Starseed

Prologue

I always danced.

Like all babies I was born kicking; I just never stopped. All during my childhood it was that way. In the 1980s Gambier Island had a permanent population of about sixty, which no more than doubled in the summer—but it sure had a lot of theatres, with proscenium stages. The garden, the livingroom, a certain clearing in the woods near Aunt Anya’s place…I danced in them all, and most of all in my room with the door closed. Sometimes there was thunderous applause; sometimes I danced for no one but myself; sometimes for intimate friends who vanished at a knock on the door. I remember clearly the moment I first understood that dancing was what I was going to do with my life.

Near sunset in late summer, 1985. Dinner and chores finished. My feet tickled. I told Dad where I was going, avoided Mom, and slipped out through the shed without banging the door. It was a kilometer and a half to the government wharf. The afternoon had been warm and wet—wet enough, I thought, to keep most of our neighbors indoors, and most boats at anchor. As I came over the last crest of the road and started down to the wharf, I saw I was right: I had the place to myself.

I began to run down the hill, kicking off my shoes and tossing my jacket to the side of the road. At the far end of the wharf I slowed and carefully descended the swaying gangway to the big dock-float down at water level. I turned halfway down and scanned the shoreline one more time to be sure. No one in sight. I circled around the boathouse at the foot of the gangway. The boathouse cut off sight of the land; there was nothing but me and the sea and the islands in the distance, grey-green mountains rising from the water. The water was highlit with sparkles of colour from the sun setting behind me over the forest. A warm mist came and went, invisibly. Even dry clothes are a nuisance when you dance. My clothes went under the rowboat that lay turtle-backed against the boathouse. The float’s surface was rough enough for safe footing when wet, but soft enough for bare feet.

I turned my back to the land and faced the sea. There are bigger theatres, but not on Earth. My parents were unreconstructed hippies, quasi-Buddhist; for their sake I bowed to the sea…then waved to it for my own: the sober, dignified wave a serious artist gives her expectant public when she is eleven years old. A passing gull gave my cue. Ladies and gentlemen, Rain McLeod! The music swelled. . .

I’ve become too sophisticated to remember the steps I improvised. They must have been some mutant amalgamation of what I thought ballet was, and all the Other Kinds of dance I’d felt in my body but had no names for then. Nomenclature doesn’t matter to an eleven-year-old. I danced, and what was in my heart came out my limbs and torso. I’ve wished since that I could still dance like that, but I’ve lost the necessary ignorance. I do remember that I was very happy. Complete.

Someone in the back row coughed—

Zalophus Californianus. A sea lion. Distinguished from harbor seals, even at that distance, by the distinct ears. Passing Gambier on his way back home from a day of raiding. Fishermen hate sea lions, call them pirates of the sea. They’ll take one bite from each fish in your net, spoiling the whole catch…then leave with the best one, waving it at you mockingly as they go. I always secretly liked them. They always danced: so it seemed to me. Drama and tragedy in the water; slapstick comedy when they were on land. He was perhaps fifty meters due east of the dock, treading water and staring at me. He coughed again, sounding very much like Grandfather.

I didn’t let him interrupt me. I worked a friendly hello wave into what I was doing, and kept on dancing. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye from time to time, watching me in apparent puzzlement, but he was no more distraction than a cloud or gull would have been—

—until there were two of him.

For a moment I “treaded water” myself, planting my feet so I faced them and dancing only with torso and arms. They were identical, grey and wet, a few meters apart, their eyes and slick heads glistening with reflected sunset. The new one gave a cough of its own, softer and higher. Grandfather and Grandmother Meade. They watched me with no discernible expression at all, giving me their complete attention, perfect bobbing Buddhas.

So I danced for them.

Well, at them. I made no attempt to “translate” what I was feeling into Sea Lion dance, to mimic the body-language I’d seen them use, so they could understand better. Even at eleven I was arrogant enough to be more interested in teaching them my dance language, telling them who I was. When you’re that young, expressing yourself is better than being understood. So I continued to dance in Human, and for the whole cycloramic world of sea and sunset—but began subtly aiming it at the sea lions, as though they were the two important critics in a packed theatre, or my actual grandparents come to see my solo debut.

What luck, to have spent my childhood so far from Vancouver’s ballet classes that no one had yet told me how I was supposed to move. I was still able to move the way I needed to, to invent anything my heart required. It felt good, that’s all this highly trained forty-six-year-old can remember. For a time machine and video gear, you can have anything I own.

The sea lions were twenty meters closer, and there were four of them now.

They were treading water in ragged formation, close enough for me to see whiskers. By logical extension of my original whimsy, the new arrivals were the paternal grandparents I’d never met, the McLeods. Ghosts in the audience. It gave an added layer of meaning to what I was doing, as much awareness of mortality and eternity as an eleven-year-old is capable of. I danced on.

