Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “This is the same.”

  “Not from where I stand.”

  “That’s why you’re wearing the dress tonight, to force you to stand somewhere else.”

  Even Nicole had to admit, when all was said and done, that the effect was as impressive as it was startling. They stood before the room’s WindowWall, its video elements displaying multiple images of the two women so they could see their reflections from every angle. Nicole hadn’t hoped for much getting dressed, the image of her own body in her mind’s eye was made up of too many angular bones and muscles, as though she were some unfinished piece of sculpture that was mostly rough edges. Hana, on the other hand, she always considered the finished, fully realized product. But the effect surprised her, far more smooth and sleek and nicely dramatic than she’d anticipated.

  She’d thought the pink too pretty-precious when she saw it on the bedspread, but the color nicely offset her tan, itself something of an exotic fashion accessory on the Frontier. The bustier was satin, overlaid with polka-dot tulle; the lace was pink, the dots tiny and black. The skirt reversed that arrangement: here was satin on the outside, with the lace polka-dot petticoat underneath, so short it barely qualified as a skating skirt. She wore a black bolero jacket on top, velvet, with an upstanding collar; it could be buttoned under the breasts—which made the initially striking effect even more so—but Nicole left it open, to allow for more freedom of movement. For all their snug appearance, the clothes had a surprising amount of give, which they’d need if the party turned out to be anything like the Initiation that preceded it. Thinking about that, Nicole wondered if she wouldn’t do better outfitting herself with a crash helmet and safety pads. Earthside, the final complement to an outfit like this would have been ankle-breaker stilettos, but nobody wore those kind of shoes in space, even in a full gravity section. Instead, she wore classic black high-top sneaks, whose flexible soles would give traction on smooth surfaces. For a final accent, the laces had been replaced by electric pink ribbon.

  It was a very feminine effect. To Nicole, it looked and felt all wrong.

  Hana stood by the door, ready to go, her expression deliberately neutral. Nicole knew that if she decided to stay behind, her friend wouldn’t try to talk her out of it.

  So she pulled on her gloves—pink Dotted Swiss netting, with frilly lace cuffs, totally club couture and so precious she could just die—and led the way.

  Because the ship’s one-gravity environment was artificially derived from the energy field generated by its Baumier Core, it was possible to customize conditions in certain compartments. For the most part, those areas were confined to the docking facilities, where the ability to shunt heavy masses with minimal resistance was most useful. It hadn’t taken very long, though, for folks to figure out the practical possibilities from an entertainment standpoint as well.

  They were far from the first to arrive and Nicole took the time after they entered to give the bay a proper once-over. Imagine a cube, fifteen meters by twenty by twenty—essentially a four-story building in one direction, and a six in the others—lit like a bordello and moderately filled with flying bodies, whose interaction with the ceiling projection made it look as though people were soaring among the very stars.

  The music came from all around, far richer and more all-enveloping than a live band would have been—jazz, with a dominant beat that gave the dancers their physical cues. There were refreshment stations in each of the room’s corners, half for food, the rest for drink, although this crowd wasn’t here to get themselves plastered or fed. They came to dance, in a manner unlike almost anywhere else in the Solar System.

  There was no floor. Dancers kicked themselves out into the open air and used the other dancers as their platform. It wasn’t so much dancing per se as a form of acrobatics. Each action triggering an equal and opposite reaction, ideally sending a body from the arms of one partner to those of another. Thing was, movement never occurred simply along a single plane. On the ground, there was forward or back, right or left; if a dancer threw their partner into the air, gravity dragged them back down. Here, they kept going, until contact with another dancer spun the pair of them off into new and unexpected directions. It demanded close to the ultimate in concentration; not only did each dancer have to remain aware of their own position but of those of everyone else. Think not only of the effect any movement might have on one’s own trajectory, but how it might interact with the rest. It was like playing chess, at breakneck speed and living pieces, bounding through a board that encompassed every physical dimension.

