STARDANCE
             Spider and Jeanne Robinson
   I can’t really say that I knew her, certainly not the way Seroff knew
Isadora. All I know of her childhood and adolescence are the anecdotes she
chanced to relate in my hearing—just enough to make me certain that all
three of the contradictory biographies on the current best-seller list are
fictional. All I know of her adult life are the hours she spent in my
presence and on my monitors—more than enough to tell me that every
newspaper account I’ve seen is fictional. Carrington probably believed he
knew her better than I, and in a limited sense he was correct— but he
would never have written of it, and now he is dead.
  But I was her video man, since the days when you touched the camera
with your hands, and I knew her backstage: a type of relationship like no
other on Earth or off it. I don’t believe it can be described to anyone not of
the profession—you might think of it as somewhere between co-workers
and combat buddies. I was with her the day she came to Skyfac, terrified
and determined, to stake her life upon a dream. I watched her work and
worked with her for that whole two months, through endless rehearsals,
and I have saved every tape and they are not for sale.
  And, of course, I saw the Stardance. I was there; I taped it.
  I guess I can tell you some things about her.


   To begin with, it was not, as Cahill’s Sham and Von Derski’s Dance
Unbound: The Creation of New Modern suggest, a lifelong fascination
with space and space travel that led her to become the race’s first
zero-gravity dancer. Space was a means to her, not an end, and its vast
empty immensity scared her at first. Nor was it, as Melberg’s hardcover
tabloid The Real Shara Drummond claims, because she lacked the talent
to make it as a dancer on Earth. If you think free-fall dancing is easier
than conventional dance, you try it. Don’t forget your dropsickness bag.
   But there is a grain of truth in Melberg’s slander, as there is in all the
best slanders. She could not make it on Earth—but not through lack of
talent.
  I first saw her in Toronto in July of 1984. I headed Toronto Dance
Theater’s video department at that time, and I hated every minute of it. I
hated everything in those days. The schedule that day called for spending
the entire afternoon taping students, a waste of time and tape which I
hated more than anything except the phone company. I hadn’t seen the
year’s new crop yet, and was not eager to. I love to watch dance done
well—the efforts of a tyro are usually as pleasing to me as a first-year violin
student in the next apartment is to you.
   My leg was bothering me even more than usual as I walked into the
studio. Norrey saw my face and left a group of young hopefuls to come
over. “Charlie… ?”
   “I know, I know. They’re tender fledglings, Charlie, with egos as fragile
as an Easter egg in December. Don’t bite them, Charlie. Don’t even bark at
them if you can help it, Charlie.”
  She smiled. “Something like that. Leg?”
  “Leg.”
  Norrey Drummond is a dancer who gets away with looking like a
woman because she’s small. There’s about a hundred and fifteen pounds of
her, and most of it is heart. She stands about five four, and is perfectly
capable of seeming to tower over the tallest student. She has more energy
than the North American Grid, and uses it as efficiently as a vane pump
(have you ever studied the principle of a standard piston-type pump? Go
look up the principle of a vane pump. I wonder what the original
conception of that notion must have been like, as an emotional
experience). There’s a signaturelike uniqueness to her dance, the only
reason I can see why she got so few of the really juicy parts in company
productions until Modern gave way to New Modern. I liked her because
she didn’t pity me.
  “It’s not only the leg,” I admitted. “I hate to see the tender fledglings
butcher your choreography.”
  “Then you needn’t worry. The piece you’re taping today is by… one of
the students.”
  “Oh, fine. I knew I should have called in sick.” She made a face. “What’s
the catch?”
  “Eh?”
  “Why did the funny thing happen to your voice just as you got to ‘one of
the students’?”
  She blushed. “Dammit, she’s my sister.”
  Norrey and I are the very oldest and closest of friends, but I’d never
chanced to meet a sister—not unusual these days, I suppose.
  My eyebrows rose. “She must be good, then.”
  “Why, thank you, Charlie.”
  “Bullshit. I give compliments right-handed or not at all—I’m not talking
about heredity. I mean that you’re so hopelessly ethical you’d bend over
backward to avoid nepotism. For you to give your own sister a feature like
that, she must be terrific.”
  “Charlie, she is,” Norrey said simply.
  “We’ll see. What’s her name?”
   “Shara.” Norrey pointed her out, and I understood the rest of the catch.
Shara Drummond was ten years younger than her sister—and seven inches
taller, with thirty or forty more pounds. I noted absently that she was
stunningly beautiful, but it didn’t deter my dismay—in her best years,
Sophia Loren could never have become a modern dancer. Where Norrey
was small, Shara was big, and where Norrey was big, Shara was bigger. If
I’d seen her on the street I might have whistled appreciatively—but in the
studio I frowned.
  “My God, Norrey, she’s enormous.”
  “Mother’s second husband was a football player,” she said mournfully.
“She’s awfully good.”
  “If she is good, that is awful. Poor girl. Well, what do you want me to
do?”
  “What makes you think I want you to do anything?”
  “You’re still standing here.”
  “Oh. I guess I am. Well… have lunch with us, Charlie?”
  “Why?” I knew perfectly well why, but I expected a polite lie.
  Not from Norrey Drummond. “Because you two have something in
common, I think.”
  I paid her honesty the compliment of not wincing. “I suppose we do.”
  “Then you will?”
  “Right after the session.”
  She twinkled and was gone. In a remarkably short time she had
organized the studioful of wandering, chattering young people into
something that resembled a dance ensemble if you squinted. They warmed
up during the twenty minutes it took me to set up and check out my
equipment. I positioned one camera in front of them, one behind, and
kept one in my hands for walk-around close-up work. I never triggered it.
   There’s a game you play in your mind. Every time someone catches or is
brought to your attention, you begin making guesses about them. You try
to extrapolate their character and habits from their appearance. Him?
Surly, disorganized—leaves the cap off the toothpaste and drinks
boilermakers. Her? Art-student type, probably uses a diaphragm and
writes letters in a stylized calligraphy of her own invention. Them? They
look like schoolteachers from Miami, probably here to see what snow looks
like, attend a convention. Sometimes I come pretty close. I don’t know how
I typecast Shara Drummond in those first twenty minutes. The moment
she began to dance, all preconceptions left my mind. She became
something elemental, something unknowable, a living bridge between our
world and the one the Muses live in.
   I know, on an intellectual and academic level, all there is to know about
dance, and I could not categorize or classify or even really comprehend the
dance she danced that afternoon. I saw it, I even appreciated it, but I was
not equipped to understand it. My camera dangled from the end of my
arm, next to my jaw. Dancers speak of their “center,” the place their
motion centers around, often quite near the physical center of gravity. You
strive to “dance from your center,” and the “contraction and release” idea
which underlies much of Modern dance depends on the center for its focus
of energy. Shara’s center seemed to move about the room under its own
power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity.
What’s the word for the outermost part of the sun, the part that still shows
in an eclipse? Corona? That’s what her limbs were: four lengthy tongues of
flame that followed the center in its eccentric, whirling orbit, writhing
fluidly around its surface. That the lower two frequently contacted the
floor seemed coincidental—indeed, the other two touched the floor nearly
as regularly.
   There were other students dancing. I know this because the two
automatic video cameras, unlike me, did their job and recorded the piece
as a whole. It was called Birthing, and depicted the formation of a galaxy
that ended up resembling Andromeda. It was only vaguely accurate,
literally, but it wasn’t intended to be. Symbolically, it felt like the birth of a
galaxy.
  In retrospect. At the time I was aware only of the galaxy’s heart: Shara.
Students occluded her from time to time, and I simply never noticed. It
hurt to watch her.
  If you know anything about dance, this must all sound horrid to you. A
dance about a nebula? I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous notion. And it
worked. In the most gut-level, cellular way it worked—save only that Shara
was too good for those around her. She did not belong in that eager crew
of awkward, half-trained apprentices. It was like listening to the late
Stephen Wonder trying to work with a pickup band in a Montreal bar.
  But that wasn’t what hurt.


   Le Maintenant was shabby, but the food was good and the house brand
of grass was excellent. Show a Diner’s Club card in there and they’d show
you a galley full of dirty dishes. It’s gone now. Norrey and Shara declined a
toke, but in my line of work it helps. Besides, I needed a few hits. How to
tell a lovely lady her dearest dream is hopeless?
   I didn’t need to ask Shara to know that her dearest dream was to dance.
More: to dance professionally. I have often speculated on the motives of
the professional artist. Some seek the narcissistic assurance that others
will actually pay cash to watch or hear them. Some are so incompetent or
disorganized that they can support themselves in no other way. Some have
a message which they feel needs expressing. I suppose most artists
combine elements of all three. This is no complaint—what they do for us is
necessary. We should be grateful that there are motives.
   But Shara was one of the rare ones. She danced because she needed to.
She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she
needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.
Anything else would have demeaned and devalued the essential statement
of her dance. I know this, from watching that one dance.
  Between toking up and keeping my mouth full and then toking again (a
mild amount to offset the slight down that eating brings), it was over half
an hour before I was required to say anything, beyond an occasional
grunted response to the luncheon chatter of the ladies. As the coffee
arrived, Shara looked me square in the eye and said, “Do you talk,
Charlie?”
  She was Norrey’s sister, all right.
  “Only inanities.”
  “No such thing. Inane people, maybe.”
  “Do you enjoy dancing, Miss Drummond?”
  She answered seriously. “Define ‘enjoy.’ ”
  I opened my mouth and closed it, perhaps three times. You try it.
  “And for God’s sake tell me why you’re so intent on not talking to me.
You’ve got me worried.”
  “Shara!” Norrey looked dismayed.
  “Hush. I want to know.”
  I took a crack at it. “Shara, before he died I had the privilege of meeting
Bertram Ross. I had just seen him dance. A producer who knew and liked
me took me backstage, the way you take a kid to see Santa Claus. I had
expected him to look even older off stage, at rest. He looked younger, as if
that incredible motion of his was barely in check. He talked to me. After a
while I stopped opening my mouth, because nothing ever came out.”
   She waited, expecting more. Only gradually did she comprehend the
compliment and its dimension. I had assumed it would be obvious. Most
artists expect to be complimented. When she did twig, she did not blush
or simper. She did not cock her head and say “Oh, come on.” She did not
say “You flatter me.” She did not look away.
   She nodded slowly and said, “Thank you, Charlie. That’s worth a lot
more than idle chatter.” There was a suggestion of sadness in her smile, as
if we shared a bitter joke.
  “You’re welcome.”
  “For heaven’s sake, Norrey, what are you looking so upset about?”
  The cat now had Norrey’s tongue.
  “She’s disappointed in me,” I said. “I said the wrong thing.”
  “That was the wrong thing?”
  “It should have been ‘Miss Drummond, I think you ought to give up
dancing.’”
  “It should have been ‘Shara, I think you ought’… what?”
  “Charlie,” Norrey began.
  “I was supposed to tell you that we can’t all be professional dancers,
that they also surf who only sand and wade. Shara, I was supposed to tell
you to dump the dance—before it dumps you.”
  In my need to be honest with her, I had been more brutal than was
necessary, I thought. I was to learn that bluntness never dismayed Shara.
She demanded it.
  “Why you?” was all she said.
  “We’re inhabiting the same vessel, you and I. We’ve both got an itch
that our bodies just won’t let us scratch.”
  Her eyes softened. “What’s your itch?”
  “The same as yours.”
  “Eh?”
