The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  “I can’t guarantee your survival,” the doctor said.

  “You can’t guarantee that any of us will live out the day,” she snapped. She whirled back to Carrington, held him with her eyes. “Bryce, let me risk it.” Her face underwent a massive effort, produced a smile that put a knife through my heart. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Carrington savored that smile and the utter surrender in her voice like a man enjoying a fine claret. I wanted to slay him with my hands and teeth, and I prayed that he would add the final cruelty of turning her down. But I had underestimated his true capacity for cruelty.

  “Go ahead with your rehearsal, my dear,” he said at last. “We’ll make a final decision when the time comes. I shall have to think about it.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hopeless, so…impotent in my life. Knowing it was futile, I said, “Shara, I can’t let you risk your life—”

  “I’m going to do this, Charlie,” she cut me off, “with or without you. No one else knows my work well enough to tape it properly, but if you want out I can’t stop you.” Carrington watched me with a detached interest. “Well?” she prodded.

  I said a filthy word.

  “You know the answer.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Tyros are transported on the pregnant broomsticks. Old hands hang outside the airlock, dangling from handholds on the outer surface of the spinning Ring (not hard in less than half a gee). They face in the direction of their spin, and when their destination comes under the horizon, they just drop off. Thruster units built into gloves and boots supply the necessary course corrections. The distances involved are small. Still, there are very few old hands.

  Shara and I were old hands, having spent more hours in weightlessness than some technicians who’d been working in Skyfac for years. We made scant and efficient use of our thrusters, chiefly in canceling the energy imparted to us by the spin of the Ring we left. We had throat mikes and hearing-aid-sized receivers, but there was no conversation on the way across the void. Being without a local vertical—a defined “up” and “down”—is more confusing and distressing than can possibly be imagined by anyone who has never left Earth. For that very reason, all Skyfac structures are aligned to the same imaginary “ecliptic,” but it doesn’t help very much. I wondered if I would ever get used to it—and even more I wondered whether I would ever get used to the cessation of pain in my leg. It even seemed to hurt less under spin these days.

  We grounded, with much less force than a skydiver does, on the surface of the new studio. It was an enormous steel globe, studded with sunpower screens and heat losers, tethered to three more spheres in various stages of construction on which Harry Stein’s boys were even now working. McGillicuddy had told me that the complex when completed would be used for “controlled density processing,” and when I said, “How nice,” he added, “Dispersion foaming and variable density casting,” as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. Right at the moment, it was Shara’s studio.

  The airlock led to a rather small working space around a smaller interior sphere some fifty meters in diameter. It too was pressurized, intended to contain a vacuum, but its locks stood open. We removed our p-suits, and Shara unstrapped her thruster bracelets from a bracing strut and put them on, hanging by her ankles from the strut while she did so. The anklets went on next. As jewelry they were a shade bulky—but they had twenty minutes’ continuous use each, and their operation was not visible in normal atmosphere and lighting. Zero-gee dance without them would have been enormously more difficult.

  As she was fastening the last strap I drifted over in front of her and grabbed the strut. “Shara. . ..”

  “Charlie, I can beat it. I’ll exercise in three gravities, and I’ll sleep in two, and I’ll make this body last. I know I can.”

  “You could skip Mass Is A Verb and go right to the Stardance.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not ready yet—and neither is the audience. I’ve to lead myself and them through dance in a sphere first—in a contained space—before I’ll be ready to dance in empty space, or they to appreciate it. I have to free my mind, and theirs, from just about every preconception of dance, change all the postulates. Even two stages is too few—but it’s the irreducible minimum.” Her eyes softened. “Charlie—I must.”

  “I know,” I said gruffly and turned away. Tears are a nuisance in free fall—they don’t go anywhere, just form silly-looking expanding spherical contact lenses, in which the world swims. I began hauling myself around the surface of the inner sphere toward the camera emplacement I was working on, and Shara entered the inner sphere to begin rehearsal.

  I prayed as I worked on my equipment, snaking cables among the bracing struts and connecting them to drifting terminals. For the first time in years I prayed, prayed that Shara would make it. That we both would.

  The next twelve days were the toughest half of my life. Shara worked as hard as I did. She spent half of every day working in the studio, half of the rest in exercise under two and a quarter gravities (the most Dr. Panzella would permit), and half of the rest in Carrington’s bed, trying to make him contented enough to let her stretch her time limit. Perhaps she slept in the few hours left over. I only know that she never looked tired, never lost her composure or her dogged determination. Stubbornly, reluctantly, her body lost its awkwardness, took on grace even in an environment where grace required enormous concentration. Like a child learning how to walk, Shara learned how to fly.

  I even began to get used to the absence of pain in my leg.

  What can I tell you of Mass, if you have not seen it? It cannot be described, even badly, in mechanistic terms, the way a symphony could be written out in words. Conventional dance terminology is by its built-in assumptions, worse than useless, and if you are at all familiar with the new nomenclature you must be familiar with Mass Is A Verb, from which it draws its built-in assumptions.

