury accommodations at, any place within United Nations jurisdiction.”

We were being given a paid-up lifetime plane ticket to anywhere in human space. If we survived to collect it.

“This is in no sense to be considered payment; any attempt at payment would be laughable and grotesque. But you have chosen to serve; your species is grateful. Is this satisfactory to you?”

I thought about it, turned to Norrey. We exchanged a few paragraphs by facial telegraph. “We accept the blank check,” she said. “We don’t promise to cash it.”

He nodded. “Perhaps the only sensible answer. All right, let us—”

“Sir,” I said urgently, “I have something I have to say first.”

“Yes?” He did me the honor of displaying patience.

“Norrey and I are willing to go, for our own reasons. I can’t speak for the others. But I must tell you that I have no great confidence that any of us can do this job for you. I will try my best—but frankly I expect to fail.”

The Chinese general’s eyes locked onto me. “Why?” he snapped.

I continued to look at Wertheimer. “You assume that because we are Stardancers, we can interpret for you. I cannot guarantee that. I venture to say that I know the Stardance tapes, even the classified ones, better than any person here. I shot them. I’ve monkeyed with speed and image-field until I know every frame by name and I will be damned if I understand their language. Oh, I get flashes, insights, but…

“Shara understood them—crudely, tentatively, and with great effort. I’m not half the choreographer she was, nor half the dancer. None of us is. No one I’ve ever seen is. She told me herself that what communication took place was more telepathy than choreography. I have no idea whether any of us can establish such a telepathic rapport through dance. I wasn’t there; I was in this oversized donut, four bulkheads away from here, filming the show.” I was getting agitated, all the pressure finding release. “I’m sorry, General,” I said to the Chinese, “but this is not something you can order done.”

Wertheimer was not fazed. “Have you used computers?”

“No,” I admitted. “I always meant to when I got time.”

“You did not think we would fail to do so? No more than you, do we have an alien/human dictionary—but we know much. You can choreograph by computer?”

“Sure.”

“Your ship’s computer memories should offer you a year’s worth of study on the trip out. They will provide you with at least enough ‘vocabulary’ to begin the process of acquiring more, and they will provide extensive if hypothetical suggestions for doing so. The research has been done. You and your troupe may be the only humans alive capable of assessing the data and putting them to use. I have seen your performance tapes, and I believe you can do it if anyone can. You are all unique people, at least in your work. You think as well as a human… but not like a human.”

It was the most extraordinary thing anyone had ever said to me; it stunned me more than anything else that was said that day.

“All of you, apparently,” he went on. “Perhaps you will meet with failure. In that case you are the best imaginable teachers and guides for the diplomat team, of whom only one has even minimal experience with free-fall conditions. They will need people who are at home in space to help them, whatever happens.”

He took out a cigarette, and the American civilian turned up the air for him unobtrusively. He lit it with a match, himself. It smoked an odd color: it was tobacco.

“I am confident that all of you will do your best. All of your company who choose to go. I hope that will be all of you. But we cannot wait until the arrival of your friends, Mr. Armstead; there are enormous constraints on us all. If you are to be introduced to the diplomatic mission before take-off, it must be now.”

Wuh oh. Red alert. You’re inspecting your housemates for the next two years—just before signing the lease. Pay attention: Harry and the others’ll be interested.

I took Norrey’s hand; she squeezed mine hard.

And to think I could have been an alcoholic, anonymous video man in New Brunswick.

“Go ahead, sir,” I said firmly.

“You’re shitting me,” Raoul exclaimed.

“Honest to God,” I assured him.

“It sounds like a Milton Berle joke,” he insisted.

“You’re too young to remember Milton Berle,” Norrey said. She was lying down on the near bunk, nodding off in spite of herself.

“So don’t I have a tape library?”

“I agree with you,” I said, “but the fact remains. Our diplomatic team consists of a Spaniard, a Russian, a Chinaman, and a Jew.”

“My God,” Tom said from his reclining position on the other bed, where he had been since he arrived. He did indeed look like strawberry yoghurt, lightly stirred, and he complained of intermittent eye and ear pain. But he was shot full of don’t-hurt and keep-going, and his hands were full of Linda’s; his voice was strong and clear. “It even makes sense.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “If he’s not going to send one delegate from each member nation, Wertheimer’s only option is to keep it down to The Big Three. It’s the only restriction most everybody can live with. It’s got to be a multi-national team; that business about mankind uniting in the face of the alien menace is the bunk.”

“Headed by the proverbial Man Above Reproach,” Linda pointed out.