   “The man was supposed to come and fix the phone on Thursday. My
roommate, Karen, and I had an all-day rehearsal. We left a note. Mister
telephone man, we had to go out, and we sure couldn’t call you, heh heh.
Please get the key from the concierge and come on in; the phone’s in the
bedroom. The phone man never showed up. They never do.” My hands
seemed to be shaking. “We came home up the back stairs from the alley.
The phone was still dead, but I never thought to take down the note on the
front door. I got sick the next morning. Cramps. Vomiting. Karen and I
were just friends, but she stayed home to take care of me. I suppose on a
Friday night the note seemed even more plausible. He slipped the lock
with a piece of plastic, and Karen came out of the kitchen as he was
unplugging the stereo. He was so indignant he shot her. Twice. The noise
scared him; by the time I got there he was halfway out the door. He just
had time to put a slug through my hip joint, and then he was gone. They
never got him. They never even came to fix the phone.” My hands were
under control now. “Karen was a damned good dancer, but I was better. In
my head, I still am.”
  Her eyes were round. “You’re not Charlie… Charles Armstead. ”
  I nodded.
  “Oh my God. So that’s where you went.”
  I was shocked by how she looked. It brought me back from the cold and
windy border of self-pity. I began a little to pity her. I should have guessed
the depth of her empathy. And in the way that really mattered, we were
too damned alike—we did share the same bitter joke. I wondered why I
had wanted to shock her.
  “They couldn’t repair the joint?” she asked softly.
  “I can walk splendidly. Given a strong enough motivation, I can even
run short distances. I can’t dance worth a damn.”
  “So you became a video man.”
   “Three years ago. People who know both video and dance are about as
common as garter belts these days. Oh, they’ve been taping dance since
the seventies—with the imagination of a network news cameraman. If you
film a stage play with two cameras in the orchestra pit, is it a movie?”
  “You do for dance what the movie camera did for drama?”
  “Pretty fair analogy. Where it breaks down is that dance is more
analogous to music than to drama. You can’t stop and start it, or go back
and retake a scene that didn’t go in the can right, or reverse the
chronology to get a tidy shooting schedule. The event happens and you
record it. What I am is what the record industry pays top dollar for—a mix
man with savvy enough to know which ax is wailing at the moment and
mike it high—and the sense to have given the heaviest dudes the best
mikes. There are a few others like me. I’m the best.”
   She took it the way she had the compliment to herself—at face value.
Usually when I say things like that I don’t give a damn what reaction I get,
or I’m being salty and hoping for outrage. But I was pleased at her
acceptance, pleased enough for it to bother me. A faint irritation made me
go brutal again, knowing it wouldn’t work. “So what all this leads to is
that Norrey was hoping I’d suggest some similar form of sublimation for
you. Because I’ll make it in dance before you will.”
   She stubborned up. “I don’t buy that, Charlie. I know what you’re
talking about, I’m not a fool, but I think I can beat it.”
  “Sure you will. You ‘re too damned big, lady. You’ve got tits like both
halves of a prize honeydew melon and an ass that any actress in Hollywood
would sell her parents for, and in Modern dance that makes you d-e-d
dead, you haven’t got a chance. Beat it? You’ll beat your head in first.
How’m I doing, Norrey?”
  “For Christ’s sake, Charlie!”
  I softened. I can’t work Norrey into a tantrum—I like her too much. “I’m
sorry, hon. My leg’s giving me the mischief, and I’m stinkin‘ mad. She
ought to make it—and she won’t. She’s your sister, and so it saddens you.
Well, I’m a total stranger, and it enrages me.”
   “How do you think it makes me feel?” Shara blazed, startling us both. I
hadn’t known she had so much voice. “So you want me to pack it in and
rent me a camera, huh, Charlie? Or maybe sell apples outside the studio?”
A ripple ran up her jaw. “Well, I will be damned by all the gods in
Southern California before I’ll pack it in. God gave me the large economy
size, but there is not a surplus pound on it and it fits me like a glove and I
can by Jesus dance it and I will. You may be right—I may beat my head in
first. But I will get it done.” She took a deep breath. “Now I thank you for
your kind intentions, Char—Mr. Armst— Oh shit.” The tears came and she
left hastily, spilling a quarter cup of cold coffee on Norrey‘s lap.
  “Charlie,” Norrey said through clenched teeth, “why do I like you so
much?”
  “Dancers are dumb.” I gave her my handkerchief.
  “Oh.” She patted at her lap a while. “How come you like me?”
  “Video men are smart.”
  “Oh.”


  I spent the afternoon in my apartment, reviewing the footage I’d shot
that morning, and the more I watched, the madder I got.
   Dance requires intense motivation at an extraordinarily early age—a
blind devotion, a gamble on the as-yet-unrealized potentials of heredity
and nutrition. You can begin, say, classical ballet training at age six—and
at fourteen find yourself broad-shouldered, the years of total effort utterly
wasted. Shara had set her sights on Modern dance—and found out too late
that God had dealt her the body of a woman.
  She was not fat—you have seen her. She was tall, big-boned tall, and on
that great frame was built a rich, ripely female body. As I ran and reran
the tapes of Birthing, the pain grew in me until I even forgot the
ever-present aching of my own leg. It was like watching a supremely gifted
basketball player who stood four feet tall.
  To make it in Modern dance, it is essential to get into a company. You
cannot be seen unless you are visible. Norrey had told me, on the walk
back to the studio, of Shara’s efforts to get into a company—and I could
have predicted nearly every word.
  “Merce Cunningham saw her dance, Charlie. Martha Graham saw her
dance, just before she died. Both of them praised her warmly, for her
choreography as much as for her technique. Neither offered her a
position. I’m not even sure I blame them—I can sort of understand.”
   Norrey could understand all right. It was her own defect magnified a
hundredfold: uniqueness. A company member must be capable of
excellent solo work—but she must also be able to blend into group effort,
in ensemble work. Shara’s very uniqueness made her virtually useless as a
company member. She could not help but draw the eye.
   And, once drawn, the male eye at least would never leave. Modern
dancers must sometimes work nude these days, and it is therefore meet
that they have the body of a fourteen-year-old boy. We may have ladies
dancing with few or no clothes on up here, but by God it is Art. An actress
or a musician or a singer or a painter may be lushly endowed, deliciously
rounded—but a dancer must be nearly as sexless as a high-fashion model.
Perhaps God knows why. Shara could not have purged her dance of her
sexuality even if she had been interested in trying, and as I watched her
dance on my monitor and in my mind’s eye, I knew she was not.
  Why did her genius have to lie in the only occupation besides model and
nun in which sexiness is a liability? It broke my heart, by empathic
analogy.
  “It’s no good at all, is it?”
  I whirled and barked. “Dammit, you made me bite my tongue.”
   “I’m sorry.” She came from the doorway into my living room. “Norrey
told me how to find the place. The door was ajar.”
  “I forgot to shut it when I came home.”
  “You leave it open?”
   “I’ve learned the lesson of history. No junkie, no matter how strung out
he is, will enter an apartment with the door ajar and the radio on.
Obviously there’s someone home. And you’re right, it’s no damn good at
all. Sit down.”
  She sat on the couch. Her hair was down now, and I liked it better that
way. I shut off the monitor and popped the tape, tossing it on a shelf.
  “I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have blown up at you at lunch. You
were trying to help me.”
   “You had it coming. I imagine by now you’ve built up quite a head of
steam.”
   “Five years’ worth. I figured I’d start in the States instead of Canada. Go
farther faster. Now I’m back in Toronto and I don’t think I’m going to
make it here either. You’re right, Mr. Armstead—I’m too damned big.
Amazons don’t dance.”
   “It’s still Charlie. Listen, something I want to ask you. That last gesture,
at the end of Birthing—what was that? I thought it was a beckoning,
Norrey says it was a farewell, and now that I’ve run the tape it looks like a
yearning, a reaching out.”
  “Then it worked.”
  “Pardon?”
   “It seemed to me that the birth of a galaxy called for all three. They’re so
close together in spirit it seemed silly to give each a separate movement.”
  “Mmm.” Worse and worse. Suppose Einstein had had aphasia. “Why
couldn’t you have been a rotten dancer? That’d just be irony. This”—I
pointed to the tape—“is high tragedy.”
  “Aren’t you going to tell me I can still dance for myself?”
  “No. For you that’d be worse than not dancing at all.”
  “My God, you’re perceptive. Or am I that easy to read?”
  I shrugged.
  “Oh, Charlie,” she burst out, “what am I going to do?”
  “You’d better not ask me that.” My voice sounded funny.
  “Why not?”
  “Because I’m already two thirds in love with you. And because you’re
not in love with me and never will be. And so that is the sort of question
you shouldn’t ask me.”
  It jolted her a little, but she recovered quickly. Her eyes softened, and
she shook her head slowly. “You even know why I’m not, don’t you?”
  “And why you won’t be.”
  I was terribly afraid she was going to say “Charlie, I’m sorry.” But she
surprised me again. What she said was “I can count on the fingers of one
foot the number of grown-up men I’ve ever met. I’m grateful for you. I
guess ironic tragedies come in pairs?”
  “Sometimes.”
  “Well, now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my life. That
should kill the weekend.”
  “Will you continue your classes?”
   “Might as well. It’s never a waste of time to study. Norrey’s teaching me
things.”
   All of a sudden my mind started to percolate. Man is a rational animal,
right? Right? “What if I had a better idea?”
  “If you’ve got another idea, it’s better. Speak.”
  “Do you have to have an audience? I mean, does it have to be live?”
  “What do you mean?”
   “Maybe there’s a back way in. Look, they’re building tape facilities into
all the TVs nowadays, right? And by now everybody has collected all the
old movies and Ernie Kovacs programs and such that they always wanted,
and now they’re looking for new stuff. Exotic stuff, too esoteric for network
or local broadcast, stuff that—”
  “The independent video companies, you’re talking about.”
  “Right. TDT is thinking of entering the market, and the Graham
company already has.”
  “So?”
   “So suppose we go freelance? You and me? You dance it and I’ll tape it:
a straight business deal. I’ve got a few connections, and maybe I can get
more. I could name you ten acts in the music business right now that
never go on tour—just record and record. Why don’t you bypass the
structure of the dance companies and take a chance on the public? Maybe
word of mouth could…”
  Her face was beginning to light up like a jack-o‘-lantern. “Charlie, do
you think it could work? Do you really think so?”
   “I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance.” I crossed the room, opened up
the beer fridge, took out the snowball I keep there in the summer, and
tossed it at her. She caught it, but just barely, and when she realized what
it was, she burst out laughing. “I’ve got just enough faith in the idea to
quit working for TDT and put my time into it. I’ll invest my time, my tape,
my equipment, and my savings. Ante up.”
  She tried to get sober, but the snowball froze her fingers and she broke
up again. “A snowball in July. You madman. Count me in. I’ve got a little
money saved. And… and I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”
  “I guess not.”


   The next three years were some of the most exciting years of my life, of
both our lives. While I watched and taped, Shara transformed herself from
a potentially great dancer into something truly awesome. She did
something I’m not sure I can explain.
  She became dance’s analogy of the jazzman.
   Dance was, for Shara, self-expression, pure and simple, first, last and
always. Once she freed herself of the attempt to fit into the world of
company dance, she came to regard choreography per se as an obstacle to
her self-expression, as a preprogrammed rut, inexorable as a script and as
limiting. And so she devalued it.
   A jazzman may blow Night in Tunisia for a dozen consecutive nights,
and each evening will be a different experience, as he interprets and
reinterprets the melody according to his mood of the moment. Total unity
of artist and his art: spontaneous creation. The melodic starting point
distinguishes the result from pure anarchy.
