The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  But we spent as much time at home as we could manage. Any gravity at all will slow your body’s mindless attempt to adapt irrevocably to zero gee, and a sixth-gee is a reasonable compromise. Since it is local normal for both Lunar surface and Skyfac, the physiological parameters are standard knowledge. The more time spent at home, the longer we could stay up—and our schedule was fixed. None of us wanted to be marooned in space. That’s how we thought of it in those days.

  If we slipped, if physicals showed one of us adapting too rapidly, we could compensate to some degree. You go out the back door, climb into the exercise yoke dangling from the power winch, and strap yourself in. It looks a little like one of those Jolly Jumpers for infants, or a modified bosun’s chair. You ease off the brake, and the yoke begins to “descend,” on a line with the hammer handle since there’s no atmospheric friction to drag you to one side. You lower away, effectively increasing the length of your hammer handle and thus your gee force. When you’re “down” far enough, say at a half gee (about 400 meters of line), you set the brake and exercise on the yoke, which is designed to provide a whole-body workout. You can even, if you want, use the built-in bicycle pedals to pedal yourself back up the line, with a built-in “parking brake” effect so that if it gets too much for you and you lose a stroke, you don’t break your legs and go sliding down to the end of your tether. From low-enough gee zones you can even hand-over-hand your way up, with safety line firmly snubbed—but below half-gee level you do not unstrap from the yoke for any reason. Imagine hanging by your hands at, say, one gravity over all infinity, wearing a snug plastic bag with three hours’ air.

  We all got pretty conscientious about…er…watching our weight.

  The big temptation was Town Hall, a sphere slightly smaller than the Goldfish Bowl. It was essentially our communal living room, the place where we could all hang out together and chew the fat in person. Play cards, teach each other songs, argue choreography, quarrel choreography (two different things), play 3-D handball, or just appreciate the luxury of free fall without a p-suit or a job to do. If a couple happened to find themselves alone in Town Hall, and were so inclined, they could switch off half the external navigation lights—signifying “Do Not Disturb”—and make love.

  (One-sixth gee sex is nice, too—but zero gee is different. Nobody’s on top. It’s a wholehearted cooperative effort or it just doesn’t happen [I can’t imagine a free-fall rape]. You get to use both hands, instead of just the one you’re not lying on. And while a good half of the Kama Sutra goes right out the airlock, there are compensations. I have never cared for simultaneous oral sex, the classic “69,” because of the discomfort and distraction. Free fall makes it not only convenient, but logical, inevitable. End of second inevitable digression.)

  For one reason and another, then, it was tempting to hang out overlong at Town Hall—and so many standard daily chores must be done there that the temptation had to be sharply curbed. Extensive physiological readouts on all of us were sent twice daily to Doc Panzella’s medical computer aboard Skyfac: as with air, food, and water, I was prepared to deal elsewhere if Skyfac ever lost its smile, but while I could have them I wanted Panzella’s brains. He was to space medicine what Harry was to space construction, and he kept us firmly in line, blistering us by radio when we goofed, handing out exercise sessions on the Jolly Jumper like a tough priest assigning novenas for penance.

  We originally intended to build five sledge hammers, for a maximum comfortable population of fifteen. But we had rushed Harry, that first year; when the first group of students got off the elevator, it was a miracle that as many as three units were operational. We had to dismiss Harry’s crew early with thanks and a bonus: we needed the cubic they were using. Ten students, Norrey, Raoul, Harry, and me totals fourteen bodies. Three units totals nine rooms. It was a hell of a courtship…but Norrey and I came out of it married; the ceremony was only a formality.

  By the second season we had completed one more three-room home, and we took up only seven new students, and everybody had a door they could close and crouch behind when they needed to, and all seven of them washed out. The fifth hammer never got built.

  It was that run of bad cards I mentioned earlier, extending itself through our second season.

  Look, I was just beginning to become a Name in dance, and rather young for it, when the burglar’s bullet smashed my hip joint. It’s been a long time, but I remember myself as having been pretty damn good. I’ll never be that good again, even with the use of my leg back. A few of the people we washed out were better dancers than I used to be—in dirtside terms. I had believed that a really good dancer almost automatically had the necessary ingredients to learn to think spherically.

