The Stardance Trilogy (4 page)

“Hello, Charlie. It’s been a long time.”

The second time it worked. “Seems like yesterday. Somebody else’s yesterday.”

“Yes, it does. It took me days to find you. Norrey’s in Paris, and no one else knew where you’d gone.”

“Yeah. How’s farming?”

“I…I’ve put that away, Charlie. It’s even more creative than dancing, but it’s not the same.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Working.”

“Dancing?”

“Yes. Charlie, I need you. I mean, I have a job for you. I need your cameras and your eye.”

“Never mind the qualifications. Any kind of need will do. Where are you? When’s the next plane there? Which cameras do I pack?”

“New York, an hour from now, and none of them. I didn’t mean ‘your cameras’ literally unless you’re using GLX-5000s and a Hamilton Board lately.”

I whistled. It hurt my mouth. “Not on my budget. Besides, I’m old-fashioned—I like to hold ’em with my hands.”

“For this job, you’ll use a Hamilton, and it’ll be a twenty-input Masterchrome, brand new.”

“You grew poppies on that farm? Or just struck diamonds with the roto-tiller?”

“You’ll be getting paid by Bryce Carrington.”

I blinked.

“Now will you catch that plane so I can tell you about it? The New Age, ask for the Presidential Suite.”

“The hell with the plane, I’ll walk. Quicker.” I hung up.

According to the
Time
magazine in my dentist’s waiting room, Bryce Carrington was the genius who had become a multibillionaire by convincing a number of giants of industry to underwrite Skyfac, the great orbiting complex that kicked the bottom out of the crystals market—and seventy-’leven other markets besides. As I recalled the story, some rare poliolike disease had wasted both his legs and put him in a wheelchair. But the legs had lost strength, not function—in lessened gravity they worked well enough. So he created Skyfac, established mining crews on Luna to supply it with cheap raw materials, and spent most of his time in orbit under reduced gravity. His picture made him look like a reasonably successful author (as opposed to writer). Other than that I knew nothing about him. I paid little attention to news and none at all to space news.

The New Age was
the
hotel in New York in those days, built on the ruins of the Sheraton. Ultraefficient security, bulletproof windows, carpet thicker than the outside air, and a lobby of an architectural persuasion that John D. MacDonald once called “Early Dental Plate.” It stank of money. I was glad I’d made the effort to locate a necktie, and I wished I’d shined my shoes. An incredible man blocked my way as I came in through the airlock. He moved and was built like the toughest, fastest bouncer I ever saw, and he dressed and acted like God’s butler. He said his name was Perry, as if he didn’t expect me to believe it. He asked if he could help me, as though he didn’t think so.

“Yes, Perry. Would you mind lifting up one of your feet?”

“Why?”

“I’ll bet twenty dollars you’ve shined your soles.”

Half his mouth smiled, and he didn’t move an inch. “Whom did you wish to see?”

“Shara Drummond.”

“Not registered.”

“The Presidential Suite.”

“Oh.” Light dawned. “Mister Carrington’s lady. You should have said so. Wait here, please.” While he phoned to verify that I was expected, keeping his eye on me and his hand near his pocket, I swallowed my heart and rearranged my face. So that was how it was. All right then. That was how it was.

Perry came back and gave me the little button-transmitter that would let me walk the corridors of the New Age without being cut down by automatic laser-fire, and explained carefully that it would blow a largish hole in me if I attempted to leave the building without returning it. From his manner I gathered that I had just skipped four grades in social standing. I thanked him, though I’m damned if I know why.

I followed the green fluorescent arrows that appeared on the bulbless ceiling, and came after a long and scenic walk to the Presidential Suite. Shara was waiting at the door, in something like an angel’s pajamas. It made all that big body look delicate. “Hello, Charlie.”

I was jovial and hearty. “Hi, babe. Swell joint. How’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“I haven’t been.”

“Well, how’s Carrington been keeping you, then?” Steady, boy.

“Come in, Charlie.”

I went in. It looked like where the Queen stayed when she was in town, and I’m sure she enjoyed it. You could have landed an airplane in the living room without waking anyone in the bedroom. It had two pianos. Only one fireplace, barely big enough to barbecue a buffalo—you have to scrimp somewhere, I guess. Roger Kellaway was on the quadio, and for a wild moment I thought he was actually in the suite, playing some unseen third piano. So this was how it was.