    In just this way Shara devalued preperformance choreography to a
starting point, a framework on which to build whatever the moment
demanded, and then jammed around it. She learned in those three busy
years to dismantle the interface between herself and her dance. Dancers
have always tended to sneer at improv dancing, even while they practiced
it, in the studio, for the looseness it gave. They failed to see that planned
improv, improv around a theme fully thought out in advance, was the
natural next step in dance. Shara took the step. You must be very, very
good to get away with that much freedom. She was good enough.
   There’s no point in detailing the professional fortunes of Drumstead
Enterprises over those three years. We worked hard, we made some
magnificent tapes, and we couldn’t sell them for paperweights. A home
video cassette industry indeed existed— and they knew as much about
Modern dance as the record industry knew about the blues when they
started. The big outfits wanted credentials, and the little outfits wanted
cheap talent. Finally we even got desperate enough to try the schlock
houses— and learned what we already knew. They didn’t have the
distribution, the prestige, or the technical specs for the critics to pay any
attention to them. Word-of-mouth advertising is like a gene pool—if it
isn’t a certain minimum size to start with, it doesn’t get anywhere.
“Spider” John Koerner is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter
who has been making and selling his own records since 1972. How many
of you have ever heard of him?
   In May of 1987 I opened my mailbox in the lobby and found the letter
from VisuEnt Inc., terminating our option with deepest sorrow and no
severance. I went straight over to Shara’s apartment, and my leg felt as if
the bone marrow had been replaced with thermite and ignited. It was a
very long walk.
  She was working on Weight Is a Verb when I got there. Converting her
big living room into a studio had cost time, energy, skull sweat, and a fat
bribe to the landlord, but it was cheaper than renting time in a studio,
considering the sets we wanted. It looked like high mountain country that
day, and I hung my hat on a fake alder when I entered.
   She flashed me a smile and kept moving, building up to greater and
greater leaps. She looked like the most beautiful mountain goat I ever saw.
I was in a foul mood and I wanted to kill the music (McLaughlin and Miles
together, leaping some themselves), but I never could interrupt Shara
when she was dancing. She built it gradually, with directional
counterpoint, until she seemed to hurl herself into the air, stay there until
she was damned good and ready, and then hurl herself down again.
Sometimes she rolled when she hit and sometimes she landed on her
hands, and always the energy of falling was transmuted into something
instead of being absorbed. It was total energy output, and by the time she
was done I had calmed down enough to be almost philosophical about our
mutual professional ruin.
  She ended up collapsed in upon herself, head bowed, exquisitely
humbled in her attempt to defy gravity. I couldn’t help applauding. It felt
corny, but I couldn’t help it.
  “Thank you, Charlie.”
   “I’ll be damned. Weight is a verb. I thought you were crazy when you
told me the title.”
  “It’s one of the strongest verbs in dance—and you can make it do
anything.”
  “Almost anything.”
  “Eh?”
  “VisuEnt gave us our contract back.”
  “Oh.” Nothing showed in her eyes, but I knew what was behind them.
“Well, who’s next on the list?”
  “There is no one left on the list.”
  “Oh.”This time it showed. “Oh.”
  “We should have remembered. Great artists are never honored in their
own lifetime. What we ought to do is drop dead— then we’d be all set.”
  In my way I was trying to be strong for her, and she knew it and tried to
be strong for me.
   “Maybe what we should do is go into death insurance, for artists,” she
said. “We pay the client premiums against a controlling interest in his
estate, and we insure that he’ll die.”
  “We can’t lose. And if he becomes famous in his lifetime he can buy
out.”
  “Terrific. Let’s stop this before I laugh myself to death.”
  “Yeah.”
  She was silent for a long time. My own mind was racing efficiently, but
the transmission seemed to be blown—it wouldn’t go anywhere. Finally
she got up and turned off the music machine, which had been whining
softly ever since the tape ended. It made a loud click.
 “Norrey’s got some land in Prince Edward Island,” she said, not meeting
my eyes. “There’s a house.”
  I tried to head her off with the punch line from the old joke about the
kid shoveling out the elephant cage in the circus whose father offers to
take him back and set him up with a decent job. “What? And leave show
business?”
   “Screw show business,” she said softly. “If I went out to PEI now, maybe
I could get the land cleared and plowed in time to get a garden in.” Her
expression changed. “How about you?”
  “Me? I’ll be okay. TDT asked me to come back.”
  “That was six months ago.”
  “They asked again. Last week.”
  “And you said no. Moron.”
  “Maybe so, maybe so.”
  “The whole damn thing was a waste of time. All that time. All that
energy. All that work. I might as well have been farming in PEI—by now
the soil’d be starting to bear well. What a waste, Charlie, what a stinking
waste.”
  “No, I don’t think so, Shara. It sounds glib to say that ‘nothing is
wasted,’ but—well, it’s like that dance you just did. Maybe you can’t beat
gravity—but it surely is a beautiful thing to try.”
  “Yeah, I know. Remember the Light Brigade. Remember the Alamo.
They tried.” She laughed, a bitter laugh.
   “Yes, and so did Jesus of Nazareth. Did you do it for material reward, or
because it needed doing? If nothing else, we now have several hundred
thousand feet of the most magnificent dance recordings on tape,
commercial value zero, real value incalculable, and by me that is no waste.
It’s over now, and we’ll both go do the next thing, but it was not a waste.”
I discovered that I was shouting, and stopped.
  She closed her mouth. After a while she tried a smile. “You’re right,
Charlie. It wasn’t waste. I’m a better dancer than I ever was.”
  “Damn right. You’ve transcended choreography.”
  She smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Even Norrey thinks it’s a dead end.”
  “It is not a dead end. There’s more to poetry than haiku and sonnets.
Dancers don’t have to be robots, delivering memorized lines with their
bodies.”
  “They do if they want to make a living.”
  “We’ll try again in a few years. Maybe they’ll be ready then.”
  “Sure. Let me get us some drinks.”
   I slept with her that night, for the first and last time. In the morning I
broke down the set in the living room while she packed. I promised to
write. I promised to come and visit when I could. I carried her bags down
to the car, and stowed them inside. I kissed her and waved goodbye. I
went looking for a drink, and at four o’clock the next morning a mugger
decided I looked drunk enough and I broke his jaw, his nose, and two ribs,
and then sat down on him and cried. On Monday morning I showed up at
the studio with my hat in my hand and a mouth like a bus-station ashtray
and crawled back into my old job. Norrey didn’t ask any questions. What
with rising food prices, I gave up eating anything but bourbon, and in six
months I was fired. It went like that for a long time.
  I never did write to her. I kept getting bogged down after “Dear
Shara…”
   When I got to the point of selling my video equipment for booze, a relay
clicked somewhere and I took stock of myself. The stuff was all the life I
had left, and so I went to the local Al-Anon instead of the pawnshop and
got sober. After a while my soul got numb, and I stopped flinching when I
woke up. A hundred times I began to wipe the tapes I still had of
Shara—she had copies of her own—but in the end I could not. From time
to time I wondered how she was doing, and I could not bear to find out. If
Norrey heard anything, she didn’t tell me about it. She even tried to get
me my job back a third time, but it was hopeless. Reputation can be a
terrible thing once you’ve blown it. I was lucky to land a job with an
educational TV station in New Brunswick.
  It was a long couple of years.
   Vidphones were coming out by 1990, and I had breadboarded one of my
own without the knowledge or consent of the phone company, which I still
hated more than anything. When the peanut bulb I had replaced the
damned bell with started glowing softly on and off one evening in June, I
put the receiver on the audio pickup and energized the tube, in case the
caller was also equipped. “Hello?”
   She was. When Shara’s face appeared, I got a cold cube of fear in the pit
of my stomach, because I had quit seeing her face everywhere when I quit
drinking, and I had been thinking lately of hitting the sauce again. When I
blinked and she was still there, I felt a little better and tried to speak. It
didn’t work.
  “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
rototiller?”
  “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 multimillionaire by
convincing a number of giants of industry to underwrite Skyfac, the great
orbiting complex that kicked the bottom out of the crystals market. 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,
establishing mining crews on Luna to supply it with cheap raw materials,
and lived 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. Ultra-efficient 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 air lock. 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. 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. “Mr. 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. It took some time. 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 knew 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, Tangier Supreme. Dom Perignon for the pipe.”
   Without cracking a smile she went to a cabinet, which 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 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 horse-laughs
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 the 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 g, 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 a job 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 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 four-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 that 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 hard 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 seated, hands in my lap. “Oh 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
tomorrow, 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.
   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,
strap you into a couch, batter you with thunders, make you weigh better
than half a ton for an unreasonably long time, and then drop you off the
edge of the world into weightlessness. I had been half expecting nausea,
but what I got was even more shocking: the sudden, unprecedented, total
absence of pain in my leg. At that, Shara was hit worse than I was, 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 air lock. The
air lock 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 in a rather large cubical compartment it was far
less than Earth normal. Nonetheless, my leg resumed biting me.
   The room tried to be a classic reception room, high-level (“Please be
seated. His Majesty will see you shortly”), but the low g and the p-suits
racked along two walls spoiled the effect. Unlike the Space Commando’s
armor, a real pressure suit looks 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 each other. 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 around 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 been sighted again?” Shara asked.
  “Just beyond the orbit of Jupiter.”
   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 the last intelsystem probe came back 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 the 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 down 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; equally
important, my feet told me that it would make a splendid 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’ll probably be good for
that long, Charlie. But Shara’s already had over a year of low g, 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-g environment doesn’t work properly
in zero g.”
  “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 eight months was set by
a Skyfac construction gang with bad deadline problems—and they hadn’t
spent a year in one-sixth g first, and they weren’t straining their hearts
the way you will be. Hell, there are four men on Luna now, from the
original dozen in the first mining team, who will never see Earth again.
Eight of their teammates tried. Don’t you two know anything about
space?”
  “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.


   Dr. Panzarella was a wiry old man with eyebrows like two fuzzy
caterpillars. He wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit 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 suspenders-and-belt type. He
looked Shara over, ran tests, and gave her just under a month and a half.
Shara said some things. I said some things. McGillicuddy said some
things. Panzarella 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 g, much less dance.
Her familiarity with one-sixth g 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—and who knew how soon Carrington would
tire of her? So I hollered at Panzarella.
   “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 real time 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
go, Tom—we’ll be going over there at once; where the hell are my
cameras?”
  McGillicuddy sputtered.
   “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 an efficiency kitchen, another Norelco.”
   McGillicuddy finally drowned me out. “Mr. 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.
   Panzarella 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. 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 g.
  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 putative 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 the cold black depths
enough insight into the meaning of extraterrestrial existence to dance of
it.
   I spent my own time arguing with engineers and electricians and
technicians and a damn fool union legate who insisted that the second
lounge, finished or not, belonged to the hypothetical future crew and
administrative personnel. Securing his permission to work there wore the
lining off my throat and the insulation off my nerves. Far too many nights
I spent slugging instead of sleeping. Minor example: Every interior wall in
the whole damned second Ring was painted the identical shade of
turquoise—and they couldn’t duplicate it to cover that godforsaken video
wall in the lounge. It was McGillicuddy who saved me from gibbering
apoplexy—at his suggestion, I washed off the third latex job, unshipped
the outboard camera that fed the wall screen, brought it inboard, and
fixed it to scan an interior wall in an adjoining room. That made us
friends again.
