The Stardance Trilogy (53 page)

Under the influence of all this good fellowship, Robert and I reached a new plateau in our relationship, to wit, publicly holding hands and necking. Nothing more serious than friendly cuddling; I think each of us was waiting for the other to make the first move. Well, I don’t really know what he was waiting for.

Come to think of it, I don’t know what I was waiting for either.

And then came the day we’d anticipated for so long. I think it’s safe to say we all woke up with a kids-on-Christmas-morning feeling. Today we would be allowed to leave the house!

Everyone showed up for breakfast, for once, and almost nothing was eaten. The buzz of conversation had its pitch and speed controls advanced one notch apiece past normal. A lot of teeth were showing. Then in the middle of the meal there was a subtle change. The feeling went from kids on Christmas morning to teenagers on the morning of the Chem Final. The laughter came more often, and more shrilly. A restless room in zero gravity is really restless; people bob around like corks in a high sea rather than undulating like seaweed. Smiles became fixed. A bulb of coffee got loose and people flinched away from it.

Kirra began to hum.

Under her breath at first, with a low buzzing tone to it. By the time I was aware of it, I found that I was humming along with her, and recognized the tune we were humming. The Song of Top Step. Ben joined softly in an octave below us. Kirra started to gently tap out the rhythm on the table. Someone two tables over picked up the melody, and that gave all of us the courage to increase our volume. Soon people were chiming in all over the cafeteria, even people from classes before or after ours. Not all of us knew the Song well enough to sing it, but most of us knew at least parts of it, and could join in for those. Those who couldn’t carry a tune kept the rhythm with utensils. Those few who didn’t know the Song at all stopped talking to listen. Even the spacers on the cafeteria staff stopped what they were doing.

We went through it three times together. The third was the best; by then almost everyone had it down. It was the kind of tune that’s easy to learn quickly; even to ears raised on different musical convenience, it was
hummable
. Kirra held the final note, then let her voice tumble slowly down to the bottom of her range and die out. There was no applause. There was not a sound. Not a cough. Still bodies.

“Let’s do it, then,” Kirra said, and the stasis was ended. We went off to school together calmly, joyfully, quietly, as one.

Assuming Ascension, Assumption, Assent

All of our nonsense is finally non-sent—

With honorable mention for whatever we meant

You are my content, and I am content.

—Teodor Vysotsky

R
EB AND
S
ULKE
were both waiting for us in Solarium Two. (For the rest of this week they would be teaching us together, twice a day; after that they’d teach separately again.) Although they knew us all by name and by sight, they marked us off on an actual checklist as we came through the open airlock chamber, and sealed both hatches carefully when we were all mustered. Reb was especially saintly, radiating calm and compassion, and Sulke was especially sour, nervous as a cat.

“If you haven’t checked your air, do so now,” she called. “We’ve got fresh tanks if you need them.” We were all in our p-suits, and I would have bet all of us had been smart enough to check our air supply. I certainly had—six times. But little Yumiko had to come forward, shamefaced, to accept a pair of tanks and a withering glare from Sulke. “Check your thruster charges too. You’re not gonna get much use out of them today, but start the habit of keeping them topped up.” Three people had to disgrace themselves this time, coming forward to have their wristlets or anklets recharged. Ben was one of them.

“You’ve heard it a million times,” Sulke told us in parade-ground voice. “I’ll tell you one more time. Space does not forgive. If you take your mind off it for five seconds, it will kill you.”

She took a breath to say more, and Reb gently cut her off. “Be mindful, as we have learned together, and all will be well.”

She exhaled, and nodded slowly. “That’s right. Okay, earthworms—” She caught herself again. “Sorry, I can’t call you that anymore, you’ve graduated.” She grinned. “Okay,
space
worms, attach your umbilicals. Make damn sure they’re hooked tight.”

The term was outdated: they weren’t real umbilicals like the pioneers used, carrying air from the mothership; they were only simple tethers. But they did fasten at the navel so that imagery was apt. Each of us found a ring to anchor ours to on the wall behind us. I checked carefully to make sure the snaplock had latched snugly shut. The umbilical was about the same diameter as spaghetti, guaranteed unbreakable, and was a phosphorescent white so it would not be lost in the darkness.