  The nice thing about the chamber was that it was big enough to accommodate dancers of every proficiency, novice to master. The novices stayed close to the bulkheads and handholds, giggling and whooping like teenagers out for their first stint on fresh ice, with skate shoes tied so loose their ankles collapsed right from the start. For them, the fun was as much in the pratfall as the successful turn around the rink. Much the same here, as Nicole watched one young man go into what would have been a sublimely elegant turn in gravity only to have it go sidesplittingly awry as an unsuspected secondary motion started spinning him head over heels. A spacer would have turned the move to his advantage, kicking a leg up and over to impart some more velocity, while throwing the body into a rolling twist to change orientation so that he could reach the bulkhead. The young man lightly panicked, flailing about with arms and legs, actually making things worse until a couple of companions caught hold and brought him safely to rest. Nicole heard some profane and shaky oaths and a lot of nervous laughter.

  But the comic relief wasn’t what interested her. And her eyes turned to the center of the room, as far from the walls as a body could go, and a wickedly mobile mass of figures whose only anchor was to each other, and that often only for the most fleeting and phantom of moments. They spun, rolled, twisted, jackknifed, somersaulted, split-kicked, ran the whole magnificent gamut of acrobatic possibilities, in solo and combinations. The truly breathtaking aspect of the event, what kept all but the bravest and most skillful—and, some would say, and rightly so, most foolhardy—on the sidelines, was that it was all improvised. People and movement and music, coming together on the spur of the moment, with equal opportunities for disaster or magic.

  Tonight, Nicole knew from the first, was magic.

  And without a second thought, or the slightest hesitation, she knew she had to be a part of it.

  She gave Hana a smile that must have been a wonder, judging from the one she got in return, and launched herself with a gentle push off the wall. Plenty of time to get silly, what mattered first was sliding themselves in sync with the music. It was Native Australian jazz, freeform, horns and guitars mated to didgeridoos, not as emphatic a beat as was heard in clubs stateside this season, but far more sensual. Nicole caught Hana’s hand and pulled her close, momentum turning them into a spin before Hana let go and threw an arm wide to pull her away from Nicole with a little more speed. The trick was to remember as second nature something that had been learned the hard way a century ago, with NASA’s earliest ventures into space. Objects in zero gravity had no weight, which meant they were susceptible to the slightest physical influence. One hearty shove could easily send a multiton satellite spinning on its way. But at the same time, those objects lost none of their mass. Which meant that once they started moving, they became annoyingly difficult to stop. As importantly, they could do a fearful amount of damage to anything—or anyone—who got in their way.

  Same applied to people. Getting them moving in zero was nothing; the trick was controlling each move so that everyone ended up precisely where they were supposed to. Challenging enough for a couple on their own. In concert with a few dozen more, all doing pretty much the same thing, it could get quite exciting.

  A new hand caught her on the periphery of the cluster of dancers, pulling her away from Hana. Nicole went with the flow, pulling a reverse jackknife into a rolling twist that sent her cascading off along a totally different orientation. She f
ound herself becoming one with the music in a way she hadn’t enjoyed for far too long, letting it soak into muscles and bones, and slowly, inexorably established herself as the core about which this system of fellow dancers began to revolve. As naturally as the movement of the spheres she fashioned the structure of the dance; she was such a wild talent, imbued with such strength and grace that the others couldn’t help but gravitate towards her, to be cast out along the pathways she defined. She didn’t do this intentionally, she wasn’t aware it was happening, that required an objectivity of perception she didn’t possess right then.

  The music built to its crescendo and then broke, and with it the dance.

  Nicole spun gently about the long axis of her body, like a dancer pirouetting on toe, joining the others in their applause, not realizing yet that most of it was directed at her. She was looking about for Hana—the press of bodies and the lousy light didn’t make that task any easier—and consequently, not where she was going, when someone’s arms reached out to gather her in.

  “Excuse me,” Nicole stammered automatically, in the moment of collision, “I really am sorry, I should have been paying better attention—!” Then she recognized the other, shorter but broader, figure, and her voice cut off.