“Can I get you something, Charlie?”

“Oh, sure. Hash Oil, Citrolli Supreme. Dom Perignon for the pipe.”

Without cracking a smile she went to a cabinet that looked like a midget cathedral, and produced precisely what I had ordered. I kept my own features impassive and lit up. The bubbles tickled my throat, and the rush was exquisite. I felt myself relaxing, and when we had passed the narghile’s mouthpiece a few times I felt her relax. We looked at each other then—really looked at each other—then at the room around us and then at each other again. Simultaneously we roared with laughter, a laughter that blew all the wealth out of the room and let in richness. Her laugh was the same whooping, braying belly laugh I remembered so well, an unselfconscious and lusty laugh, and it reassured me tremendously. I was so relieved I couldn’t stop laughing myself, and that kept
her
going, and just as we might have stopped she pursed her lips and blew a stuttered arpeggio. There’s an old audio recording called the
Spike Jones Laughing Record
, where the tuba player tries to play “The Flight Of The Bumblebee” and falls down laughing, and the whole band breaks up and horselaughs for a full two minutes, and every time they run out of air the tuba player tries another flutter and roars and they all break up again, and once when Shara was blue I bet her ten dollars that she couldn’t listen to that record without at least giggling and I won. When I understood now that she was quoting it, I shuddered and dissolved into great whoops of new laughter, and a minute later we had reached the stage where we literally laughed ourselves out of our chairs and lay on the floor in agonies of mirth, weakly pounding the floor and howling. I take that laugh out of my memory now and then and rerun it—but not often, for such records deteriorate drastically with play.

At last we dopplered back down to panting grins, and I helped her to her feet.

“What a perfectly dreadful place,” I said, still chuckling.

She glanced around and shuddered. “Oh God, it is, Charlie. It must be awful to need this much front.”

“For a horrid while I thought you did.”

She sobered, and met my eyes. “Charlie, I wish I could resent that. In a way I do need it.”

My eyes narrowed. “Just what do you mean?”

“I need Bryce Carrington.”

“This time you can trot out the qualifiers. How do you need him?”

“I need his money,” she cried.

How can you relax and tense up at the same time?

“Oh, damn it, Shara! Is that how you’re going to get to dance? Buy your way in? What does a critic go for, these days?”

“Charlie, stop it. I need Carrington to get seen. He’s going to rent me a hall, that’s all.”

“If that’s all, let’s get out of this dump right now. I can bor—get enough cash to rent you any hall in the world, and I’m just as willing to risk my money.”

“Can you get me Skyfac?”

“Uh?”

I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why she proposed to go to Skyfac to dance. Why not Antarctica?

“Shara, you know even less about space than I do, but you must know that a satellite broadcast doesn’t have to be made from a satellite?”

“Idiot. It’s the setting I want.”

I thought about it. “Moon’d be better, visually. Mountains. Light. Contrast.”

“The visual aspect is secondary. I don’t want one-sixth gee, Charlie. I want zero gravity.”

My mouth hung open.

“And I want you to be my video man.”

God, she was a rare one. What I needed then was to sit there with my mouth open and think for several minutes. She let me do just that, waiting patiently for me to work it all out.

“Weight isn’t a verb anymore, Charlie,” she said finally. “That dance ended on the assertion that you can’t beat gravity—you said so yourself. Well, that statement is incorrect—obsolete. The dance of the twenty-first century will have to acknowledge that.”

“And it’s just what you need to make it. A new kind of dance for a new kind of dancer. Unique. It’ll catch the public eye, and you should have the field entirely to yourself for years. I like it, Shara. I like it. But can you pull it off?”

“I thought about what you said: that you can’t beat gravity but it’s beautiful to try. It stayed in my head for months, and then one day I was visiting a neighbor with a TV and I saw newsreels of the crew working on Skyfac Two. I was up all night thinking, and the next morning I came up to the States and got in Skyfac One. I’ve been up there for nearly a year, getting next to Carrington. I can do it, Charlie, I can make it work.” There was a ripple in her jaw that I had seen before—when she’d told me off in Le Maintenant. It was a ripple of determination.

Still I frowned. “With Carrington’s backing.”

Her eyes left mine. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

“What does he charge?”

