The Stardance Trilogy (37 page)

But not in this vessel! The pressure patches could have been in any of four separate locker-sections—a total of more than two dozen small compartments, identified only by numbers.

I could see him pleading for silence, but no one could hear him above the general roar. I could see him gesturing for silence, but almost no one else could. The aft attendant could tell him which locker, but he could not hear her. He looked at me pleadingly.

I spun back to her, and wondered for a moment if she had gone mad with frustration: she had torn her hood back over her head and was waving furiously. Then I got it and pulled my own hood off. The babble of the earphones went away, and I could hear her shouting.

Just barely. The air was getting thin in here. But it was also coming my way: I could just make out a high distant Donald Duck voice, squawking the same word over and over again.

I should have been terrified that the word made absolutely no sense to me, but I did not seem to have time. Once I was sure I’d heard it right, I whirled and dutifully began braying it as loud as I could toward the Chinese.

“Before,”
I screamed,
“Before, before, before, before—”

It felt good to scream: pressure change was trying to explode my lungs, and emptying them that way probably saved them serious damage. He already had his own hood off, he was quick; no, he was better than quick, because he instantly solved the puzzle that had baffled me; he yanked his hood back over his head, oriented himself and kicked off, and within seconds he was pulling the most beautiful pressure patch I’d ever seen out of Compartment B-4.

By then I was so dizzy from spinning my head back and forth I felt as though my eyeballs were about to pop out of their sockets—as indeed they probably were—and I had to pull my hood back on and let my seatmate haul me back down into my seat…where I spent some minutes concentrating on not soiling my p-suit. The internal suit pressure rose quickly, but at least as much of it came from my intestines as from my airtanks, and it got ripe enough in there to steam up my hood and make my eyes water for a few moments.

I became aware that my seatmate was shaking my shoulder gently. I opened my eyes, and some of the dizziness went away.

She was pointing to her ears, then to her belt control panel, and shaking her head. I nodded, and fumbled until I found the shutoff switch for my suit radio. The babbling sound of dozens of frightened passengers went away. I noticed for the first time that all the blinking seatback signs were saying, not “FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS,” but “MAINTAIN RADIO SILENCE.”

She touched her hood to mine. “Are ya right?” she called.

“Occasionally,” I said lightheadedly, but I got it. Several weeks in Australia, even in the multilingual environments of Suit Camp, will give you a working familiarity with Aussie slang. She was an Aborigine. Now that I thought about it, I had noticed her once or twice in Camp, had wondered vaguely why, in the midst of one of the largest remaining Aboriginal reserves in Australia, she seemed to be the only Abo who was actually taking Suit Camp training. All the others I’d seen had been outside the Camp, in town and at the Cairns airport.

“You took an awful bloody chance,” she said.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I called back.

“Too right! You saved us all, I reckon—you and the Chinese bloke. Fast as a scalded cat he was, eh? Hold on, here he comes.”

The Chinese rejoined us. He was moving more slowly now that the emergency was past. The delicate grace with which he docked himself back in his chair, without a wasted motion or a bounce, pleased my dancer’s eyes. I resolved to ask him at the first opportunity to tutor me in “jaunting,” the spacer’s term for moving about in zero gee.

He joined his hood to ours. “Thank you,” he said to me.

As our eyes met I felt the old familiar tingle in the pit of the stomach that I had not felt in ages.

And suppressed it. I thanked him right back—but without putting any topspin on it.
I’m too old to climb these stairs again,
I told myself,
even in zero gee…

“I thank you both,” the Aborigine girl said. “Best put our ears on, but. I think they’re getting it sorted out.”

The seatbacks were now flashing, “MONITOR YOUR RADIO.” We separated, and I switched my radio back on in time to hear the surviving attendant say, “—xt person that makes a sound, I am personally going to drag aft and cycle through the airlock, is that
fucking well understood?
”

She sounded sincere; the only sound in response was dozens of people breathing at different rates.

“Passenger in seat 1-E: is Mr. Henderson dead?”