  It was all like that: jury-rig, improvise, file to fit and paint to cover. If a
camera broke down, I spent sleep time talking with off-shift engineers,
finding out what parts in stock could be adapted. It was simply too
expensive to have anything shipped up from Earth’s immense gravity well,
and Luna didn’t have what I needed.
   At that, Shara worked harder than I did. A body must totally
recoordinate itself to function in the absence of weight—she had to forget
literally everything she had ever known or learned about dancing and
acquire a whole new set of skills. This turned out to be even harder than
we had expected. McGillicuddy had been right: What Shara had learned
in her year of one-sixth g was an exaggerated attempt to retain terrestrial
patterns of coordination—rejecting them altogether was actually easier
for me.
   But I couldn’t keep up with her—I had to abandon any thought of
handheld camera work and base my plans solely on the six fixed cameras.
Fortunately GLX-5000s have a ball-and-socket mount; even behind that
damned one-way glass I had about forty degrees of traverse on each one.
Learning to coordinate all six simultaneously on the Hamilton Board did a
truly extraordinary thing to me—it lifted me that one last step to unity
with my art. I found that I could learn to be aware of all six monitors with
my mind’s eye, to perceive almost spherically, to—not share my attention
among the six—to encompass them all, seeing like a six-eyed creature
from many angles at once. My mind’s eye became holographic, my
awareness multilayered. I began to really understand, for the first time,
three-dimensionality.
   It was that fourth dimension that was the kicker. It took Shara two days
to decide that she could not possibly become proficient enough in free-fall
maneuvering to sustain a half-hour piece in the time required. So she
rethought her work plan too, adapting her choreography to the demands
of exigency. She put in six hard days under normal Earth weight.
  And for her, too, the effort brought her that one last step toward
apotheosis.
  On Monday of the fourth week we began taping Liberation.


  Establishing shot:
   A great turquoise box, seen from within. Dimensions unknown, but the
color somehow lends an impression of immensity, of vast distances.
Against the far wall, a swinging pendulum attests that this is a
standard-gravity environment; but the pendulum swings so slowly and is
so featureless in construction that it is impossible to estimate its size and
so extrapolate that of the room.
   Because of this trompe l’oeil effect, the room seems rather smaller than
it really is when the camera pulls back and we are wrenched into proper
perspective by the appearance of Shara, prone, inert, face down on the
floor, facing us.
  She wears beige leotard and tights. Hair the color of fine mahogany is
pulled back into a loose ponytail which fans across one shoulder blade. She
does not appear to breathe. She does not appear to be alive.
   Music begins. The aging Mahavishnu, on obsolete nylon acoustic,
establishes a Minor E in no hurry at all. A pair of small candles in simple
brass holders appear inset on either side of the room. They are larger than
life, though small beside Shara. Both are unlit.
  Her body… there is no word. It does not move, in the sense of motor
activity. One might say that a ripple passes through it, save that the
motion is clearly all outward from her center. She swells, as if the first
breath of life were being taken by her whole body at once. She lives.
  The twin wicks begin to glow, oh, softly. The music takes on quiet
urgency.
  Shara raises her head to us. Her eyes focus somewhere beyond the
camera yet short of infinity. Her body writhes, undulates, and the glowing
wicks are coals (that this brightening takes place in slow motion is not
apparent).
  A violent contraction raises her to a crouch, spilling the ponytail across
her shoulder. Mahavishnu begins a cyclical cascade of runs, in increasing
tempo. Long, questing tongues of yellow-orange flame begin to blossom
downward from the twin wicks, whose coals are turning to blue.
   The contraction’s release flings her to her feet. The twin skirts of flame
about the wicks curl up over themselves, writhing furiously, to become
conventional candle flames, flickering now in normal time. Tablas,
tambouras, and a bowed string bass join the guitar, and they segue into
an energetic interplay around a minor seventh that keeps trying,
fruitlessly, to find resolution in the sixth. The candles stay in perspective,
but dwindle in size until they vanish.
  Shara begins to explore the possibilities of motion. First she moves only
perpendicular to the camera’s line of sight, exploring that dimension.
Every motion of arms or legs or head is clearly seen to be a defiance of
gravity, of a force as inexorable as radioactive decay, as entropy itself. The
most violent surges of energy succeed only for a time—the outflung leg
falls, the outthrust arm drops. She must struggle or fall. She pauses in
thought.
   Her hands and arms reach out toward the camera, and at the instant
they do we cut to a view from the left-hand wall. Seen from the right side,
she reaches out into this new dimension, and soon begins to move in it.
(As she moves backward out of the camera’s field, its entire image shifts
right on our screen, butted out of the way by the incoming image of a
second camera, which picks her up as the first loses her without a visible
seam.)
  The new dimension too fails to fulfill Shara’s desire for freedom from
gravity. Combining the two, however, presents so many permutations of
movement that for a while, intoxicated, she flings herself into
experimentation. In the next fifteen minutes, Shara’s entire background
and history in dance are recapitulated, in a blinding tour de force that
incorporates elements of jazz, Modern, and the more graceful aspects of
Olympic-level mat gymnastics. Five cameras come into play, singly and in
pairs on split screen, as the “bag of tricks” amassed in a lifetime of study
and improvisation are rediscovered and performed by a superbly trained
and versatile body, in a pyrotechnic display that would shout of joy if her
expression did not remain aloof, almost arrogant. This is the offering, she
seems to say, which you would not accept. This, by itself, was not good
enough.
   And it is not. Even in its raging energy and total control, her body
returns again and again to the final compromise of mere erectness, that
last simple refusal to fall.
   Clamping her jaw, she works into a series of leaps, ever longer, ever
higher. She seems at last to hang suspended for full seconds, straining to
fly. When, inevitably, she falls, she falls reluctantly, only at the last possible
instant tucking and rolling back onto her feet. The musicians are in a
crescendoing frenzy. We see her now only with the single original camera,
and the twin candles have returned, small but burning fiercely.
  The leaps begin to diminish in intensity and height, and she takes
longer to build to each one. She has been dancing flat out for nearly
twenty minutes; as the candle flames begin to wane, so does her strength.
At last she retreats to a place beneath the indifferent pendulum, gathers
herself with a final desperation, and races forward toward us. She reaches
incredible speed in a short space, hurls herself into a double roll, and
bounds up into the air off one foot, seeming a full second later to push off
against empty air for a few more inches of height. Her body goes rigid, her
eyes and mouth gape wide, the flames reach maximum brilliance, the
music peaks with the tortured wail of an electric guitar, and—she falls,
barely snapping into a roll in time, rising only as far as a crouch. She holds
there for a long moment, and gradually her head and shoulders slump,
defeated, toward the floor. The candle flames draw in upon themselves in
a curious way and appear to go out. The string bass saws on, modulating
down to D.
   Muscle by muscle, Shara’s body gives up the struggle. The air seems to
tremble around the wicks of the candles, which have now grown nearly as
tall as her crouching form.
  Shara lifts her face to the camera with evident effort. Her face is
anguished, her eyes nearly shut. A long beat.
   All at once she opens her eyes wide, squares her shoulders, and
contracts. It is the most exquisite and total contraction ever dreamed of,
filmed in real time but seeming almost to be in slow motion. She holds it.
Mahavishnu comes back in on guitar, building in increasing tempo from a
down-tuned bass string to a D with a flatted fourth. Shara holds.
   We shift for the first time to an overhead camera, looking down on her
from a great height. As Mahavishnu’s picking increases to the point where
the chord seems a sustained drone, Shara slowly lifts her head, still
holding the contraction, until she is staring directly up at us. She poises
there for an eternity, like a spring wound to the bursting point…
   … and explodes upward toward us, rising higher and faster than she
possibly can in a soaring flight that is slow motion now, coming closer and
closer until her hands disappear off either side and her face fills the
screen, flanked by two candles which have bloomed into gouts of yellow
flame in an instant. The guitar and bass are submerged in an orchestra.
   Almost at once she whirls away from us, and the POV switches to the
original camera, on which we see her fling herself down ten meters to the
floor, reversing her attitude in mid-flight and twisting. She comes out of
her roll in an absolutely flat trajectory that takes her the length of the
room. She hits the far wall with a crash audible even over the music,
shattering the still pendulum. Her thighs soak up the kinetic energy and
then release it, and once again she is racing toward us, hair streaming
straight out behind her, a broad smile of triumph growing larger in the
screen.
  In the next five minutes all six cameras vainly try to track her as she
caroms around the immense room like a hummingbird trying to batter its
way out of a cage, using the walls, floor, and ceiling the way a jai alai
master does, existing in three dimensions. Gravity is defeated. The basic
assumption of all dance is transcended.
  Shara is transformed.
  She comes to rest at last at vertical center in the forefront of the
turquoise cube, arms-legs-fingers-toes-face straining outward, turning
gently end over end. All four cameras that bear on her join in a four-way
split screen, the orchestra resolves into its final E Major, and—fade-out.
   I had neither the time nor the equipment to create the special effects
that Shara wanted. So I found ways to warp reality to my need. The first
candle segment was a twinned shot of a candle being blown out from
above—in ultra-slow-motion, and in reverse. The second segment was a
simple recording of reality. I had lit the candle, started taping—and had
the Ring’s spin killed. A candle behaves oddly in zero g. The low-density
combustion gases do not rise up from the flame, allowing air to reach it
from beneath. The flame does not go out: It becomes dormant. Restore
gravity within a minute or so, and it blooms back to life again. All I did
was monkey with speeds a bit to match in with the music and Shara’s
dance. I got the idea from Harry Stein, Skyfac’s construction foreman,
who was helping me design the next dance.
  I set up a screen in the Ring One lounge, and everyone in Skyfac who
could cut work crowded in for the broadcast. They saw exactly what was
being sent out over worldwide satellite hookup (Carrington had sufficient
pull to arrange twenty-five minutes without commercial interruption)
almost a full half second before the world did.
   I spent the broadcast in the Communications Room, chewing my
fingernails. But it went without a hitch, and I slapped my board dead and
made it to the lounge in time to see the last half of the standing ovation.
Shara stood before the screen, Carrington sitting beside her, and I found
the difference in their expressions instructive. Her face showed no
surprise or modesty.
  She had had faith in herself throughout, had approved this tape for
broadcast—she was aware, with that incredible detachment of which so
few artists are capable, that the wild applause was only what she deserved.
But her face showed that she was deeply surprised—and deeply
grateful—to be given what she deserved.
   Carrington, on the other hand, registered a triumph strangely mingled
with relief. He too had had faith in Shara, backing it with a large
investment—but his faith was that of a businessman in a gamble he
believes will pay off, and as I watched his eyes and the glisten of sweat on
his forehead, I realized that no businessman ever takes an expensive
gamble without worrying that it may be the fiasco that will begin the loss
of his only essential commodity: face.
   Seeing his kind of triumph next to hers spoiled the moment for me, and
instead of thrilling for Shara I found myself almost hating her. She spotted
me, and waved me to join her before the cheering crowd, but I turned and
literally flung myself from the room. I borrowed a bottle from Harry Stein
and got stinking.
   The next morning my head felt like a fifteen-amp fuse on a forty-amp
circuit, and I seemed to be held together only by surface tension. Sudden
movements frightened me. It’s a long fall off that wagon, even at one-sixth
g.
   The phone chimed—I hadn’t had time to rewire it—and a young man I
didn’t know politely announced that Mr. Carrington wished to see me in
his office. At once, I spoke of a barbed-wire suppository and what Mr.
