The Stardance Trilogy (20 page)

The headphones crackled with another carrier wave: Raoul calling from Tom and Linda’s place. “Norrey? Charlie? Tom’s okay. The doctor’s on his way, Charlie, but he’s not going to get here in time to do you any good. I called the Space Command, there’s no scheduled traffic
near
here, there’s just nothing in the neighborhood, Charlie, just nothing at all what the hell are we going to
do
?” Harry must have been very busy with Tom, or he’d have grabbed the mike by now.

“Here’s what you’re going to do, buddy,” I said calmly, spacing my words to slow him down. “Push the ‘record’ button. Okay? Now put the speakers on so Harry and Linda can witness. Ready? Okay. ‘I, Charles Armstead, being of sound mind and body—’”

“Charlie!”

“Don’t spoil the tape, buddy. I haven’t got time for too many retakes, and I’ve got better things to do. ‘I, Charles Armstead—’”

It didn’t take very long. I left everything to the Company—and I made Fat Humphrey a full partner. Le Maintenant had closed the month before, strangled by bureaucracy. Then it was Norrey’s turn, and she echoed me almost verbatim.

What was there to do then? We said our good-byes to Raoul, to Linda, and to Harry, making it as short as possible. Then we switched off our radios. Sitting backwards in the saddle was uncomfortable for Norrey; she turned around again and I hugged her from behind like a motorcycle passenger. Our hoods touched. What we said then is really none of your damned business.

An hour went by, the fullest hour I had ever known. All infinity stretched around us. Both of us being ignorant of astronomy, we had given names of our own to the constellations on our honeymoon. The Banjo. The Leering Gerbil. Orion’s Truss. The Big Pot Pipe and the Little Hash Pipe. One triplet near the Milky Way quite naturally became the Three Musketeers. Like that. We renamed them all, now, re-evoking that honeymoon. We talked of our lost plans and hopes. In turns, we freaked out and comforted each other, and then we both freaked out together and both comforted each other. We told each other those last few secrets even happily-marrieds hold out. Twice, we agreed to take off our p-suits and get it over with. Twice, we changed our minds. We talked about the children we didn’t have, and how lucky it was for them that we didn’t have them. We sucked sugar water from our hood nipples. We talked about God, about death, about how uncomfortable we were and how absurd it was to die uncomfortable—about how absurd it was to die at all.

“It was the deadline pressure killed us,” I said finally, “stupid damned deadline pressure. In a big hurry. Why? So we wouldn’t get marooned in space by our metabolisms. What was so wrong about that?” (I was very close, now.) “What were we so scared of? What has Earth got, that we were risking our necks to keep?”

“People,” Norrey answered seriously. “Places. There aren’t many of either up here.”

“Yeah, places. New York. Toronto. Cesspools.”

“Not fair. Prince Edward Island.”

“Yeah, and how much time did we get to spend there? And how long before it’s a bloody city?”

“
People
, Charlie. Good people.”

“Seven billion of ’em, squatting on the same disintegrating anthill.”

“Charlie, look out there.” She pointed to the Earth. “Do you see an ‘oasis hanging in space’? Does that look crowded to you?”

She had me there. From space, one’s overwhelming impression of our home planet is of one vast, godforsaken wilderness. Desert is by far the most common sight, and only occasionally does a twinkle or a miniature mosaic give evidence of human works. Man may have polluted hell out of his atmosphere—seen edge-on at sunset it looks no thicker than the skin of an apple—but he has as yet made next to no visible mark on the face of his planet.

“No. But it is, and you know it. My leg hurts all the time. There’s never a moment of real silence. It stinks. It’s filthy and germ-ridden and riddled with evil and steeped in contagious insanity and hip-deep in despair. I don’t know what the hell I ever wanted to go back there for.”

“Charlie!” I only realized how high my volume had become when I discovered how loud she had to be to out-shout me. I broke off, furious with myself.
Again you want to freak out? The last time wasn’t bad enough?

I’m sorry,
I answered myself,
I’ve never died before. I understand it’s been done worse.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I said aloud. “I guess I just haven’t cared much for Earth since Le Maintenant closed.” It started out to be a wisecrack, but it didn’t come out funny.

“Charlie,” she said, her voice strange.

You see? There she goes now, and we’re off and running again.
“Yeah?”

