by Spider
She lowered her voice. “And he’s a champion lover! He does a bit o’ what Fat just did, knows what you want about a second before you know it yourself.”
“Definitely the backwards of my ex.”
“If I hadn’t had to clear out so Robert could get some sleep, I might be there still. Hey, how are you and Robert gettin’ along, then?”
“What the hell is that stuff floating in your beer?”
“What, this? It’s yeast. Thomas Cooper leaves it in, for flavor. Kinda interestin’ the way it swirls about like that: the zero gee saves you havin’ to shake up the bottle to get it off the bottom. Seriously, though, what about you and Robert? I had this lovely idea how handy it’d be if you two hit it off like Ben and me. We could swap roomies and—”
“Whoa!” I said. “Take your time.” Change the subject again? No, deal with it. “I don’t know how I feel about Robert…but I do know I’m not in any hurry. The most important thing on my mind right now is learning how to dance all over again, and that’s all I want to think about until I get it done or it kills me. Robert will have to wait.” Now change the subject. “I wonder how Fat Humphrey manages to decant wine properly in free fall? This is delicious.”
Kirra started to answer, then took a sip of beer instead. “Look, Morgan, answer me this. Are we roommates, or are we friends?”
“Friends,” I answered without hesitation. “I hope.”
“Then listen’a me. There some blokes you can hold at arm’s length and after a while they go away. But I know you, and I’ve seen you with Robert. He’s got a hook in you…just a little one, maybe, but a hook. And you got one in him. You try keepin’ him at arm’s length forever, your arms’re gonna start gettin’ shorter. He ain’t gonna go away. You want to get on with your dancin’, it might be less distraction to just go ahead an’ get it over with, see where it goes an’ get it integrated. Might help to have somethin’ to dance about, eh?”
I don’t remember exactly what mumbled evasion I made. Just then a welcome distraction presented itself: the floorshow began.
Well, not exactly a floorshow. A single performer, a busker, doing an act I would have thought impossible in zero gee: juggling.
Free fall juggling is done barefoot. You do not make the balls or clubs or whatever go in a circle, because they won’t. Instead you make them go in a rectangle. Hand to hand to foot to foot to hand. This particular juggler used orange balls of some resilient material, the size of real oranges. It seemed he was known and liked here; people broke off conversations to watch him and clap along. He had twinkling eyes and a goatee. Except for a G-string, he was barefoot to the eyebrows. He began in a slow motion that would simply not have been possible on Earth, then got faster and faster until the balls began to blur into an orange rectangle in the air before him. He started with four, but keep adding more from a pouch at his waist. I thought I counted as high as sixteen. Then suddenly he changed the pattern, so that they crossed over and back in front of him in an X-pattern, and then went back to a rectangle again. There was applause. He brought his feet up and hands down until the rectangle was a square, then a horizontal rectangle, and returned to the basic position. More applause. Suddenly he had one hand high over his head and the rectangle was a triangle. With the suddenly free left hand he took a joint from his pocket and struck it alight, took a deep puff. Loud applause. He seemed to pay no attention at all to the balls. He took another puff, tossed the joint to the nearest patron, and resumed work with all four limbs. The balls began to ever so gradually slow down, until they were individually distinguishable, and continued to slow. Within a minute he was back in the slow motion he’d started with—yes, there were sixteen balls—and still they kept decelerating. Without warning he flipped over, upside down to his original orientation, without disturbing the stately progress of the balls. Thunderous applause. Suddenly all the balls exploded outward from him, in a spherical distribution. I half-ducked, not one came near me, or anyone else. All sixteen bounced off something harmless and returned to him in almost-unison; he caught them all in his pouch and folded at the waist in a free fall bow. The house came down.
“Teena,” I asked, “how do I tip that juggler five dollars?”
“It’s done, Morgan,” Teena said in my ears. “I’ve debited your account. His name is Christopher Micah.”