Carrington might do with it, at once. Without changing expression, he
repeated his message and disconnected.
  So I crawled into my clothes, decided to grow a beard, and left. Along
the way I wondered what I had traded my independence for, and why.
  Carrington’s office was oppressively tasteful, but at least the lighting
was subdued. Best of all, its filter system would handle smoke—the sweet
musk of pot lay on the air. I accepted a macrojoint of “Maoi-Zowie” from
Carrington with something approaching gratitude, and began melting my
hangover.
   Shara sat next to his desk, wearing a leotard and a layer of sweat. She
had obviously spent the morning rehearsing for the next dance. I felt
ashamed, and consequently snappish, avoiding her eyes and her hello.
Panzarella and McGillicuddy came in on my heels, chattering about the
latest sighting of the mysterious object from deep space, which had
appeared this time in the neighborhood of Mercury. They were arguing
over whether it displayed signs of sentience or not, and I wished they’d
shut up.
  Carrington waited until we had all seated ourselves and lit up, then
rested a hip on his desk and smiled. “Well, Tom?”
  McGillicuddy beamed. “Better than we expected, sir. All the ratings
agree we had about seventy-four percent of the world audience—”
  “The hell with the Nielsons,” I snapped. “What did the critics say?”
  McGillicuddy blinked. “Well, the general reaction so far is that Shara
was a smash. The Times—”
  I cut him off again. “What was the less-than-general reaction?”
  “Well, nothing is ever unanimous.”
  “Specifics. The dance press? Liz Zimmer? Migdalski?”
  “Uh. Not as good. Praise, yes—only a blind man could’ve panned that
show. But guarded praise. Uh, Zimmer called it a magnificent dance
spoiled by a gimmicky ending.”
  “And Migdalski?” I insisted.
  “He headed his review, ‘But What Do You Do for an Encore?’ ”
McGillicuddy admitted. “His basic thesis was that it was a charming
one-shot. But the Times—”
   “Thank you, Tom,” Carrington said quietly. “About what we expected,
isn’t it, my dear? A big splash, but no one’s willing to call it a tidal wave
yet.”
  She nodded. “But they will, Bryce. The next two dances will sew it up.”
  Panzarella spoke up. “Ms. Drummond, may I ask why you played it the
way you did? Using the null-g interlude only as a brief adjunct to
conventional dance—surely you must have expected the critics to call it
gimmickry.”
   Shara smiled and answered, “To be honest, Doctor, I had no choice. I’m
learning to use my body in free fall, but it’s still a conscious effort, almost
a pantomime. I need another few weeks to make it second nature, and it
has to be if I’m to sustain a whole piece in it. So I dug a conventional
dance out of the trunk, tacked on a five-minute ending that used every
zero-g move I knew, and found to my extreme relief that they made
thematic sense together. I told Charlie my notion, and he made it work
visually and dramatically—that whole business of the candles was his, and
it underlined what I was trying to say better than any set we could have
built.”
  “So you have not yet completed what you came here to do?” Panzarella
asked Shara.
  “Oh, no. Not by any means. The next dance will show the world that
dance is more than controlled falling. And the third… the third will be
what this has all been for.” Her face lit, became animated. “The third
dance will be the one I have wanted to dance all my life. I can’t entirely
picture it yet—but I know that when I become capable of dancing it, I will
create it, and it will be my greatest dance.”
  Panzarella cleared his throat. “How long will it take you?”
  “Not long,” she said. “I’ll be ready to tape the next dance in two weeks,
and I can start on the last one almost at once. With luck, I’ll have it in the
can before my month is up.”
  “Ms. Drummond,” Panzarella said gravely, “I’m afraid you don’t have
another month.”
   Shara went white as snow, and I half rose from my seat. Carrington
looked intrigued.
  “How much time?” Shara asked.
  “Your latest tests have not been encouraging. I had assumed that the
sustained exercise of rehearsal and practice would tend to slow your
system’s adaptation. But most of your work has been in total
weightlessness, and I failed to realize the extent to which your body is
accustomed to sustained exertion—in a terrestrial environment.”
  “How much time?”
  “Two weeks. Possibly three, if you spend three separate hours a day at
hard exercise in two gravities.”
  “That’s ridiculous,” I burst out. “Don’t you understand about dancers’
spines? She could ruin herself in two gees.”
  “I’ve got to have four weeks,” Shara said.
  “Ms. Drummond, I am sorry.”
  “I’ve got to have four weeks.”
   Panzarella had that same look of helpless sorrow that McGillicuddy and
I had had in our turn, and I was suddenly sick to death of a universe in
which people had to keep looking at Shara that way. “Dammit,” I roared,
“she needs four weeks.”
  Panzarella shook his shaggy head. “If she stays in zero g for four
working weeks, she may die.”
  Shara sprang from her chair. “Then I’ll die,” she cried. “I’ll take that
chance. I have to.”
  Carrington coughed. “I’m afraid I can’t permit you to, darling.”
  She whirled on him furiously.
  “This dance of yours is excellent PR for Skyfac,” he said calmly, “but if it
were to kill you it might boomerang, don’t you think?”
  Her mouth worked, and she fought desperately for control. My own
head whirled. Die? Shara?
  “Besides,” he added, “I’ve grown quite fond of you.”
  “Then I’ll stay up here in space,” she burst out.
  “Where? The only areas of sustained weightlessness are factories, and
you’re not qualified to work in one.”
  “Then for God’s sake give me one of the new pods, the small spheres.
Bryce, I’ll give you a higher return on your investment than a factory pod,
and I’ll…” Her voice changed. “I’ll be available to you always.”
  He smiled lazily. “Yes, but I might not want you always, darling. My
mother warned me strongly against making irrevocable decisions about
women. Especially informal ones. Besides, I find zero-g sex rather too
exhausting as a steady diet.”
  I had almost found my voice, and now I lost it again. I was glad
Carrington was turning her down—but the way he did it made me yearn to
drink his blood.
   Shara too was speechless for a time. When she spoke, her voice was low,
intense, almost pleading. “Bryce, it’s a matter of timing. If I broadcast two
more dances in the next four weeks, I’ll have a world to return to. If I have
to go Earthside and wait a year or two, that third dance will sink without
a trace—no one’ll be looking, and they won’t have the memory of the first
two. This is my only option, Bryce—let me take the chance. Panzarella
can’t guarantee four weeks will kill me.”
  “I can’t guarantee your survival,” the doctor said.
   “You can’t guarantee that any one of us will live out the day,” she
snapped. She whirled back to Carrington, held him with her eyes. “Bryce,
let me risk it.” Her face underwent a massive effort, produced a smile that
put a knife through my heart. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
  Carrington savored that smile and the utter surrender in her voice like a
man enjoying a fine claret. I wanted to slay him with my hands and teeth,
and I prayed that he would add the final cruelty of turning her down. But I
had underestimated his true capacity for cruelty.
   “Go ahead with your rehearsal, my dear,” he said at last. “We’ll make a
final decision when the time comes. I shall have to think about it.”
   I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hopeless, so… impotent in my life. Knowing
it was futile, I said, “Shara, I can’t let you risk your life—”
  “I’m going to do this, Charlie,” she cut me off, “with or without you. No
one else knows my work well enough to tape it properly, but if you want
out I can’t stop you.” Carrington watched me with detached interest.
“Well?”
  I said a filthy word. “You know the answer.”
  “Then let’s get to work.”


   Tyros are transported on the pregnant broomsticks. Old hands hang
outside the air lock, dangling from handholds on the outer surface of the
spinning Ring. They face in the direction of the spin, and when their
destination comes under the horizon, they just drop off. Thruster units
built into gloves and boots supply the necessary course corrections. The
distances involved are small. Shara and I, having spent more weightless
hours than some technicians who’d been in Skyfac for years, were old
hands. We made scant and efficient use of our thrusters, chiefly in
canceling the energy imparted to us by the spin of the Ring we left. We
had throat mikes and hearing-aid-sized receivers, but there was no
conversation on the way across the void. I spent the journey appreciating
the starry emptiness through which I fell—I had come, perforce, to
understand the attraction of sky diving—and wondering whether I would
ever get used to the cessation of pain in my leg. It even seemed to hurt less
under spin those days.
   We grounded, with much less force than a sky diver does, on the surface
of the new studio. It was an enormous steel globe, studded with sunpower
screens and heat-losers, tethered to three more spheres in various stages
of construction, on which p-suited figures were even now working.
McGillicuddy had told me that the complex when completed would be
used for “controlled density processing,” and when I said, “How nice,” he
added, “Dispersion foaming and variable density casting,” as if that
explained everything. Perhaps it did. Right at the moment, it was Shara’s
studio.
   The air lock led to a rather small working space around a smaller
interior sphere some fifty meters in diameter. It too was pressurized,
intended to contain a vacuum, but its locks stood open. We removed our
p-suits, and Shara unstrapped her thruster bracelets from a bracing strut
and put them on, hanging by her ankles from the strut while she did so.
The anklets went on next. As jewelry they were a shade bulky—but they
had twenty minutes’ continuous use each, and their operation was not
visible in normal atmosphere and lighting. Indoor zero-gee dance without
them would have been enormously more difficult.
  As she was fastening the last strap I drifted over in front of her and
grabbed the strut. “Shara…”
  “Charlie, I can beat it. I’ll exercise in three gravities, and I’ll sleep in
two, and I’ll make this body last. I know I can.”
  “You could skip Mass Is a Verb and go right to the Stardance.”
   She shook her head. “I’m not ready yet—and neither is the audience. I’ve
got to lead myself and them through dance in a sphere first—in a
contained space—before I’ll be ready to dance in empty space, or for them
to appreciate it. I have to free my mind, and theirs, from just about every
preconception of dance, change the postulates. Even two stages is too
few—but it’s the irreducible minimum.” Her eyes softened. “Charlie—I
must.”
   “I know,” I said gruffly, and turned away. Tears are a nuisance in free
fall—they don’t go anywhere. I began hauling myself around the surface of
the inner sphere toward the camera emplacement I was working on, and
Shara entered the inner sphere to begin rehearsal.
   I prayed as I worked on my equipment, snaking cables among the
bracing struts and connecting them to drifting terminals. For the first
time in years I prayed, prayed that Shara would make it. That we both
would.
   The next twelve days were the toughest of my life. Shara worked twice
as hard as I did. She spent half of every day working in the studio, half of
the rest in exercise under two and a quarter gravities (the most Dr.
Panzarella would permit), and half of the rest in Carrington’s bed, trying
to make him contented enough to let her stretch her time limit. Perhaps
she slept in the few hours left over. I only know that she never looked tired,
never lost her composure or her dogged determination. Stubbornly,
reluctantly, her body lost its awkwardness, took on grace even in an
environment where grace required enormous concentration. Like a child
learning to walk, Shara learned how to fly.
  I even began to get used to the absence of pain in my leg.


   What can I tell you of Mass, if you have not seen it? It cannot be
described, even badly, in mechanistic terms, the way a symphony could be
written out in words. Conventional dance terminology is, by its built-in
assumptions, worse than useless, and if you are at all familiar with the
new nomenclature you must be familiar with Mass Is a Verb, from which
it draws its built-in assumptions.
  Nor is there much I can say about the technical aspects of Mass. There
were no special effects; not even music. Brindle’s superb score was
composed from the dance, and added to the tape with my permission two
years later, but it was for the original, silent version that I was given the
Emmy. My entire contribution, aside from editing and installing the two
trampolines, was to camouflage batteries of wide-dispersion light sources
in clusters around each camera eye, and wire them so that they energized
only when they were out-of-frame with respect to whichever camera was
on at the time—ensuring that Shara was always lit from the front,
presenting two (not always congruent) shadows. I made no attempt to
employ flashy camera work; I simply recorded what Shara danced,
changing POV only as she did.
