The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  On Earth the classic full lotus position is something a Soto Zen Buddhist may take or leave alone, as his joints and ligaments allow. But in Kûkan Zen (I learned later that Reb coined the term: kûkan is Japanese for “space”), the lotus posture becomes both more important and less difficult. It is fundamental in “sitting” kûkanzen, the space equivalent of sitting zazen.

  In the absence of weight, if you don’t tuck your feet securely under the opposite knees, any “sitting” posture you assume will require considerable muscular effort, impossible to maintain for any length of time. When you relax, you end up in the Free Fall Crouch, the body’s natural rest position, halfway between sitting and standing.

  What’s wrong with that? you may ask. Well, the idea is that Sitting, in the Zen sense, is something you do with full and powerful awareness. It requires some effort to do properly. Sitting zazen on Earth is not like sitting in a chair or standing or lying down or squatting or anything else humans do as a matter of course. It is a special posture you assume for the purpose of meditation, and after enough self-conditioning, just assuming that posture will make you begin to enter a meditative state.

  And terrestrial zazen posture involves total relaxation in the midst of total attention. If relaxation alone were the goal, you would meditate lying down. The attempt to maintain a specific, defined posture (spine straight, chin down, hands just so) involves just enough effort and attention to make you see that you are, in a way, accomplishing something although you’re merely sitting. It’s one of those paradoxes—like using your mind to become so mindful you can achieve no-mind—that lie at the heart of Zen.

  Reb felt it necessary to maintain that paradox, even in an environment where it’s more difficult to maintain anything but Free Fall Crouch. Full lotus position is stressful for most beginners, in gravity—but it becomes quite tolerable in zero gee. Even for someone a lot less limber than I am: over the next few days I saw senior citizens who hadn’t touched their toes in decades spend time in lotus. The worst part is getting unfolded again.

  Similarly, Reb was forced to modify hand arrangement. Suzuki’s “cosmic mudra”—left hand on top of right, middle joints of middle fingers aligned, thumb tips touching—tends to come apart without gravity’s help. Reb interlaced the fingers to compensate.

  And of course the zafu (round pillow), and the slanted wooden meditation bench used by other Eastern religions, are useless in space. In their place Kûkan Zen uses one of the most ubiquitous items of space hardware, as humble and commonplace as a pillow on Earth: the Velcro belt.

  If you simply drift freely while meditating, you will naturally drift in the direction of airflow, and sooner or later end up bumping against the air-outgo grille. Distracting. But if you temporarily shut down the room’s airflow to maintain your position, in a short time your exhalations will generate a sphere of carbon dioxide around your head and suppress your breathing reflex. Even more distracting.

  So you leave the airflow running…and stick the back of your Velcro belt to the nearest convenient wall. People can tell you’re meditating, rather than just hanging around, because your legs are tucked up in lotus and your hands are clasped.

  When two or more people are sitting kûkanzen together, it’s customary to all use the same wall, all face the same way, for the same reason that on Earth Suzuki’s disciples sit facing the wall rather than the group. Humans are so gregarious it’s hard for them to be in each other’s visual field without paying attention to each other.

  That’s Kûkan Zen. Simple elegance, elegant simplicity.

  The second chapter of Suzuki’s book deals with breathing. We didn’t get to that until the following day. Hawkins-roshi would put special emphasis on breathing (even for a Zen teacher), since once we graduated, we wouldn’t be doing it anymore…

  At the close of our first lesson in Kûkan Zen 101, Reb said, “One thing before I let you all go. Does everyone understand why I brought you here to meet Harry Stein?”

  Perhaps we did, but no one spoke.

  “One of the reasons I brought you to this Solarium, when I could just as easily have had video piped into the classroom, is that here in this room you were as close to Harry as you could possibly get—you’d be little closer EVA, since a p-suit is a layer too—and it made a difference. You’ve all seen high-quality video and holo of Stardancers, dozens of hours of it in Suit Camp alone…but God, that was the Harry Stein himself, one of the original Six, right there, inches away, and it made a difference, didn’t it?” There were nods and murmurs of agreement. Everyone in the room knew it made a difference. “Just what that difference was is one of those things—like the phenomenon of ‘contact high’—that defy explanation unless you admit the existence of the thing I’ve labeled ‘spirituality.’ And your personal religion, whatever it may be, had nothing to do with it, did it?”