“Uh…no. I’ve got my hand over the leak and the…the entry wound. His chest is still—”

“Jesus! Wait…uh…ten more seconds for cabin pressure to come back up and then get his hood off. Gently! Passenger 1-F, there’s a first-aid kit in Compartment D-7 in front of you; get a pressure bandage and give it to 1-E; then try to get a pulse rate. Is anyone here a doctor or a paramedic?”

Breathing sounds. Someone grunting softly. A cough.

“Damn. Passenger in 6-B, answer yes or no, do you require medical assistance?”

Breathing sounds.

“Dammit, the woman who passed the word!—do you need help?”

Whoops—she meant me! I started to reply…and my body picked that moment to finish restoring equilibrium, with prolonged and noisy eructations at both ends of my alimentary canal.

“…no-o-o…” I finished, and everyone, myself included, began to howl with tension-breaking laughter—

—everyone except the attendant. “SILENCE!” she roared, loud enough to make my earphones distort, and the laughter fell apart. “It is past time you started acting like spacers. A real spacer is dying while you giggle. We all nearly died because none of you could read a flashing sign six inches from your face! You in 1-E—” That passenger was muttering
sotto voce
to someone who was helping him remove the injured attendant’s hood. “—switch off your radios and chatter hood to hood if you must. Does anyone else need medical aid? No? Then listen up! I want all of you to keep your hoods on—even after you’re certain the pressure has come back up. I’m going to switch to command channel now and report. You won’t be able to hear it. I’ll fill you all in the moment I am good and God damned ready…but not if I hear
one word
on this channel when I come back on. And if you switch off your radio, for Christ’s sake
watch your seatback signs this time
.”

The moment she switched frequencies, several people began chattering. But they were loudly shushed; finally even the most determined—the loudmouth who’d been making jokes before takeoff—had been persuaded to shut up. The attendant’s anger had sobered, humbled us. Despite weeks of training, we had screwed up, in our first crisis. Now we had to sit in silence like chastened children while the grown-ups straightened things out.

I switched my own mike off, and huddled with my seatmates until our three hoods were touching. There was an awkward silence. We all grinned at each other nervously.

“What happens now?” I said finally. “Losing all that air must have pushed us off course, right? Spoiled our vector, or whatever?”

“So we miss our bus,” the Aborigine girl said. “Question is, how many go-rounds does it take to match up with it again—and how much air have we got to drink while we wait?”

“I think we’ll be all right,” the Chinese said. “The pilot maneuvered to correct, and I think she did a good job.” His voice was a pleasant tenor. His English was utterly unaccented, newscaster’s English.

“How do you reckon?” she asked.

“She didn’t blast too quickly, and she didn’t blast too slowly. And it was one short blast. I think she’s good. We might make the original rendezvous, or something close to it.”

His confidence was very reassuring. I thought again about asking him to teach me how to jaunt. And decided against it. There would be plenty of qualified instructors around…and I was here to simplify my life, not complicate it again.

The attendant came swimming down the aisle past us as he spoke. We sat up to watch. She checked the pressure patch first, popping a little round membrane of blue sticky between her fingers and watching to see if any of its droplets migrated toward the patch. Only when she was satisfied did she turn and check on Mr. Henderson, holding a brief hood-to-hood conference with the passenger who was taking care of him. Then she drifted aimlessly in a half crouch, talking to the pilot on the channel we couldn’t hear. Finally she nodded and did something to her belt. The seatback signs began flashing “MONITOR YOUR RADIO” again. I switched mine on.

“Make sure your neighbor has his ears on,” she said. “Is everybody listening? Okay, here’s the word. Captain de Brandt is going to attempt to salvage our original rendezvous window. In about fifteen minutes the main engines will fire. You can expect about a half gee for about two minutes. There may be additional maneuvering after that, so remain strapped in and braced until I tell you otherwise. Expect acceleration warning in twelve minutes; until then I want you to take your hoods off to save your suit air. But be ready to seal up fast!”

“When will Channel One be coming back on TV?” someone asked. “I want to watch the docking.” It was the compulsive joker, aft.

“We can’t spare the bytes.”