He began a new routine involving what seemed to be razor-sharp knives. I didn’t see how he could deal with knives with his feet—and didn’t get to find out that day, because just then there was a small disturbance behind me. Kirra and I turned to look. Micah kept on working, properly ignoring the distraction.
Fat Humphrey was drifting just outside one of the opaqued bubble booths, talking softly to someone inside, who was answering him in too loud a voice. It seemed to be the second-oldest argument in history: the customer wanted more booze and Fat was cutting her off, politely and firmly. I started to turn back to catch Micah’s knife act, when all at once I recognized the voice. It was Sulke.
Everyone else had returned their attention to the show. Kirra and I exchanged a glance and quietly slipped over to see if we could be of help, taking our drinks and munchies with us.
We were. Fat was handicapped somewhat by being an old friend of hers, but because Kirra and I were her students we were able to cheerfully bully her into quieting down. We swarmed into her booth with her, winked at Fat, and sealed the door to keep the noise inside.
“S’not fair, gahdammit,” she complained. “I’m not even near drunk enough.”
Kirra sent a peanut toward her in slow motion. “Catch that.”
She missed in three grabs, then tried to catch it in her mouth and muffed that too. It went up her nose, and she blasted it clear with a loud snort. “I didn’t say I wasn’t drunk. Said I wasn’t drunk enough.”
“For what?” I asked soothingly.
“To fall asleep, gahdammit. This is my one day off a week, the day I catch up on all the sleep I missed, an’ if I fuck up and miss any I’ll never get caught up.”
“How come you gotta be drunker’n this to fall asleep?” Kirra asked.
“Because I’m scared.” She heard the words come out and frowned. “No, I’m not, gahdammit, I’m pissed off is what I am! I’m not scared of anything. But I’m mad as hell.”
“About what?”
She sneered. “Hmmph! How would you know? You groundhogs. You freebreathers. Never paid for an hour’s air in your life, either of you. Where’d you come from, McLeod, North America somewhere, right? Worst come to worst, you could always go on welfare. Kirr’, you could always jungle up and live off the land. There’s no fuckin’ land to live off up here.”
“Rough,” Kirra agreed.
“You don’t know the half of it! Nineteen friggin’ outfits in space I can work for, and eighteen of ’em suck wind. The only place that doesn’t treat you like shit is this one…and now crazy bastards are shootin’ at it.”
“Shooting at it!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“Aw fer chrissake, you really think the air plant went down last night by accident? You have any idea how many different systems have to fail in cascade before that can happen? You probably think it was space junk put a hole in your Elevator on the way up here, huh?”
I was shocked. “What makes you think it wasn’t?”
“You were there. Did you see the object that hulled you?”
“Well, no. I think it ended up in the Steward’s head.”
She shook her head. “There was nothin’ in Henderson’s head but burned meat. It was a laser. They’re keepin’ it quiet, but a frenna mine saw the hull.”
“But who the hell would want to hurt Top Step?”
She stared. “You serious? Religious fanatics, wanna pull down the false angels and their wicked cosmic orgy. Shiites, Catholics, Fundamentalists, take your pick. Then you got the Chinese, since old Chen Ten Li got tossed out on his ear. Then there’s the other eighteen sonofabitch outfits I tol’ you ’bout, and their
parent corporations dirtside. Top Step could outcompete any one of them at what they do, and the only reason it doesn’t is because the Starseed Foundation chooses not to. How could they not all hate this place?”
I thought of the epidemic of food poisoning that had run through Suit Camp just before takeoff. “Jesus.”
She was frowning hugely. “Gahdammit. Not supposed to talk about this shit with you people. Prob’ly get shit for it. Bad for morale. Might get scared an’ go home, kilobucks down’a tube. Forget I said anything, okay?”
“Sure,” Kirra said soothingly.
“Thanks,” Sulke said. “You’re okay, for a freebreather.” She reached out and snatched Kirra’s beer, finished it in a single squeeze.