“Why are the Monkey Bars blinking on and off?”

At once I rechecked the air bottle, then the Y-joint, hoses, and joins. No, she was getting air. I looked then, and sure as hell the Monkey Bars were blinking on and off in the far distance, a Christmas-tree bulb on a flasher circuit. I checked the air again, carefully, to make sure we weren’t both hallucinating, and returned to our spoon embrace.

“Funny,” I said, “I can’t think of a circuit malf that’d behave that way.”

“Something must have struck the sunpower screen and set it spinning.”

“I guess. But what?”

“The hell with it, Charlie. Maybe it’s Raoul trying to signal us.”

“If it is, to hell with him indeed. There’s nothing more I want to say, and I’m damned if there’s anything I want to hear. Leave the damn phone off the hook. Where were we?”

“Deciding Earth sucks.”

“It certainly does—hard. Why does anybody live there, Norrey? Oh, the hell with that too.”

“Yeah. It can’t be such a bad place. We met there.”

“That’s true.” I hugged her a little tighter. “I guess we’re lucky people. We each found our Other Half. And before we died, too. How many are that lucky?”

“Tom and Linda, I think. Diane and Howard in Toronto. I can’t think of anybody else I know of, for sure.”

“Me either. There used to be more happy marriages around when I was a kid.” The Bars began blinking twice as fast. A second improbable meteor? Or a chunk of the panel breaking loose, putting the rest in a tighter spin? It was an annoying distraction; I moved until I couldn’t see it. “I guess I never realized just how incredibly lucky we are. A life with you in it is a square deal.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she cried, moving in my arms. Despite the awkwardness she worked around in her saddle to hug me again. My p-suit dug into my neck, the earphone on that side notched my ear, and her strong dancer’s arms raised hell with my throbbing back, but I made no complaint. Until her grip suddenly convulsed even tighter.

“Charlie!”

“Nnngh.”

She relaxed her clutch some, but held on. “What the hell is that?”

I caught my breath. “What the hell is what?” I twisted in my seat to look.
“What the hell is that?”
We both lost our seats on the Car and drifted to the ends of our hoses, stunned limp.

It was practically on top of us, within a hundred meters, so impossibly enormous and foreshortened that it took us seconds to recognize, identify it as a ship. My first thought was that a whale had come to visit.

Champion
, said the bold red letters across the prow. And beneath,
United Nations Space Command.

I glanced back at Norrey, then checked the air line one more time. “‘No scheduled traffic,’” I said hollowly, and switched on my radio.

The voice was incredibly loud, but the static was so much louder that I knew it was off-mike, talking to someone in the same room. I remember every syllable.

“—pid fucking idiots are too God damned dumb to turn on their radios, sir. Somebody’s gonna have to tap ’em on the shoulder.”

Further off-mike, a familiar voice began to laugh like hell, and after a moment the radioman joined in. Norrey and I listened to the laughter, speechless. A part of me considered laughing too, but decided I might never stop.

“Jesus Christ,” I said finally. “How far does a man have to go to have a little privacy with his wife?”

Startled silence, and then the mike was seized and the familiar voice roared, “You son of a bitch!”

“But seeing you’ve come all this way, Major Cox,” Norrey said magnificently, “we’ll come in for a beer.”

“You dumb son of a bitch,” Harry’s voice came from afar. “You dumb son of a bitch.” The Monkey Bars had stopped winking. We had the message.

“After you, my love,” I said, unshipping the air tank, and as I reached the airlock my last thruster died. Bill Cox met us at the airlock with three beers, and mine was
delicious
.

The two sips I got before the fun started.

Like Phillip Nolan, I had renounced something out loud—and had been heard.

I took those two sips right away, and made them last. Officers and crew were frankly gaping at Norrey and me. At first I naturally assumed they were awed by anyone dumb enough to turn off their radios in an emergency. Well, I hadn’t thought of being dead as an emergency. But on the second sip I noticed a certain subtle classification of gaping. With one or two exceptions, all the female crew were gaping at me and all the male crew were gaping at Norrey. I had not exactly forgotten what we were wearing under our p-suits; there was almost nothing to forget. We were “decently” covered by sanitary arrangements, but just barely, and what is commonplace on a home video screen on Earth is not so in the ready room of a warship.

