by Spider
It was that fourth dimension that was the kicker. It took Shara two days to decide that she could not possibly become proficient enough in free-fall maneuvering to sustain a half-hour piece in the time required. So she rethought her work plan too, adapting her choreography to the demands of her situation. She put in six hard days under normal Earth weight.
And for her, too, the effort was that one last step toward apotheosis.
On Monday of the fourth week we began taping Liberation.
Establishing shot:
A great turquoise box, seen from within. Dimensions unknown, but the color somehow lends an impression of immensity, of vast distances. Against the far wall a swinging pendulum attests that this is a standard-gravity environment; but the pendulum swings so slowly and is so featureless in construction that it is impossible to estimate its size and so extrapolate that of the room.
Because of this trompe-l’oeil effect, the room seems rather smaller than it really is when the camera pulls back and we are wrenched into proper perspective by the appearance of Shara, inert, face down on the floor, her head toward us.
She wears beige leotard and tights. Hair the color of fine mahogany is pulled back into a loose ponytail which fans across one shoulder blade. She does not appear to breathe. She does not appear to live.
Music begins. The aging Mahavishnu, on obsolete nylon acoustic, establishes a minor E in no hurry at all. A pair of small candles in simple brass holders appear inset on either side of the room. They are larger than life, though small beside Shara. Both are unlit.
Her body…there is no word. It does not move, in the sense of motor activity. One might say that a ripple passes through it, save that the motion is clearly all outward from her center. She swells as if the first breath of life were being taken by her whole body at once. She lives.
The twin wicks begin to glow, oh, softly. The music takes on quiet urgency.
Shara raises her head to us. Her eyes focus somewhere beyond the camera yet short of infinity. Her body writhes, undulates, and the glowing wicks are coals (that this brightening takes place in slow motion is not apparent).
A violent contraction raises her to a crouch, spilling the ponytail across her shoulder. Mahavishnu begins a cyclical cascade of runs, in increasing tempo. Long questing tongues of yellow-orange flame begin to blossom downward from the twin wicks, whose coals are turning to blue.
The contraction’s release flings her to her feet. The twin skirts of flame about the wicks curl up over themselves, writhing furiously, to become conventional candle-flames, flickering now in normal time. Tablas, tambouras, and a bowed string bass join the guitar, and they segue into an energetic interplay around a minor seventh that keeps trying, fruitlessly, to find resolution in the sixth. The candles stay in perspective, but dwindle in size until they vanish.
Shara begins to explore the possibilities of motion. First she moves only perpendicular to the camera’s line of sight, exploring that dimension. Every motion of arms or legs or head is clearly seen to be a defiance of gravity—of a force as inexorable as radioactive decay, as entropy itself. The most violent surges of energy succeed only for a time—the outflung leg falls, the outthrust arm drops. She must struggle or fall. She pauses in thought.
Her hands and arms reach out toward the camera, and at the instant they do we cut to a view from the left-hand wall. Seen from the right side, she reaches out into this new dimension, and soon begins to move in it. (As she moves backward out of the camera’s field, its entire image shifts right on our screen, butted out of the way by the incoming image of a second camera, which picks her up as the first loses her without a visible seam.)
The new dimension too fails to fulfill Shara’s desire for freedom from gravity. Combining the two, however, presents so many permutations of movement that for a while, intoxicated, she flings herself into experimentation. In the next fifteen minutes Shara’s entire background and history in dance are recapitulated, in a blinding tour de force that incorporates elements of jazz, Modern, and the more graceful aspects of Olympic-level mat gymnastics. Five cameras come into play, singly and in pairs on splitscreen, as the “bag of tricks” amassed in a lifetime of study and improvisation are rediscovered and performed by a superbly trained and versatile body, in a pyrotechnic display that would shout of joy if her expression did not remain aloof, almost arrogant. This is the offering, she seems to say, which you would not accept. This, by itself, was not good enough.
And it is not. Even in its raging energy and total control her body returns again and again to the final compromise of mere erectness, that last simple refusal to fall.