She failed to answer, for long enough to answer me. In that instant I began believing in God again, for the first time in years, just to be able to hate Him.

But I kept my mouth shut. She was old enough to manage her own finances. The price of a dream gets higher every year. Hell, I’d half expected it from the moment she’d called me.

But only half.

“Charlie, don’t just sit there with your face all knotted up. Say something. Cuss me out, call me a whore, something.”

“Nuts. You be your own conscience; I have trouble enough being my own. You want to dance, you’ve got a patron. So now you’ve got a video man.”

I hadn’t intended to say that last sentence at all.

Strangely, it almost seemed to disappoint her at first. But then she relaxed and smiled. “Thank you, Charlie. Can you get out of whatever you’re doing right away?”

“I’m working for an educational station in Shediac. I even got to shoot some dance footage. A dancing bear from the London Zoo. The amazing thing was how well he danced.” She grinned. “I can get free.”

“I’m glad. I don’t think I could pull this off without you.”

“I’m working for you. Not for Carrington.”

“All right.”

“Where is the great man, anyway? Scuba diving in the bathtub?”

“No,” came a quiet voice from the doorway. “I’ve been sky diving in the lobby.”

His wheelchair was a mobile throne. He wore a five-hundred-dollar suit the color of strawberry ice cream, a powder-blue turtleneck and one gold earring. The shoes were genuine leather. The watch was the newfangled bandless kind that literally tells you the time. He wasn’t tall enough for her, and his shoulders were absurdly broad, although the suit tried to deny both. His eyes were like twin blueberries. His smile was that of a shark wondering which part will taste best. I wanted to crush his head between two boulders.

Shara was on her feet. “Bryce, this is Charles Armstead. I told you…”

“Oh yes. The video chap.” He rolled forward and extended an impeccably manicured hand. “I’m Bryce Carrington, Armstead.”

I remained in my seat, hands in my lap. “Ah yes. The rich chap.”

One eyebrow rose an urbane quarter inch. “Oh my. Another rude one. Well, if you’re as good as Shara says you are, you’re entitled.”

“I’m rotten.”

The smile faded. “Let’s stop fencing, Armstead. I don’t expect manners from creative people, but I have far more significant contempt than yours available if I need any. Now I’m tired of this damned gravity and I’ve had a rotten day testifying for a friend and it looks like they’re going to recall me tomorrow. Do you want the job or don’t you?”

He had me there. I did. “Yeah.”

“All right, then. Your room is 2772. We’ll be going up to Skyfac in two days. Be here at eight a.m.”

“I’ll want to talk with you about what you’ll be needing, Charlie,” Shara said. “Give me a call tomorrow.”

I whirled to face her, and she flinched from my eyes.

Carrington failed to notice. “Yes, make a list of your requirements by tonight, so it can go up with us. Don’t scrimp—if you don’t fetch it, you’ll do without. Good night, Armstead.”

I faced him. “Good night, Mr. Carrington.” Suh.

He turned toward the narghile, and Shara hurried to refill the chamber and bowl. I turned away hastily and made for the door. My leg hurt so much I nearly fell on the way, but I set my jaw and made it. When I reached the door I said to myself, you will now open the door and go through it, and then I spun on my heel. “Carrington!”

He blinked, surprised to discover I still existed. “Yes?”

“Are you aware that she doesn’t love you in the slightest? Does that matter to you in any way?” My voice was high, and my fists were surely clenched.

“Oh,” he said, and then again, “Oh. So that’s what it is. I didn’t think success alone merited that much contempt.” He put down the mouthpiece and folded his fingers together. “Let me tell you something, Armstead. No one has ever loved me, to my knowledge. This suite does not love me.” His voice took on human feeling for the first time. “But it is mine. Now get out.”

I opened my mouth to tell him where to put his job, and then I saw Shara’s face, and the pain in it suddenly made me deeply ashamed. I left at once, and when the door closed behind me I vomited on a rug that was worth slightly less than a Hamilton Masterchrome board. I was sorry then that I’d worn a necktie.

The trip to Pike’s Peak Spaceport, at least was aesthetically pleasurable. I enjoy air travel, gliding among stately clouds, watching the rolling procession of mountains and plains, vast jigsaws of farmland, and intricate mosaics of suburbia unfolding below.