  We left in a very quiet, thoughtful mood.

  There was a food fight at lunch. A zero-gee food fight is amazing. Almost everybody misses, because they can’t help aiming too high. Robert, having “space legs,” did well—but his roommate Ben did almost as well, despite his klutziness. You couldn’t sneak up on him…

  Glenn, I noticed, was infuriated at both the food fight, and how badly she lost. I could tell, just from her expression, that she believed handling oneself in free fall was something best conquered by intellect—and therefore, she ought to be one of the best at it. I’d seen the expression before, on the faces of beginner dance students who were also intellectuals. They see people they consider their inferiors picking up the essentials of movement quicker than they can, and it forces them to admit there are kinds of intelligence that do not live in the forebrain.

  I didn’t do very well in the food fight myself. I found that just as infuriating as Glenn did. But I covered it better.

  Glenn’s and my problem was addressed almost immediately. The schedule called for spending our afternoons in Jaunting class, learning how to move in zero gee.

  Our instructor was Sulke Drager, a powerfully built woman whose primary job, I later learned, was rock-rat: one of the hardboiled types who blasted new tunnels and cubics into Top Step when needed. In between, she worked in the Garden and taught Jaunting, and worked two more jobs in other space habitats. She was not here for Symbiosis, like us; she was a spacer. A permanent transient, citizen of the biggest small town in human history. I think she privately thought we were all crazy.

  I thought she was crazy. She had chosen a life with all the disadvantages of a Stardancer, and none of the advantages, it seemed to me. She could never go back to Earth; her body was long since permanently adapted to free fall. But she was not a telepathic immortal as we hoped to be. Just a human a long way from home, hustling for air money, hoping to bank enough to buy her retirement air. Talk about wage slaves! Sulke was as dependent as a goldfish.

  Most of us were disappointed when she confirmed that it would be a good month before we got any EVA time. For about the first fifteen minutes, we were disappointed. That’s how long it took us to convince ourselves that we weren’t ready to go outdoors yet, Suit Camp or no Suit Camp. Theory is not practice.

  (One thing I had never anticipated, for instance, in all the hours I’d spent trying to imagine movement in this environment: sweat that trickled up. Or refused to trickle at all, and just sort of pooled up in the small of your back until you flung or toweled it off. What a weird sensation!)

  We were given wrist and ankle thruster-bracelets, but Sulke only allowed us to use them to correct mistakes: the first step was to learn to be as proficient as possible without external aids.

  As I had been during the food fight—hell, since I’d arrived in space—I was dismayed to learn how clumsy I was in this environment. Like Glenn, I had assumed I had a secret weapon that would allow me to outstrip all the others. Instead, it seemed I had more to unlearn than most: inappropriate habits of movement were more deeply ingrained in me.

  This infuriated me. So much that I probably worked
twice as hard as anyone else in the class, using all the discipline and concentration I’d learned in thirty years of professional dance.

  “No, no McLeod,” Sulke said. “Stop trying to swim in air, you look like a drunken octopus.” She jaunted to me and stopped my tumble, without putting herself into one. “Use your spine, not your limbs!”

  It was a particularly galling admonition: in transitioning from ballet to modern dance, I had spent countless hours learning to use my spine. In one gee. “I thought I was.” Someone giggled.

  “Watch Chen, there, see how he does it? Chen, pitch forward half a rev, and yaw half.” Robert performed the maneuver requested: in effect he stood on his head, spinning on his long axis so he was still facing her when he was done. His legs barely flexed, and his arms left his sides only at the end of the maneuver. “See what he did with his spine?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t understand it,” I admitted.

  “Put your hands on him, here, and here.” She indicated her abdomen and the small of her back.

  I refused myself permission to blush. I used my thrusters to jaunt to him, and was relieved to do a near-perfect job, canceling all my velocity just as I reached him, without tumbling myself again. He was upside down with reference to me; I couldn’t read his expression. I put my hands where I’d been told.