Clamping her jaw, she works into a series of leaps, ever longer, ever higher. She seems at last to hang suspended for full seconds, straining to fly. When, inevitably, she falls, she falls reluctantly, only at the last possible instant tucking and rolling back onto her feet. The musicians are in a crescendoing frenzy. We see her now only with the single original camera, and the twin candles have returned, small but burning fiercely.
The leaps begin to diminish in intensity and height, and she takes longer to build to each one. She has been dancing flat out for nearly twenty minutes; as the candle flames begin to wane, so does her strength. At last she retreats to a place beneath the indifferent pendulum, gathers herself with a final desperation, and races forward toward us. She reaches incredible speed in a short space, hurls herself into a double roll and bounds up into the air off one foot, seeming a full second later to push off against empty air for a few more centimeters of height. Her body goes rigid, her eyes and mouth gape wide, the flames reach maximum brilliance, the music peaks with the tortured wail of an electric guitar and—she falls, barely snapping into a roll in time, rising only as far as a crouch. She holds there for a long moment, and gradually her head and shoulders slump, defeated, toward the floor. The candle flames draw in upon themselves in a curious way and appear to go out. The string bass saws on alone, modulating down to D.
Muscle by muscle, Shara’s body gives up the struggle. The air seems to tremble around the wicks of the candles, which have now grown nearly as tall as her crouching form.
Shara lifts her face to the camera with evident effort. Her face is anguished, her eyes nearly shut. A long beat.
All at once she opens her eyes wide, squares her shoulders, and contracts. It is the most exquisite and total contraction ever dreamed of, filmed in realtime but seeming almost to be in slow motion. She holds it. Mahavishnu comes back in on guitar, building in increasing tempo from a downtuned bass string to a D chord with a flatted fourth. Shara holds.
We shift for the first time to an overhead camera, looking down on her from a great height. As Mahavishnu’s picking speed increases to the point where the chord seems a sustained drone, Shara slowly lifts her head, still holding the contraction, until she is staring directly up at us. She poises there for an eternity, like a spring wound to the bursting point…
…and explodes upward toward us, rising higher and faster than she possibly can in a soaring flight that is slow motion now, coming closer and closer until her hands disappear to either side and her face fills the screen, flanked by two candles which have bloomed into gouts of yellow flame in an instant. The guitar and bass are submerged in an orchestra.
Almost at once she whirls away from us, and the POV switches to the original camera, on which we see her fling herself down ten meters to the floor, reversing her attitude in mid-flight and twisting. She comes out of her roll in an absolutely flat trajectory that takes her the length of the room. She hits the far wall with a crash audible even over the music, shattering the still pendulum. Her thighs soak up the kinetic energy and then release it, and once again she is racing toward us, hair streaming straight out behind her, a broad smile of triumph growing larger on the screen.
In the next five minutes all six cameras vainly try to track her as she caroms around the immense room like a hummingbird trying to batter its way out of a cage using the walls, floor and ceiling the way a jai alai
master does, existing in three dimensions. Gravity is defeated. The basic assumption of all dance is transcended.
Shara is transformed.
She comes to rest at last at vertical center in the forefront of the cube, arms-legs-fingers-toes-face straining outward, her body turning gently end over end. All four cameras that bear on her join in a four-way splitscreen, the orchestra resolves into its final E major, and—fade out.
I had neither the time nor the equipment to create the special effects that Shara wanted. So I found ways to warp reality to my need. The first candle segment was a twinned shot of a candle being blown out from above—in ultraslow motion, and in reverse. The second segment with a simple recording of linear reality. I had lit the candle, started taping—and had the Ring’s spin killed. A candle behaves oddly in zero gee. The low-density combustion gases do not rise up from the flame, allowing air to reach it from beneath. The flame does not go out: it becomes dormant. Restore gravity within a minute or so, and it blooms back to life again. All I did was monkey with speeds a bit to match in with the music and Shara’s dance. I got the idea from Harry Stein, Skyfac’s construction foreman, who was helping me design things Shara would need for the next dance.