“Wertheimer himself would have been perfect,” Raoul put in.

“Sure,” I agreed drily, “but he had some pressing obligations elsewhere.”

“Ezequiel DeLaTorre will do just fine,” Tom said thoughtfully.

I nodded. “Even I’ve heard of him. Okay, I’ve told you all we know. Comments? Questions?”

“I want to know about this one-year trip home business,” Tom spoke up. “As far as I know, that’s impossible.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “We’ve been in space a long time. I don’t know if they can understand how little prolonged acceleration we can take at this point. What about it, Harry? Raoul? Can the deed be done?”

“I don’t think so,” Harry said.

“Why not? Can you explain?”

Guest privileges aboard Skyfac include computer access. Harry jaunted to the terminal, punched up a reference display.

The screen said:

“That’s the simplest expression for a transfer time from planet to planet,” he said.

“Jesus.”

“And it’s too simple for your problem.”

“Uh—they said something about a freezing transfer.”

“Got it,” Raoul said. “Friesen’s Transfer, on the tip of my mind. Sure, it’d work.”

“How?” everyone said at once.

“I used to study all the papers on Space Colonization when I was a kid,” Raoul bubbled. “Even when it was obvious that L-5 wasn’t going to get off the ground, I never gave up hope—it seemed like the only way I might ever get to space. Lawrence Friesen presented a paper at Princeton once… sure, I remember, ’80 or a little earlier. Wait a minute.” He hopped rabbitlike to the terminal, used its calculator function.

Harry was working his own belt-buckle calculator. “How’re you gonna get a characteristic velocity of 28 klicks a second?” he asked skeptically.

“Nuclear pulse job?” Tom suggested.

That was what I had been afraid of. I’ve read that there are people who seriously propose propelling themselves into deep space by goosing themselves with hydrogen bombs—but you’ll never get me upin one of them things.

“Hell no,” Raoul said—thank goodness. “You don’t need that kind of thrust with a Friesen. Watch.” He set the terminal for engineering display and began sketching the idea. “You wanna start from an orbit like this.”

“A 2:1 resonance orbit?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he affirmed.

“Like Skyfac?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure, that’d—hey! Hey, yeah—we’re just where we want to be. Gee, what a funny coincidence, huh?”

Harry, I could see, was beginning to smell the same rat Wertheimer had. Maybe Tom was, too; all that yoghurt got in the way. “So then?” I prompted.

Raoul cleared the screen and calculated some more. “Well, you’d want to make your ship lose, let’s see, a little less than a kilometer per second. That’s—well, nearly two minutes acceleration at one gravity. Hmmmm. Or a tenth-gee, say, about a seventeen-minute burn. Nothing.

“That starts us falling toward Earth. What we want to do then is slingshot around it. So we apply an extra .. . 5.44 klicksecs at just the right time. About nine minutes at one gravity, but they won’t use one gravity because you need it fast. Might be, lemme see, 4.6 minutes at two gees, or it might be 2.3 at four.”

“Oh, fine,” I said cheerfully. “Only a couple of minutes at four gees. Our faces’ll migrate around the back of our heads, and we’ll be the only animals in the system with frontbones. Go on.”

“So you get this,” Raoul said, keying the drafting display again:

“And that gives us a year of free fall, in which to practice our choreography, throw up, listen to our bones rot, kill the diplomats and eat them, discuss Heinlein’s effect on Proust, and bone up on Conversational Alien. Then we’re at Saturn. Gee, that’s another lucky break, the launch window for a one-year Friesen being open—”

“Yeah,” Harry interrupted, looking up from his calculator, “that gets you to Saturn in a year—at twelve klicksecs relative. That’s more’n escape velocity for Earth.”

“We let the ship get captured by Titan,” Raoul said triumphantly.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Oh. Dump eight or nine klicksecs—”

“Sure,” Raoul went on, punching keys. “Easy. A tenth gee for two-and-a-half hours. Or make it easy on ourselves, a hundredth of a gee for a little more than a day. Uh, twenty-five and a half hours. A hundredth gee isn’t enough to make pee trickle down your leg, even if you’re free-fall adapted.”

I had actually managed to follow most of the salient points—computer display is a wondrous aid for the ignorant. “Okay then,” I said sharply, in my “pay attention, here comes your blocking” voice, focusing everyone’s attention by long habit. “Okay. This thing can be done. We’ve been talking it over ever since two hours before your shuttle docked here. I’ve told you what they want of us, and why they want all of us. My inclination is to tell you to have your answers ready along about next fall. But the bus is leaving soon. That launch window business you mentioned, Raoul.” Harry’s eyes flashed suspiciously, and yes, Tom too had picked up on the improbability of such luck. “So,” I went on doggedly, “I have to ask for your final answers within the hour. I know that’s preposterous, but there’s no choice.” I sighed. “I advise you to use the hour.”