  The first season’s dismal results had shown me my error, and so for the second semester we used different criteria. We tried to select for free-thinking minds, unconventional minds, minds unchained by preconception and consistency. Raoul described them as “science-fiction-reader types.” The results were ghastly. In the first place, it turns out that people who can question even their most basic assumptions intellectually can not necessarily do so physically—they could imagine what needed doing, but couldn’t do it. Worse, the free-thinkers could not cooperate with other free-thinkers, could not work with anyone’s preconception consistently. What we wanted was a choreographer’s commune, and what we got was the classic commune where no one wanted to do the dishes. One chap would have made a terrific solo artist—when I let him go, I recommended to Sony that they finance him to a Studio of his own—but we couldn’t work with him.

  And two of the damned idiots killed themselves through thoughtlessness.

  They were all well coached in free-fall survival, endlessly drilled in the basic rules of space life. We used a double-buddy system with every student who went EVA until they had demonstrated competence, and we took every precaution I could or can think of. But Inge Sjoberg could not be bothered to spend a whole hour a day inspecting and maintaining her p-suit. She managed to miss all six classic signs of incipient coolant failure, and one sunrise she boiled. And nothing could induce Alexi Nikolski to cut off his huge mane of brown hair. Against all advice he insisted on tying it back in a kind of doubled-up pony tail, “as he had always done.” The arrangement depended on a single hairband. Sure as hell it failed in the middle of a class, and quite naturally he gasped. We were minutes away from pressure; he would surely have drowned in his own hair. But as Harry and I were towing him to Town Hall he unzipped his p-suit to deal with the problem.

  Both times we were forced to store the bodies in the Closet for a gruesomely long time, while next-of-kin debated whether to have the remains shipped to the nearest spaceport or go through the legal complication of arranging for burial in space. Macabre humor saved our sanity (Raoul took to calling it Travis McGee’s Closet), but it soured the season.

  And it wasn’t much more fun to say good-bye to the last of the live ones. On the day that Yeng and DuBois left, I nearly bottomed out. I saw them off personally, and the “coitus with a condom” imagery of shaking hands with p-suits on was just too ironically appropriate. The whole semester, like the first, had been coitus with a condom—hard work, no product—and I returned to Town Hall in the blackest depression I had known since…since Shara died. By association, my leg hurt; I wanted to bark at someone. But as I came in through the airlock Norrey, Harry and Linda were watching Raoul make magic.

  He was not aware of them, of anything external, and Norrey held up a warning hand without meeting my eyes. I put my temper on hold and my back against the wall beside the airlock; the velcro pad between my shoulder-blades held me securely. (The whole sphere is carpeted in “female” velcro; pads of “male” are sewn into our slippers—which also have “thumbs”—our seats, thighs, backs, and the backs of our gloves. Velcro is the cheapest furniture there is.)

  Raoul was making magic with common household ingredients. His most esoteric tool was what he referred to as his “hyperdermic needl
e.” It looked like a doctor’s hypo with elephantiasis: the chamber and plunger were oversized, but the spike itself was standard size. In his hands it was a magic wand.

  Tethered to his skinny waist were all the rest of the ingredients: five drinking bulbs, each holding a different colored liquid. At once I identified a source of subconscious unease, and relaxed: I had been missing the vibration of the air conditioner, missing the draft. Twin radial tethers held Raoul at the center of the sphere, in the slight crouch typical of free fall, and he wanted still air—even though it severely limited his working time. (Shortly, exhaled carbon dioxide would form a sphere around his head; he would spin gently around his tethers and the sphere would become a donut; by then he must be finished. Or move. I would have to be careful myself to keep moving, spiderlike, as would the others.)

  He speared one of the bulbs with his syringe, drew off a measured amount. Apple juice, by the color of it, admixed with water. He emptied the syringe gently, thin knuckly fingers working with great delicacy, forming a translucent golden ball that hung motionless before him, perfectly spherical. He pulled the syringe free, and the ball…shimmered…in spherically symmetrical waves that took a long time to ebb.