I piped it to the video wall in the Ring One Lounge, and everyone in Skyfac who could cut work crowded in for the broadcast. They saw exactly what was being sent out over worldwide satellite hookup—(Carrington had arranged twenty-five minutes without commercial interruption) almost a full half second before the world did.
I spent the broadcast in the Communications Room, chewing my fingernails. But it went without a hitch, and I slapped my board dead and made it to the Lounge in time to see the last half of the standing ovation. Shara stood before the screen, Carrington sitting beside her, and I found the difference in their expressions instructive. Her face showed no embarrassment or modesty. She had had faith in herself throughout, had approved this tape for broadcast—she was aware, with that incredible detachment of which so few artists are capable, that the wild applause was only what she deserved. But her face showed that she was deeply surprised—and deeply grateful—to be given what she deserved.
Carrington, on the other hand, registered a triumph strangely admixed with relief. He too had had faith in Shara, and had backed it with a large investment—but his faith was that of a businessman in a gamble he believes will pay off, and as I watched his eyes and the glisten of sweat on his forehead, I realized that no businessman ever takes an expensive gamble without worrying that it may be the fiasco that will begin the loss of his only essential commodity: face.
Seeing his kind of triumph next to hers spoiled the moment for me, and instead of thrilling for Shara I found myself almost hating her. She spotted me, and waved me to join her before the cheering crowd, but I turned and literally flung myself from the room. I borrowed a bottle from Harry Stein and got stinking.
The next morning my head felt like a fifteen-amp fuse on a forty- amp circuit, and I seemed to be held together only by surface tension. Sudden movements frightened me. It’s a long fall off that wagon, even at one-sixth gee.
The phone chimed—I hadn’t had time to rewire it—and a young man I didn’t know politely announced that Mr. Carrington wished to see me in his office. At once. I spoke of a barbed-wire suppository, and what Mr. Carrington might do with it, at once. Without changing expression he repeated his message and disconnected.
So I crawled into my clothes, decided to grow a beard, and left. Along the way I wondered what I had traded my independence for, and why?
Carrington’s office was oppressively tasteful, but at least the lighting was subdued. Best of all, its filter system would handle smoke—the sweet musk of pot lay on the air. I accepted a macrojoint of “Maoi-Zowie” from Carrington with something approaching gratitude, and began melting my hangover.
Shara sat next to his desk, wearing a leotard and a layer of sweat. She had obviously spent the morning rehearsing for the next dance. I felt ashamed, and consequently snappish, avoiding her eyes and her hello. Panzella and McGillicuddy came in on my heels, chattering about the latest sighting of the mysterious object from deep space, which had appeared this time in the Asteroid Belt. They were arguing over whether or not it displayed signs of sentience, and I wished they’d shut up.
Carrington waited until we had all seated ourselves and lit up, then rested a hip on his desk and smiled. “Well, Tom?”
McGillicuddy beamed. “Better than we expected, sir. All the ratings agree we had about 74 percent of the world audience…”
“The hell with the nielsens,” I snapped. “What did the critics say?”
McGillicuddy blinked. “Well, the general reaction so far is that Shara was a smash. The Times…”
I cut him off again. “What was the less-than-general reaction?”
“Well, nothing is ever unanimous.”
“Specifics. The dance press? Liz Zimmer? Migdalski?”
“Uh. Not as good. Praise yes—only a blind man could’ve panned that show. But guarded praise. Uh, Zimmer called it a magnificent dance spoiled by a gimmicky ending.”
“And Migdalski?” I insisted.
“He headed his review, ‘But What Do You Do for An Encore?’” McGillicuddy admitted. “His basic thesis was that it was a charming one-shot. But the Times…”
“Thank you, Tom.” Carrington said quietly. “About what we expected, isn’t it, my dear? A big splash, but no one’s willing to call it a tidal wave yet.”
She nodded. “But they will, Bryce. The next two dances will sew it up.”
Panzella spoke up. “Ms. Drummond, may I ask you why you played it the way you did? Using the null-gee interlude only as a brief adjunct to conventional dance—surely you must have expected the critics to call it gimmickry.”
