Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  The gym was strung with orange webbing everywhere to give people something to hang onto and to keep them from caroming into each other, especially the newcomers. Some of the webbing was rigged so that the younger kids could bounce off it every which way—like a three-dimensional trampoline. Bobby went straight to that. I thought I might like to try that sometime, but I didn't feel like it right now. Mom and Bev were talking to some friends they'd made in the farms, and Douglas and Mickey went off in search of a counselor, so I was left to myself again. I hung on the orange webbing, twisting slowly this way and that, watching the crowds of people. Half the colonists must have been here in the gym, over 750 people. If this had been a two-dimensional space, it would have been crowded. In three dimensions, it only seemed cluttered.

  And it was disorienting. It was too easy to forget which was up and which was down, and then every direction looked like every other, and that's when you were most likely to lose your lunch—

  Somebody caught my foot and swung me around to face her—

  J'mee.

  "Hi," she said.

  "Hi," I said.

  After that, neither of us had anything else to say. There was too much history between us.

  I didn't know if J'mee was still angry with me or if I was angry with her. Or was that all settled now that we were both in the same starship? And what about her Dad? He probably didn't want me talking to her. After all, I was just a bit of brown tube-trash. He hadn't said "tube-nigger"—but that's what he meant.

  "So … " I said.

  "Yeah," she agreed.

  "I like you better as a girl," I said. On the Line, she'd been disguised as a boy.

  "I like you better as a girl too," she said. "We saw pictures of you on the train." Bobby and I had worn disguises on Luna. Our pictures had been shown at the hearing—

  Abruptly she laughed. "Stop looking so serious. I'm joking with you."

  "Oh. Good."

  "Didn't you like being a girl?"

  I shrugged. "It was okay." That was the expected answer. "Did you like being a boy?"

  She shrugged back and made a face. "I thought it was silly. Some of it. But it was interesting. People treated me differently."

  "Yeah, I noticed that too. All this boy-girl stuff. Sometimes it gets very confusing."

  "Uh-huh."

  And then there was another one of those endless uncomfortable silences.

  "Um—"

  "What?" she asked.

  "I was just thinking. It's going to be a long trip. Maybe we could be friends again … ?"

  "Okay," she said.

  And that was that.

  "What about your Dad?"

  She shrugged. "He's not happy unless he has someone to be angry at." And then she whispered, "Mostly, he blames the HARLIE unit."

  "He does?"

  "Yeah. He doesn't think you or your brother are smart enough."

  "Oh." That stung. But before I could say anything in response, a crew member swam up to us, a boy not much older than either J'mee or myself.

  "Charles Dingillian?"

  "Yes?"

  "Captain Boynton would like to see you. Follow me, please?"

  I turned to J'mee. "Have you met the Captain?"

  She shook her head.

  "Come with me." I held out a hand and we followed the crew member. Out of consideration for our inexperience in free fall, he didn't launch himself off the webbing. Instead, he pointed down—up?—and we followed him on a circuitous route across the webbing, pulling ourselves hand over hand. Captain Boynton was in the center of a knot of colonists and crew. He had one foot hooked in a loop of webbing and he had a plastic bubble of beer in one hand. "Oh, there you are, Ensign," he said when he saw us. "Who's your companion?"

  "Captain Boynton. This is J'mee Cheifetz."

  "Your father is David Cheifetz?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Mm." He turned to me. "Ensign, there's a rumor going around this ship that you're quite an accomplished musician. Is that true?"

  "I can play a keyboard."

  "Well, somebody was in your cabin playing Beethoven and Gershwin and Joplin. And somebody piped it throughout the entire ship."

  "I don't know about it being piped throughout the ship, sir. But yes, that was me playing."

  "My compliments." He pointed off to one side. "There's a music-cockpit over there. Would you like to play something for us now?"

  "I haven't really practiced in a month, sir."

  "I doubt that anyone will mind."

  "Yes, sir."

  J'mee and I pulled ourselves over to where the keyboard was anchored against one wall. I switched it on and familiarized myself with the layout. It was more sophisticated than I expected—more than I expected to find on a starship; but J'mee said, "When you're going into space, you can't afford second best."

  "I never thought about it that way." I hit the power switch, and all three keyboards lit up obediently.

  "What are you going to play?" she asked.

  "I dunno. What do you like?"

  "Something happy?"

  "I can do that." There was a kind of show Dad used to do for quickie concerts. It was mostly what he called "happy-silly stuff" and even though it wasn't what you would call important music, it never failed to make the audience cheer.

  It was Dad's happy-silly stuff that made me want to learn how to play. It was the first music I ever learned.

  I started with "Happy Days Are Here Again." I started out very soft, very slow, almost sad and plaintive. But then, after the first chorus, I brought up the drums, increased the beat, and turned it into a brassy assault. It was a shame I was playing in free fall; there was no place for anyone to tap their feet. But some people started clapping, and others started singing, and so I went through the song an extra time, louder and faster, building toward a climax that never happened—instead I did a trick backwards-segue into "Turkey In The Straw," which is one of the silliest songs ever; but it lends itself well to a lot of funky syncopation and over-the-top harmonies and surprise sounds like slide-whistles and explosions. I played it the way Dad always did, with elephant trumpets and carousel cacaphonies, and steam-organs, and even a couple of sirens. It was great.

