by Spider
“Norrey—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Smoke this digit and shut up. I’ve loved you since before you knew me, Charlie, before your leg got chopped up, when you were still dancing. I knew you before you were a cripple. I loved you before I ever saw you offstage. I knew you before you were a lush, and I’ve loved you all the years since in the way that you wanted me to.
“Now you come before me on two legs. You still limp, but you’re not a cripple anymore. Fat Humphrey the telepath doesn’t give you wine with your meal, and when I kiss you at the studio I notice you didn’t have a drink on the plane. You buy me dinner and you babble about being rich and powerful and you try to sell me some crack-brained scheme for dancing in space, you have the goddam audacity to lay all this on me and never once say the word ‘love’ with your mouth and ask me to be your other half again.” She snatched the roach out of my hand. “God dammit, Cratchit, you leave me no alternative…”
And she actually paused and toked and held it and exhaled before she let the smile begin.
“…but to raise your fucking salary.”
And we were both holding hands in the apricots and grinning like gibbons. Blood roared in my ears; I literally shuddered with emotion too intense to bear. I groped for a cathartic wisecrack. “Who said I was buying dinner?”
A high, nasal voice from nearby said, “I’m buying, Mr. Armstead.”
We looked up, startled to discover that the world still existed around us, and were further startled.
He was a short, slight young man. My first impression was of cascades of ringlets of exceedingly curly black hair, behind which lurked a face like a Brian Froud drawing of a puckish elf. His glasses were twin rectangles of wire and glass, thicker than the glass in airlock doors, and at the moment they were on the end of his nose. He squinted down past them at us, doing his best to look dignified. This was considerably difficult, as Fat Humphrey was holding him a clear foot off the floor, one big sausage-plate fist clutching his collar. His clothes were expensive and in excellent taste, but his boots were splendidly shabby. He was trying, unsuccessfully, not to kick his feet.
“Every time I pass your table I keep steppin’ on his ears,” Humphrey explained, bringing the little guy closer and lowering his voice. “So I figure him for a snoop or a newsie and I’m just givin’ him the bum’s rush. But if he’s talkin’ about buyin’, it’s your decision.”
“How about it, friend? Snoop or newsie?”
Insofar as it was possible, he drew himself up. “I am an artist.”
I queried Norrey with my eyes and was answered.
“Set that man down and get him a chair, Fat. We’ll discuss the check later.”
This was done, and the kid accepted the last of the roach, hitching his tunic into shape and pushing his glasses back up.
“Mr. Armstead, you don’t know me, and I don’t know this lady here, but I’ve got these terrific ears and no shame at all. Mr. Pappadopolous is right, I was eavesdropping just great. My name is Raoul Brindle, and—”
“I’ve heard of you,” Norrey said. “I have a few of your albums.”
“I do too,” I agreed. “The next to the last one was terrific.”
“Charlie, that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Raoul blinked furiously. “No, he’s right. The last one was trash. I owed a pound and paid.”
“Well, I liked it. I’m Norrey Drummond.”
“You’re Norrey Drummond?”
Norrey got a familiar look. “Yes. Her sister.”
“Norrey Drummond of TDT, that choreographed Shifting Gears and danced the Question An Dancer variations at the Vancouver conference, that—” He stopped, and his glasses slid down his nose. “Ohmigod. Shara Drummond is your sister? Ohmigod, of course. Drummond. Drummond, sisters, imbecile.” He sat on his excitement and hitched up his glasses and tried to look dignified some more.
For my money he pulled it off. I knew something about Raoul Brindle, and I was impressed. He’d been a child-genius composer, and then in his college days he’d decided music was no way to make a living and became one of the best special effects men in Hollywood. Right after Time did a half-page sidebar on his work of Children of the Lens—which I mightily admired—he released a video-cassette album composed entirely of extraordinary visuals, laser optics and color effects, with synthesizer accompaniment of his own. It was sort of Yellow Submarine cubed, and it had sold like hell and been followed by a half dozen more occasionally brilliant albums. He had designed and programmed the legendary million-dollar lightshow system for the Beatles’ reunion as a favor for McCartney, and one of his audio-only tapes followed my deck everywhere it went. I resolved to buy his dinner.
