The Stardance Trilogy (5 page)

But the jump to Skyfac in Carrington’s personal shuttle,
That First Step
, might as well have been an old Space Commando rerun. I
know
they can’t put portholes in space ships—but dammit, a shipboard video relay conveys no better resolution, color values, or presence than you get on your living room tube. The only differences are that the stars don’t “move” to give the illusion of travel, and there’s no director editing the POV to give you dramatically interesting shots.

Aesthetically speaking. The
experiential
difference is that they do not, while you are watching the Space Commando sell hemorrhoid remedies, trap you into a couch, batter you with thunders, make you weigh better than half a megagram for an unreasonably long time, and then drop you off the edge of the world into weightlessness. Body fluids began rising into my upper half: my ears sang, my nose flooded, and I “blushed” deep red. I had been prepared far nausea, but what I got was even more shocking: the sudden, unprecedented, total absence of pain in my leg. Shara got the nausea for both of us, barely managing to deploy her dropsickness bag in time. Carrington unstrapped and administered an antinausea injection with sure movements. It seemed to take forever to hit her, but when it did there was an enormous change—color and strength returned rapidly, and she was apparently fully recovered by the time the pilot announced that we were commencing docking and would everyone please strap in and shut up? I half expected Carrington to bark manners into him, but apparently the industrial magnate was not that sort of fool. He shut up and strapped himself down.

My leg didn’t hurt in the slightest. Not at all.

The Skyfac complex looked like a disorderly heap of bicycle tires and beach balls of various sizes. The one our pilot made for was more like a tractor tire. We matched course, became its axle, and matched spin, and the damned thing grew a spoke that caught us square in the airlock. The airlock was “overhead” of our couches, but we entered and left it feet first. A few yards into the spoke, the direction we traveled became “down,” and handholds became a ladder. Weight increased with every step, but even when we had emerged into a rather large cubical compartment it was far less than Earth normal. Nonetheless my leg resumed nibbling at me.

The room tried to be a classic reception room, high-level (“Please be seated. His Majesty will see you shortly”), but the low gee and the p-suits racked along two walls spoiled the effect. Unlike the Space Commando’s armor, a real pressure suit looked like nothing so much as a people-shaped baggie, and they look particularly silly in repose. A young dark-haired man in tweed rose from behind a splendidly gadgeted desk and smiled. “Good to see you, Mr. Carrington. I hope you had a pleasant jump.”

“Fine thanks, Tom. You remember Shara, of course. This is Charles Armstead. Tom McGillicuddy.” We both displayed our teeth and said we were delighted to meet one another. I could see that beneath the pleasantries, McGillicuddy was upset about something.

“Nils and Mr. Longmire are waiting in your office, sir. There’s…there’s been another sighting.”

“God
damn
it,” Carrington began, and cut himself off. I stared at him. The full force of my best sarcasm had failed to anger this man. “All right. Take care of my guests while I go hear what Longmire has to say.” He started for the door, moving like a beach ball in slow motion but under his own power. “Oh yes—the
Step
is loaded to the gun’ls with bulky equipment, Tom. Have her brought round to the cargo bays. Store the equipment in Six.” He left, looking worried. McGillicuddy activated his desk and gave the necessary orders.

“What’s going on, Tom?” Shara asked when he was through.

He looked at me before replying. “Pardon my asking, Mr. Armstead, but are you a newsman?”

“Charlie. No, I’m not. I am a video man, but I work for Shara.”

“Mmmm. Well, you’ll hear about it sooner or later. About two weeks ago an object appeared within the orbit of Neptune, just appeared out of nowhere. There were…certain other anomalies. It stayed put for half a day and then vanished again. The Space Command slapped a hush on it, but it’s common knowledge on board Skyfac.”

“And the thing has appeared again?” Shara asked.

“Just beyond the orbit of Saturn.”

I was only mildly interested. No doubt there was an explanation for the phenomenon, and since Isaac Asimov wasn’t around I would doubtless never understand a word of it. Most of us gave up on intelligent nonhuman life when Project Ozma came up empty. “Little green men, I suppose. Can you show us the Lounge, Tom? I understand it’s just like the one we’ll be working in.”

He seemed to welcome this change of subject. “Sure thing.”

