Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  We drew steadily closer to the main dock. The detailed plans of the Glory Of God had been a big secret, but we knew the general layout. The long arm of the cross was eight kilometers long, and the short arm five kilometers. However, the living quarters were all contained in a sphere about three hundred meters in diameter on the far side of the cross, and the Christ-figure itself was no more than a thin translucent skin stretched over a metal frame of girders. The purpose of the Glory Of God had been effect. Thomas Madison had planned the whole system with that in mind. GOG moved in sun-synchronous polar orbit, roughly eight hundred kilometers high, which meant that the cross was visible at nine-thirty every evening (prime time, if you want to be cynical) from almost everywhere on Earth. Seen from the surface, GOG was a shining emblem in the sky, bigger than the full Moon. As its designer had intended, the sight was breathtaking.

  But Vilfredo Germani was a theoretical physicist, not a religious leader. He was interested in other uses of GOG, and visual effects were of no interest to him. As the Shuttle performed its final closing he became more intense and preoccupied. The funding foundations and government grant committees knew Germani as a gregarious, affable man, the most lucid and persuasive salesman for his ideas that could be imagined. They would not have recognized the twitchy, dark-faced fanatic who peered anxiously at the forward screen.

  To be honest, I was no less nervous. GOG had been the home and personal vision of Thomas Madison, the Hand of God, the People’s Friend, the Living Word, the Great Healer. Thomas Madison, born Eric Kravely, poor and lecherous and angry until at thirty-two he had given up selling perfumes and found his true vocation. Contributors who gave enough (five million dollars, according to the Press, but they had that figure too low) were flown out to GOG, for a personal audience and special treatment. That included visions guaranteed to send them home reeling, their minds receptive to even bigger suggestions of support. Those special effects had never been documented. If they were still operating, our visit might be wilder than Germani realized.

  We docked, and that ended my speculations. The Shuttle operated in a shirt-sleeve environment, but the inside of GOG would be, at least initially, exposed to the vacuum and temperatures of open space. The four of us climbed into our suits. In spite of all our practicing, Celia seemed to have no idea what she was doing, and I had to help her with the clasps and seals.

  The attitude control system of GOG was still functioning, and it held the Christ-figure always pointing toward Earth. That displayed a clean-lined, beautiful design, the best that money could buy. However, the dock and living quarters were on the far side, hidden from Earth-view, and our final approach had told quite a different story. The back of GOG was little more than an open frame, with the habitation sphere attached to the center of the cross. We could see the crude welds on the girders, and a tangle of cables that held the whole structure in balance. Everything looked dark, and somehow dirty, as though it had hung there in space for a million years. The Shuttle ship that Thomas Madison used to bring his visitors to GOG had, by no accident, lacked observation ports.

  It was typical of Vilfredo Germani that our approach to GOG was televised, and that his first act when we were inside the Glory Of God was to tape a lecture for subsequent transmission. He had his sponsors to satisfy, and although he was a superb scientist he had even better showman’s instincts. Thomas Madison would have appreciated him.

  However, the television program could also be considered a foolhardy act. Madison’s followers had not died with him. To millions of the faithful, back on Earth, the invasion of the Glory Of God for secular purposes was simple sacrilege. It had been six years now, but the followers were still loyal and Madison had always attracted extremists. When he returned home, Germani would be a target for everything from vilification to assassination attempts.

  With McCollum’s help I set up the camera just inside the dock. A corridor leading to the interior of GOG stretched away dark behind Germani’s suited figure, and added a suitable element of mystery. While I adjusted the camera angle, McCollum searched around for a power outlet. He tested it with an ammeter, and grunted with satisfaction.

  “Still juice here. That’s going to save us a whole lot of trouble.” Bright fluorescents came on, and threw a harsh pattern of yellow light and black shadows across the beams and partitions of the chamber. Germani looked around him, nodded at me to start recording, and stared straight into the camera.