“So how do you know me well enough to spot me in a restaurant, Raoul, and why have you been dropping eaves?”
“I didn’t spot you here. I followed you here.”
“Sonofabitch, I never saw you. Well, what did you follow me for?”
“To offer you my life.”
“Eh?”
“I’ve seen the Stardance.”
“You have?” I exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “How did you pull that off?”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Large weather we’re having, isn’t it? So I saw the Stardance and I made it my business to find you and follow you, and now you’re going back to space to dance and I’m going with you. If I have to walk.”
“And do what?”
“You said yourself, you’re going to need a stage manager. But you haven’t thought it through. I’m going to create a new art form for you. I’m going to beat my brains to peanut butter for you. I’m going to design free-fall sets and visuals and do the scores, and they’ll both work integrally together and with the dances. I’ll work for coffee and cakes, you don’t even have to use my music if you don’t want to, but I gotta design those sets.”
Norrey cut him off with a gentle, compassionate hand over his month. “How do you mean, free-fall sets?” She took her hand away.
“It’s free fall, don’t you understand? I’ll design you a sphere of trampolines, with cameras at the joints, and the framework’ll be tubes of colored neon. For free-space work I’ll give you rings of laser-lit metal flakes, loops of luminous gas, modified fireworks, giant blobs of colored liquid hanging in space to dance around and through—singing Jesus, as a special effects man I’ve been waiting all my life for zero gravity. It—it makes the Dykstraflex obsolete, don’t you see?”
He was blinking hard enough to keep the insides of his glasses swept, glancing rapidly back and forth from Norrey to me. I was flabbergasted, and so was she.
“Look, I’ve got a microcassette deck here. I’ll give it to you, Mister Armstead—”
“Charlie,” I corrected absently.
“—and you take it home and listen. It’s just a few tracks I cut after I saw the Stardance. It’s just audio, just first impressions. I mean, it’s not even the frame of a score, but I thought it…I mean, I thought maybe you’d…it’s completely shitful, here, take it.”
“You’re hired,” I said.
“Just promise me you’ll—hired?”
“Hired. Hey, Fat! You got a VCR in the joint somewhere?”
So we went into the back room where Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous lives, and I fed the Stardance tape into his personal television, and the four of us watched it together while Maria ran the restaurant, and when it was over it was half an hour before any of us could speak.
Chapter 2
So of course there was nothing to do then but go up to Skyfac.
Raoul insisted on paying for his own passage, which startled and pleased me. “How can I ask you to buy a pig in a poke?” he asked reasonably. “For all you know I may be one of those permanently spacesick people.”
“I anticipate having at least some gravity in the living units, Raoul. And do you have any idea what an elevator costs a civilian?”
“I can afford it,” he said simply. “You know that. And I’m no good to you
if I have to stay in the house all day. I go on your payroll the day we know I can do the job.”
“That’s silly,” I objected. “I plan to take carloads of student dancers up, with no more warranty than you’ve got, and they sure as hell won’t be paying for their tickets. Why should I discriminate against you for not being poor?”
He shook his head doggedly, his eyeglasses tattooing the sides of his nose. “Because I want it that way. Charity is for those that need it. I’ve taken a lot of it, and I bless the people who gave it to me when I needed it, but I don’t need it any more.”
“All right,” I agreed. “But after you’ve proved out, I’m going to rebate you, like it or not.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and we booked our passage.
Commercial transportation to orbit is handled by Space Industries Corp., a Skyfac subsidiary, and I have to congratulate them on one of the finest natural puns I’ve ever seen. When we located the proper gate at the spaceport, after hours of indignity at Customs and Medical, I was feeling salty. I still hadn’t fully readapted after the time I’d spent in free fall with Shara, and the most I could pry out of the corporation medicos was three months—my “pull” with the top brass meant nothing to the Flight Surgeon in charge. I was busy fretting that it wasn’t enough time and tightening my guts in anticipation of takeoff when I rounded the last corner and confronted the sign that told me I was in the right place.