I placed my own drink unobtrusively behind me, and hoped it would stay there. “Sulke, tell me something. If being a free-lance spacer is really so bad—and I believe you—then why not opt out? Take that last step and become a Stardancer like us? Then you could tell Skyfac and Lunindustries and all the rest to go take a hike.”
She boiled over. “You outa your gahdamn mind? You people are all assholes. Worse than assholes, you’re cowards: solving your problems by runnin’ away from them. You won’t catch me doin’ that shit. Maybe I can’t ever go home again, but at least I’m human! I’ve hung around Stardancers a long time, and by Jesus they ain’t human, and I can’t understand how in hell a human bein’ could deliberately stop being a human bein’. I’ll teach you fools how to swim, but I got nothing but contempt for ya. Nobody gets inside Sulke Drager’s head but Sulke Drager, an’ don’ you forget it, see?”
Like all true spacers, she was a rugged individualist. She was certainly paying a high price to be one in space.
“Do you have to go EVA to get home, Sulke?”
“Crash here on my day off,” she said, eyes beginning to cross. “And even if I did, I can navigate safely in free space when I’m dree times trunker than this. That’s why it’s not fair that fat bastard cut me off.”
“Well, since he did,” Kirra said reasonably, “what do we want to stay around here and class up his place for him, then?”
“Damn right,” I agreed. “Sleep’s too precious to miss on his account. Let’s quit this program.”
Sulke allowed herself to be taken home. Teena guided the three of us to the dormitory where employees crashed. It was basically a cube full of sleepsacks, with minimal amenities and few entertainment facilities. If Top Step was the best of nineteen employers in space, the others had to be pretty bad.
By the time we got back to Le Puis, Micah had finished for the night. But the tenor sax player who’d replaced him was very good, had a big full Ben Webster sound, so we stayed and drank and tipped him, and this time remembered to sign Fat Humphrey’s guest book—in tipsy scrawls—before we left. As we were doing so, he came up beside us. “You handled Sulke real nice,” he said, “and I like her. You two didn’t spend no money in here tonight, you understand?” We thanked him.
Then Kirra went to keep her rendezvous with her bug-eyed lover, and I went off to my gym to work.
To my surprise, the wine helped. This time I managed to set sixteen beats I could stand to watch on replay, and repeat them more or less at will. I was going to beat this! It was even harder than transitioning from ballet to modern had been, and I was no longer in my twenties…but I was going to do it.
It helped me forget the uneasiness that Sulke’s talk of sabotage had put in the back of my mind. I was pretty sure she was wrong, anyway.
Kirra was still out when I got back to our room. I sat kûkanzen for about an hour, watched dance holos for a while in bed, then put on a sleep mask and earphones that played soft music so she wouldn’t wake me when she came in.
Nevertheless I woke an hour or so later. There are no bedsprings to creak in zero gee, and they were probably making an honest effort to be quiet, but Kirra was after all a singer.
I thumbed the sleep mask up onto my forehead.
I can’t claim I was a voyeurism virgin. Dancers generally lead a lively life, and once or twice in my checkered past I had watched live humans go at it—often enough, it had seemed to me. It’s the oldest dance there is, of course, but as a spectator art it palls quickly, once the excitement of taboo-breaking is past.
But I never watched anyone make love, which is different, even to a mere witness.
Let alone in zero gee, which changes things.
They were beautiful together, moving in slow joyous unison, singing a soft, wordless song in improvised harmony, flexing together inside their sleepsack like a single beating heart.
A host of emotions ran through my mind. Annoyance that they were being so impolite, followed by the thought that in a few months I would be “in the same room with” thousands of love-making people, that soon none of us would ever again make love in private, that dealing with this disturbing situation was the best possible rehearsal I could have for what was to come, that if I couldn’t deal with two friends making love three meters away, I’d never be able to deal with forty-odd thousand strangers making love inside my skull…
…and I couldn’t get around the fact that watching them was turning me distinctly on. I had to deal with that, and with the fact that I was staring as much at Kirra as at Ben, and with jealousy of Kirra, and with the way my own growing arousal wanted me to get up and go find Robert and fuck his brains out, and with how another part of me that I didn’t understand wouldn’t let me do that, and it was hard to think about any of this stuff when I was getting horny enough to bark, and finally my hand crept down to my clitoris and began to move in slow circles, and as they increased in speed I realized with shock that Ben, unlike most men, had not taken his glasses off to copulate—
—his 360° vision glasses!