Bill, of course, was too much of a gentleman to notice. Or maybe he realized there was not one practical thing to do about the situation except ignore it. “So reports of your demise were exaggerated, eh?”

“On the contrary,” I said, wiping my chin with my glove. “They omitted our resurrection. Which by me is the most important part. Thanks, Bill.”

He grinned, and said a strange thing very quickly. “Don’t ask any of the obvious questions.” As he said it, his eyes flickered slightly. On Earth or under acceleration they would have flicked from side to side. In free fall, a new reflex controls, and he happened to be oriented out of phase to my local vertical: his pupils described twin circles, perhaps a centimeter in diameter, and returned to us. The message was plain. The answers to my obvious next questions were classified information. Wait.

Hmmm.

I squeezed Norrey’s hand hard—unnecessarily, of course—and groped for a harmless response.

“We’re at your disposal,” is what I came up with.

He flinched. Then in a split second he decided that I didn’t mean whatever he’d thought I meant, and his grin returned. “You’ll want a shower and some food. Follow me to my quarters.”

“For a shower,” Norrey said, “I will follow you through hell.” We kicked off.

There was my second chance to gawk like a tourist at the innards of a genuine warship—and again I was too busy to pay any attention. Did Bill really expect his crew to believe that he had just happened to pick us up hitchhiking? Whenever no one was visibly within earshot, I tried to pump him—but in Space Command warships the air pressure is so low that sounds travel poorly. He outflew my questions—and how much expression does a man wear on the soles of his feet?

At last we reached his quarters and swung inside. He backed up to a wall and hung facing us in the totally relaxed “spaceman’s crouch,” and tossed us a couple of odd widgets. I examined mine: it looked like a wristwatch with a miniature hair dryer attached. Then he tossed us a pair of cigarettes and I got it. Mass priorities in a military craft differ from those of essentially luxury operations like ours or Skyfac’s: the
Champion’s
air system was primitive, not only low-pressure but inefficient. The widgets were combination air-cleaner/ashtrays. I slipped mine over my wrist and lit up.

“Major William Cox,” I said formally, “Norrey Armstead. Vice versa.”

It is of course impossible to bow when your shoulders are velcro’d to the wall, but Bill managed to signify. Norrey gave him what we call the free-fall curtsy, a movement we worked out idly one day on the theory that we might someday give curtain calls to a live audience. It’s indescribable but spectacular, as frankly sexual as a curtsy and as graceful.

Bill blinked, but recovered. “I am honored, Ms. Armstead. I’ve seen all the tapes you’ve released, and—well, this will be easy to misunderstand, but you’re her sister.”

Norrey smiled. “Thank you, Major—”

“Bill.”

“—Bill. That’s high praise. Charlie’s told me a lot about you.”

“Likewise, one drunken night when we met dirtside. Afterwards.”

I remembered the night—weeks before I had consciously realized that I was in love with Norrey—but not the conversation. My subconscious tells me only what it thinks I ought to know.

“Now you must both forgive me,” he went on, and I noticed for the first time that he was in a hurry. “I’d like nothing better than to chat, but I can’t. Please get out of your p-suits, quickly.”

“Even more than a shower, I’d like some answers, Bill,” I said. “What the hell brings you out our way, just in the nicotine like that? I don’t believe in miracles, not that kind anyway. And why the hush?”

“Yes,” Norrey chimed in, “and why didn’t your own Ground Control know you were in the area?”

Cox held up both hands. “Whoa. The answer to your questions run about twenty minutes minimum. In—” he glanced at his watch, “less than three we accelerate at two gravities. That’s why I want you out of those suits—my bed
will
accommodate air tank fittings, but you’d be uncomfortable as hell.”

“What? Bill, what the hell are you talking about? Accelerate where? Home is a couple o’ dozen klicks that-away.”

“Your friends will be picked up by the same shuttle that is fetching Dr. Panzella,” Cox said. “They’ll join us at Skyfac in a matter of hours. But you two can’t wait.”

“For
what
?” I hollered.

Bill arm-wrestled me with his eyes, and lost. “Damn it,” he said, then paused. “I have specific orders not to tell you a thing.” He glanced at his chronometer. “And I really do have to get back to the Worry Hole. Look, if you’ll trust me and pay attention, I can give you the whole twenty minutes in two sentences, all right?”