The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  “If it comes to that extreme,” I said, “I for one am going free lance.”

  “Chen Ten Li has a gun,” Linda said suddenly.

  “What?” Five voices at once.

  “What kind?” from Harry.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A small handgun, squarish looking. Not much barrel.”

  “How did you get a look at it?” I asked.

  “Jack-in-the-box effect. Took him by surprise, and he recovered late.”

  The jack-in-the-box effect is one of the classic surprises of free fall, predictable but unexpected, and it gets virtually every new fish. Any container, cabinet or drawer you open will spew its contents at you—unless you have thought to velcro them all in place. The practical joke possibilities are nearly inexhaustible. But I smelled a rat. “How about that, Tom?”

  “Eh?”

  “If Chen Ten Li has been one of the major forces behind intelligent use of space, wouldn’t he know about jack-in-the-box?”

  Tom’s voice was thoughtful. “Huh. Not necessarily. Li is one of those paradoxes, like Isaac Asimov refusing to fly. For all his understanding of the issues of space, this is the first time he’s been further off-planet than a jetliner goes. He’s a groundlubber at heart.”

  “Still,” I objected, “jack-in-the-box is standard tourist anecdote. He’s only need to have spoken with one returned spacegoer, for any length of time.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Raoul said, “but there was a lot about zero gee that I knew about intellectually, that I still tripped over when I got there. Besides, what motive could Li have for letting Linda see a gun?”

  “That’s what bothers me,” I admitted. “I can think of two or three reasons offhand—and they all imply either great clumsiness or great cunning. I don’t know which I’d prefer. Well…anyone else see any heat?”

  “I haven’t seen a thing,” Norrey said judiciously, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ludmilla has a weapon of some kind.”

  “Anybody else?”

  Nobody responded. But each of the diplomats had fetched a sizable mass of uninspected luggage.

  “Okay. So the upshot is, we’re stuck in a subway with three rival gangleaders, two cops and a nice old man. This is one of the few times I’ve ever been grateful that the eyes of the world are upon us.”

  “Much more than the eyes of the world,” Linda corrected soberly.

  “It’ll be okay,” Raoul said. “Remember: a diplomat’s whole function is to maintain hostilities short of armed conflict. They’ll all pull together at the showdown. Most of ’em may be chauvinists—but underneath I think they’re all human chauvinists, too.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Linda said. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”

  Startled silence, then, “What do you mean, darling? We’re not human?” from Tom.

  “Are we?”

  I began to understand what she was driving at, and I felt my mind accelerate to meet her thought.

  What does it mean to be human? Considering that the overwhelming mass of the evidence has been taken from observation of humans under one gravity, pinned against a planet? By others in the same predicament?

  “Certainly,” Tom said. “Humans are humans whether they float or fall.”

  “Are you sure?” Linda asked softly. “We are different from our fellows, different in basic ways. I don’t mean just that we can never go back and live with them. I mean spiritually, psychologically. Our thought patterns change, the longer we stay in space—our brains are adapting just like our bodies.”

  I told them what Wertheimer had said to me the week before—that we choreographed as well as humans but not like humans.

  “That’s John Campbell’s classic definition of ‘alien,’” Raoul said excitedly.

  “Our souls are adapting, too,” Linda went on. “Each of us spends every working day gazing on the naked face of God, a sight that groundhogs can only simulate with vaulting cathedrals and massive mosques. We have more perspective on reality than a holy man on the peak of the highest mountain on Earth. There are no atheists in space—and our gods make the hairy thunderers and bearded paranoids of Earth look silly. Hell, you can’t even make out Olympus from the Studio—much less from here.” The distant Earth and Moon were already smaller than we were used to.

  “There’s no denying that space is a profoundly moving place,” Tom maintained, “but I don’t see that it makes us other than human. I feel human.”

  “How did Cro-Magnon know he was different from Neanderthal?” Raoul asked. “Until he could assess discrepancies, how would he know?”

  “The swan thought he was an ugly duckling,” Norrey said.

  “But his genes were swan,” Tom insisted.

  “Cro-Magnon’s genes started out Neanderthal,” I said. “Have you ever examined yours? Would you know a really subtle mutation if you saw one?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this silliness, Charlie?” Tom asked irritably. “Do you feel inhuman?”

  I felt detached, listening with interest to the words that came out of my mouth. “I feel other than human. I feel like more than a new man. I’m a new thing. Before I followed Shara into space, my life was a twisted joke, with too many punchlines. Now I am alive. I love and can be loved. I didn’t leave Earth behind. I put space ahead.”