“Huh? That’s not—”

“Shut up.” She switched back to command frequency.

I took off my hood. The cabin pressure was lower now than it had been before the blowout. Which was good: all the foul air gushed out of my suit as I unsealed it. I was briefly embarrassed, but in low pressure no one can smell anything very well; it passed without comment, as it were.

I wondered how much air I had left, if I should need it. These were cheap tourist p-suits we were wearing, with just enough air to survive a disaster like we’d just had, in four small cylinders fitted along our upper arms and shins. (In proper p-suits with full-size tanks at our backs, we’d have needed awfully complicated seats.)

There was a subdued murmur of conversation. Suddenly the attendant’s strident voice overrode it; she must have pulled off her hood. “You! Nine-D, sit down and buckle up!”

“What the hell for? You said we’ve got twelve minutes—”

“Sit down!”

It was the joker again. “See here,” he said, “we’re not soldiers and we’re not convicts. I’ve been looking forward to free fall for a long time, and I have a right to enjoy it. You have no authority—”

“Don’t tell me: you’re an American, right? This vessel is in a state of emergency; I have authority to break your spine! Sit or be restrained.”

“Come, come, the emergency is passed, you said so yourself. Stop being hysterical and lighten up a little.” He drifted experimentally out into the aisle. “We have a perfect right to
Jesus!
”

She had pushed off much too hard, I thought, with the full force of terrestrial muscles. She came up the aisle not in graceful slow motion, as my seatmate had earlier, but like a stone fired from a sling. Even I knew not to jump that hard in zero gee: you bash your head. But as she came she was tucking, rolling—

—she flashed past me quickly, but it’s just about impossible to move too fast for a dancer to follow: I spun my head and tracked her. She ended her trajectory heels foremost,
smacked
those heels against the seats on either side of him, took all the kinetic energy of her hurtling body on her thighs, and came to a dead stop with her nose an inch from his, drifting just perceptibly to her left.

Try it yourself sometime: drop from a third-story window, and land in a sitting position without a grunt of impact, without a bruise.

I may had been the only one present equipped to fully appreciate what a feat she had just accomplished—but it made the loudmouthed American cross his eyes and shut up.

“You have the right to remain silent,” she told him, loud enough to be heard all over the vessel; he flinched. “If you give up that right, I will break your arm. You have no right to counsel until such time as we match orbits with or land upon UN soil—which we don’t plan to do.” I don’t think he was hearing her. He was busy with the tricky mechanics of getting back into his seat. “Does anyone else have any questions? No? You—strap him in there.”

She kicked off backwards, repeated her feat by flipping in midair and braking herself against the first row of seats, came to rest with her back against the forward bulkhead, and glared around at us. Suddenly her expression softened.

“Look, people,” she called, her voice harsh in the low air pressure, “I know how you feel. I remember my first time in free fall. But you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy it later. Right now I want you strapped in. We’re in a new orbit, one we didn’t pick: there’s no telling when the Captain may have to dodge some new piece of junk.” She sighed. “I know you’re not military personnel. But in space you take orders from anyone who has more experience than you, and ask questions later. A lot later. I’ve logged over six thousand hours in space, half of them in this very can, and I
will
space the next jerk who gives me any shit.”

“Fair go,” my Aborigine seatmate called. “We’re with you!”

There was a rumble of agreement in which I joined.

“Look, Miss—” she added.

“Yes?”

“You asked for a doctor before. I ain’t no whitefella doctor. My people reckon me a healer, but. Can I come see the bloke?”

The attendant started to answer, frowned and hesitated.

“I won’t hurt him any.”

“All right, come ahead. But be careful! Come
slow
. And headfirst—don’t try to flip on the way, you’re too green.”

She unstrapped and clambered over me with some difficulty, clutching comically in all directions. A few people tittered. The Chinese steadied her and helped. Presently she was floating in the aisle like someone swimming in a dream…except that her swimming motions accomplished nothing. She looked over her shoulder to the Chinese. “Give us a hand then, will you, mate?”

He hesitated momentarily…then put his hand where he had to and gave her a gentle, measured push.