It said:
S.I.C. TRANSIT
(gloria mundi)
I laughed so hard that Norrey and Raoul had to help me aboard and strap me in, and I was still chuckling when acceleration hit us.
Sure enough, Raoul got spacesick as soon as the drive cut off—but he’d been sensible enough to skip breakfast, and he responded rapidly to the injection. That banty little guy had plenty of sand: by the time we were docked at Ring One he was trying out riffs on his Soundmaster. White as a piece of paper and completely oblivious, eyes glued to the outboard video, fingers glued to the Soundmaster’s keyboard, ears glued to its earplugs. If elevator-belly ever troubled him again, he kept it to himself.
Norrey had no trouble at all. Neither did I. Our appointment with the brass had been set for an hour hence, just in case, so we stashed Raoul in the room assigned to him and spent the time in the Lounge, watching the stars wheel by on the big video wall. It was not crowded; the tourist trade had fallen off sharply when the aliens came, and never recovered. The New Frontier was less attractive with New Indians lurking in it somewhere.
My attempts to play seasoned old spacehound to Norrey’s breathless tourist were laughably unsuccessful. No one ever gets jaded to space, and I took deep satisfaction in being the one who introduced Norrey to it. But if I couldn’t pull off nonchalance, at least I could be pragmatic.
“Oh, Charlie! How soon can we go outside?”
“Probably not today, hon.”
“Why not?”
“Too much to do first. We’ve got to insult Tokugawa, talk to Harry Stein, talk to Tom McGillicuddy, and when all that’s done you’re going to take your first class in EVA 101—indoors.”
“Charlie, you’ve taught me all that stuff already.”
“Sure. I’m an old spacehound, with all of six months experience. You dope, you’ve never even touched a real p-suit.”
“Oh, welfare checks! I’ve memorized every word you’ve told me. I’m not scared.”
“There in a nutshell is why I refuse to go EVA with you.”
She made a face and ordered coffee from the arm of her chair.
“Norrey. Listen to me. You are not talking about putting on a raincoat and going to stand next to Niagara Falls. About six inches beyond that wall there is the most hostile environment presently available to a human. The technology which makes it possible for you to live there at all is not as old as you are. I’m not going to let you within ten meters of an airlock until I’m convinced that you’re scared silly.”
She refused to meet my eyes. “Dammit, Charlie, I’m not a child and I’m not an idiot.”
“Then stop acting like both.” She jumped at the volume and looked at me. “Or is there any other kind of person who believes you can acquire a new set of reflexes by being told about them?”
It might have escalated into a full-scale quarrel, but the waiter picked that moment to arrive with Norrey’s coffee. The Lounge staff like to show off for the tourists; it increases the tip. Our waiter decided to come to our table the same way George Reeves used to leap tall buildings, and we were a good fifteen meters from the kitchen. Unfortunately, after he had left the deck, committing himself, a gaunt tourist decided to change seats without looking, and plotted herself an intersecting course. The waiter never flinched. He extended his left arm sideways, deploying the drogue (which looks just like the webbing that runs from Spiderman’s elbow to his ribs); tacked around her; brought his hand to his chest to collapse the drogue; transferred the coffee to that hand; extended the other arm and came back on course; all in much less time than it has taken you to read about it. The tourist squawked and tumbled as he went by, landing on her rump and bouncing and skidding a goodly distance thereon; the waiter grounded expertly beside Norrey, gravely handed her a cup containing every drop of coffee he had started out with, and took off again to see to the tourist.
“The coffee’s fresh,” I said as Norrey goggled. “The waiter just grounded.”
It’s one of the oldest gags on Skyfac, and it always works. Norrey whooped and nearly spilled hot coffee on her hand—only the low gee gave her time to recover. That cut her laughter short; she stared at the coffee cup, and then at the waiter, who was courteously pointing out one of the half dozen LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP signs to the outraged tourist.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah.”