“Radios on Channel Four,” Sulke said. “Seal your hood and hold on to your anchor. Is there anyone whose hood is not sealed? Okay, here we go.”

There was a dysharmonic whining sound as high-volume pumps went into operation, draining the air from the Solarium. As the air left, the noise diminished. The cubic was large, it took awhile. We spent the time staring out the vast window.

Two was the only true solarium, the one that always faced the Sun. Its window worked like modern sunglasses: you could stare directly at the Sun, without everything else out there turning dark as well. The p-suit hood added another layer of polarization. The Sun looked like an old 60-watt bulb head-on, but by its light you could see Top Step’s own mirror farm a few miles away, a miniature model of the three immense ones that circle the globe, beaming down gigawatts for the groundhogs to squabble over. It looked like God’s chandelier. I could also just make out two distant Stardancers, their Symbiotes spun out into crimson discs, a little One-ish of the mirror farm. (That’s the side away from Earth in Top Step parlance.) They looked like they were just basking in the sun, rippling slightly like jellyfish, but for all I knew they could have been directing construction out in the Asteroid Belt. Who knows what a Stardancer is thinking? All other Stardancers, that’s who, and nobody else. There were no p-suited Third-Monthers visible at the moment, though there were surely some out there, too far to see or in other quadrants of space.

The sound of the pumps was gone now. The outside world is miked in a p-suit, but the mike only functions in atmosphere. There was no longer any air to support sound outside our suits, so we heard none.

“Hard vacuum,” Sulke announced in my ear. “Maintain radio silence unless you have an emergency. And don’t have an emergency. Here we go.”

A crack appeared at the bottom of the great window. In eerie utter silence, it slid upward until it was gone. A great gaping hole opened out on empty space. Radio silence or no, there was a soft susurrant murmur. For a moment my mind tried to tell me that the Sun and empty space were
below
me, that the huge opening was a bomb bay and I was about to fall out. But I suppressed the fear easily. Reb had trained me well.

“All right,” Sulke said, “starting over at this end,
one at a time
, move out when I tell you. Don’t move until the person before you has reached the end of their leash, I don’t want any tangles today. Try to fan out, so we end up making a big shaving brush. Rostropovitch, you’re first.”

Reb arranged himself like a skydiver, feet toward us, and gave a short blast on his ankle thrusters. “Follow me, Dmitri,” he said softly, and jaunted slowly out into emptiness. Dmitri followed him, and then Yumiko, and the exodus began. When my turn came I was ready. A one-second blast, and I was in motion. As I passed through the open window there was a sensation as if I had pierced some invisible membrane…and then I was in free space, tether unreeling slightly behind me, concentrating on my aim.

The umbilical placed enough drag on me that I had to blast again halfway out. I did it for a hair too long, and reached the end of my rope with a jerk that put me into a slow-motion tumble. I stabilized it easily, and could have come to a stop—Sulke had trained me well, too—but I didn’t. Like someone standing on a mountaintop and turning in circles, I rotated slowly. Now that I was no longer busy, I let myself take it all in.

And like my mates, I was dumbstruck.

It’s like the psychedelic experience. It cannot be described, and only a fool will try. I know that even my clearest memories of the event are pale shadows.

In free space you seem to see better, in more detail than usual. Everything has an uncanny “realer than real” look, because there is no air to scatter the light that reaches your eyes. You see about 20 percent more stars than can be seen on the clearest night on Earth, just a little brighter and clearer than even the best simulation, and none of them twinkle. Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all visible, and visibly different from the other celestial objects.

For the first time I gained some real sense of the size of Top Step. It looked like a mountain that had decided to fly, a mountain the size of Mount Baker back where I came from. (Already I had stopped thinking, “back
home
.”) Even though at that point in history something over a quarter of it had been tunneled out and put to assorted uses, the only externally prominent sign of human occupancy was the mammoth docking complex at the tip—and it had the relative dimensions of the hole in the tip of a fat cigar.

