by Spider
She looked thoughtful. “Tell me something.”
“Sure.”
“How’s your back feel?”
“Why, not too—oh!”
“How ’bout those knees, then?”
My back did not hurt. My knees did not hurt.
“You worked out more in the last two days than you did in the last year, tell me I’m wrong,” she said. “Have your legs buckled? Got crook back?”
No and no, by God. I was tired and ached in a dozen places, but they were no worse than one should expect when getting back into shape after a long layoff.
“You can do this. Matter of time, that’s all.”
I was thunderstruck. She was absolutely right. My instrument was working again. Hell, I had managed to transition from ballet to modern dance once: I could learn this. There was nothing stopping me! Nothing but time and courage. The sense of relief was overwhelming. I felt a surge of elation, and at the same time a delicious tiredness. Moments before I’d been suffering from fatigue; now I was just sleepy.
“Kirra, you’re an angel,” I cried, and hugged her harder, and kissed her. Then we smiled at each other, and she jaunted to her own bed and dimmed the lights. She undressed quickly and slid into the sack. “Night, lovey,” she called softly.
“G’night, Kirra,” I murmured. “I’m happy for you. Ben’s sweet.”
My last thought was I’m going to sleep sounder tonight than I have in years, and then almost at once I was deep under—
—and then I was wide awake, saying, “What the hell was that?” aloud, and Kirra said it too and we both listened and heard nothing but silence, total silence, and at last I thought Silence? In a space dwelling?
The air circulation system in Top Step is whisper quiet—but boy, do you miss that whisper when it stops!
Then a robot was speaking with Teena’s voice, loudly, in my left ear.
In only the one ear, and very slowly, unmistakably Teena’s voice but without any inflections of tone or pitch: she must have been talking to or with nearly every resident of Top Step at once, time-sharing like mad, no bytes to spare for vocal personality or stereo effect. “Attention! Attention! There has been a major system malfunction. There is no immediate cause for alarm, repeat, no cause for alarm. The circulation system is temporarily down. It is being repaired. All personnel are advised to remain in constant motion until further notice. Do not let yourself remain motionless for more than a few moments. If you can reach p-suit or other personal pressure, please do so, calmly.” Not wanting to drain her resources any further, we asked no questions.
A moment later, her voice was superseded by that of Dorothy Gerstenfeld. She explained the nature of the problem, assured us it would be fixed long before it became serious, entreated us all not worry, and sounded so serene and confident herself that I did stop worrying. Her explanation was too technical for me to follow, but her tone of voice said I should be reassured by it, so I was.
The circulation system was only down for half an hour. Nothing to be afraid of: Top Step was immense and a lot of it was pressurized; there was more than enough air on hand to last us all much longer than half an hour in a pinch. The worst of it was nuisance: when the air stops flowing in a space habitat, you must not be motionless. If you are, exhaled CO2 forms an invisible sphere around your head and slowly smothers you. There are many jobs aboard Top Step for which constant head motion is contraindicated, tracking a large-mass docking, for instance; such people had to find someone to fan their heads, or stop work for the duration. And everyone else had to keep moving. You can’t imagine how annoying that can be until it’s forced upon you. Not that being in motion takes any hard work, in zero gee—it’s just that your natural tendency and subconscious desire is to stop moving as much as possible, to stimulate the terrestrial environment you remember as natural, and overcoming that impulse gets wearing very quickly. Especially if you were tired to begin with.
But it was over soon enough. Kirra and I experimented with fanning each other’s faces, and told each other campfire stories, and at last we heard the soft sound of the pumps coming back up to speed. Because I was alert for it, I became consciously aware for the first time of the movement of air on my skin as soon as it resumed.
“The emergency is over,” Teena said, still in robot mode. “Repeat, the emergency is over. There have been zero casualties. Resume normal operations. Thank you.”
“Thank you all for not panicking,” Dorothy’s voice added. “We have everything under control now. Resume your duties. Those of you on sleep shift, try to get back to sleep; you’ve a long day ahead.”