  No. Mass Is a Verb can be described only in symbolic terms, and then
poorly. I can say that Shara demonstrated that mass and inertia are as
able as gravity to supply the dynamic conflict essential to dance. I can tell
you that from them she distilled a kind of dance that could have been
imagined only by a group-head consisting of an acrobat, a stunt diver, a
skywriter, and an underwater ballerina. I can tell you that she dismantled
the last interface between herself and utter freedom of motion, subduing
her body to her will and space itself to her need.
   And still I will have told you next to nothing. For Shara sought more
than freedom—she sought meaning. Mass was, above all, a spiritual
event—its title pun paralleling its thematic ambiguity between the
technological and the theological. Shara made the human confrontation
with existence a transitive act, literally meeting God halfway. I do not
mean to imply that her dance at any time addressed an exterior God, a
discrete entity with or without white beard. Her dance addressed reality,
gave successive expression to the Three Eternal Questions asked by every
human being who ever lived.
  Her dance observed her self, and asked, How have I come to be here?
  Her dance observed the universe in which self existed, and asked, How
did all this come to be here with me?
   And at last, observing her self in relation to its universe, Why am I so
alone?
  And, having asked these questions, having earnestly asked them with
every muscle and sinew she possessed, she paused, hung suspended in the
center of the sphere, her body and soul open to the universe, and when no
answer came, she contracted. Not in a dramatic, ceiling-spring sense as
she had in Liberation, a compressing of energy and tension. This was
physically similar, but an utterly different phenomenon. It was a focusing
inward, an act of introspection, a turning of the mind’s (soul’s?) eye in
upon itself, to seek answers that lay nowhere else. Her body too, therefore,
seemed to fold in upon itself, compacting her mass, so evenly that her
position in space was not disturbed.
   And reaching within herself, she closed on emptiness. The camera faded
out, leaving her alone, rigid, encapsulated, yearning. The dance ended,
leaving her three questions unanswered, the tension of their asking
unresolved. Only the expression of patient waiting on her face blunted the
shocking edge of the non-ending, made it bearable, a small, blessed sign
whispering, “To be continued.”
  By the eighteenth day we had it in the can, in rough form.
   Shara put it immediately out of her mind and began choreographing
Stardance, but I spent two hard days of editing before I was ready to
release the tape for broadcast. I had four days until the half hour of prime
time Carrington had purchased—but that wasn’t the deadline I felt
breathing down the back of my neck.
   McGillicuddy came into my workroom while I was editing, and
although he saw the tears running down my face he said no word. I let the
tape run, and he watched in silence, and soon his face was wet too. When
the tape had been over for a long time he said, very softly, “One of these
days I’m going to have to quit this stinking job.”
  I said nothing.
 “I used to be a karate instructor. I was pretty good. I could teach again,
maybe do exhibition work, make ten percent of what I do now.”
  I said nothing.
  “The whole damned Ring’s bugged, Charlie. The desk in my office can
activate and tap any vidphone in Skyfac. Four at a time, actually.”
  I said nothing.
  “I saw you both in the air lock when you came back the last time. I saw
her collapse. I saw you bringing her around. I heard her make you promise
not to tell Dr. Panzarella.”
  I waited. Hope stirred.
   He dried his face. “I came in here to tell you I was going to Panzarella,
to tell him what I saw. He’d bully Carrington into sending her home right
away.”
  “And now?” I said.
  “I’ve seen that tape.”
  “And you know the Stardance will probably kill her?”
  “Yes.”
  “And you know we have to let her do it?”
  “Yes.”
  Hope died. I nodded. “Then get out of here and let me work.”
  He left.


  On Wall Street and aboard Skyfac it was late afternoon when I finally
had the tape edited to my satisfaction. I called Carrington, told him to
expect me in half an hour, showered, shaved, dressed, and left.
   A major of the Space Command was there with him when I arrived, but
he was not introduced and so I ignored him. Shara was there too, wearing
a thing made of orange smoke that left her breasts bare. Carrington had
obviously made her wear it, as an urchin writes filthy words on an altar,
but she wore it with a perverse and curious dignity that I sensed annoyed
him. I looked her in the eye and smiled. “Hi, kid. It’s a good tape.”
  “Let’s see,” Carrington said. He and the major took seats behind the
desk, and Shara sat beside it.
   I fed the tape into the video rig built into the office wall, dimmed the
lights, and sat across from Shara. It ran twenty minutes, uninterrupted,
no sound track, stark naked.
  It was terrific.
   “Aghast” is a funny word. To make you aghast, a thing must hit you in a
place you haven’t armored over with cynicism yet. I seem to have been
born cynical; I have been aghast three times that I can remember. The
first was when I learned, at the age of three, that there were people who
could deliberately hurt kittens. The second was when I learned, at age
seventeen, that there were people who could actually take LSD and then
hurt other people for fun. The third was when Mass Is a Verb ended and
Carrington said in perfectly conversational tones, “Very pleasant; very
graceful. I like it,” when I learned, at age forty-five, that there were men,
not fools or cretins but intelligent men, who could watch Shara
Drummond dance and fail to see. We all, even the most cynical of us,
always have some illusion which we cherish.
 Shara simply let it bounce off her somehow, but I could see that the
major was as aghast as I, controlling his features with a visible effort.
  Suddenly welcoming a distraction from my horror and dismay, I
studied him more closely, wondering for the first time what he was doing
here. He was my age, lean and more hard-bitten than I am, with silver fuzz
on top of his skull and an extremely tidy mustache on the front. I’d taken
him for a crony of Carrington’s, but three things changed my mind.
Something indefinable about his eyes told me that he was a military man
of long combat experience. Something equally indefinable about his
carriage told me that he was on duty at the moment. And something quite
definable about the line his mouth made told me that he was disgusted
with the duty he had drawn.
  When Carrington went on, “What do you think, Major?” in polite tones,
the man paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts and choosing his
words. When he did speak, it was not to Carrington.
  “Ms. Drummond,” he said quietly, “I am Major William Cox,
commander of S.C. Champion, and I am honored to meet you. That was
the most profoundly moving thing I have ever seen.”
  Shara thanked him most gravely. “This is Charles Armstead, Major Cox.
He made the tape.”
  Cox regarded me with new respect. “A magnificent job, Mr. Armstead.”
He stuck out his hand, and I shook it.
   Carrington was beginning to understand that we three shared a thing
which excluded him. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, Major,” he said with no
visible trace of sincerity. “You can see it again on your television tomorrow
night, if you chance to be off duty. And eventually, of course, cassettes will
be made available. Now perhaps we can get to the matter at hand.”
  Cox’s face closed as if it had been zippered up, became stiffly formal.
“As you wish, sir.”
  Puzzled, I began what I thought was the matter at hand. “I’d like your
own Comm Chief to supervise the actual transmission this time, Mr.
Carrington. Shara and I will be too busy to—”
   “My Comm Chief will supervise the broadcast, Armstead,” Carrington
interrupted, “but I don’t think you’ll be particularly busy.”
  I was groggy from lack of sleep; my uptake was rather slow.
  He touched his desk delicately. “McGillicuddy, report at once,” he said,
and released it. “You see, Armstead, you and Shara are both returning to
Earth. At once.”
  “What?”
  “Bryce, you can’t,” Shara cried. “You promised.”
  “I promised I would think about it, my dear,” he corrected.
  “The hell you say. That was weeks ago. Last night you promised.”
   “Did I? My dear, there were no witnesses present last night. Altogether
for the best, don’t you agree?”
  I was speechless with rage.
   McGillicuddy entered. “Hello, Tom,” Carrington said pleasantly. “You’re
fired. You’ll be returning to Earth at once, with Ms. Drummond and Mr.
Armstead, aboard Major Cox’s vessel. Departure in one hour, and don’t
leave anything you’re fond of.” He glanced from McGillicuddy to me.
“From Tom’s desk you can tap any vidphone in Skyfac. From my desk you
can tap Tom’s desk.”
  Shara’s voice was low. “Bryce, two days. God damn you, name your
price.”
   He smiled slightly. “I’m sorry, darling. When informed of your collapse,
Dr. Panzarella became most specific. Not even one more day. Alive you are
a distinct plus for Skyfac’s image—you are my gift to the world. Dead you
are an albatross around my neck. I cannot allow you to die on my
property. I anticipated that you might resist leaving, and so I spoke to a
friend in the”—he glanced at Cox—“higher echelons of the Space
Command, who was good enough to send the Major here to escort you
home. You are not under arrest in the legal sense—but I assure you that
you have no choice. Something like protective custody applies. Goodbye,
Shara.” He reached for a stack of reports on his desk, and I surprised
myself considerably.
   I cleared the desk entirely, tucked head catching him squarely in the
sternum. His chair was belted to the deck and so it snapped clean. I
recovered so well that I had time for one glorious right. Do you know how,
if you punch a basketball squarely, it will bounce up from the floor? That’s
what his head did, in low-g slow motion.
   Then Cox had hauled me to my feet and shoved me into the far corner
of the room. “Don’t,” he said to me, and his voice must have held a lot of
that “habit of command” they talk about, because it stopped me cold. I
stood breathing in great gasps while Cox helped Carrington to his feet.
   The millionaire felt his smashed nose, examined the blood on his
fingers, and looked at me with raw hatred. “You’ll never work in video
again, Armstead. You’re through. Finished. Un-em-ployed, you get that?”
  Cox tapped him on the shoulder, and Carrington spun on him. “What
the hell do you want?” he barked.
  Cox smiled. “Carrington, my late father once said, ‘Bill, make your
enemies by choice, not by accident.’ Over the years I have found that to be
excellent advice. You suck.”
  “And not particularly well,” Shara agreed.
  Carrington blinked. Then his absurdly broad shoulders swelled and he
roared, “Out, all of you! Off my property at once!”
   By unspoken consent, we waited for McGillicuddy, who knew his cue.
“Mr. Carrington, it is a rare privilege and a great honor to have been fired
by you. I shall think of it always as a Pyrrhic defeat.” And he half bowed
and we left, each buoyed by a juvenile feeling of triumph that must have
lasted ten seconds.
   The sensation of falling that comes with zero g is literal truth, but your
body quickly learns to treat it as an illusion. Now, in zero g for the last
time, for the half hour before I would be back in Earth’s own gravitational
field, I felt I was falling. Plummeting into some bottomless gravity well,
dragged down by the anvil that was my heart, the scraps of a dream that
should have held me aloft fluttering overhead.
   The Champion was three times the size of Carrington’s yacht, which
childishly pleased me until I recalled that he had summoned it here
without paying for either fuel or crew. A guard at the air lock saluted as
we entered. Cox led us to a compartment aft of the air lock where we were
to strap in. He noticed along the way that I used only my left hand to pull
myself along, and when we stopped he said, “Mr. Armstead, my late father
also told me, ‘Hit the soft parts with your hand. Hit the hard parts with a
utensil.’ Otherwise I can find no fault with your technique. I wish I could
shake your hand.”
  I tried to smile, but I didn’t have it in me. “I admire your taste in
enemies, Major.”
  “A man can’t ask for more. I’m afraid I can’t spare time to have your
hand looked at until we’ve grounded. We begin reentry immediately.”
  “Forget it.”
