The Stardance Trilogy (10 page)

“No!” this time it was me shouting.

“Major,” Shara said urgently, “that’s not the way. Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I
know
.”

“Hell and damnation, woman,” Cox said. “What do you want me to do? Let them have the first shot? There are vessels from four countries on their way right now, but they won’t—”

“Major, wait. Give me time.”

He began to swear, then cut off. “How much time?”

She made no direct reply. “If only this telepathy thing works in reverse…it must. I’m no more strange to them than they are to me. Probably less so; I get the idea they’ve been around. Charlie?”

“Yeah.”

“This is a take.”

I knew. I had known since I first saw her in open space on my monitor. And I knew what she needed now, from the faint trembling of her voice. It took everything I had, and I was only glad I had it to give. With extremely realistic good cheer, I said, “Break a leg, kid,” and killed my mike before she could hear the sob that followed.

And she danced.

It began slowly, the equivalent of one-finger exercises, as she sought to establish a vocabulary of motion that the creatures could comprehend.
Can you see
, she seemed to say,
that this movement is a reaching, a yearning? Do you see that
this
is a spurning, this an unfolding, that a graduated elision of energy? Do you feel the ambiguity in the way I distort this arabesque, or that the tension can be resolved so?

And it seemed that Shara was right, that they had infinitely more experience with disparate cultures than we, for they were superb linguists of motion. It occurred to me later that perhaps they had selected motion for communication because of its very universality. Man danced before he spoke. At any rate, as Shara’s dance began to build, their own began to slow down perceptibly in speed and intensity, until at last they hung motionless in space, watching her.

Soon after that, Shara must have decided that she had sufficiently defined her terms, at least well enough for pidgin communication—for now she began to dance in earnest. Before she had used only her own muscles and the shifting masses of her limbs. Now she added thrusters, singly and in combination, moving within as well as in space. Her dance became a true dance: more than a collection of motions, a thing of substance and meaning. It was unquestionably the
Stardance
, just as she had prechoreographed it, as she had always intended to dance it. That it had something to say to utterly alien creatures, of man and his nature, was not at all a coincidence: it was the essential and ultimate statement of the greatest artist of her age, and it had something to say to God Himself.

The camera lights struck silver from her p-suit, gold from the twin air tanks on her shoulders. To and fro against the black backdrop of space, she wove the intricacies of her dance, a leisurely movement that seemed somehow to leave echoes behind it. And the meaning of those great loops and whirls became clear, drying my throat and clamping my teeth.

For her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try to create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile embodiment of entropy into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is capable simultaneously of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself.

It spoke of Shara and her life.

Again and again cyclical statements of hope began, only to collapse into confusion and ruin. Again and again cascades of energy strove for resolution, and found only frustration. All at once she launched into a pattern that seemed familiar, and in moments I recognized it: the closing movement of
Mass Is A Verb
recapitulated—not repeated but reprised, echoed, the Three Questions given a more terrible urgency by this new context. And as before, it segued into that final relentless contraction, that ultimate drawing inward of all energies. Her body became derelict, abandoned, drifting in space, the essence of her being withdrawn to her center and invisible.

The quiescent aliens stirred for the first time.

And suddenly she exploded, blossoming from her contraction not as a spring uncoils, but as a flower bursts from a seed. The force of her release flung her through the void as though she were tossed, like a gull in a hurricane, by galactic winds. Her center appeared to hurl itself through space and time, yanking her body into a new dance.

And the new dance said,
This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving—and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.

This is what it is to be human: to persist.

It said all this with a soaring series of cyclical movements that held all the rolling majesty of grand symphony, as uniquely different from each other as snowflakes, and as similar. And the new dance
laughed
, as much at tomorrow as at yesterday, and most of all at today.

For this is what it means to be human: to laugh at what another would call tragedy.

The aliens seemed to recoil from the ferocious energy, startled, awed, and perhaps a little frightened by Shara’s indomitable spirit. They seemed to wait for her dance to wane, for her to exhaust herself, and her laughter sounded on my speaker as she redoubled her efforts, became a pinwheel, a catherine wheel. She changed the focus of her dance, began to dance
around
them, in pyrotechnic spatters of motion that came ever closer to the intangible spheroid which contained them. They cringed inward from her, huddling together in the center of the envelope, not so much physically threatened as cowed.

This
, said her body,
is what it means to be human: to commit hara-kiri, with a smile, if it becomes needful.

And before that terrible assurance, the aliens broke. Without warning fireflies and balloon vanished, gone,
elsewhere
.

I know that Cox and Tom were still alive, because I saw them afterwards, and that means they were probably saying and doing things in my hearing and presence, but I neither heard them nor saw them then; they were as dead to me as everything except Shara. I called out her name, and she approached the camera that was lit, until I could make out her face behind the plastic hood of her p-suit.

“We may be puny, Charlie,” she puffed, gasping for breath. “But by Jesus we’re tough.”

“Shara—come on in now.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Carrington’ll
have
to give you a free-fall place to live now.”

“A life of exile? For what? To dance? Charlie,
I haven’t got any more to say
.”

“Then I’ll come out there.”

“Don’t be silly. Why? So you can hug a p-suit? Tenderly bump hoods one last time? Balls. It’s a good exit so far—let’s not blow it.”

“
Shara!
” I broke completely, just caved in on myself and collapsed into great racking sobs.

“Charlie, listen now,” she said softly, but with an urgency that reached me even in my despair. “Listen now, for I haven’t much time. I have something to give you. I hoped you’d find it for yourself, but…will you listen?”