The first breezes of evening found the sweat under my hair and on my chest and chilled them. I increased my energy output to compensate. I was grinning, spinning.

Seven sea lions. Twenty meters away, faces absolutely blank, staring.

Everything came together—sea, sky, purple clouds of sunset, sea lions—to generate that special magic always sought and so seldom found. I lost myself; the dance began dancing me. It burst out of me like laughter or tears, without thought or effort. My legs were strong, wind infinite, ideas came, every experiment worked and suggested the next. There’s a special state of being, the backwards of a trance, where you transcend yourself and become a part of everything—where you seem to stand still, while the world dances around and through you. Many dancers never experience it. I’d been to that level a few times before, for fleeting moments. This time I knew I could stay as long as I wanted.

Time stopped; I went on.

Even an eleven-year-old body has limits; every dance has a natural, logical end. Eventually, with warm contentment and mild regret, I left Nirvana and returned to the world of illusion again. I was still, upright, arms upthrust toward the clouds, reaching for the unseen stars.

The float was ringed by more than a dozen sea lions, the farthest within five meters of me. I looked round at them all, half-expecting them to clap and bark like cartoon seals. They stared at me. Bobbing in silent syncopation, seeming to be thinking about what they’d just seen. My first applause…

I bowed, deeply.

And then waved, grandly.

Darkness was falling fast. Sweat dripped from me, my soles tingled, and many muscles announced their intention to wake up stiff tomorrow. I was perfectly happy.

This, I thought, is what I’m supposed to do. My Thing, as Mom was always calling it: what I would do with my life. I understood now what I had always sensed, that Mom was going to hate it (though I didn’t yet understand why)…but that didn’t matter anymore.

Maybe that’s when you become an adult. When your parents’ opinions no longer control.

I kept silent when I returned home that night. But the next day I called Grandmother in Vancouver, and told her that she had won the tug of war with my mother. I moved into her huge house on the mainland, and let her enroll me in ballet class, and in normal school, like other kids. Within weeks I had been teased so much over the name “Rain M’Cloud” (which had never struck anyone on Gambier Island as odd) that I changed it to Morgan. It seemed to me a much more dignified name for a ballerina.

It was a long time before I saw Gambier Island again.

I always danced. But from the day of the sea lions, dancing was just about all I did, all I was. For thirty-two years. Until the day came when my body simply would not do it anymore. The day in April of 2017 when Doctor Thompson and Doctor Immega told me that even more surgery would not help, that I could never dance again. My lower back and knees were spent.

I tried the dancer’s classic escape hatches for a few years. Choreography. Teaching. When they didn’t work for me, I tried living without dance. I even tried relationships again. Nothing worked.

Including me. There were lots of trained, experienced professionals looking for work, as technological progress made more and more occupational specialties obsolete. There were few job openings for a forty-six-year-old who couldn’t even type. Even the traditional unskilled-labour jobs were increasingly being done by robots. Sure, I could go back to school, and in only a few years of drudgery acquire a new profession—ideally, one which would not be obsolete by the time I graduated. But what for? Nothing interested me.

The salt of the earth had lost its savor.

I went back to Gambier Island. By now it was becoming a suburb of Vancouver; even in winter there were stores and cars and paved roads and burglaries. There was talk of a condominium complex. I sat for six months in the cabin where I had been born, waiting for some great answer to come from out of the sky. I visited my parents’ graves frequently. Sat zazen in the woods. Split cords of wood. Read the first twenty pages of a dozen books. Walked the parts of the Island that were still wild, by day and night. Nature accepted my presence amiably enough, but offered no answers. Nothing.

I went down to the wharf and consulted the sea lions, as I had many times. They had nothing to say. They just looked at me, as if waiting for me to begin dancing.

After enough days of that, “nothing” started to look good to me. I filled out the Euthanasia application I had brought with me, putting down “earliest possible” for Date and leaving the space for Reason blank. I’d have a response within a week or two; by the end of the month, unless I changed my mind, my problems would be over.

In my bones, I was a dancer. And I couldn’t dance anymore.

Not anywhere on Earth…

That very night I was lying in the hammock behind the house, watching the stars, when my eye was caught by a large bright one. It moved relative to the other stars, so it was a satellite. It moved roughly north to south, and was quite large: it had to be Top Step. Funny I’d never thought of it before. The House the Stardance Built, as the media called it. Transplanted asteroid, parting gift of alien gods—the place where they made angels out of people. Hollow stone cigar, phallic womb in High Orbit. Gateway to immortality, to the stars, to freedom from every kind of human fear or need there was…and all it cost was everything you had, forever.

Dancers say, you go where the work is. Suddenly, at age forty-six, I had nowhere to go but up.