I froze in embarrassment for a long moment…and then I told myself he was too busy to pay attention to what was going on behind his back—no, I told myself the hell with it—and finished what I had started.
Eventually so did they. And then I think all three of us fell asleep. I know I did, feeling more relaxed than I had since I’d left Earth.
The next day the three of us discussed it over breakfast—Kirra brought it up, asking if they’d awakened me—and after some talk we agreed to be the kind of friends who can be that intimate among one another. It was something new for me, and a bit of a stretch: I’d never allowed anyone to observe me in ecstasy before except the one who was causing it. But in the days that followed I came to find it quite pleasant and natural to read a book, or watch TV, while Kirra and Ben made love a few meters away…and more than once the sight inspired me to pleasure myself. Kirra and Ben were delighted with this state of affairs, as it gave them a convenient place to make love whenever they wished—it seemed Robert was more inhibited, and so it was less comfortable for them in Ben’s room.
I think it’s different for men, harder to watch and not participate, harder to let yourself be watched. For some of them masturbating seems to represent a kind of defeat in their minds. Sad.
Those first few days in Top Step pretty much set the pattern for the next four weeks…to the extent that there was a pattern. Meals and classes loosely defined the day, but we had great slabs of unstructured free time after both morning and afternoon class, and our evenings, to spend as we wished—piefaced in Le Puis if that was what we chose.
One thing we all did was swap life stories. There’d been no time to do so back at Suit Camp, where every spare minute was spent studying or undergoing tests. I can’t recall how many times I told my own story until everyone had heard it. One common theme that ran through the stories I heard in return was technological obsolescence. Just as the automobile had once ruined the buggy whip trade, the recent enormous strides in nanotechnology (made with much help from the Starseed Foundation) had made a lot of formerly lucrative occupations superfluous. Suddenly a lot of white-collar workers found themselves facing the same dilemma as a dancer or an athlete in her forties: should I start life over from
square one, or opt out of the game altogether? Quite a few of them chose Symbiosis.
Another common topic of conversation was politics, but—and I know you’ll find this hard to believe, for I did—political discussions somehow never once degenerated into arguments. Even in the first weeks, we were starting to find all political differences of Earthbound humans less and less relevant to anything in our own lives—and the tendency increased with time.
I’d expected to work harder than this. I said as much to Reb one day during class, sometime during the first week. “I guess I just pictured us all spending most of our time…working.”
“At what, Morgan?”
“I don’t know, studying concrete stuff we’ll need when we’re Stardancers. Solar system navigation, ballistics, solar sailing, astronomy, uh, zero-gee engineering and industry, nanotechnology, picotechnology—things like that.” There was a murmur of agreement from the others in the class.
“You may study any of those, if you wish,” he said. “Some of you are doing so, on your own initiative. But it’s not necessary. Studying data, memorizing facts, is not necessary. You won’t need those facts until you become a Stardancer and join the Starmind…and then you’ll have them. That’s the beauty of telepathy.”
He was right, of course. The instant I entered Symbiosis, I’d be part of the group consciousness Reb called the Starmind. I’d have total access to the combined memories of all living Stardancers, something over forty thousand minds. Anything they knew, I would know, when and if I needed to know it.
As they would know everything I knew…
You can be told about something like that a thousand times, and remind yourself a million…and still you just can’t get your mind around it, somehow.
“What you need to study,” Reb continued, “is not facts…but attitude, a flexible mindset, so that encompassing that much scope doesn’t destroy you. That’s why meditation is the best work you can do.”