“Y—yes.”

“Charlie, zero-gee dance is going to get awful popular all of a sudden. I’ve opened the door. But you know how fads are, they’ll bitch it all up unless you move fast. I’m leaving it in your hands.”

“What…what are you talking about?”

“About you. Charlie. You’re going to dance again.”

Oxygen starvation, I thought. But she can’t be that low on air already. “Okay. Sure thing.”

“For God’s sake stop humoring me—I’m straight, I tell you. You’d have seen it yourself if you weren’t so damned stupid. Don’t you understand?
There’s nothing wrong with your leg in free fall!
”

My jaw dropped.

“Do you hear me, Charlie? You can dance again!”

“No,” I said, and searched for a reason why not. “I…you can’t…it’s…dammit, the leg’s not strong enough for inside work.”

“Forget for the moment that inside work’ll be less than half of what you do. Forget it and remember that smack in the nose you gave Carrington. Charlie, when you leaped over the desk
: you pushed off with your right leg.
”

I sputtered for a while and shut up.

“There you go, Charlie. My farewell gift. You know I’ve never been in love with you…but you must know that I’ve always loved you. Still do.”

“I love you, Shara.”

“So long, Charlie. Do it right.”

And all four thrusters went off at once. I watched her go down. A while after she was too far to see, there was a long golden flame that arced above the face of the globe, waned, and then flared again as the airtanks went up.

The flight from Washington was miserable. How can a man who’s worked in free fall get airsick? Worse, I had awakened that morning with the same stinking cold I had had ever since returning Earthside, and so I spent the whole flight anticipating the knives that would be thrust through my ears when we landed. But I turned down the proffered drink as well as the meal.

I was not even depressed. Too much had happened to me in the last few weeks. I was wrung out, drained, just sort of…on standby, taking disinterested notes while my automatic pilot steered my body around. It helped to be in a familiar place—why, come to think, hadn’t I once thought of Toronto, about a thousand years ago, as “home?”

There were reporters when I got through Customs, of course, but not nearly as many as there had been at first. Once, as a kid, I spent a summer working in a mental hospital, and I learned an extraordinary thing: I learned that anyone, no matter how determined, whom you
utterly
ignore will eventually stop pestering you and go away. I had been practicing the technique so consistently for the last three weeks that the word had gone out, and now only the most Skinnerian newstapers even troubled to stick microphones in my face. Eventually there was a cab in front of me and I took it. Toronto cabbies can be relied upon not to recognize anybody, thank God.

I was “free” now.

Reentering the TDT studio was a strong déjà vu experience, strong enough almost to penetrate my armor. Once, geologic ages ago, I had worked here for three years, and briefly again thereafter. And once, in this building, I had seen Shara Drummond dance for the first time. I had came full circle.

I felt nothing.

Always excepting, of course, the god damned leg. After all the time in free fall it hurt much worse than I’d remembered, more than it had hurt since the original days of its ruining, unimaginably far in the past. I had to pause twice on the way upstairs, and I was soaking with sweat by the time I made the top. (Ever wonder why dance studios are
always
up at least one flight of stairs? Did you ever try to rent that much square footage on ground level?) I waited on the landing, regularizing my breathing, until I decided that my color had returned, and then a few seconds more. I knew I should feel agitated now, but I was still on standby.

I opened the door, and déjà vu smacked at me again. Norrey was across the old familiar room, and just as before she was putting a group of students through their paces. They might have been the same students. Only Shara was missing. Shara would always be missing. Shara was air pollution now, upper atmosphere pollution, much more widely distributed than most corpses get to be.

She had been cremated at the
top
of the atmosphere, and by it.

But her older sister was very much alive. She was in the midst of demonstrating a series of suspensions on half-toe as I entered, and I just had time to absorb an impression of glowing skin, healthy sweat, and superb muscle tone before she glanced up and saw me. She stiffened like a stop-frame shot, then literally fell out of an extension. Automatically her body tucked and rolled, and she came out of it at a dead run, crying and swearing as she came, arms outstretched. I barely had time to brace the good leg before she cannoned into me, and then we were rocking in each other’s arms like tipsy giants, and she was swearing like a sailor and crying my name. We hugged for an endless time before I became aware that I was holding her clear of the floor and that my shoulders were shrieking nearly as loud as my leg.
Six months ago it would have buckled,
I thought vaguely, and set her down.

“All right, are you all right, are you all right?” her voice was saying in my ear.

I pulled back and tried to grin. “My leg is killing me. And I think I’ve got the flu.”

“Damn you, Charlie, don’t you dare misunderstand me.
Are you all right?
” Her fingers gripped my neck as if she intended to chin herself.

My hands dropped to her waist and I looked her in the eyes, abandoning the grin. All at once I realized I was no longer on standby. My cocoon was ruptured, blood sang in my ears, and I could feel the very air impinging on my skin. For the first time I thought about why I had come here, and partly I understood. “Norrey,” I said simply, “I’m okay. Some ways I think I’m in better shape than I’ve been in twenty years.”

The second sentence just slipped out, but I knew as I said it that it was true. Norrey read the truth in my eyes, and somehow managed to relax all over without loosing her embrace. “Oh, thank
God
,” she sobbed, and pulled me closer. After a time her sobs lessened, and she said, almost petulantly, her voice tiny, “I’d have broken your
neck
,” and we were both grinning like idiots and laughing aloud. We laughed ourselves right out of our embrace, and then Norrey said “Oh!” suddenly and turned bright red and spun around to her class.