  “Aw, phooey,” Tom said. “Half of that’s your leg—and I know what the other half is because it happened to me, at Linda’s family’s place. It’s the city-mouse-in-the-country effect. You find a new, less stressful environment, get some insights, and start making better, more satisfying decisions. Your life straightens out. So something must be magic about the place. Nuts.”

  “The Mountain is magic,” Linda said gently. “Why is magic a dirty word for you?” At that stage of their relationship, it suited Tom and Linda to maintain a running pseudodisagreement on matters spiritual. Occasionally they realized what was obvious to the rest of us: that they almost never actually disagreed with each other on anything but semantics.

  “Tom,” I said insistently. “This is different. I’ve been to the country. I’m telling you that I’m not an improved version of the man I was—I’m something altogether different now. I’m the man I could never have been on Earth, had lost all hope of being. I—I believe in things that I haven’t believed in since I was a kid. Sure I’ve had some good breaks, and sure, opening up to Norrey has made my life more than I ever thought it could be. But my whole makeup has changed, and no amount of lucky breaks will do that. Hell, I used to be a drunk.”

  “Drunks smarten up every day,” Tom said.

  “Sure—if they can find the strength to maintain cold turkey for the rest of their lives. I take a drink when I feel like it. I just hardly ever feel like it. I stopped needing booze, just like that. How common is that? I smoke less these days, and treat it less frivolously when I do.”

  “So space grew you up in spite of yourself?”

  “At first. Later I had to pitch in and work like hell—but it started without my knowledge or consent.”

  “When did it begin?” Norrey and Linda asked together.

  I had to think. “When I began to learn how to see spherically. When I finally learned to cut loose of up and down.”

  Linda spoke. “A reasonably wise man once said that anything that disorients you is good. Is instructive.”

  “I know that wise man,” Tom sneered. “Leary. Brain-damage case if I ever heard of one.”

  “Does that make him incapable of having ever been wise?”

  “Look,” I said, “we are all unique. We’ve all come through a highly difficult selection process, and I don’t suppose the first Cro-Magnon felt any different. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that our talent is not a normal human attribute.”

  “Normal people can live in space,” Norrey objected. “Space Command crews. Construction gangs.”

  “If they’ve got an artificial local vertical,” Harry said. “Take ’em outdoors
, you gotta give em straight lines and right angles or they start going buggy. Most of ’em. S’why we get rich.”

  “That’s true,” Tom admitted. “At Skyfac a good outside man was worth his mass in copper, even if he was a mediocre worker. Never understood it.”

  “Because you are one,” Linda said.

  “One what?” he said, exasperated.

  “A Space Man,” I said spacing it so the capitals were apparent. “Whatever comes after Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. You’re space-going Man. I don’t think the Romans had the concept, so Homo novis is probably the best you can do in Latin. New Man. The next thing.”

  Tom snorted. “Homo excastra is more like it.”

  “No, Tom,” I said forcefully, “You’re wrong. We’re not outcasts. We may be literally ‘outside the camp,’ ‘outside the fortress’—but the connotation of ‘exile’ is all wrong. Or are you regretting the choice you made?”

  He was a long time answering. “No. No, space is where I want to live, all right. I don’t feel exiled—I think of the whole solar system as ‘human territory.’ But I feel like I’ve let my citizenship in its largest nation lapse.”

  “Tom,” I said solemnly, “I assure you that that is the diametric opposite of a loss.”

  “Well, the world does look pretty rotten these days, I’ll grant you that. There isn’t a lot of it I’ll miss.”

  “You miss my point.”

  “So explain.”

  “I talked about this with Doc Panzella some, before we left. What is the normal lifespan for a Space Man?”

  He started to speak twice, stopped trying.

  “Right. There’s no way to frame a guess—it’s a completely new ball game. We’re the first. I asked Panzella and he told me to come back when two or three of us had died. We may all die within a month, because fatigue products refuse to collect in our feet or our corns migrate to our brains or something. But Panzella’s guess is that free fall is going to add at least forty years to our lifespans. I asked him how sure he was and he offered to bet cash.”

  Everyone started talking at once, which doesn’t work on radio. The consensus was, “Say what?” The last to shut up and drop out was Tom. “—possibly know a thing like that, yet?” he finished, embarrassed.

  “Exactly,” I said. “We won’t know ’til it’s too late. But it’s reasonable. Your heart has less work to do, arterial deposits seem to diminish—”

  “So it won’t be heart trouble that gets us,” Tom stipulated, “assuming that lowering the work load drastically turns out to be good for a heart. But that’s one organ out of many.”