  “Keep a light contact as he begins, then pull your hands away,” Sulke directed. “Reverse the maneuver, Chen.”

  So I didn’t get my hands quite far enough out of the way, quite fast enough. As he spun backwards, his groin brushed down across the palm I’d had on his belly. Now I was blushing. When he finished—a little awkwardly this time—he wore that inscrutable-Asian face of his. But he was blushing a little too. The giggles from the rest of the class didn’t help. “You’re jumping ahead,” Sulke called. “We don’t get to mating for days, yet.”

  In free fall maneuvering, mating simply means interacting with another body. We’d all heard dozens of puns on the terms before we’d left Suit Camp, but this feeble one put the class in stitches. I thought wistfully about putting a few of them in traction. Then I did a quarter-yaw, to face Sulke, and copied Robert’s maneuver, very nearly perfectly. The giggling became applause.

  “Much better,” Sulke said. “It must be a question of motivation. Buckley, you try it.”

  Robert and I exchanged a meaningful glance…and as I was trying to decide just what meaning to put into my half, something cracked me across the skull. It was one of Ben’s elbows. Without cafeteria tables to hold on to and brace himself against, his enhanced visual perception was little help to him: he would be one of the klutziest in our class—that day, anyway. “Sorry, Morgan!”

  I welcomed the distraction. “Forget it.”

  “Uh…could I…I mean, would you mind…?”

  For the next five or ten minutes, an orgy of belly-and-back-touching spread outwards from Robert and me, until everyone had mastered the forward half-pitch. (At least one other male was as careless with his hands as I had been with Robert. I pretended not to notice.) Then Sulke turned our collective attention to the roll and yaw techniques, which took up the rest of the class period.

  After class there were a couple of free hours before dinner. I had Teena guide me back to Solarium One, where we’d seen Harry Stein—where Norrey Armstead had addressed me by my name!—and sat kûkanzen for a timeless time, seeking some clarity, some balance. There were about a half dozen of us there, all doing the same thing. I don’t know about the others; I left as confused and scattered as I’d arrived.

  I sat by myself at dinner. A lot of us did, I think.

  When I got back to my room Kirra was not there. I spent an hour or so at my desk, browsing through data banks, learning basic things about Top Step’s layout. It is a huge, complex place, but interactive holographic maps help a lot in understanding it. I only had to bother Teena once. The important thing to remember from a navigational standpoint is that the arrow will always be painted on the wall farthest from Earth, and will point “outboard,” toward the main docking area through which everyone enters Top Step. Eventually I sighed and collapsed the display back to the simple overview map I’d started with.

  There was no sense putting it off any longer. I’d already stalled for almost a full day. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

  I described my requirements to Teena, and she found me a gym not presently in use, where I could try to dance.

  The space Teena directed me to was terrific—spacious, well padded, fully equipped, complete with top of the line sound and video gear. I could lock it from inside for up to an hour at a time. I locked it, selected music that did not dictate tempo, and—at last!—began trying my first dance “steps” in space.

  The session was a disaster.

  I spent a longer, slower time than usual warming up, and was careful not to overextend myself. But it was a fiasco. After an hour and a half of hard sweaty effort I had not put together five consecutive seconds I would want to show anyone. Not one single sequence I’d invented in my mind worked the way it was supposed to; not one combination I’d memorized from videos of Stardancers worked the way I’d thought it would. I was less graceful than a novice skater. Part of the problem was that the moves I’d envisioned always stopped when I was done with them…whereas every motion in free fall keeps going until something stops it. Every once in a while I accidentally created a moment of beauty…then could not reproduce it a second later. It was as though someone had randomly rewired a computer keyboard so there was no way to predict the effect of hitting any given key. And I kept poking my face through drifting mists of sweat globules that I’d spun off earlier, a truly disgusting experience.

  I had not expected this to be easy. Well, okay, maybe I had. As I watched the video replay of my flounderings on the monitor, I was not sure it was possible.