   He bowed to Shara, did not tell her how deeply sorry he was to et cetera,
wished us all a comfortable journey, and left. We strapped into our
acceleration couches to await ignition. There ensued a long and heavy
silence, compounded of a mutual sadness that bravado could only have
underlined. We did not look at each other, as though our combined sorrow
might achieve some kind of critical mass. Grief struck us dumb, and I
believe that remarkably little of it was self-pity.
   But then a whole lot of time seemed to have gone by. Quite a bit of
intercom chatter came faintly from the next compartment, but ours was
not in circuit. At last we began to talk, desultorily, discussing the probable
critical reaction to Mass Is a Verb, whether analysis was worthwhile or
the theater really dead, anything at all except future plans. Eventually
there was nothing else to talk about, so we shut up again. I guess I’d say
we were in shock.
  For some reason I came out of it first. “What in hell is taking them so
long?” I barked irritably.
  McGillicuddy started to say something soothing, then glanced at his
watch and yelped. “You’re right. It’s been nearly an hour.”
  I looked at the wall clock, got hopelessly confused until I realized it was
on Greenwich time rather than Wall Street, and realized he was correct.
“Chrissakes,” I shouted, “the whole bloody point of this exercise is to
protect Shara from overexposure to free fall! I’m going forward.”
   “Charlie, hold it.” McGillicuddy, with two good hands, unstrapped
faster than I. “Dammit, stay right there and cool off. I’ll go find out what
the holdup is.”
  He was back in a few minutes, and his face was slack. “We’re not going
anywhere. Cox has orders to sit tight.”
  “What? Tom, what the hell are you talking about?”
  His voice was all funny. “Red fireflies. More like bees, actually. In a
balloon.”
  He simply could not be joking with me, which meant he flat out had to
have gone completely round the bend, which meant that somehow I had
blundered into my favorite nightmare where everyone but me goes crazy,
and begins gibbering at me. So I lowered my head like an enraged bull,
and charged out of the room so fast the door barely had time to get out of
my way.
  It just got worse. When I reached the door to the bridge I was going
much too fast to be stopped by anything short of a body block, and the
crewmen present were caught flatfooted. There was a brief flurry at the
door, and then I was on the bridge, and then I decided that I had gone
crazy too, which somehow made everything all right.
  The forward wall of the bridge was one enormous video tank— and just
enough off center to faintly irritate me, standing out against the black
deep as clearly as cigarettes in a darkroom, there truly did swarm a
multitude of red fireflies.
   The conviction of unreality made it okay. But then Cox snapped me
back to reality with a bellowed “Off this bridge, mister.” If I’d been in a
normal frame of mind it would have blown me out the door and into the
farthest corner of the ship; in my current state it managed to jolt me into
acceptance of the impossible situation. I shivered like a wet dog and
turned to him.
  “Major,” I said desperately, “What is going on?”
  As a king may be amused by an insolent varlet who refuses to kneel, he
was bemused by the phenomenon of someone failing to obey him. It
bought me an answer. “We are confronting intelligent alien life,” he said
concisely. “I believe them to be sentient plasmoids.”
   I had never for a moment believed that the mysterious object which had
been leapfrogging around the solar system since I came to Skyfac was
alive. I tried to take it in, then abandoned the task and went back to rny
main priority. “I don’t care if they’re eight tiny reindeer; you’ve got to get
this can back to Earth now.”
   “Sir, this vessel is on Emergency Red Alert and on Combat Standby. At
this moment the suppers of everyone in North America are getting cold. I
will consider myself fortunate if I ever see Earth again. Now get off my
bridge.”
  “But you don’t understand. Sustained free fall might kill Shara. That’s
what you came up here to prevent, dammit—”
  “MR. ARMSTEAD! This is a military vessel. We are facing nearly a
dozen intelligent beings who appeared out of hyper-space near here
twenty minutes ago, beings who therefore use a drive beyond my
conception with no visible parts. If it makes you feel any better, I am
aware that I have a passenger aboard of greater intrinsic value to my
species than this ship and everyone else on her, and if it is any comfort to
you this knowledge already provides a distraction I need like an auxiliary
anus, and I can no more leave this orbit than I can grow horns. Now will
you get off this bridge or will you be dragged?”
  I didn’t get a chance to decide: They dragged me.
   On the other hand, by the time I got back to our compartment Cox had
put our vidphone screen in circuit with the tank on the bridge. Shara and
McGillicuddy were studying it with rapt attention. Having nothing better
to do, I did too.
  McGillicuddy had been right. They did act more like bees, in the
swarming rapidity of their movement. It was a while before I could get an
accurate count: ten of them. And they were in a balloon—a faint, barely
tangible thing on the fine line between transparency and translucency.
Though they darted like furious red gnats, it was only within the confines
of the spheroid balloon —they never left it or seemed to touch its inner
surface.
   As I watched, the last of the adrenaline rinsed out of my kidneys, but it
left a sense of frustrated urgency. I tried to grapple with the fact that
these Space Commando special effects represented something that
was—more important than Shara. It was a primevally disturbing notion,
but I could not reject it.
   In my mind were two voices, each hollering questions at the top of their
lungs, each ignoring the other’s questions. One yelled: Are those things
friendly? Or hostile? Or do they even use those concepts? How big are
they? How far away? From where? The other voice was less ambitious
but just as loud: all it said, over and over again, was: How much longer
can Shara remain in free fall without dooming herself?
  Shara’s voice was full of wonder. “They’re… they’re dancing.”
  I looked closer. If there was a pattern to the flies-on-garbage swarm
they made, I couldn’t detect it. “Looks random to me.”
  “Charlie, look. All that furious activity, and they never bump into each
other or the walls of that envelope they’re in. They must be in orbits as
carefully choreographed as those of electrons.”
  “Do atoms dance?”
  She gave me an odd look. “Don’t they, Charlie?”
  “Laser beam,” McGillicuddy said.
  We looked at him.
   “Those things have to be plasmoids—the man I talked to said (they were
first spotted on radar. That means they’re ionized gases of some kind—the
kind of thing that used to cause UFO reports.” He giggled, then caught
himself. “If you could slice through that envelope with a laser, I’ll bet you
could deionize them pretty good—besides, that envelope has to hold their
life support, whatever it is they metabolize.”
  I was dizzy. “Then we’re not defenseless?”
  “You’re both talking like soldiers,” Shara burst out. “I tell you they’re
dancing. Dancers aren’t fighters.”
  “Come on, Shara,” I barked. “Even if those things happen to be remotely
like us, that’s not true. Samurai, karate, kung fu— they’re dance.” I nodded
to the screen. “All we know about these animated embers is that they
travel interstellar space. That’s enough to scare me.”
  “Charlie, look at them,” she commanded.
  I did.
   By God, they didn’t look threatening. They did, the more I watched,
seem to move in a dancelike way, whirling in mad adagios just too fast for
the eye to follow. Not like conventional dance—more analogous to what
Shara had begun with Mass Is a Verb. I found myself wanting to switch to
another camera for contrast of perspective, and that made my mind start
to wake up at last. Two ideas surfaced, the second one necessary in order
to sell Cox the first.
  “How far do you suppose we are from Skyfac?” I asked McGillicuddy.
   He pursed his lips. “Not far. There hasn’t been much more than
maneuvering acceleration. The damn things were probably attracted to
Skyfac in the first place—it must be the most easily visible sign of
intelligent life in this system.” He grimaced. “Maybe they don’t use
planets.”
  I reached forward and punched the audio circuit. “Major Cox.”
  “Get off this circuit.”
  “How would you like a closer view of those things?”
   “We’re staying put. Now stop jiggling my elbow and get off this circuit
or I’ll—”
  “Will you listen to me? I have four mobile cameras in space,
remote-control, self-contained power source and light, and better
resolution than you’ve got. They were set up to tape Shara’s next dance.”
  He shifted gears at once. “Can you patch them into my ship?”
  “I think so. But I’ll have to get back to the master board in Ring One.”
  “No good, then. I can’t tie myself to a top—what if I have to fight or
run?”
  “Major—how far a walk is it?”
  It startled him a bit. “A mile or two, as the crow flies. But you’re a
groundlubber.”
  “I’ve been in free fall for most of two months. Give me a portable radar
and I can ground on Phobos.”
  “Mmmm. You’re a civilian—but dammit, I need better video.
Permission granted.”
  Now for the first idea. “Wait—one thing more. Shara and Tom must
come with me.”
  “Nuts. This isn’t a field trip.”
   “Major Cox—Shara must return to a gravity field as quickly as possible.
Ring One’ll do—in fact, it’d be ideal, if we can enter through the ‘spoke’ in
the center. She can descend very slowly and acclimatize gradually, the way
a diver decompresses in stages, but in reverse. McGillicuddy will have to
come along to stay with her—if she passes out and falls down the tube, she
could break a leg even in one-sixth g. Besides, he’s better at EVA than
either of us.”
  He thought it over. “Go.”
  We went.
   The trip back to Ring One was far longer than any Shara or I had ever
made, but under McGillicuddy’s guidance we made it with minimal
maneuvering. Ring, Champion, and aliens formed an equiangular triangle
about a mile and a half on a side. Seen in perspective, the aliens took up
about as much volume as Shea Stadium. They did not pause or slacken in
their mad gyration, but somehow they seemed to watch us cross the gap
to Skyfac. I got an impression of a biologist studying the strange antics of
a new species. We kept our suit radios off to avoid distraction, and it
made me just a little bit more susceptible to suggestion.
   I left McGillicuddy with Shara and dropped down the tube six rings at a
time. Carrington was waiting for me in the reception room, with two
flunkies. It was plain to see that he was scared silly, and trying to cover it
with anger. “Goddammit, Armstead, those are my bloody cameras.”
   “Shut up, Carrington. If you put those cameras in the hands of the best
technician available—me—and if I put their data in the hands of the best
strategic mind in space—Cox—we might be able to save your damned
factory for you. And the human race for the rest of us.” I moved forward,
and he got out of my way. It figured. Putting all humanity in danger might
just be bad PR.


  After all the practicing I’d done, it wasn’t hard to direct four mobile
cameras through space simultaneously by eye. The aliens ignored their
approach. The Skyfac comm crew fed my signals to the Champion and
patched me in to Cox on audio. At his direction I bracketed the balloon
with the cameras, shifting POV at his command. Space Command
Headquarters must have recorded the video, but I couldn’t hear their
conversation with Cox, for which I was grateful. I gave him slow-motion
replay, close-ups, split screens—everything at my disposal. The movements
of individual fireflies did not appear particularly symmetrical, but
patterns began to repeat. In slow motion they looked more than ever as
though they were dancing, and although I couldn’t be sure, it seemed to
me that they were increasing their tempo. Somehow the dramatic tension
of their dance seemed to build.
  And then I shifted POV to the camera which included Skyfac in the
background, and my heart turned to hard vacuum and I screamed in pure
primal terror—halfway between Ring One and the swarm of aliens, coming
up on them slowly but inexorably, was a p-suited figure that had to be
Shara.
  With theatrical timing, McGillicuddy appeared in the doorway, leaning
heavily on the chief engineer, his face drawn with pain. He stood on one
foot, the other leg plainly broken.
  “Guess I can’t… go back to exhibition work… after all,” he gasped.
“Said… ‘I’m sorry, Tom’… knew she was going to swing on me… wiped me
out anyhow. Oh, dammit, Charlie, I’m sorry.” He sank into an empty chair.
  Cox’s voice came urgently. “What the hell is going on? Who is that?”