McGillicuddy led us through a p-door opposite the one Carrington had used, through long halls whose floors curved up ahead of and behind us. Each was outfitted differently, each was full of busy, purposeful people, and each reminded me somehow of the lobby of the New Age, or perhaps of the old movie 2001. Futuristic Opulence, so understated as to fairly shriek. Wall Street lifted bodily into orbit—the
clocks
were on Wall Street time. I tried to make myself believe that cold, empty space lay a short distance away in any direction, but it was impossible. I decided it was a good thing spacecraft didn’t have portholes—once he got used to the low gravity, a man might forget and open one to throw out a cigar.

I studied McGillicuddy as we walked. He was immaculate in every respect, from necktie knot to nail polish, and he wore no jewelry at all. His hair was short and black, his beard inhibited, and his eyes surprisingly warm in a professionally sterile face. I wondered what he had sold his soul for. I hoped he had gotten his price.

We had to descend two levels to get to the Lounge. The gravity on the upper level was kept at one-sixth normal, partly for the convenience of the Lunar personnel who were Skyfac’s only regular commuters, and mostly (of course) for the convenience of Carrington. But descending brought a subtle increase in weight, to perhaps a fifth or a quarter normal. My leg complained bitterly, but I found to my surprise that I preferred the pain to its absence. It’s a little scary when an old friend goes away like that.

The Lounge was a larger room than I had expected, quite big enough for our purposes. It encompassed all three levels, and one whole wall was an immense video screen, across which stars wheeled dizzily, joined with occasional regularity by a slice of mother Terra. The floor was crowded with chairs and tables in various groupings, but I could see that, stripped, it would provide Shara with entirely adequate room to dance. From long habit my feet began to report on the suitability of the floor as a dancing surface. Then I remembered how little use the floor was liable to get.

“Well,” Shara said to me with a smile, “this is what home will look like for the next six months. The Ring Two Lounge is identical to this one.”

“Six?” McGillicuddy said. “Not a chance.”

“What do you mean?”
Shara and I said together.

He blinked at our combined volume. “Well, you’d probably be good for that long, Charlie. But Shara’s already had a year of low gee, while she was in the typing pool.”

“So what?”

“Look, you expect to be in free fall for long periods of time, if I understand this correctly?”

“Twelve hours a day,” Shara agreed.

He grimaced. “Shara I hate to say this…but I’ll be surprised if you last a month. A body designed for a one-gee environment doesn’t work properly in zero gee.”

“But it will adapt, won’t it?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Sure. That’s why we rotate all personnel Earthside every fourteen months. Your body will adapt. One way. No return. Once you’ve fully adapted, returning to Earth will stop your heart—if some other major systemic failure doesn’t occur first. Look, you were just Earthside for three days—did you have any chest pains? Dizziness? Bowel trouble? Dropsickness on the way up?”

“All of the above,” she admitted.

“There you go. You were close to the nominal fourteen-month limit when you left. And your body will adapt even faster under no gravity at all. The successful free-fall endurance record of about eighteen months was set by a Skyfac construction gang with bad deadline problems—and they hadn’t spent a year in one-sixth gee first, and they weren’t straining their hearts the way you will be. Hell, there are four men in Luna now, from the original mining team, who will never see Earth again. Eight of their teammates tried. Don’t you two know anything about space? Didn’t Carrington tell you?”

I had
wondered
why Carrington had gone to the trouble of having our preflight physicals waived.

“But I’ve got to have at least four months. Four months of solid work, every day. I must.” She was dismayed, but fighting hard for control.

McGillicuddy started to shake his head, and then thought better of it. His warm eyes were studying Shara’s face. I knew exactly what he was thinking, and I liked him for it.

He was thinking,
How to tell a lovely lady her dearest dream is hopeless?

He didn’t know the half of it. I
knew
how much Shara had already—irrevocably—invested in this dream, and something in me screamed.

And then I saw her jaw ripple and I dared to hope.