  At one point, J'mee poked me and shouted, "Look up!" I did, and I saw that some people had figured out how to dance, sort of. They were bouncing between the webbing and the bulkhead, doing back flips and somersaults and swan dives, and then hitting the webbing with their back or the wall with both feet and kicking off again for more. I played louder.

  The problem with "Turkey In The Straw" is that there's no place to go from there. It's a better closer than opener. But Dad had solved that problem in a concert once in a way that brought tears of laughter to the audience's eyes. So I did the same thing here—I segued into the finale of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Cannons and all. And cranked the sound up to eleven.

  It worked.

  Everybody cheered and yelled and applauded, and a bunch of people I didn't even know swam over and thanked me and clapped me on the back and I ended up feeling good about myself in a way I'd never felt before. It was strange and weird and unsettling. I loved it.

  ORIENTATION

  See, this whole business—ever since Dad had said, "I have an idea. Let's go to the moon"—we'd just kept moving and moving and moving, but without any real sense of where we were going. Or why. Or what we would do when we got there. At least, that's what it felt like to me.

  I mean, it hadn't been very well planned. We'd bounced around from one piece of luck to another—both bad and good—and we hadn't been so stupid that we'd killed ourselves (except for Dad), but neither had we been so smart that we could say we knew what we were doing.

  And even though everybody else had some idea what they wanted—by the time we launched off Luna, I didn't even know if I wanted to go anymore. Except by then, I didn't really have a choice.

  When we'd started, all I'd wanted was to be left alone with my music. Back on Earth, I'd
had to fight for every moment of privacy. There wasn't any. And the situation was worse once we started traveling—the only moments I'd had to myself in the past month had been when Alexei's people had webbed me and tossed me onto the cart. So I hadn't really had much chance to think about any music at all—not while we were jumping off the planet, not while we were bouncing off the moon, and certainly not while we were leaping to the stars. What with everything else that was going on, the only music I'd had was the music at Dad's funeral. And the music at the party—

  All of which proved that I was a bigger idiot than everybody said.

  Because I'd always thought that music was something I did for myself.

  I'd never realized that it could be something I did for others.

  But after that impromptu concert, the mood on the Cascade was different. People were humming and singing in the corridors. And joking. And anything that went thump, someone else would sing that piece of the 1812 that ended with the cannon shots. Da-da Da-da Da-da Da-Daa! Da! Da! Boom!

  It made me smile.

  So I guess I should talk about that too.

  J'mee and I were hiding in the keel. Well, not exactly hiding—just getting away from everyone else, so we could talk. We weren't talking about anything in particular, just stuff, and then suddenly she said, "You never smile, do you."

  "Yeah, I do."

  "I've never seen you smile."

  "I smile all the time."

  "Not on this side of your face, you don't. You never smile."

  "I do too," I insisted.

  She furrowed her eyebrows and gave me an exasperated girlfriend look. "Charles. Trust me on this. You are not a smiler. Maybe you think you're smiling. But over here—on my side—I don't see it."

  "Well, maybe I haven't had a lot to smile about."

  "You could have smiled when you saw me."

  "I did."

  "No, you didn't."

  "This conversation isn't going anywhere," I said, frustrated.

  "I know how you could end it."

  "How?"

  "By smiling."

  "What if I don't feel like smiling?"

  "What if you do?"

  Of course, now that she had challenged me to smile, I couldn't. I was too frustrated to smile.

  So she leaned over and kissed me.

  On the lips.

  Long enough to be a real kiss.

  The first one.

  Oh.

  "There," she said. "That's a smile."

  It must have been a smile. My face felt different. I didn't know what to say.

  "I like you when you smile," she said. "You're cute."

  Cute? Me! If anybody else had said that, I'd have socked him. But when J'mee said it—well, whatever my face was doing, suddenly it started doing a lot more of it.

  She leaned toward me. And kissed me again.

  This time I kissed back.

  When we finally broke apart, neither of us said anything. We just smiled at each other. It wasn't just my face that felt different now. It was all of me.

  And afterward, the smile wouldn't go away. I felt like I was flying. Well, I was—we didn't have any gravity anywhere but the centrifuges—but now, I liked free fall.

  Douglas and Mickey noticed immediately. But they were too polite to say anything directly. As obvious as it must have been. Mickey simply said, "You look happy," and Douglas gave me a kind of knowing look that made me glad to have him as a brother, so I knew it was okay, I could talk to him about it later.

  Then Mom and Bev and Stinky came in, all smelling fresh from the showers, and we headed up/forward to the galley for dinner. Bev noticed that I was in a good mood, and pointed it out to Mom. "Oh, is that what's different?" she said. "Maybe he's finally got a girlfriend. That'll do it every time."

  So of course, Stinky had to say something too. "Chigger's got a girlfriend. Chigger's got a girlfriend." I looked over at Douglas, and he said, "Shut up, Stinky." And Stinky looked at him, surprised, and actually shut up.