  She had to be on our frequency. “Shara!” I screamed. “Get your ass
back in here!”
  “I can’t, Charlie.” Her voice was startlingly loud, and very calm.
“Halfway down the tube my chest started to hurt like hell.”
   “Ms. Drummond,” Cox rapped, “if you approach any closer to the aliens
I will destroy you.”
  She laughed, a merry sound that froze my blood. “Bullshit, Major. You
aren’t about to get gay with laser beams near those things. Besides, you
need me as much as you do Charlie.”
  “What do you mean?”
   “These creatures communicate by dance. It’s their equivalent of speech,
it has to be a sophisticated kind of sign language, like hula.”
  “You can’t know that.”
 “I feel it. I know it. Hell, how else do you communicate in airless space?
Major Cox, I am the only qualified interpreter the human race has at the
moment. Now will you kindly shut up so I can try to learn their language?”
  “I have no authority to—”
  I said an extraordinary thing. I should have been gibbering, pleading
with Shara to come back, even racing for a p-suit to bring her back.
Instead I said, “She’s right. Shut up, Cox.”
  “What are you trying to do?”
  “Damn you, don’t waste her last effort.”
  He shut up.
   Panzarella came in, shot McGillicuddy full of painkiller, and set his leg
right there in the room, but I was oblivious. For over an hour I watched
Shara watch the aliens. I watched them myself, in the silence of utter
despair, and for the life of me I could not follow their dance. I strained my
mind, trying to suck meaning from their crazy whirling, and failed. The
best I could do to aid Shara was to record everything that happened, for a
hypothetical posterity. Several times she cried out softly, small muffled
exclamations, and I ached to call out to her in reply, but did not. With the
last exclamation, she used her thrusters to bring her closer to the alien
swarm, and hung there for a long time.
   At last her voice came over the speaker, thick and slurred at first, as
though she were talking in her sleep. “God, Charlie. Strange. So strange.
I’m beginning to read them.”
  “How?”
   “Every time I begin to understand a part of the dance, it… it brings us
closer. Not telepathy, exactly. I just… know them better. Maybe it is
telepathy, I don’t know. By dancing what they feel, they give it enough
intensity to make me understand. I’m getting about one concept in three.
It’s stronger up close.”
  Cox’s voice was gentle but firm. “What have you learned, Shara?”
   “That Tom and Charlie were right. They are warlike. At least there’s a
flavor of arrogance to them—conviction of superiority. Their dance is a
challenging, a dare. Tell Tom they do use planets.”
  “What?”
  “I think at one stage of their development they’re corporeal,
planetbound. Then when they have matured sufficiently, they… become
these fireflies, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, and head out into
space.”
  “Why?” from Cox.
  “To find spawning grounds. They want Earth.”
  There was a silence lasting perhaps ten seconds. Then Cox spoke up
quietly. “Back away, Shara. I’m going to see what lasers will do to them.”
  “No!” she cried, loud enough to make a really first-rate speaker distort.
  “Shara, as Charlie pointed out to rne, you are not only expendable, you
are for all practical purposes expended.”
  “No!” This time it was me shouting.
  “Major,” Shara said urgently, “that’s not the way. Believe me, they can
dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”
  “Hell and damnation, woman,” Cox said, “what do you want me to do?
Let them have the first shot? There are vessels from four countries on their
way right now.”
  “Major, wait. Give me time.”
  He began to swear, then cut off. “How much time?”
   She made no direct reply. “If only this telepathy thing works in reverse…
it must. I’m no more strange to them than they are to me. Probably less
so; I get the idea they’ve been around. Charlie?”
  “Yeah.”
  “This is a take.”
  I knew. I had known since I first saw her in open space on my monitor.
And I knew what she needed now, from the faint trembling of her voice. It
took everything I had, and I was only glad I had it to give. With extremely
realistic good cheer, I said, “Break a leg, kid,” and killed my mike before
she could hear the sob that followed.
  And she danced.
   It began slowly, the equivalent of one-finger exercises, as she sought to
establish a vocabulary of motion that the creatures could comprehend.
Can you see, she seemed to say, that this movement is a reaching, a
yearning? Do you see that this is a spurning, this an unfolding, that a
graduated elision of energy? Do you feel the ambiguity in the way I
distort this arabesque, or that the tension can be resolved so?
   And it seemed that Shara was right, that they had infinitely more
experience with disparate cultures than we, for they were superb linguists
of motion. It occurred to me later that perhaps they had selected motion
for communication because of its very universality. At any rate, as Shara’s
dance began to build, their own began to slow down perceptibly in speed
and intensity, until at last they hung motionless in space, watching her.
   Soon after that Shara must have decided that she had sufficiently
defined her terms, at least well enough for pidgin communication—for
now she began to dance in earnest. Before, she had used only her own
muscles and the shifting masses of her limbs. Now she added thrusters,
singly and in combination, moving within as well as in space. Her dance
became a true dance: more than a collection of motions, a thing of
substance and meaning. It was unquestionably the Stardance, just as she
had choreographed it, as she had always intended to dance it. That it had
something to say to utterly alien creatures, of man and his nature, was not
at all a coincidence: It was the essential and ultimate statement of the
greatest artist of her age, and it had something to say to God himself.
  The camera lights struck silver from her p-suit, gold from the twin air
tanks on her shoulders. To and fro against the black backdrop of space,
she wove the intricacies of her dance, a leisurely movement that seemed
somehow to leave echoes behind it. And the meaning of these great loops
and whirls slowly became clear, drying my throat and clamping my teeth.
   For her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy
of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It
spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless
ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an
ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably
predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of
the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the
universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment
of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to
touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind
perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once
attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox
by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever
unable to cooperate even with himself.
  It spoke of Shara and her life.
   Again and again, cyclical statements of hope began, only to collapse into
confusion and ruin. Again and again, cascades of energy strove for
resolution, and found only frustration. All at once she launched into a
pattern that seemed familiar, and in moments I recognized it: the closing
movement of Mass Is a Verb recapitulated—not repeated but reprised,
echoed, the Three Questions given a more terrible urgency by this new
altar on which they were piled. And as before, it segued into that final
relentless contraction, that ultimate drawing-inward of all energies. Her
body became derelict, abandoned, drifting in space, the essence of her
being withdrawn to her center and invisible.
  The quiescent aliens stirred for the first time.
   And suddenly she exploded, blossoming from her contraction not as a
spring uncoils, but as a flower bursts from a seed. The force of her release
flung her through the void as though she were tossed like a gull in a
hurricane by galactic winds. Her center appeared to hurl itself through
space and time, yanking her body into a new dance.
   And the new dance said, This is what it is to be human: to see the
essential existential futility of all action, all striving—and to act, to strive.
This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This
is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is
to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope
that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be
answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the
certainty of failure.
  This is what it is to be human: to persist.
   It said all this with a soaring series of cyclical movements that held all
the rolling majesty of grand symphony, as uniquely different from each
other as snowflakes, and as similar. And the new dance laughed, and it
laughed as much at tomorrow as it did at yesterday, and it laughed most
of all at today.
  For this is what it means to be human: to laugh at what another
would call tragedy.
   The aliens seemed to recoil from the ferocious energy, startled, awed,
and faintly terrified by Shara’s indomitable spirit. They seemed to wait for
her dance to wane, for her to exhaust herself, and her laughter sounded on
my speaker as she redoubled her efforts, became a pinwheel, a Catherine
wheel. She changed the focus of her dance, began to dance around them,
in pyrotechnic spatters of motion that came ever closer to the intangible
spheroid which contained them. They cringed inward from her, huddling
together in the center of the envelope, not so much physically threatened
as cowed.
  This, said her body, is what it means to be human: to commit
hara-kiri, with a smile, if it becomes needful.
   And before that terrible assurance, the aliens broke. Without warning
fireflies and balloon vanished, gone, elsewhere.


  I know that Cox and McGillicuddy were still alive, because I saw them
afterward, and that means they were probably saying and doing things in
my hearing and presence, but I neither heard nor saw them then; they
were as dead to me as everything except Shara. I called out her name, and
she approached the camera that was lit, until I could make out her face
behind the plastic hood of her p-suit.
  “We may be puny, Charlie,” she puffed, gasping for breath. “But by
Jesus we’re tough.”
  “Shara—come on in now.”
  “You know I can’t.”
  “Carrington’ll have to give you a free-fall place to live now.”
 “A life of exile? For what? To dance? Charlie, I haven’t got anything
more to say.”
  “Then I’ll come out there.”
  “Don’t be silly. Why? So you can hug a p-suit? Tenderly bump hoods
one last time? Balls. It’s a good exit so far—let’s not blow it.”
  “Shara!” I broke completely, just caved in on myself and collapsed in
great racking sobs.
   “Charlie, listen now,” she said softly, but with an urgency that reached
me even in my despair. “Listen now, for I haven’t much time. I have
something to give you. I hoped you’d find it for yourself, but… will you
listen?”
  “Y—yes.”
  “Charlie, zero-g dance is going to get awful popular all of a sudden. I’ve
opened the door. But you know how fads are, they’ll bitch it all up unless
you move fast. I’m leaving it in your hands.”
  “What… what are you talking about?”
  “About you, Charlie. You’re going to dance again.”
  Oxygen starvation, I thought. But she can’t be that low on air already.
“Okay. Sure thing.”
  “For God’s sake stop humoring me—I’m straight, I tell you. You’d have
seen it yourself if you weren’t so damned stupid. Don’t you understand?
There’s nothing wrong with your leg in free fall!”
  My jaw dropped.
  “Do you hear me, Charlie? You can dance again!”
  “No,” I said, and searched for a reason why not. “I… you can’t… it’s…
dammit, the leg’s not strong enough for inside work.”
   “Forget for the moment that inside work’ll be less than half of what you
do. Forget it and remember that smack in the nose you gave Carrington.
Charlie, when you leaped over the desk, you pushed off with your right
leg.”
  I sputtered for a while and shut up.
   “There you go, Charlie. My farewell gift. You know I’ve never been in
love with you… but you must know that I’ve always loved you. Still do.”
  “I love you, Shara.”
  “So long, Charlie. Do it right.”
   And all four thrusters went off at once. I watched her go down. A while
after she was too far to see, there was a long golden flame that arced above
the face of the globe, waned, and then flared again as the air tanks went
up.


   There’s a tired old hack plot about the threat of alien invasion unifying
mankind overnight. It’s about as realistic as Love Will Find a Way—if
those damned fireflies ever come back, they’ll find us just as disorganized
as we were the last time. There you go.
  Carrington, of course, tried to grab all the tapes and all the money—but
neither Shara nor I had ever signed a contract, and her will was most
explicit. So he tried to buy the judge, and he picked the wrong judge, and
when it hit the papers and he saw how public and private opinion were
going, he left Skyfac in a p-suit with no thrusters. I think he wanted to go
the same way she had, but he was unused to EVA and let go too late. He
was last seen heading in the general direction of Betelgeuse. The Skyfac
board of directors picked a new man who was most anxious to wash off
the stains, and he offered me continued use of all facilities.
  And so I talked it over with Norrey, and she was free, and that’s how the
Shara Drummond Company of New Modern Dance was formed. We
specialize in good dancers who couldn’t cut it on Earth for one reason or
another, and there are a surprising hell of a lot of them.
   I enjoy dancing with Norrey. Together we’re not as good as Shara was
alone—but we mesh well. In spite of the obvious contraindications, I think
our marriage is going to work.
  That’s the thing about us humans: We persist.
The End