The Last Dance

by Martin L Shoemaker

  Like the rest of the officers, I was in white as well, my dress whites, which never felt quite right to me: more like equipment than clothes. I was awkwardly aware of all the places where it didn’t fit the way it was designed.

  I saw someone who was perfectly comfortable in her dress whites; but then, she had been wearing them for a lot more years than I had. Admiral Morais, my former commander, had rearranged her schedule literally for months so that she could join us on the Aldrin as it swung around Mars. I was honored beyond words, and I beamed when she came up through the line. “Admiral.” I snapped a salute.

  Morais returned my salute. “At ease, Chief Carver. You can relax for a day. You’re off duty.”

  I relaxed as much as I could in full dress—maybe 5 percent or so—and I got Tracy’s attention. “Tracy, honey, this is Admiral Morais. I’ve told you about her. Admiral, my wife, Tracy Wells.”

  “Tracy Wells-Carver, Anson. Get used to that.” Tracy smiled more broadly, and I melted. (Would I ever stop doing that? I hoped not.) Then she hugged the admiral, and I cringed. I wasn’t sure how this fit with protocol.

  But I needn’t have worried. Morais returned the hug, with only a slight reserve. If Tracy had breached protocol, Morais was too classy to react. Instead she just smiled back. “Dr. Wells-Carver. Delighted! I loved Pioneers’ Creed. I can’t wait to see your next documentary.”

  Tracy’s smile couldn’t get any broader, but I could feel how happy she was. “You’ve seen Creed?”

  Morais nodded. “Tracy, everyone on Mars has seen it, over and over. They’ve seen your whole series. You captured the real Mars experience.”

  “Admiral.” Tracy hesitated, very unlike her. “I’m flattered.”

  “You deserve it. When this affair is over, I would enjoy a chance to talk with you and Chief Carver in less crowded circumstances.”

  “Absolutely. I want to hear all the news.”

  Then they hugged again; and the admiral, mindful of the crowd backing up behind her, moved down the line to Nick. “Captain Aames,” she said. You would have to know Morais well to detect the amusement in those words. She knew Nick hated formalities like this.

  “Admiral.” The captain and the admiral saluted, stiffly. While I greeted our other guests, half my attention was reserved for Nick and the admiral. Nick clashing with the brass was as predictable as an orbit, but I hoped he would be on his best behavior for Tracy’s sake. He had been reluctant to attend at all, only agreeing to be my best man after I had harangued him for weeks; but he had cleaned up nicely for the occasion. His red-gray hair and beard had been trimmed neatly, and his dress whites fit precisely, like he was born in them. He was slightly short, but I almost never noticed that. Nick acted tall—a tall presence, even around senior officers like Morais.

  “The Aldrin is a very fine vessel, Captain,” Morais said. “I see the new habitat rings are completed.”

  “Completed and half-booked. It’s getting a bit crowded aboard.” Nick was proud of his command, but he didn’t like many people. The more the Aldrin grew, the more he huddled in his black-walled office and let me deal with passengers and crew. “I would offer you an inspection tour, but—”

  “Orbital mechanics waits for no man,” Morais replied with an old clichè of the space business. “Still, we’ll have time for a fine reception, and for our dance.”

  Nick’s face was stony. “I’ll have to pass on the dance. It was bad enough Carver got me into this suit. Dancing wasn’t part of the agreement.”

  The admiral shook her head. “I must insist. Protocol demands an officers’ dance; and as senior officers present, we must set an example. Plus it would be good to test those legendary dance moves of yours.”

  Nick started to steam. “My ship, my rules. Pass.”

  The admiral’s face tightened. She wasn’t angry—not yet—but she was heading that way. “My gravipause, my rules, Captain. Anson Carver is one of the finest young officers I have ever commanded, and I will see him shown the proper respect.”

  I tried to defuse the tension. “Admiral, it’s all right, we don’t need—”

  But Morais would have none of that. “It’s all right, Chief Carver, because Captain Aames knows he’s going to accede to protocol and my request. We will show proper respect to you and your lovely bride. And we’ll do it without my having to make it a formal command and an incident in his record. Won’t we, Captain?” She stared directly at Nick.