  The galley was another cargo pod—everything was a cargo pod—only this one was fitted for free-fall meal service. There were twenty-three of them, all in constant operation. There were 1500 people aboard the Cascade, so everybody had to eat in assigned shifts. Sometimes you could trade a mealtime with someone else, but mostly not. And sometimes, you could have an actual sit-down meal in the centrifuge, and most people tried to eat there whenever they could, but most times, it wasn't convenient, even if you had reserved a table.

  The whole ship was a giant rabbit warren of tubes and hatches, and everything was sealed most of the time, and unless you knew what you were doing, sometimes it was just this side of impossible to get from one place to another. It helped a little bit that everything was color coded and numbered and there were arrows and colored lines everywhere; but you still had to know what arrows to follow and how the numbers worked, only this was in three dimensions, not two, and there weren't any up-and-down cues, and most of the time it was just a whole lot easier to stay in your local service cluster.

  At least, the free-fall galleys had furniture—of a sort. That helped a little. But it was a kind of furniture that didn't depend on gravity. The first time we ate in the galley, Douglas slipped into geek-mode and explained that on Earth or any other planet, furniture is about resisting gravity—it's about holding things up. But in free fall, furniture is only about leverage. You bumped your butt onto a bench-thing, and hooked your feet around a rod beneath, and your tray was held in place by a magnet on the part that served as a table. You could also put a keyboard on it for typing or playing music. We had the same kind of seats in the classrooms.

  But Mickey disagreed. He'd had more experience with free fall and different flavors of gravity than most people; working on the Line, living at Geostationary, he'd had lots of time to get adjusted to free fall, Earth-normal, and all the steps in between, including Mars and Luna. Even a 10% difference can be profound, he said, especially when you're walking—because when you're walking, your body is like a pendulum, and depending on the amount of gravity you're dealing with, you have to throw yourself forward—just enough that your body falls in the direction you want to go, and then you move your foot forward to catch yourself and keep going. That's why you can't walk in Lunar gravity, you have to bounce; but Martian gravity is strong enough to let you glide. He said we could see for ourselves on the different levels of the ship's centrifuge. I intended to do just that.

  But on the matter of furniture, Mickey said that the real reason for furniture is that it lets you organize things. Not just things, it also lets you organize people. You can put the baby in the crib, the toddler in the playpen, the children in the sandbox, the mommy in the kitchen, the daddy at the desk. And it was especially useful for meetings and meals, because when we were all situated on our various perches, we were all oriented the same way. And we could face each other to talk. So, according to Mickey, furniture is about orientation—first physically, then emotionally.

  Mom and Bev and Stinky went to get their meal trays from the service end, there wasn't room for all of us to go at once, so Doug and Mickey and I grabbed six seats together until it was our turn. I looked across to Doug and asked, "Is this what it feels like? Was it like this for you?"

  Douglas and Mickey exchanged a glance, and then Douglas said, "Yeah, kinda."

  Mickey added, "It gets better, Chigger. You'll see."

  "Okay, thanks."

  While we were eating—and for some reason, the food actually tasted good tonight—Senior Petty Officer Bradley came floating by. "Charles, can I talk to you for a moment?"

  "Uh—sure."

  He hooked himself onto a perch. "Listen, your dad was a conductor, wasn't he?"

  "Yeah … ?"

  "I heard he was pretty good."

  "He was one of the best. And I'm not just saying that. It's true."

  "I don't doubt it. You're pretty good yourself. Your dad trained you?"

  I glanced at Douglas. Should
I answer this? He nodded. I turned back to Mr. Bradley. "Yes, sir. He did."

  "Well, he did a good job. You're very good with a keyboard."

  "Thank you, sir." I wondered if he was ever going to get to the point.

  My impatience must have shown, because he said, "Here's the thing. Some of us colonists—we've tried to form a band, but we don't really know what we're doing. We don't have a lot of experience that way. So we thought that maybe you could help us get started … ?"

  "I don't know about bands," I said. "I know about orchestras."

  "What's the difference?"

  "A band has no strings attached," said Douglas, dryly.

  "Huh?" Bradley blinked.

  "What Douglas said. A band is a lot of blowhards. All wind."

  "Oh," said Bradley, suddenly getting it. "Those are music jokes, aren't they?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  "See, I didn't know that. All the music on this ship is canned. We thought that was fine, until last night when you started playing. That's what we're missing here. Our own music."

  I looked to Douglas. He looked to Mickey. Mickey looked to me. The silence must have been too loud; Mom stopped wiping Stinky's face and looked over at us, "What's up?"

  "They're forming a band," Douglas said.

  "Good idea," said Mom. "This place could use a little livening up."

  Abruptly, I had an idea. "Will you sing with us?" I asked.

  "Huh—?" She nearly choked. "Charles, I haven't sung in public in nine years. Not since Bobby was born."

  "And you've been angry about it ever since," I said. She glanced at me sharply—because it was the truth.

  "We'd be pleased to have you, ma'am," Bradley said.