“Damn it, Charlie,” Tom said in real anger, “is this a family or isn’t it?”

“I—”

“What kind of shit is that?” Raoul agreed. “A man shouldn’t insult his friends.”

Linda and Harry also looked offended.

“Listen, you idiots,” I said, giving it my very best shot, “this is forever. You’llnever ski again, never swim, never walk around under even Lunar gravity. You’ll never take a shit without technological assistance again.”

“Where on Earth can you take a shit without technological assistance today?” Linda asked.

“Come on,” I barked, “don’t give me satire, think about it. Do I have to get personal? Harry—Raoul—how many women you figure you’re going to date in space? How many would leave behind a whole world to stay with you? Seriously, now. Linda—Tom—do you know of any evidence at all to suggest that childbirth is possible in free fall? Do you want to bet two lives someday? Or had you planned to opt for sterilization? Now the four of you stop talking like comic book heroes and listen to me, God dammit.” I discovered to my transient surprise that I genuinely was blazing mad; my tension was perfectly happy to find release as anger. I realized, for the first time, that a little histrionics can be a dangerous thing. “We have no way of knowing whether we can communicate with the goddam fireflies. On a gamble with odds that long, stakes this high, two lives is enough to risk. We don’t need you guys anyway,” I shouted, and then I caught myself.

“No,” I went on finally, “that’s a lie. I won’t try to claim that. But we can do it without you if it can be done at all. Norrey and I have personal reasons for going—but what do you people want to throw away a planet for?”

There was a glutinous silence. I had done my best; Norrey had nothing to add. I watched four blank, expressionless faces and waited.

At last Linda stirred. “We’ll solve zero-gee childbirth,” she said with serene confidence, and added, “when we have to,” a second later.

Tom had forgotten his discomfort. He looked long at Linda, smiling with puffy lips amid his burst capillaries, and said to her, “I was raised in New York. I’ve known cities all my life. I never realized how much tension was involved in city life until I stayed at your family’s home for a week. And I never realized how much I hated that tension until I noticed how much I was getting to dread having to go dirtside again. You only realize how stiff your neck and shoulders were when someone rubs them out for you.” He touched her cheek with blood-purple fingernails. “It will be a long time before we have to put a lock on our airlock. Sure, we’ll have a child someday—and we won’t have to teach it how to adapt to a jungle.”

She smiled, and took his purple fingers in her own. “We won’t have to teach it how to walk.”

“In zero gee,” Raoul said meditatively, “I’m taller.” I thought he meant the few centimeters that every spine stretches in free fall, but then he said, “In zero gee nobody isshort.”

By golly, he was right. “Eye-level” is a meaningless term in space; consequently so is height.

But his voice was speculative; he had not committed himself yet.

Harry sucked beer from a bulb, belched, and studied the ceiling. “On my mind. For a long time. This adapting stuff. I could work all year insteada half. See a job through foronce. Was thinking of doing it anyway.” He looked at Raoul. “Don’t figure I’ll miss the ladies any.”

Raoul met his eyes squarely. “Me either,” he said, and this time his voice held commitment.

Light dawned in the cerebral caverns, and my jaw hung down. “Jesus Christ in a p-suit!”

“It’s just a blind spot, Charlie,” Linda said compassionately.

She was right. It has nothing to do with wisdom or maturity or how observant I am. It’s just a personal quirk, a blind spot: I never will learn to notice love when it’s under my nose.

“Norrey,” I said accusingly. “You know I’m an idiot, why didn’t you tell me? Norrey?”

She was sound asleep.

And all four of them were laughing like hell at me, and after a second I had to laugh too. Any man who does not know himself a fool is a damned fool; any man who tries to hide it is a double-damned fool, for he is alone. Together, we laughed, diminishing my foolishness to a shared thing, and Norrey stirred and half-smiled in her sleep.

“All right,” I said when I could get my breath, “someone for all and all for someone. I won’t try to fight the weather. I love you all, and will be glad of your company. Tom, you stretch out and get some sleep yourself; Raoul, get the light; the four of us’ll go get briefed and come back for you and Norrey, Tom; we’ll pack your comic books and your other tunic. You still mass around seventy-two, right?” I bent and kissed Norrey’s forehead. “Let’s roll it.”