  I expected Nick to bristle even further. The only records he cared about were safety and mission objectives. Threatening his personal record usually made him laugh.

  But Nick surprised me. He stared right back, never breaking the fiery eye contact, and answered, “As you wish, Admiral.”

  Tracy and I had twenty minutes of privacy between the receiving line and the reception: just enough to build up anticipation, not enough to do anything about it. Not properly, anyway. But we did spend five of those minutes embracing, kissing, and enjoying the anticipation. And the quiet! I had never imagined how chaotic a wedding would be.

  But then Tracy pulled away. “Sorry, Anson, you’ve messed up my hair. I need to touch this up before we go in.”

  “Allllll right.” I sighed. “If you’re sure you don’t want to just sneak away to our cabin.”

  Tracy giggled. “After the point Admiral Morais made about protocol, do you think we dare miss our own reception? She scares Nick Aames! She’s certainly more than I want to tangle with. So let me work.”

  Tracy started adjusting her hair in the mirror, and I stood back and gazed at her as she worked. Removing her veil and reaching for a brush, Tracy continued, “So Nick is certainly in an extra sour mood tonight, isn’t he? I know he and Hannah had a messy breakup, but does that have to put him down on all marriage?”

  “It’s not marriage,” I explained, “it’s weddings.”

  Tracy paused. “Oh?”

  “Hannah was his first marriage, but his second wedding. The first one was a disaster, and he has been sour on weddings ever since. He and Hannah ran off to a justice of the peace, and he had to get half-drunk even to go through with that.”

  “A disaster? How bad could it have been?”

  “Tragic, really. But Nick never talks about it, and it’s not really my story to tell.”

  Tracy put her veil back on, adjusted it in the mirror, and turned to face me. “Oh, come on, Anson. Now that you’ve started, you know you’re going to tell me eventually.” She reached her arms around me; but at the last instant, she jabbed her fingers into the ticklish spot beneath my ribs, and I jolted off the floor in the low gravity. “So you might as well tell me now,” she said as I settled to the deck, “before I really make you jump.”

  “Oh, you think so?” I grabbed her wrists, and I wished we had the rest of the night to ourselves. But we didn’t. “All right, all right. But I wasn’t actually there. This was before I ever served under Nick. This is just the story as Bosun Smith told it to me.” And slowly, as the evening’s celebrations played out, I started telling Tracy the story Smitty had told me about Nick. And about Rosalia.

  Nick was a lieutenant in the International Space Corps at the time, stationed at the new São Paulo Spaceport and overseeing component tests for L2 Farport. Smitty was a petty officer at the port; but the Corps was pretty new then, and fraternization rules were pretty lax. Smitty was . . . well, not Nick’s friend—he didn’t make friends easily even then—but a close acquaintance. And his occasional dance partner in the nightclubs of São Paulo. Smith always had a way of dragging people out of their shells. In Nick’s case, she did so through dance. I joked about Nick’s dancing, but he’s actually not bad, and very enthusiastic. It’s one of his very few passions outside of his work. These days he only dances alone, and only in the privacy of his office. I’m one of the few people who has seen him dance in years. But back then, he had quite a reputation in the Corps.

  Of course, Nick also had a reputation as a bit of a martinet. Oh, not like he is no
w that he’s in command. He wasn’t as moody as he is now, with his cabin all in black and him never leaving it except on duty. The dark moods came later, after all of this. But he was just as much a stickler for procedure and safety and attention to detail. He never hesitated to write up any infraction that he saw, no matter how small. But his first introduction to Rosalia, the new ensign at the port, was when she wrote him up.