  It had to be possible. There was nothing back on Earth for me to return to. Shara Drummond had done this. Her sister Norrey had done it. Crippled defeated old Charlie Armstead had managed it. I had seen countless tapes of Stardancers who had had no dance training before coming to space, making shapes of almost unbearable beauty. Dammit, I was a good dancer, a great dancer.

  Back on Earth, yeah, said the video monitor, when you were younger…

  Finally I’d had all I could take for now. “That’s it. Teena, wipe all tapes of this session.”

  “Yes, Morgan. There is a message for you, left after you told me to see that you were not disturbed. Will you accept it now?”

  I sighed. “Why not?” Nothing happened, of course. I sighed again. “I mean, ‘Yes, Teena, I’ll take it now.’”

  The monitor filled with Robert’s face, wearing the vague smile everyone wears when leaving a phone message. “Hello, Morgan. You asked me if I’d tutor you in jaunting. I have time free this evening. Call me if you’re still interested.”

  I thought about it while I got my breathing under control and toweled up sweat. I’d begun this evening confused and scattered. With diligent effort I had brought myself to miserable and depressed. It was time to cut my losses. “Record this message, Teena—” The screen turned into a mirror. “—Jesus, audio only!” It opaqued again. “Take one: ‘Hello, Robert, this is Morgan. Thank you for your offer. Perhaps another time.’ Cut. Too stiff. Take two: ‘Hi, Robert, Morgan here. Maybe another night, okay? I just washed my spine and I can’t do a thing with it.’ Oh my God…take three: ‘Robert, this is Morgan. Look, I don’t know if it’s a good idea if we—I don’t think I—’” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Teena, just send take one, to ‘cut’, okay? Then refuse all calls until I tell you otherwise.”

  “Yes, Morgan.”

  I used the gym’s shower bag—God, I’ll never get used to water that slithers, it’s even weirder than sweat that won’t trickle—and went back to my room. Halfway back, as an experiment, I had Teena stop guiding me, and tried to find my own way. I barked my shins a couple of times misjudging turns, I had to double back once, a
nd my Contact-Per-Hectometer rate was humiliating…but I found my own damn home without help.

  As the door irised open, song spilled out. Kirra was home. She was halfway into her sleepsack, her “swag,” as she called it, and the lights were out in her hemisphere. My own lights were on low standby. She stopped singing to greet me. “Oh, don’t stop,” I protested, closing the door behind me.

  “I haven’t,” she said. “You just can’t hear it anymore. What you been up to, lovey?”

  “Wasting time,” I answered evasively. “Sing so I can hear, Kirra, really. If I fall asleep listening to music, I dream dances. At least I used to. I could use the inspiration.”

  So she went back to it. In this song her voice had about the range, pitch and tone of an alto recorder, if you know that sound. (I don’t know why they were called that: they had no recording capacity at all.) It was soothing, hypnotic, resonated in my belly somewhere like a cat’s purr.

  I stripped and stuffed myself into my own sleepsack, told my room lights to slow-fade. Today I talked with Charlie Armstead and Norrey Armstead, I told myself. Kirra’s warm sweet voice rose and fell in ways as unfamiliar to me as the words themselves. Just as I was drifting off to sleep I understood that they were unfamiliar to her too. She was singing about space, about zero gee. If there is no up or down, what’s a melody to do? Her soothing voice washed away all turbulent emotion, set me adrift from my drifting body.

  In my dreams there were sea lions. Highlit crimson by sunset, the colour of Stardancers. Floating all around me, all oriented to my personal vertical, treading air. Waiting patiently. For the first time, I wished I spoke Sea Lion.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I humbly say to those who study the mystery,

  Don’t waste time.

  —Sekito Kisen

  Sandokai Sutra

  (translated by Thomas Cleary)

  KIRRA AND I both woke up with stiff necks. We hadn’t learned yet that if you don’t secure your head while you sleep in zero gee, you nod all night long, in time with your breathing. A terrestrial equivalent might be watching a tennis match for eight hours while lying on your side. We gave each other neck rubs before we got dressed. Kirra gave a first-rate neck rub. It’s a rare skill, and blessed in a roommate. It was the first time I’d had friendly hands on me, and the first warm flesh I’d touched with my fingers, in I couldn’t remember how many months.