I had surprisingly little difficulty feeling sleepy again, and Kirra was snoring—musically—before I was. As I was fading out again I had a thought. “Teena?” I whispered.
“Yes, Morgan?” Her reply was also whispered, but I could tell this was the old, fully human-sounding Teena again, so it was all right to bother her now.
“What caused the circulation system to go down?”
She almost seemed to hesitate. Silly, of course; computers don’t hesitate. “A component was improperly installed through carelessness. It has been replaced.”
“Oh. Glad it wasn’t anything serious. A meteor or something. That reminds me: how is Mr. Henderson, the Chief Steward on my flight up here?”
“I’m sorry to say he died about four hours ago, without regaining consciousness.”
“Oh.” No one had needed to fan his head while the air was down.
“Good night. Morgan.”
“G’night.”
My last drifting thought was something about how lucky I’d been lately. Two life-threatening emergencies in forty-eight hours, and I’d lived through them both.
There weren’t any more for weeks.
CHAPTER SIX
Tom Seaver: What time is it, Yogi?
Yogi Berra: You mean now?
A COMPANY MANAGER I toured Nova Scotia with once summed up that province as follows: “Too many churches; not enough bars.” I’m afraid the same could be said of Top Step.
That overgrown cigar had churches and temples of almost every possible kind in its granite guts, over three dozen, including three different zendos; if I had wanted to do nothing but kûkanzen “sitting” or Rinzai chanting with my free time, I could have. But I’d never been all that committed as a Buddhist—I’d never been fully committed to anything except the dance—and somehow it felt wrong to spend all of my last three months as a human being pursuing no-thought. I intended to do a lot of thinking, before I stepped outdoors and jaunted into a big glob of red goo and opened up my p-suit. I still wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to go through with this.
I tended to spend my free time in one of four places: Solarium Three, Le Puis, my room, and the gym I came to think of as my studio.
Sol Three was a popular hangout for just about everyone in my class, and for some from the two classes ahead of us and some of the staff as well. Not Sol One, where I’d met Harry Stein and three others of The Six: this Solarium was, as its number indicates, all the way round the other side of Top Step. An accidental pun, for that’s the side facing Earth: Sol Three overlooking Sol III. It was more commonly and informally known as the Café du Ciel—a reference I understood the first time I saw its spectacular view.
Have you ever been to New Orleans, to the old French Quarter? Do you know the Café du Monde? You sit outdoors and sip chicoried café au lait, and eat fresh hot beignets smothered with so much powdered sugar you mustn’t inhale while biting, and you watch the world go by. Look one way, and there’s the Mississippi, Old Man River himself, just rolling along. Look another and you’re seeing Jackson Square, another and you’re looking at the French Market. Street buskers play alto sax, or vibes, or clarinet, very well. They say if you sit in the Café du Monde long enough, sooner or later you’ll see everyone you know pass by.
The same is said of the Café du Ciel—and it’s literal truth.
It tended to have a lot of pe
ople in it, and it tended to be rather quiet, although there was no rule about noise. There were no buskers there. There were no beignets available either—powdered sugar isn’t practical in free fall—but you could bring a bulb of coffee from the cafeteria. What made the Solarium reminiscent of the Café du Monde was the view.
The scenery was so majestic it was like being in some great cathedral. When the Fireflies originally whisked Top Step from the asteroid belt into High Earth Orbit as their final parting gift to humanity, they picked a polar orbit concentric to the day/night terminator, to keep the big stone cigar in perpetual sunlight. So the Earth we saw from Solarium Three was always half in sunlight and half in darkness, an immense yin-yang symbol. Our orbit was high enough that you could just see the entire globe at once. The slow grandeur of the dance it did I cannot describe, spinning end-on when we were passing over one of the Poles, then seeming to lurch crazily sideways as our orbit flung us toward the Equator and the opposite Pole. A whole planet endlessly executing the same arabesque turn. If you haven’t got graphic software that’ll simulate it, get an old-fashioned globe and see it for yourself, it’s the grandest roller coaster I know, endlessly absorbing. We all felt its pull: there in the big window was everything we were about to say goodbye to.