  Smitty was an astronaut first class then, attached to Commandant Birch as an administrative aide, so she was there for their first meeting, recording the minutes. She said Nick showed up just at the appointed hour, summoned by the commandant to discuss his inspection of a cargo rocket bound for high orbit. He paid little attention to Rosalia, standing at attention along the wall. She was in perfect duty order, her long dark hair rolled up into a bun behind her cap, her blue Corps uniform neat and trim. Nick sized her up as a Brazilian local, correctly as it happened, and so he didn’t consider her worth his attention. The locals in the Corps then had a reputation as token spacers, enlisted merely to satisfy Brazilian politicians, and expected to wash out before they ever saw orbit. Nick didn’t know it then, but Rosalia was determined to shatter that reputation.

  After Commandant Birch returned Nick’s salute, he called the review to order, and he started asking Nick questions about the cargo rocket. Finally he got to the crux of the matter: “So on 5 May, you performed a readiness inspection on cargo rocket 54-17?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “And you found eleven exceptions that caused you to issue a hold on preparation for launch?”

  Nick glanced over at Rosalia. “I did, sir. I’m sure the ensign did her best to prepare the vessel, but—”

  Birch interrupted Nick to say, “You are under a misimpression, Lieutenant. The ensign was not in charge of preparing the cargo rocket.”

  Nick twitched under the commandant’s gaze, but he chanced another glance at Rosalia. The corner of her mouth was turned up in just a hint of a grin. “Oh?” he asked.

  “No, the ensign was in charge of the readiness inspection of 6 May. Ensign, tell the lieutenant what you found.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rosalia stepped forward. “Sir, in addition to the eleven exceptions reported on 5 May, I found two loose safety covers on an environmental system.”

  Nick couldn’t stop himself from interrupting. “That’s impossible. Someone must have been in there between the inspections.”

  The commandant shook his head. “We have the access records. No one entered the rocket or the area between the inspections. And, Ensign, what would be the consequences of these loose covers?”

  “If I may, Commandant?” Birch nodded, and Rosalia pushed a simulation from her comp to his desk display. The inside of the rocket appeared. “I simulated the most likely scenario. The covers would have shaken loose during launch”—the image started shaking with a simulated launch—“and crashed around the cabin.” And the simulated covers smashed back, bounced around, and broke instruments everywhere they tumbled. “The results would be tens of thousands of dollars in lost time and equipment.”

  Throughout her simulation, Nick had leaned over the desk. Occasionally he openly glared at Rosalia, as if enraged that she had the temerity to report him. But at the end, he shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands. Depending on which instruments were broken, possibly the entire payload.” He straightened up and snapped to attention. “Commandant, I have no excuse. I await your discipline.”

  And then Birch actually laughed. “Relax, Lieutenant. We caught the problem. And we would have caught it before launch, regardless. You had so much to report, you just lost track. This will go in your record, and that will gnaw at you: a blemish on your spotless record. That will be enough to make you twice as careful in the future. Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

  As Nick turned to leave, he stole one more glance at the young ensign. This time, with Nick blocking her from the commandant’s view, she openly grinned at him.

  The incident became a mark on Nick’s record; but in the eyes of his fellow lieutenants, the mark on his reputation was even larger. No one had ever caught Nick in such a large mistake before. No one had ever made Nick back down. But the new ensign, a local girl who had worked her way into the officer ranks of the Corps, had done both in one day. In one move, Rosalia had become Nick’s rival for the top officer at the port.

  Nick had been dead wrong, he’d been caught, and he took his lumps. As you might guess, it motivated him to be more careful in his own work; but it also drove him to be more ruthless in his reviews of others. Sure enough, about three weeks later he found something to report in Rosalia’s work. It was a minor thing—Smitty didn’t even remember what it was—but Rosalia took her lumps better than Nick had. She was always much more good-natured than him. Sometimes that made her a little sloppier, but it made her easier to deal with as a person.

  And then the inspections became almost a game for them, tit-for-tat reporting on each other, but a game with strict, fair rules: they only reported legitimate infractions that actually belonged on a report. They never made up anything just to score points on each other. Their commanders were amused, but also annoyed, because the infractions they reported became a paperwork nightmare. Also, the game became frequent fodder for the rumor mill, and a few joked that Nick and Rosalia should just get a room already. But most assumed it was rivalry, not romance, the two of them bucking for promotion—Rosalia earned lieutenant in record time—and each seeing the other as the most likely obstacle in their path.