  Amy Cobri regarded her eye to eye—zero being that rare environment where that was easily accomplished—and smiled.

  “Fancy meeting you here, Nicole,” she said.

  Five years ago, she’d been a child just beginning her awkward transition to adulthood, a darkly handsome girl possessing her father’s brute strength cast in a much sleeker mold. Now, that promise was substantially fulfilled. She had a swimmer’s physique, with powerful shoulders and superbly sculpted muscles, a big girl maturing into a big woman. She wore her hair long, in defiance of spacer custom, a thick mass of elegant waves the color of aged mahogany that fell to her shoulders and somehow stayed obediently in place despite the lack of gravity. On her own, she was quite pretty, with her father’s Catalan olive skin and dark eyes; the expert application of makeup—which like her hair had survived the rigors of the dance substantially unscathed—made her beautiful. She wore slippers and a black dress that verged on scandalous. In her wildest mood, Nicole doubted she’d risk anything so short or tight, and she also had to confess that she doubted she’d look as good in the bargain. No jewelry, though, nothing on her person to indicate that Amy was heir to the richest private fortune in human space.

  Nothing in the young woman’s eyes to indicate that five years before she’d tried her best to have Nicole killed.

  “Likewise,” was Nicole’s still reply.

  “You’re a hard person to get ahold of. Except, I guess, in an emergency.” She offered a shy smile at the memory of the pandemonium earlier tonight in the hallway. “You figure that’s what gazelles feel like in the middle of an elephant stampede?”

  “You came through okay.”

  That wasn’t the response the young woman had been looking for, but she hid her reaction well.

  “You look good,” said Amy.

  “As do you.”

  Unaccountably, Amy threw back her head and laughed, that small act sending her drifting ever so slightly up and away from Nicole. She braked herself automatically, with an unconscious skill that impressed Nicole—As, Nicole thought in that same moment, it was no doubt meant to—but remained in the slightly dominant position.

  “God,” the girl crowed delightedly, as though she’d just aced an Olympic downhill, “the look on your face, it’s priceless! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make fun, especially with all the history between us—but, Nicole, give me some credit willya? I’m not going to bite.” She flashed a grin that was meant to be knowing and wicked. “Unless I’m asked.”

  Nicole couldn’t help a smile in return, thinking back to the night they’d first met at a reception Earthside, shortly after Nicole’s assignment to Edwards. Amy was thirteen, and Nicole had just been grounded, stripped of her astronaut’s flight status, Amy’d set out to win Nicole’s friendship, overjoyed that Nicole and her older brother Alex had crossed swords from the start. Too late, Nicole came to understand the genesis of their sibling rivalry. By then, Alex was condemned, even though Nicole tried her best to save him.

  The last time Nicole had seen Amy was not long after that, at the Cobri compound on Staten Island. The girl stood at the top of the mansion’s main stairway, shrieking “You killed my brother!” over and over again, her voice spiraling ever upward into an out-of-control falsetto.

  The two images always came side by side whenever Nicole thought of her.

  Residual momentum had scattered the mass of dancers, a rough analogue to the dispersal of celestial bodies, Nicole and Amy moving a small ways off by themselves. Eventually, they’d reach the wall, but the only way Nicole was going to get anywhere fast was to work in tandem with Amy, which was no doubt what she intended. Nicole kept that realization to herself, and her face relaxed, and resolved to wait for Hana to find her.

  Assuming, she thought suddenly, concern betrayed by the smallest tightening of the lips and the return of combat tension to her arms and legs, she’s able to.

  That day with Emmanuel Cobri, she’d warned him off in no uncertain terms: attempt even the slightest harm to her family and friends and he’d regret it. Even though his resources beggared her own—Hell, they beggared those of most of the nations on the globe—he paid her heed. Because she had assets he couldn’t touch. By adoption, she was Hal, and High-Born, and they played by different rules. It was the most basic of business equations: any satisfaction derived from revenge against Nicole simply wasn’t worth the potential cost.