  “The question has been with us now for more than forty years,” he said easily. “Is spacetime quantized, and if so, how? We hope that in the next two weeks we will be able to provide a definite answer.”

  I had heard him talk before, and he knew all the tricks. If he had not happened to have the talent to be a top scientist, he would have made his living easily as a salesman. Grab them in the first second, and then you can give your spiel at leisure. Not that the average person would consider spacetime quantization much of a grabber, but Germani was now addressing his funding agencies, science writers, and fellow scientists (in roughly that order).

  “Planck and Einstein and Bohr started this,” he went on, “over a century ago. Planck first proposed that in certain circumstances energy must be emitted only in discrete units—quanta—rather than being continuous. Einstein extended that idea to more general circumstances, and then Bohr applied it to the electronic transitions in atoms. We can call this process first quantization, the quantization of energy levels and energy emission.”

  It was astonishing to see how his manner changed when the camera was on him. Germani modeled his public presence on his fellow-countryman, fellow physicist, and idol, Enrico Fermi. A few minutes ago he had been nervous and jumpy, now even with the confining presence of the spacesuit he was all relaxed affability. There was even a self-deprecating little smile on his face, as though to say that he knew the audience was familiar with all this, but he had to repeat it anyway.

  “The next step was taken about 1930,” he went on. “Heisenberg, Pauli and Dirac quantized the electromagnetic field itself—second quantization.” As he spoke the lights in the chamber flickered and dimmed to a level much too low for the cameras. Germani swore, changed at once into an irritable physicist, and swung round to McCollum.

  “What the devil’s this? I thought we had electric power.”

  While he was speaking, the lights dropped even further. A deep, throbbing hum sounded in my ears (radio-frequency induction in my suit). A blue haze filled the airless chamber, and within it flashing letters formed: THE GLORY OF GOD, THE GLORY OF GOD, THE GLORY OF GOD.

  I heard Celia’s gasp. “What’s happening?”

  “Part of the visitors’ reception routine.” I was already heading along the entry corridor, followed closely by Malcolm McCollum. “The system must still be turned on, we triggered it when we docked. Now we have to find the power control center.”

  McCollum was moving on past me. “Which way?” he asked over his suit phone. We had come to a branch in the corridor.

  “This one, for a bet.” I took the upward leg and followed it for twenty meters, until I found myself at an airlock. “This the way to the real interior. I’ll go back for the others. I’ll bet the welcoming system switches off as soon as there’s no one in the chamber.”

  McCollum grunted as he moved to study the lock controls. “You may be right, Jimmy. Go do it. Maybe you’ll be more useful than I thought. I’m going to have a go at this airlock. If we have a breathable atmosphere inside things will go a lot easier setting up our experiment.”

  As I returned to the docking area I took a closer look at the corridor walls. GOG had been deserted and empty for six years now, circling the globe like a dark monument to Madison’s dreams. We were the first people to set foot on the habitat in all that time, but once the lights were on everything still shone new and gleaming. The Glory Of God.

  By the time that I got there Germani had become tired of waiting and
returned to the Shuttle to oversee the unloading of his experimental equipment. The crates were floating in now, seven of them. Celia was opening each one and inspecting the contents. These instruments would remain in vacuum—they were designed to do so—until they could be deployed in precise positions along GOG’s unequal arms.

  Everything had survived the trip up from Earth, and by the time that Germani reappeared and heard that the equipment was fine, air and full power were available in the interior. Suddenly the head of the party was beaming again, waving his hands and eager to get out of his suit.

  Time to celebrate. We had finished Phase One of what Vilfredo Germani unblushingly described as “the most important physics experiment ever performed by humans.”

  Celia Germani is short and blond; ash blond, North Italian blond. Left uncombed—as it usually is—the hair of her head clusters to tight ringlets. She disdains the use of makeup. Her skin is naturally dark, and she loves to sunbathe naked. It is a surprise to find fair, sun-baked hair on her tanned legs, in her armpits, and in a broad, golden swath along her belly from pubes to navel.