  And they were probably right, up until that night in Porco Cego, a nightclub near the hotel where many of the junior officers stayed. São Paulo was a pretty small port then, and there was a shortage of on-base housing, so junior officers and senior enlisted were encouraged to find billets nearby. Smitty had a room there, too, and she said it was a great way to meet the locals, particularly at dance clubs like O Porco.

  That night, Nick was cutting moves on the floor, drifting from partner to partner and dance to dance. Smitty says he was in a rare, relaxed mood, enjoying the release of just moving to the music. Locals and Corps, he danced his way through them all.

  Then a beautiful, graceful, dark-haired Brazilian woman tapped him on the shoulder for the next dance. It took two takes for Nick to recognize Rosalia out of uniform, her hair down around her bare shoulders, decked out for a night of liberty.

  “What do you want?” Nick asked in his usual blunt fashion.

  Rosalia laughed. “If you don’t know, then you’re probably too thick-headed to keep time, but I’ll give you a try anyway. Dance, Lieutenant?”

  Nick started to turn away; but he turned back and looked her over, her golden skin set off against a sleeveless blue peasant blouse and a flowing white skirt. He shrugged. “Oh, what the hell? I’ve danced with everyone else tonight.”

  And then, Smitty says, magic happened. Between Nick’s enthusiasm and Rosalia’s grace, they made the perfect partners: swinging around the floor, changing steps and styles with the tempo changes as if they could read each other’s minds. They anticipated every step, every spin. Smitty thinks it was another form of testing each other, challenging and assessing one another; and they quickly learned what they could do together, daring themselves to new heights with every song. There was no more trading that night: Nick and Rosalia had found their partners. They finished with “Brigas Nunca Mais,” a slow, languid, romantic tune that’s great to listen to but nearly impossible to dance to. The tempo’s just wrong, not quite a fast song, not quite a slow dance. But they did it, turning it into a sensual mix of pulling away but not quite out of reach, drawing swiftly together as if tugged by a gravity well, and then spinning slowly around, locked in each other’s arms. When the music finally stopped, the onlookers applauded.

  Smitty tells me that Nick never made it back to his hotel room that night, the first time that had ever happened. But it became a pretty regular occurrence after that.

  Though the reporting game continued, the tone
changed, at least for Rosalia. It became more about giving Nick points that he could work off on the dance floor. But for Nick, it remained as serious as ever; and Smitty says eventually Rosalia realized: this wasn’t a game for him, it was rehearsal for the deadliest challenges imaginable. Yes, that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. They drill that into us so we can’t forget it. But that message struck Nick more deeply than it did the average astronaut. Obsessively, you would have to say. And so he kept right up on the smallest infractions, the smallest details, reporting them with that cynical, critical view he has.

  Mind you, Nick wasn’t being an ass just for the fun of it. L2 Farport, the jumping-off station at LaGrange Point 2 beyond the moon, had recently been approved by the System Initiative; and everyone knew they would be staffing construction crews in the near future. São Paulo started receiving a lot of visits from brass and diplomats, and everyone assumed the teams there had a good shot at L2. Nick made no secret that he planned to turn that good shot into a sure thing.

  Even though Rosalia agreed with Nick in principle, and even though she wanted the L2 assignment as much as he did, she grew annoyed with Nick’s obsession. Smitty thinks Rosalia decided she wanted to find Nick’s fun side, somehow. On the dance floor, out on the town, in bed. She wanted to lighten him up, to show him he could enjoy life and still live within regulations, still advance his career. One night, she took it a little too far. She always did take more risks than Nick. That night, after Nick fell asleep, she logged in to the hotel computer and canceled his morning wake-up call. Smitty says that she heard the consequences the next morning from three rooms away.

  “You did what?”

  “Lighten up. It’s not like you have important duty today.”

  “It’s duty. It’s all important. People rely on us. The brass are watching us. I’ve got twenty minutes!”