  Nor is there much I can say about the technical aspects of Mass. There were no special effects; not even music. Raoul Brindle’s superb score was composed from the dance, and added to the tape with my permission two years later, but it was for the original, silent version that I was given the Emmy. My entire contribution, aside from editing and installing the two trampolines, was to camouflage batteries of wide-dispersion light sources in clusters around each camera eye, and wire them so that they energized only when they were out-of-frame with respect to whichever camera was on at the time—ensuring that Shara was always lit from the front, presenting two (not always congruent) shadows. I made no attempt to employ flashy camera work; I simply recorded what Shara danced, changing POV only as she did.

  No, Mass Is A Verb can be described only in symbolic terms, and then poorly. I can say that Shara demonstrated that mass and inertia are as able as gravity to supply the dynamic conflict essential to dance. I can tell you that from them she distilled a kind of dance that could only have been imagined by a group-head consisting of an acrobat, a stunt-diver, a skywriter and an underwater ballerina. I can tell you that she dismantled the last interface between herself and utter freedom of motion, subduing her body to her will and space itself to her need.

  And still I will have told less than nothing. For Shara sought more than freedom—she sought meaning. Mass was, above all, a spiritual event—its title pun reflecting its thematic ambiguity between the technological and the theological. Shara made the human confrontation with existence a transitive act, literally meeting God halfway. I do not mean to imply that her dance at any time addressed an exterior God, a discrete entity with or without white beard. Her dance addressed reality, gave successive expression to the Three Eternal Questions asked by every human being who ever lived.

  Her dance observed her self, and asked, “How have I come to be here?”

  Her dance observed the universe in which self existed, and asked, “How did all this come to be here with me?”

  And at last, observing her self in relation to its un
iverse, “Why am I so alone?”

  And having asked these questions with every muscle and sinew she possessed, she paused hung suspended in the center of the sphere, her body and soul open to the universe, and when no answer came, she contracted. Not in a dramatic, coiling-spring sense as she had in Liberation, a compressing of energy and tension. This was physically similar, but an utterly different phenomenon. It was an act of introspection, a turning of the mind’s (soul’s?) eye in upon itself, to seek answers that lay nowhere else. Her body too, therefore, seemed to fold in upon itself, compacting her mass, so evenly that her position in space was not disturbed.

  And reaching within herself, she closed on emptiness.

  The camera faded out leaving her alone, rigid, encapsulated, yearning. The dance ended, leaving her three questions unanswered, the tension of their asking unresolved. Only the expression of patient waiting on her face blunted the shocking edge of the non-ending, made it bearable, a small, blessed sign whispering, “To be continued.”

  By the eighteenth day we had it in the can, in rough form. Shara put it immediately out of her mind and began choreographing Stardance, but I spent two hard days of editing before I was ready to release the tape for broadcast. I had four days until the half-hour of prime time Carrington had purchased—but that wasn’t the deadline I felt breathing down the back of my neck.

  McGillicuddy came into my workroom while I was editing, and although he saw the tears running down my face he said no word. I let the tape run, and he watched in silence, and soon his face was wet too. When the tape had been over for a long time he said, very softly, “One of these days I’m going to have to quit this stinking job.”

  I said nothing.

  “I used to be a karate instructor. I was pretty good. I could teach again, maybe do some exhibition work, make ten percent of what I do now.”

  I said nothing.

  “The whole damned Ring’s bugged, Charlie. The desk in my office can activate and tap my vidphone in Skyfac. Four at a time, actually.”

  I said nothing.

  “I saw you both in the airlock, when you came back the last time. I saw her collapse. I saw you bringing her around. I heard her make you promise not to tell Dr. Panzella.”

  I waited. Hope stirred.

  He dried his face. “I came in here to tell you I was going to Panzella, to tell him what I saw. He’d bully Carrington into sending her home right away.”

  “And now?” I said.

  “I’ve seen that tape.”

  “And you know that the Stardance will probably kill her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know we have to let her do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Hope died. I nodded. “Then get out of here and let me work.”

  He left.

  On Wall Street and aboard Skyfac it was late afternoon when I finally had the tape edited to my satisfaction. I called Carrington, told him to expect me in half an hour, showered, shaved, dressed, and left.

  A major of the Space Command was there with him when I arrived, but he was not introduced and so I ignored him. Shara was there too, wearing a thing made of orange smoke that left her breasts bare. Carrington had obviously made her wear it, as an urchin writes filthy words on an altar, but she wore it with a perverse and curious dignity that I sensed annoyed him. I looked her in the eye and smiled. “Hi, kid. It’s a good tape.”

  “Let’s see,” Carrington said. He and the major took seats behind the desk and Shara sat beside it.

  I fed the tape into the video rig built into the office wall, dimmed the lights, and sat across from Shara. It ran twenty minutes, uninterrupted, no soundtrack, stark naked.

  It was terrific.

  “Aghast” is a funny word. To make you aghast, a thing must hit you in a place you haven’t armored over with cynicism yet. I seem to have been born cynical; I have been aghast three times that I can remember. The first was when I learned, at the age of three, that there were people who could deliberately hurt kittens. The second was when I learned, at age seventeen, that there were people who could actually take LSD and then hurt other people for fun. The third was when Mass Is A Verb ended and Carrington said in perfectly conversational tones, “Very pleasant; very graceful. I like it,” when I learned, at age forty-five, that there were men, not fools or cretins but intelligent men, who could watch Shara Drummond dance and fail to see. We all, even the most cynical of us, always have some illusion which we cherish.