Shara smiled and answered. “To be honest, Doctor, I had no choice. I’m learning to use my body in free fall, but it’s still a conscious effort, almost a pantomime. I need another few weeks to make it second nature, and it has to be if I’m to sustain a whole piece in it. So I dug a conventional dance out of the trunk, tacked on a five-minute ending that used every zero-gee move I knew, and found to my extreme relief that they made thematic sense together. I told Charlie my notion, and he made it work visually and dramatically—the whole business of the candles was his, and it underlined what I was trying to say better than any set we could have built.”
“So you have not yet completed what you came here to do?” Panzella asked her.
“Oh, no. Not by any means. The next dance will show the world that dance is more than controlled falling. And the third…the third will be what this has all been for.” Her face lit, became animated. “The third dance will be the one I have wanted to dance all my life. I can’t entirely picture it, yet—but I know that when I become capable of dancing it, I will create it, and it will be my greatest dance.”
Panzella cleared his throat. “How long will it take you?”
“Not long,” she said. “I’ll be ready to tape the next dance in two weeks, and I can start on the last one almost at once. With luck, I’ll have it in the can before my month is up.”
“Ms. Drummond,” Panzella said gravely, “I’m afraid you don’t have another month.”
Shara went white as snow, and I half rose from my seat. Carrington looked intrigued.
“How much time?” Shara asked.
“Your latest tests have not been encouraging. I had assumed that the sustained exercise of rehearsal and practice would tend to slow your system’s adaptation. But most of your work has been in total weightlessness. And I failed to realize the extent to which your body is accustomed to sustained exertion—in a terrestrial environment. There are already signs of Davis’s Syndrome in—”
“How much time?”
“Two weeks. Possibly three, if you spend three separate hours a day at hard exercise in two gravities. We can arrange that by—”
“That’s ridiculous.” I burst out. “Don’t you understand abou
t dancers’ spines? She could ruin herself in two gees.”
“I’ve got to have four weeks,” Shara said.
“Ms. Drummond, I am very sorry.”
“I’ve got to have four weeks.”
Panzella had that same look of helpless sorrow that McGillicuddy and I had had in our turn, and I was suddenly sick to death of a universe in which people had to keep looking at Shara that way. “Dammit,” I roared, “she needs four weeks.”
Panzella shook his shaggy head. “If she stays in zero gee for four working weeks, she may die.”
Shara sprang from her chair. “Then I’ll die,” she cried. “I’ll take that chance. I have to.”
Carrington coughed. “I’m afraid I can’t permit you to, darling.”
She whirled on him furiously.
“This dance of yours is excellent PR for Skyfac,” he said calmly, “but if it were to kill you it might boomerang, don’t you think?”
Her mouth worked, and she fought desperately for control. My own head whirled. Die? Shara?
“Besides,” he added, “I’ve grown quite fond of you.”
“Then I’ll stay up here in space,” she burst out.
“Where? The only areas of sustained weightlessness are factories, and you’re not qualified to work in one.”
“Then for God’s sake give me one of the new pods, the smaller spheres. Bryce, I’ll give you a higher return on your investment than a factory pod, and I’ll…” Her voice changed. “I’ll be available to you always.”
He smiled lazily. “Yes, but I might not want you always, darling. My mother warned me strongly against making irrevocable decisions about women. Especially informal ones. Besides, I find zero-gee sex rather too exhausting as a steady diet.”
I had almost found my voice, and now I lost it again. I was glad Carrington was turning her down—but the way he did it made me yearn to drink his blood.
Shara too was speechless for a time. When she spoke, her voice was low, intense, almost pleading. “Bryce, it’s a matter of timing. If I broadcast two more dances in the next four weeks, I’ll have a world to return to. If I have to go Earthside and wait a year or two, that third dance will sink without a trace—no one’ll be looking, and they won’t have the memory of the first two. This is my only option, Bryce—let me take the chance. Panzella can’t guarantee four weeks will kill me.”