  Before I sought out Celia she was, in her own charming words, “almost a virgin” at twenty-seven. Blame that on her father. He had turned the mind of his only child so effectively to physics that until I came on the scene there had been no time for much else. Now Celia wanted to make up for lost opportunities.

  Five hours after our arrival at GOG, the first stage of the occupation was complete. We had chosen living quarters not far from the main lock, set up our monitors for air and power, eaten a makeshift meal, and gone to bed. In the excitement of liftoff, ascent, and rendezvous, no one had slept for thirty-six hours.

  As soon as McCollum and Germani were out of sight, Celia drifted into my room. She slipped off her clothes and wriggled into my sleeping bag. “Jimmy?”

  “No.”

  She giggled. “Here I am.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” I responded to her kiss, but my head was full of my own thoughts and worries. I did not want company.

  “Jimmy, we’re in freefall. Remember?”

  I remembered. It had been a point of persuasion to Celia, one reason for my presence with the experimental party. Sex in zero gee. I had talked of it as an ecstatic experience, making up the details as I went along. Now Celia was calling me on it.

  My body did its part, willingly if not enthusiastically. Perhaps the lack of gravity did add some extra dimension to our actions, for although my mind was calm and detached as Celia gasped and shuddered against me, I had the feeling of consciousness expanding outward, concentric waves of my awareness that swelled to encompass the whole of GOG. Something was out there, something strange.

  While we lay coupled I wandered mentally through the rest of the habitat’s interior, the part that we had not yet explored. We had encountered no more of Thomas Madison’s planned miracles, but even without them the Glory Of God induced a feeling of uneasiness, of events poised to happen.

  I wondered. What had they left behind here, the followers of Madison, when they fled to Earth?

  The Church of Christ Ascendant, the heart of Madison’s empire, had collapsed at the moment of his death, days before the organization was due to be hit by Earth authorities with tax evasion and criminal charges. The staff had hurried away from the Glory Of God, panic-stricken that they might be stranded five hundred miles above the Earth. Many of them had arrived on the surface just in time to be sent to jail for fraud and extortion.

  The habitat had emptied with no long goodbyes, no attempt to put the place into mothballs, no time to put the power supplies on standby status. (Will the last person to leave the Glory Of God please turn out the lights.)

  I had learned the details of Madison’s death through the news media, just like anyone else. To his devout followers it was not the fact of his death that was intolerable; it was its ignominious nature.

  Part of Madison’s plan required that he return to Earth from GOG every month or two for personal contacts and minor miracles. Everywhere he went he offered gifts: printed prayers, signed photographs, little silvery reproductions of GOG. To his minor contributors, people who had given fifty dollars, there was a little plastic telescope, cost maybe a quarter, that would let you see the details on the orbiting cross quite easily. For the skeptics, or those who were wavering, he would call on the power of Faith and hold his hand in a naked flame without being burned, stop his heart for two minutes, or stare full into the sun without being blinded.

  The little tricks were nothing in themselves, but they added to his image.

  Image: he was all image, crafted by the most skillful and professional public relations campaign in history. GOG’s messages were sent by television and radio to two hundred countries, and to every one he projected a different personality, even used a different name. He was Thomas Madison only in the United States. Was he really an American, a Chinese, a Russian, Brazilian, or European? No one could say. Subtle plastic surgery had shaped his nose just so, adjusted the spacing and shape of his eyes, modelled his cheekbones, defined his hairline. Surgery had given him the features of the world, made him a face for all nations. Few people knew the man behind the facade, but everyone agreed on one thing: compared with Thomas Madison, every previous religious leader and fund-raiser had been a fumbling amateur.

  And then he had been destroyed, six years ago, by something so stupid.