  Shara simply let it bounce off her somehow, but I could see that the major was as aghast as I, controlling his features with a visible effort.

  Suddenly welcoming a distraction from my horror and dismay, I studied him more closely, wondering for the first time what he was doing here. He was my age, lean and more hard bitten than I am, with silver fuzz on top of his skull and an extremely tidy mustache on the front. I’d taken him for a crony of Carrington’s, but three things changed my mind. Something indefinable about his eyes told me that he was a military man of long combat experience. Something equally indefinable about his carriage told me that he was on duty at the moment. And something quite definable about the line his mouth made told me that he was disgusted with the duty he had drawn.

  When Carrington went on, “What do you think, Major?” in polite tones, the man paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts and choosing his words. When he did speak, it was not to Carrington.

  “Ms. Drummond,” he said quietly, “I am Major William Cox, commander of S.C. Champion, and I am honored to meet you. That was the most profoundly moving thing I have ever seen.”

  Shara thanked him most gravely. “This is Charles Armstead, Major Cox. He made the tape.”

  Cox regarded me with new respect. “A magnificent job, Mister Armstead.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

  Carrington was beginning to understand that we three shared a thing which excluded him. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, Major,” he said with no visible trace of sincerity. “You can see it again on your television tomorrow night, if you chance to be off duty. And eventually, of course, cassettes will be made available. Now perhaps we can get to the matter at hand.”

  Cox’s face closed as if it had been zippered up, became stiffly formal. “As you wish, sir.”

  Puzzled, I began what I thought was the matter at hand. “I’d like your own Comm Chief to supervise the actual transmission this time, Mr. Carrington. Shara and I will be too busy to—”

  “My Comm Chief will supervise the broadcast, Armstead,” Carrington interrupted, “but I don’t think you’ll be particularly busy.”

  I was groggy from lack of sleep; my uptake was slow.

  He touched his desk delicately. “McGillicuddy, report at once,” he said, and released it. “You see, Armstead you and Shara are both returning to Earth. At once.”

  “What?”

  “Bryce, you can’t,” Shara cried. “You promised.”

  “Did I? My dear, there were no witnesses present last night. Altogether for the best, don’t you agree?”

  I was speechless with rage.

  McGillicuddy entered. “Hello, Tom,” Carrington said pleasantly. “You’re fired. You’ll be returning to Earth at once, with Ms. Drummond and Mr. Armstead, aboard Major Cox’s vessel. Departure in one hour, and don’t leave anything you’re fond of.” He glanced from McGillicuddy to me. “From Tom’s desk you can tap any vidphone in Skyfac. From my desk you can tap Tom’s desk.”

  Shara’s voice was low. “Bryce, two days. God damn you, name your price.”

  He smiled slightly. “I’m sorry, darling. When informed of your collapse, Dr. Panzella became most specific. Not even one more day. Alive you are a distinct plus for Skyfac’s image—you are my gift to the world. Dead you are an albatross around my neck. I cannot allow you to die on my property. I anticipated that you might resist leaving, and so I spoke to a friend in the,” he glanced at Cox, “higher echelons of the Space Command, who was good enough to send the Major here to escort you home.
You are not under arrest in the legal sense—but I assure you that you have no choice. Something like protective custody applies. Goodbye, Shara.” He reached for a stack of reports on his desk, and I surprised myself considerably.

  I cleared the desk entirely, tucked head catching him squarely in the sternum. His chair was bolted to the deck and so it snapped clean. I recovered so well that I had time for one glorious right. Do you know how, if you punch a basketball squarely, it will bounce up from the floor? That’s what his head did, in low gee slow motion.

  Then Cox had hauled me to my feet and shoved me into the far corner of the room. “Don’t,” he said to me, and his voice must have held a lot of that “habit of command” they talk about because it stopped me cold. I stood breathing in great gasps while Cox helped Carrington to his feet.

  The multibillionaire felt his smashed nose, examined the blood on his fingers, and looked at me with raw hatred. “You’ll never work in video again, Armstead. You’re through. Finished. Un-em-ployed, you got that?”

  Cox tapped him on the shoulder, and Carrington spun on him. “What the hell do you want?” he barked.

  Cox smiled. “Carrington, my late father once said, ‘Bill, make your enemies by choice, not by accident.’ Over the years I have found that to be excellent advice. You suck.”

  “And not particularly well,” Shara agreed.

  Carrington blinked. Then his absurdly broad shoulders swelled and he roared, “Out all of you! Off my property at once!”

  By unspoken consent, we waited for Tom, who knew his cue. “Mister Carrington, it is a rare privilege and a great honor to have been fired by you. I shall think of it always as a Pyrrhic defeat.” And he half-bowed and we left, each buoyed by a juvenile feeling of triumph that must have lasted ten seconds.