Second-month Postulants generally seemed to graduate into being attracted more by Solariums One and Four, which faced raw empty space: everything they were about to say hello to. I visited those cubics a few times; they had even more of that cathedral-hush feel. Too much for me, then.
(Only dedicated tanners spent much time in Sol Two—the only true solarium, the one which always faced the Sun—and for them I suppose it must have been Paradise. You could put a spin on yourself, go to sleep, and toast evenly on all sides without effort. But I never got the habit; skin cancer aside, a dancer with a tan is a dancer who’s out of work.)
But sometimes looking at Earth made you want to make noise and have a little fun. So if I wasn’t in Sol Three I could usually be found in Le Puis, our only tavern, where things were livelier.
To serve its several purposes, a tavern should have both places where one can be seen, and places where one cannot be seen. The designer of Le Puis had accomplished this splendidly. Being there was a little like being inside a stupendous honeycomb made of dozens of transparent globes, with a large spherical clearing at the center, in which danced two or three dozen small table-spheres, fuzzy with Velcro. The tables kept perfect station with each other; you could not move one more than a few inches before it maneuvered to correct, with little semivisible squirts of steering gas. (Odorless, I’m happy to report.) The pattern the tables made in space was not a simple grid, more of a starburst effect. You could hang around one of the tables (literally) until you met someone you liked, then adjourn for more private conversation to one of the dozens of surrounding sphericles—a word exactly analogous to “cubicle.” By simply pulling the lips of the door closed, you soundproofed your sphericle. If you found that you wanted to get really private, the walls could be opaqued. It reminded me a little of the private chambers you sometimes find in really first-rate Japanese restaurants, with rice-paper-and-bamboo walls, soft cushions, and a door that sometimes slides open to admit attentive servers, fragrant food, and the chuckle of a nearby fountain.
I was with Kirra on my first visit to Le Puis; I guess it was our third or fourth day in Top Step. As we emerged from the igloo-tunnel that led from the main corridor into the heart of the honeycomb, we were approached by the largest and happiest human being I’ve ever seen, before or since.
“Crikey,” Kirra said, watching him draw near. “Is that—?”
“God, I think it is,” I said. “I should have guessed when I heard the name of this place.”
“Hello, ladies,” the apparition boomed as he came to a halt beside us. He wore an expression of barely contained glee. When he smiled, his cheeks looked like grapefruits. “Welcome to my joint. I got a nice little table for you. If you’ll follow me…” He spun and jaunted gracefully away.
I’ve met a lot of celebrities in my time, but I felt a touch of awe. It was Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous, who used to own Le Maintenant, the Toronto restaurant in which Stardancers Incorporated was founded at the turn of the century. He was every bit as colorful and extraordinary as Charlie Armstead made him sound in the famous Titan Transmission of 1999.
Armstead says Humphrey was very fat when he was a groundhog. But I don’t think he could have been as big then as he was the day I met him. I don’t think you can be that fat in a one-gee field. In free fall, he was as graceful as any ballerina, and moved with stately elegance, like an extremely well-bred zeppelin.
He docked at a table with a good view of the room—even his bulk could not displace the table much—and we docked there too. “Let’s see,” he said to me, “you look to me like a nice dry white wine, maybe a Carrington 2004. And for you,” he said to Kirra, “I got some Thomas Cooper, fresh from Oz. Peanuts and a little sharp cheese and some of those little oyster cracker things, right?” He drifted away, beaming.
He was one of those special people who so obviously love life, so much, that you feel like a jerk for not enjoying it as much as they are. And so you cheer up to about half their level, which is twice as cheerful as you were. And for the next little while, you notice that everyone you talk to seems to be smiling at you.
But how had he known Kirra was from Australia?
“Funny,” I said, “he didn’t look red. But that was exactly what I would have ordered, if he’d given me a chance. If I’d known he had a vintage that good in stock.”
“Me too,” she agreed. “Armstead didn’t lie about that bloke. He reads minds, all right. Without Symbiosis.”