  Women threw themselves at Madison when he visited Earth; young and old, ugly and beautiful, rich and poor. He could have had discreet affairs with a hundred or a thousand of them. Instead he took the wife of Jack Burdon, his oldest friend and staunchest supporter. Burdon led the Church of Christ Ascendant in Australia. He would do anything for Madison, but when he caught the two of them in the act on Madison’s two-hundred foot yacht he had gone temporarily crazy. According to his own confession he had shot Madison five times in the head, slit his throat, and thrown the body to the sharks and saltwater crocodiles that patrol the coast of northern Australia. He had beaten his wife so severely that she was now a grinning vegetable. Then Burdon had told everything he knew to the international police and the taxation authorities, providing the evidence that sent a couple of hundred top people in the Church to jail.

  A great financial empire (fifty billion dollars, tax free, and still growing) had vanished between a woman’s thighs. Audits revealed that most of the money had vanished with it, like rain on dry sand, leaving no sign of its existence.

  There remained of Madison’s ministry only the bewildered followers, still grieving for what they had lost, and this empty shell, the Glory Of God, sweeping dark and silent through the star-filled sky. How many people, every night, still looked up longingly and hoped for the return of the glittering cross?

  Celia interrupted my thoughts, gripping me hard and whispering in my ear. “Jimmy. What’s that—do you hear it?”

  It was a murmur of sound, coming from all around us. The whole body of GOG was in tiny movement, creaking and flexing, a Titan stretching in his sleep.

  I groped at my side until I found my watch and looked at its luminous dial. “It’s nothing bad. We’ll get this every fifty minutes or so.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Thermal cycling. GOG goes in and out of Earth-shadow every orbit, cools down or heats up. Everything contracts or expands.”

  She snuggled against me, enfolding me with her arms and legs. “You’re so smart. You could be anything you want to be. How did I live before I had you?” She moved one hand to stroke my chest, running her fingers up along my collarbone and into the hollow of my neck. “You’ll never find anyone who loves you as much as I do. Never. Tell me you love me, Jimmy. Tell me you don’t know how you lived before you found me.”

  Just a couple more days, I said to myself. Then I told Celia that I loved her. I did not tell her how I lived before I found her.

  The next morn
ing we were ready to go on with Germani’s experiment. Malcolm McCollum was at GOG’s main power board, checking circuits. I was with him, making my own analysis of the places where power had been available when we first arrived at the habitat.

  McCollum patched in the compact fusion unit that we brought up from Earth, then paused with his big fist clamped on one of the switches. “Now this would be a real fun test. If I throw it, we light up the whole of GOG. Ninety megawatts. We only draw half that for the experiment.”

  I looked at my watch and shook my head. “Don’t do it, Mac. We’re on the night side. People down there would get the wrong idea.”

  “Ah.” He grinned at me. “Nice thought, though—get the religious maggots a bit excited. But you’re probably right, Jimmy. Stay here while I tell Germani we’re all set.”

  I was happy to have time to myself. While McCollum was with Vilfredo Germani I confirmed what I already suspected. One power board, fully operating, was linked to a hidden part of GOG. Some region of the habitat was inaccessible to normal entry. I could trace it by following the power lines.

  I did not have time to follow up at once. Germani was bursting with impatience, and Celia and I were sent outside to string the array of interferometers and magnetometers along GOG’s jutting arms. The placement was critical, and tightly controlled through an array of lasers. It called for no real thought, but for concentration and steadiness. I found my hands trembling within my suit. I had slept for only a couple of hours. Once Celia had fallen asleep I had wandered the interior of GOG, studying the layout of the habitation sphere.

  As we slowly installed the instruments she now reviewed the whole experiment for me. She went into details that I could not possibly have understood. After a few minutes I realized that she was doing it for her own benefit, not mine. It had dawned on me some time ago that although Vilfredo Germani was the showman and fund-raiser, the fundamental ideas came from Celia. She had devised the crucial test for “third quantization”—the test to see if space-time itself had a granular structure, rather than being continuous.