by Spider
The Stardance Trilogy
Spider & Jeanne
Robinson
a Baen Books
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Stardance copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979; Starseed copyright © 1991, Starmind copyright © 1994, by Spider & Jeanne Robinson.
A Baen Book Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN 10: 1-4165-2082-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2082-2
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First Baen printing, September 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Spider.
The stardance trilogy / by Spider & Jeanne Robinson.
p. cm.
“A Baen Books original.”
ISBN-13: (invalid) 978-1-4165-2082-2
ISBN-10: 1-4165-2082-1
1. Science fiction, American. I. Robinson, Jeanne. II. Title.
PS3568.O3156S725 2006 813'.54--dc22 2006012263
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
Baen Books
by Spider Robinson
Callahan’s Lady
Lady Slings the Booze
The Stardance Trilogy (with Jeanne Robinson)
Lifehouse
User Friendly
Telempath
Very Bad Deaths
CONTENTS
STARDANCE
Stardance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Stardancers
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Starseed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Snygamy
Chapter 1
STARSEED
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
STARMIND
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 3
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part 4
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part 5
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part 6
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part 7
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part 8
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part 9
Chapter 25
Epilogue
This one’s for Luanna Mountainbourne,
who may well make prophets of us one day…
“In order to find one’s place in the infinity of being,
one must be able both to separate and unite.”
—I Ching
Acknowledgments
What we’d like to do here is thank all the people without whom this book could not have been finished, as opposed to, but not excluding, that general gang of friends and relatives who kept us alive during its writing; they would have done so anyway, book or no book, and should be thanked in different ways.
Among the former and sometimes the latter are: Ben Bova, Gordon R. Dickson, our agent Kirby McCauley, our editor and friend Jim Frenkel, Joe W. Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D., and Laurence Janifer, all of whom donated information, advice, and assistance above and beyond the call of friendship, all at the cost of working time or leisure or both. It should be clearly understood that none of the above people are to blame for what we have done with their information and aid: any errors are ours.
On a less personal but just as basic level, this book could also never have become what it is without A House In Space, Henry S.F. Cooper’s fascinating account of zero-gee life in Skylab; G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution, which built Skyfac in our minds; the recent works of John Varley and Frank Herbert, who roughly simultaneously pioneered (at least as far as we know) the concept on which the ending of this book depends; Murray Louis’s exquisite and moving columns in Dance Magazine; the books, past advice and present love of Stephen Gaskin; the inspirational dance of Toronto Dance Theatre, Murray Louis, Pilobolus, the Contact Improv Movement, and all of our dancing buddies in Nova Scotia; the lifework of Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Pangborn, and John D. MacDonald; the whiskey of Mr. Jameson, the coffee of Jamaica, and the music of Frank Zappa, Paul Simon, and Yes.
1
STARDANCE
Chapter 1
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 relatively few 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 about 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 Shara 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 her 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 slanders, 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 1989. 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 that I hated more than anything except the phone company. I hadn’t seen the new year’s 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 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 (do you know the principle of a standard piston-type pump? Go look up the principle of a vane pump.) 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. We lived together once, but it didn’t work out.
“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 my students’?”
She blushed. “Dammit, she’s my sister.”
Norrey and I go back a long way together, but I’d never met 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 again?”
“Shara.” Norrey pointed her out, and I understood the rest of the catch. Shara Drummond was ten years younger than her sister—and a good eighteen centimeters taller, with fifteen or eighteen more kilos. I noted absently that she was stunningly beautiful, but it didn’t lessen 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 studio full 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 closeup work. I never triggered it.
There’s a game that 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, just about 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 so 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 videocameras, 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 not an accurate literal portrayal, 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 Steveland 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 Fat Humphrey’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 aspects of all three. This is not 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 simply 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 knew 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 d
own 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, Ms. 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 older offstage, 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 ‘Ms. Drummond, I think you ought to give up dancing.’”
“It should have been ‘Shara, I think you ought’…what?”