Doctor Panzella was a wiry old man with eyebrows like two fuzzy caterpillars. He wore a tight-fitting jump-suit which would not foul a p-suit’s seals should he have to get into one in a hurry. His shoulder-length hair, which should have been a mane on that great skull, was clipped securely back against a sudden absence of gravity. A cautious man. To employ an obsolete metaphor, he was a suspender-
and
-belt type. He looked Shara over, ran tests on the spot, and gave her just under a month and a half. Shara said some things. I said some things. McGillicuddy said some things. Panzella shrugged, made further, very careful tests, and reluctantly cut loose of the suspenders. Two months. Not a day over. Possibly less, depending on subsequent monitoring of her body’s reactions to extended weightlessness. Then a year Earthside before risking it again. Shara seemed satisfied.

I didn’t see how we could do it.

McGillicuddy had assured us that it would take Shara at least a month simply to learn to handle herself competently in zero gee, much less dance. Her familiarity with one-sixth gee would, he predicted, be a liability rather than an asset. Then figure three weeks of choreography and rehearsal, a week of taping and just maybe we could broadcast one dance before Shara had to return to Earth. Not good enough. She and I had calculated that we would need three successive shows, each well received, to make a big enough dent in the dance world for Shara to squeeze into it. A year was far too big a spacing to be effective—and
who knew how soon Carrington might tire of her?
So I hollered at Panzella.

“Mr. Armstead,” he said hotly, “I am specifically contractually forbidden to allow this young lady to commit suicide.” He grimaced sourly. “I’m told it’s terrible public relations.”

“Charlie, it’s okay,” Shara insisted. “I can fit in three dances. We may lose some sleep, but we can do it.”

“I once told a man nothing was impossible. He asked me if I could ski through a revolving door. You haven’t got…”

My brain slammed into hyperdrive, thought about things, kicked itself in the ass a few times, and returned to realtime in time to hear my mouth finish without a break: “…much choice, though. Okay Tom, have that damned Ring Two Lounge cleaned out, I want it naked and spotless and have somebody paint over that damned video wall, the same shade as the other three and I mean the same. Shara, get out of those clothes and into your leotard. Doctor, we’ll be seeing you in twelve hours; quit gaping and move, Tom—we’ll be going over there at once; where the hell are my cameras?”

McGillicuddy spluttered.

“Get me a torch crew—I’ll want holes cut through the walls, cameras behind them, one-way glass, six locations, a room adjacent to the Lounge for a mixer console the size of a jetliner cockpit, and bolt a Norelco coffee machine next to the chair. I’ll need another room for editing, complete privacy and total darkness, size of any efficiency kitchen, another Norelco.”

McGillicuddy finally drowned me out. “Mister Armstead, this is the Main Ring of the Skyfac One complex, the administrative offices of one of the wealthiest corporations in existence. If you think this whole Ring is going to stand on its head for you…”

So we brought the problem to Carrington. He told McGillicuddy that henceforth Ring Two was
ours
, as well as any assistance whatsoever that we requested. He looked rather distracted. McGillicuddy started to tell him by how many weeks all this would put off the opening of the Skyfac Two complex. Carrington replied very quietly that he could add and subtract quite well, thank you, and McGillicuddy got white and quiet.

I’ll give Carrington that much. He gave us a free hand.

Panzella ferried over to Skyfac Two with us. We were chauffeured by lean-jawed astronaut types, on vehicles looking for all the world like pregnant broomsticks. It was as well that we had the doctor with us—Shara fainted on the way over. I nearly did myself, and I’m sure that broomstick has my thigh-prints on it yet. Falling through space is a scary experience the first time. Some people never get used to it. Most people. Shara responded splendidly once we had her inboard again, and fortunately her dropsickness did not return. Nausea can be a nuisance in free fall, a disaster in a p-suit. By the time my cameras and mixer had arrived, she was on her feet and sheepish. And while I browbeat a sweating crew of borrowed techs into installing them faster than was humanly possible, Shara began learning how to move in zero gee.

We were ready for the first taping in three weeks.

Living quarters and minimal life support were rigged for us in Ring Two so that we could work around the clock if we chose, but we spent nearly half of our nominal “off-hours” in Skyfac One. Shara was required to spend half of three days a week there with Carrington, and spent a sizable portion of her remaining nominal sack time out in space, in a p-suit. At first it was a conscious attempt to overcome her gut-level fear of all that emptiness. Soon it became her meditation, her retreat, her artistic reverie—an attempt to gain from contemplation of cold black depths enough insight into the meaning of extraterrestrial existence to dance of it.