  He filled his syringe with air, jabbed it into the heart of the ball and squeezed. The bulb filled with a measured amount of air, expanding into a nearly transparent golden bubble, around which iridescent patterns chased each other in lazy swirls. It was about a meter in diameter. Again Raoul disengaged the syringe.

  Filling it in turn from bulbs of grape juice, tomato juice and unset lime jello, he filled the interior of the golden bubble with spherical beads of purple, red, and green, pumping them into bubbles as he formed them. They shone, glistened, jostling but declining to absorb each other. Presently the golden bubble was filled with Christmas-tree balls in various sizes from grape to grapefruit, shimmering, borrowing colors from each other. Marangoni Flow—gradients in surface tension—made them spin and tumble around each other like struggling kittens. Occasional bubbles were pure water, and these were rainbow scintillations that the eye ached to fragment and follow individually.

  Raoul was drifting for air now, holding the macrobubble in tow with the palm of his hand, to which the whole thing adhered happily. If he were to strike it sharply now, I knew, the whole cluster would snap at once into a single, large bubble around the surface of which streaks of colors would run like tears (again, by Marangoni Flow). I thought that was his intention.

  The master lighting panel was velcro’d to his chest. He dialed for six tight spots, focusing them on the bubble-jewel with sure fingers. Other lights dimmed, winked out. The room was spangled with colors and with color, as the facets of the manmade jewel flung light in all directions. With a seemingly careless wave of his hand, Raoul set the scintillating globe spinning, and Town Hall swam in its eerie rainbow fire.

  Drifting before the thing, Raoul set his Musicmaster for external speaker mode, velcro’d it to his thighs, and began to play.

  Long, sustained warm tones first. The globe thrilled to them, responding to their vibrations, expressing the music visually. Then liquid trills in a higher register, with pseudowoodwind chords sustained by memory-loop beneath. The globe seemed to ripple, to pulse with energy. A simple melody emerged, mutated, returned, mutated again. The globe spangled in perfect counterpoint. The tone of the melody changed as it played, from brass to violin to organ to frankly electronic and back again, and the globe reflected each change with exquisite subtlety. A bass line appeared. Horns. I kicked myself free of the wall, both to escape my own exhalations and to get a different perspective on the jewel. The others were doing likewise, drifting gently, trying to become organic with Raoul’s art. Spontaneously we danced, tossed by the music like the glistening jewel, by the riot of color it flung around the spherical room. An orchestra was strapped to Raoul’s thighs now, and it made us free-fall puppets.

  Improv only; not up to concert standard. Simple group exercises, luxuriating in the sheer physical comfort of free fall and sharing that awareness. Singing around the campfire, if you will, trying to out unfamiliar harmonies on each other’s favorite songs. Only Harry abstained, drifting somehow “to one side” with the odd, incongruous grace of a polar bear in the water. He became thereby a kind of second focus of the dance, became the camera eye toward which Raoul aimed his creation, and we ours. (Raoul and Harry had become the fastest of friends, the chatterbox and the sphinx. They admired each other’s hands.) Harry floated placidly, absorbing our joy and radiating it back.

  Raoul tugged gently on a line, and a large expandable wire loop came to him. He adjusted it to just slightly larger than the bubblejewel, captured that in the loop and expanded the loop rapidly at once. Those who have only seen it masked by gravity have no idea how powerful a force surface tension is. The bubblejewel became a concave lens about three meters in diameter, within which multicolored convex lenses bubbled, each literally perfect. He oriented it toward Harry, added three low-power lasers from the sides, and set the lens spinning like the Wheel of Kali. And we danced.

  After a while the knock-knock light went on beside the airlock. That should have startled me—we don’t get much company—but I paid no mind, lost in zero-gee dance and in Raoul’s genius, and a little in my own in hiring him. The lock cycled and opened to admit Tom McGillicuddy—which should have startled the hell out of me. I had no idea he was thinking of coming up to visit, and since he hadn’t been on the scheduled elevator I’d just put Yeng and DuBois on, he must have taken a very expensive special charter to get here. Which implied disaster.