And at the same time all of Top Step was less than a dust mote. So vast is space that mighty Earth itself, off Three-ish, was a pebble, and the Sun was a coal floating in an eternal sea of ink. That made me some kind of subatomic particle. A pun awful enough to be worthy of Ben came to me: it had been too long since I’d been lepton. That made me think of Robert, and I recalled vaguely that the force that keeps leptons together is called the Weak Force. I was rummaging through my forebrain, looking for wordgames to anchor me to reality, cerebral pacifiers.

I looked around for Robert, spotted his turquoise p-suit coming into my field of vision perhaps twenty meters away—why, we were practically rubbing elbows. As in the classroom simulation holo, half of him was in darkness…but here in real space, there was enough backscatter of light from Top Step to make his dark side just barely visible. Other students floated beyond him; I picked out Kirra and Ben, holding hands. Jaunting as a couple is trickier than jaunting solo, but they had learned the knack.

Reb and Sulke let us all just be there in silence for a measureless time.

A forest of faint white umbilicals, like particle tracks from a cyclotron, led back to the Solarium we’d come from. Its huge window now seemed a pore in the skin of Top Step. All around us, stars burned without twinkling, infinitely far away. I became acutely aware of my breath whistling in and out, of the movement of my chest and belly as I breathed, of my pulse chugging in my ears, of the food making its way along my digestive tract and the sensation of air flowing across my skin. I felt a powerful spontaneous urge to try a dance step I’d been working on, something like an arabesque crossed with an Immelman roll. I squelched the urge firmly. Right place, wrong time.

I seemed to be at the center of the Universe, turning lazily end over end. My breathing slowed. Time stopped.

“I’m sorry, Reb,” Yoji Kuramatso said sadly.

“It’s all right, Yoji-san,” Reb said at once.
“Daijôbu-da!”
he jetted toward Yoji, flipped over halfway there and decelerated, came to a stop beside him.

“I really thought I could handle it,” Yoji said, his voice trembling slightly.

“
Simpai suru-na
, Yoji-san,” Reb said soothingly. “Switch to Channel Six now.”

They both switched their radios to a more private channel, and Reb began conducting Yoji back to Top Step, letting their umbilicals reel them slowly in rather than trying to use thrusters.

There was a murmur of embarrassment and sympathy. Yoji was liked.

“He did that great,” Sulke said. “If you’re going to panic, that’s the way to do it. Quietly. Slowly. Is anyone else having trouble?”

No one spoke.

“Okay, we’ll marinate until Reb gets back, and then we’ll get to work.”

Robert was passing through my visual field again. I didn’t want to break radio silence, so I waited until he was facing my way and made a tentative come-here gesture. He worked himself into the right attitude, pointed his hands down at his feet and gave a short blast on both wrist thrusters. He glided toward me in ultraslow motion, stretching his hands out toward me as he came. I oriented myself to him. When he arrived, we locked hands like trapeze acrobats, only pressing instead of pulling, and I gave an identical blast in the opposite direction with my ankle-thrusters to kill his velocity. Maybe it was because we got it right that Sulke didn’t chew us out for maneuvering without permission…or she may have had other reasons.

We drifted, facing each other, holding hands. The sun was at my back, so there was too much glare from his hood for me to see his face clearly. He must have seen mine well in the reflected light.

By mutual consent we moved to a new position, side to side, each with an arm around the other, facing infinity together. Part of me wanted to switch off my radio and talk with him hood-to-hood. But Sulke would have skinned me…and there really were no words, anyway.

If you are going to fall through endless darkness for timeless time, it is nice to have someone’s arm around you.

After a while, Reb returned and we started doing simple maneuvers. Even classwork didn’t break the mood, pop the bubble of our dreamlike state of awe and wonder. I don’t mean we were in a trance—at all times we remained mindful, of our tethers and our thruster placement and our air supply—but at the same time we experienced something like rapture, a three-dimensional awareness. I had been in a similar mental/physical state before, often…but only onstage. I wondered which of the others had anything in their experience to liken this to.

I was going to like this. This had been a good idea. Way to go, Morgan.