“Natural talent, I guess.”
The airflow in this space was breezier than usual, with the temperature upped just a notch to compensate. I understood why when someone a few tables away lit up a pipe of marijuana. The smell was familiar, pleasant. I hadn’t smoked in years myself, but it reminded me of good times past. Childhood on Gambier Island. The dorms at SFU, and the party on Legalization Day. Motel rooms after performances on the road. Perhaps it was time I took it up again. No, not until after I had mastered zero gee well enough to dance. If then.
Fat Humphrey returned with our drinks in free-fall drinking bulbs, docked on the next table while passing them to us. Kirra’s was three times the size of mine. I’m not much of a drinker; it seemed she was. “How do you do that, Mr. Pappadopolous?” I asked. “Know what we want and how much?”
“Call me Fat. How do you know how much to breathe?”
I gave up. “This is my friend Kirra. I’m Morgan McLeod.”
“Hello, Kirra.” He held out his hand, and when she tried to shake it he took hers and kissed it. She dimpled. The same thing happened to me. “You wouldn’t be the Morgan McLeod that danced Indices of Refraction with Morris, would you?”
I admitted it.
“Goddamn. It’s a pleasure to have you in my joint. You ever see her dance, Kirra?”
“No,” she said.
“Then you one lucky person; you got a treat in store. Get Teena to dig some of her tapes and holos out of the Net for you.”
“I will,” she agreed.
I had never achieved the level of fame of a Baryshnikov or a Drummond, did not often get recognized by someone who was not in the dance world. It was dawning on me that Top Step was a nest of dance lovers.
“You wouldn’t be Kirra from Queensland, wouldja?” he went on. “The singer?” Kirra dimpled and admitted it.
A nest of arts lovers.
“Both of you please be sure you sign my visitors’ book on the way out. Look, I gotta tell this to ev’body comes here the first time: be careful with these.” He produced from somewhere on his person a pair of small mesh bags, and tossed them to us. Peanuts and oyster crackers. A wedge of sharp cheese followed after them. “It ain’t so bad if a little piece o’ cheese gets away from you…but them peanuts and cra
ckers got salt on ’em. Somebody gets one o’ them in the eye, and maybe the bouncer has to go to work. And if you didn’t guess from lookin’ at me, I’m the bouncer.” He shook with mirth at his own joke. We both promised we’d be careful. “Oh, Kirra, one more t’ing. You drinkin’ that beer, an’ you feel like you wanna burp, s’cuse me, but don’t.”
“Why not, Fat?”
“You back on Earth, your stomach got food on the bottom an’ air on top, so you burp, no problem. But up here, the air an’ the food is all mixed together, you see what I mean?”
She frowned. “Thanks, mate. Hey, how about the other direction?”
“No problem there. Lotsa people spend all their time up here fartin’ around.” He shuddered with mirth again. “I’ll come back later and talk, okay? Meanwhile you both have a good time.” He drifted majestically away.
We looked at each other and giggled together. Then we looked down at our drinks and snacks. Twice as many peanuts as oyster crackers. Kirra generally ate twice as much as I did at cafeteria meals. Fat Humphrey magic again.
“Something else, i’nt he?” Kirra said.
“He sure is. All right, out with it: tell me everything about Ben.”
Her face glowed. “Oh, Morgan, i’nt he smashing? I don’t usually fall for a bloke this quick—but oh my, he lights me up. He’s so excited about everything, you know? The least little thing is special to him, and so it makes everything special for you to be around him. You know comin’ here to space wasn’t exactly my idea, I told you that: it just sort of landed on me plate and I took a bite—but Benjamin! He wants it so much, looks forward to it so much, I’m startin’ to get kind of excited about it meself. He explains to me all about how marvelous it’s gonna be, and I can understand it better. I was just thinkin’ of all this as an extra long Walkabout—but he makes it sound like more fun than Christmas.” She took a long swig of ale.
“He is fun to be around,” I agreed. “He’s sort of the backwards of my ex-husband. He had a way of making a good time dull.”