  But I was in a warm fog, lost in the dance, perhaps a little hypnotized by the sparkling of Raoul’s grape-juice, tomato-juice and lime-jello kaleidoscope. I may not even have nodded hello to Tom, and I know I was not even remotely surprised by what he did, then.

  He joined us.

  With no hesitation, casting away the velcro slippers he’d brought from the airlock’s dressing chamber, he stepped off into thick air and joined us within the sphere, using Raoul’s guy wires to position himself so that our triangle pattern became a square. And then he danced with us, picking up our patterns and the rhythm of the music.

  He did a creditable job. He was in damned good shape for someone who’d been doing all our paperwork—but infinitely more important (for terrestrial physical fitness is so useless in space), he was clearly functioning without a local vertical, and enjoying it.

  Now I was startled, to my bones, but I kept pokerfaced and continued dancing, trying not to let Tom catch me watching. Across the sphere Norrey did likewise—and Linda, above, seemed genuinely oblivious.

  Startled? I was flabbergasted. The single factor that had washed out sixteen students out of seventeen was the same thing that washed out Skyfac construction men, the same thing that had troubled eight of the nine Skylab crewmen back when the first experiments with zero-gee life had been made: inability to live without a local vertical.

  If you bring a goldfish into orbit (the Skylab crew did), it will flounder helplessly in its globe of water. Show the fish an apparent point of reference, place a flat surface against its water-sphere (which will then form a perfect hemisphere thereon quite naturally), and the fish will decide that the plane surface is a stream bed, aligning its body perpendicularly. Remove the plate, or add a second plate (no local vertical or too many), and the goldfish will soon die, mortally confused. Skylab was purposely built to have three different local verticals in its three major modules, and eight out of nine crewmen faithfully and chronically adjusted to a module’s local vertical as they entered it, without conscious thought. Traveling all the way through all three in one jaunt gave them headaches; they hated the docking adapter which was designed to have no local vertical at all. It is physically impossible to get dizzy in zero gee, but they said they felt dizzy any time they were prevented from coming into focus with a defined “floor” and “walls.”

  All of them except one—described as “one of the most in
telligent of the astronauts, as well as one of the most perverse.” He took to the docking adapter—to life without up and down—like a duck to water. He was the only one of nine who made the psychological breakthrough. Now I knew how lucky I had been that Norrey and Raoul had both turned out to be Stardancer material. And how few others ever could be.

  But Tom was unquestionably one of them. One of us. His technique was raw as hell, he thought his hands were shovels and his spine was all wrong, but he was trainable. And he had that rare, indefinable something that it takes to maintain equilibrium in an environment that forbids equilibration. He was at home in space.

  I should have remembered. He had been ever since I’d known him. It seemed to me in that moment that I perceived all at once the totality of my bloody blind stupidity—but I was wrong.

  The impromptu jam session wound down eventually; Raoul’s music frivolously segued into the closing bars of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and as that last chord sustained, he stabbed a rigid hand through his lens, shattering it into a million rainbow drops that dispersed with the eerie grace of an expanding universe.

  “Hoover that up,” I said automatically, breaking the spell, and Harry hastened to kick on the air scavenger before Town Hall became sticky with fruit juice and jello. Everyone sighed with it, and Raoul the magician was once again a rabbity little guy with a comic-opera hypo and a hula hoop. And a big wide smile. The tribute of sighs was followed by a tribute of silence; the warm glow was a while in fading. I’ll be damned, I thought, I haven’t made memories this good in twenty years. Then I put my mind back in gear.

  “Conference,” I said briefly, and jaunted to Raoul. Harry, Norrey, Linda and Tom met me there, and we grabbed hands and feet at random to form a human snowflake in the center of the sphere. This left our faces every-which-way to each other, of course, but we ignored it, the way a veteran DJ ignores the spinning of a record label he’s reading. Even Tom paid no visible mind to it. We got right down to business.