“How many classes will I need before I’m ready?”
I smiled and took her hand. “Not as many as I thought.”
The meeting with Tokugawa, the new chairman of the board, was low comedy. He received us personally in what had been Carrington’s office, and the overall effect was of a country bishop on the Pope’s throne. Or perhaps “tuna impersonating a piranha” is closer to the image I want. In the vicious power struggle which followed Carrington’s death, he had been the only candidate ineffectual enough to satisfy everyone. Tom McGillicuddy was with him, to my delight, the cast already gone from his ankle. He was growing a beard.
“Hi, Tom. How’s the foot?”
His smile was warm and familiar. “Hello, Charlie. It’s good to see you again. The foot’s okay—bones knit faster in low gee.”
I introduced Norrey to him, and to Tokugawa as an afterthought.
The most powerful man in space was short, gray, and scrutable. In deference to the custom of the day he wore traditional Japanese dress, but I was willing to bet that his English was better than his Japanese. He started when I lit up a joint, and Tom had to show him how to turn up the breeze and deploy the smoke filter. Norrey’s body language said she didn’t like him, and I trust her barometer even more than my own; she lacks my cynicism. I cut him off in the middle of a speech about Shara and the Stardance that must have used up four ghostwriters.
“The answer is ‘no.’”
He looked as though he had never heard the expression before. “—I—”
“Listen, Toke old boy, I read the papers. You and Skyfac Inc. and Lunindustries Inc. want to become our patrons. You’re inviting us to move right in and start dancing, offering to underwrite the whole bloody venture. And none of this has anything to do with the fact that antitrust legislation was filed against you this week, right?”
“Mister Armstead, I’m merely expressing my gratitude that you and Shara Drummond chose to bring your high art to Skyfac in the first place, and my fervent hope that you and her sister will continue to feel free to make use of—”
“Where I come from we use that stuff for methane power.” I took a lingering drag while he sputtered. “You know damn well how Shara came to
Skyfac, and you sit in the chair of the man who killed her. He killed her by making her spend so many of her offstage hours in low or no gee, because that was the only way he could get it up. You ought to be bright enough to know that the day Norrey or I or any member of our company dances a step on Skyfac property, a red man with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is going to come up to you and admit that it just froze over.” The joint was beginning to hit me. “As far as I’m concerned, Christmas came this year on the day that Carrington went out for a walk and forgot to come back, and I will be gone to hell before I’ll live under his roof again, or make money for his heirs and assigns. Do we understand each other?” Norrey was holding my hand tightly, and when I glanced over she was grinning at me.
Tokugawa sighed and gave up. “McGillicuddy, give them the contract.”
Pokerfaced, Tom produced a stiff folded parchment and passed it to us. I scanned it, and my eyebrows rose. “Tom,” I said blandly, “is this honest?”
He never even glanced at his boss. “Yep.”
“Not even a percentage of the gross? Oh my.” I looked at Tokugawa. “A free lunch. It must be my good looks.” I tore the contract in half.
“Mister Armstead,” he began hotly, and I was glad that Norrey interrupted him this time. I was getting to like it too much.
“Mr. Tokugawa, if you’ll stop trying to convince us that you’re a patron of the arts, I think we can get along. We’ll let you donate some technical advice and assistance, and we’ll let you sell us materials and air and water at cost. We’ll even give back some of the skilled labor we hire away from you when we’re done with them. Not you, Tom—we want you to be our full-time business manager, if you’re willing.”
He didn’t hesitate a second, and his grin was beautiful. “Ms. Drummond, I accept.”
“Norrey. Furthermore,” she went on to Tokugawa, “we’ll make a point of telling everybody we know how nice you’ve been, any time the subject comes up. But we are going to own and operate our own studio, and it may suit us to put it on the far side of Terra, and we will be independents. Not Skyfac’s in-house dance troupe: independents. Eventually we hope to see Skyfac itself settle into the role of the benevolent old rich uncle who lives up the road. But we don’t expect to need you for longer than you need us, so there will be no contract. Have we a meeting of the minds?”