  Amy, though, didn’t think like that—or rather the Amy Nicole remembered. She bore grudges, and didn’t care a damn how high the price would be to pay them back.

  The music caught her by surprise, a harsh, driving, modern beat, far more emphatic and demanding than the jazz piece that preceded it. She caught a flash of movement from Amy, almost too fast to follow, and let her body handle the parry, spinning aside and around in an aikido deflection, aborting her counter-strike only at the last second as she realized this was no attack but merely the invitation to another dance.

  Nicole wanted to pull away, but Amy proved surprisingly adept at controlling the space between them. She kept herself in Nicole’s face, and the pair of them separate from the others, challenging Nicole to prove how good she truly was by getting past her. Nicole refused to take the bait. She met Amy on the girl’s own terms, seized moment and situation and made both her own, content to let her lead but always ready to act should matters slip out of hand.

  A new shape slithered between them with the sinuous charm of an otter. Nicole thought it might be Hana to the rescue—About bloody time, woman, was her thought in that instant of mistaken identity—until scent and the briefest of touches, flesh on fur, and ultimately sight told her it was Raqella, the young Hal flight officer.

  To flout Nicole, he twisted away with Amy, who let him, quickly disappearing from sight below the main mass of dancers.

  Nicole wanted to breathe a sigh of relief and return to enjoying the party.

  Instead, she arched into a cartwheel that brought her into an arm’s-length interaction with another couple, which in turn imparted sufficient delta-V—an increase in forward velocity—to propel her across the crowded heart of the room. She danced, because that was what was expected, but in reality she was hunting, sliding through the air as a dolphin would through water, playing people like currents to help her on her way. As she flew, never at rest, each movement flowed one to the next as though choreographed, Nicole totally aware of the others around her, taking care that her physical intentions never impacted negatively on theirs.

  Jenny Coy popped out of nowhere to try to partner her, but Nicole was here and gone before the young woman could properly get her bearings and she had to content herself with a very nice systems analyst from Lockheed. An astronaut managed to pace her for an entire sequence, gai
ning a round of spontaneous applause from the small clutch of onlookers watching near the entrance after Nicole left him flat.

  The room was big and crowded, and everyone was moving every which way—but it was still a finite number of objects in a finite space, and so Nicole finally caught up with Raqella and Amy. The Hal tossed Amy into Nicole’s arms, but Amy would have none of that, using a variation on Nicole’s own aikido parry to twist herself back the way she came towards Raqella.

  What had come before, it was quickly realized by everyone else present, had been but prologue. This was the main event. The three of them were poetry, in sync with themselves, the space, the music, so much so that the other dancers instinctively deferred to them, pulling gradually closer to the walls to give them more and more room. They didn’t need it; none was ever more than an arm’s length from the others, and only out of contact for the heartbeat it took to fly from one hand to the next. In a way, it was like watching eels, they moved with an almost boneless magic, bodies seemingly inextricably intertwined. And with such speed that the slightest misstep or hesitation would have meant disaster. They were utterly dependent on one another, operating on levels of trust that went far beyond conscious thought. There simply wasn’t time to rationally evaluate the danger of each action, each had to assume the body would be there to catch them, as they would be in return. More than once, there were gasps from the audience, as some thought the dance would come shatteringly to an end, a few spacing themselves out along the walls in hopes of being able to stop a collision if that was the case.

  But they never missed.

  There was a drumbeat undertone to the music, a pulse Nicole’s body responded to long before her mind caught on. Her heart seemed to pound in tune, with such force that she was flushed, as though her skin were a garment grown stiflingly, unbearably hot.

  Raqella turned, and she crooked legs and arms, head tilted just so, in a pose that meant nothing to her but struck him like an almost physical blow. Amy tried to interfere, but he set her aside with a force and look that effectively quelled any more protests—though her expression spoke eloquently to Nicole that this little confrontation was far from settled. Nicole noticed, but couldn’t care less. She was watching an altogether different show.