  “Think it through, Tom. Space is a sterile environment. With reasonable care it always will be. Your immune system becomes almost as superfluous as your semicircular canals—and do you have any idea how much energy fighting off thousands of wandering infections drains from your life system? That might have been used for maintenance and repair? Or don’t you notice your energy level drop when you go dirtside?”

  “Well sure,” he said, “but that’s just…”

  “—the gravity, you were gonna say? See what I mean? We’re healthier, physically and mentally, than we ever were on Earth. When did you ever have a cold in space? For that matter, when was the last time you got deeply depressed, morose? How come we hardly ever, any of us, have dog days, black depressions and sulks and the like? Hell, the word depression is tied to gravity. You can’t depress something in space, you can only move it. And the very word gravity has come to be a synonym for humorlessness. If there’s two things that’ll kill you early it’s depression and a lack of a sense of humor.”

  In a vivid rush came the memory of what it had felt like to live with a defective leg under one gravity. Depression, and an atrophying sense of humor. It seemed so long ago, so very far away. Had I ever really been that despairing?

  “Anyway,” I went on, “Panzella says that people who spend a lot of time in free fall—and even the people in Luna who stay in one-sixth gee, those exiled miners—show a lower incidence of heart and lung trouble, naturally. But he also says they show a much lower incidence of cancers of all kinds than the statistical norm.”

  “Even with the higher radiation levels?” Tom asked skeptically. Whenever there’s a solar flare, we all see green polliwogs for a while, as the extra radiation impacts our eyeballs—and it doesn’t make any difference whether we’re indoors or out.

  “Yep,” I assured him. “Coming out from under the atmosphere blanket was the main health hazard we all gambled on in living in space—but it seems to’ve paid off. It seemed there should have been a higher risk of cancer, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Go ask why. And the lower lung trouble is obvious—we breath real air, better filtered than the Prime Minister’s, dust free and zero pollen count. Hell, if you had all the money on Earth, you couldn’t have a healthier environment tailor-made. How about old Mrs. Murphy on Skyfac? What is she, sixty-five?”

  “Sixty-six,” Raoul said. “And free-fall handball champ. She whipped my ass, three games running.”

  “It’s almost as though we were designed to live in space,” Linda said wonderingly.

  “All right,” Tom cried in exasperation. “All right, I give up. I’m sold. We’re all going to live to be a hundred and twenty. Assuming that the aliens don’t decide we’re delicious. But I still say that this ‘new species’ nonsense is muddy thinking, delusions of grandeur. For one thing, there’s no guarantee we’ll breed true—or, as Charlie pointed out, at all. But more important, Homo novis is a ‘species’ without a natural habitat! We’re not self-sustaining, friends! We’re utterly dependent on Homo sapiens, unless and until we learn how to make our own air, water, food, metals, plastics, tools, cameras—”

  “What are you so pissed off about?” Harry asked.

  “I’m not pissed off!” Tom yelled.

  We all broke up, then, and Tom was honest enough to join us after a while.

  “All right,” he said. “I am angry. I’m honestly not sure why. Linda, do you have any handles on it?”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “‘anger’ and ‘fear’ are damned close to synonyms…”

  Tom started.

  Raoul spoke up, his voice strained. “If it will help any, I will be glad to confess that our pending appointment with these super-fireflies has me, for one, scared shitless. And I haven’t met ’em personally like you and Charlie, Tom. I mean, this little caper could cost us a lot more than just Earth.”

  That was such an odd sentence that we just let it sit there a while.

  “I know what you mean,” Norrey said slowly. “Our job is to establish telepathic rapport with what seems to be a group-mind. I’m almost…almost afraid I might succeed.”

  “Afraid you might get lost, darling?” I said. “Forget it—I wouldn’t let go of you long enough. I didn’t wait twenty years to be a widower.” She squeezed my hand.

  “That’s the point,” Linda said. “The worst we’re facing is death, in one form or another. And we always have been under sentence of death, all of us, for being human. That’s the ticket price for this show. Norrey, you and Charlie looked death right in the eye a week ago. Sure as hell you will again some day. It might turn out to be a year from now, at Saturn: so what?”

  “That’s the trouble,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Fear doesn’t go away just because it’s illogical.”

  “No,” Linda agreed, “but there are methods for dealing with it—and repressing it until it comes out as anger is not one of them. Now that we’re down to the root, though, I can teach you techniques of self-discipline that’ll at least help a lot.”

  “Teach me too,” Raoul said, almost inaudibly.

  Harry reached out and took his hand. “We’ll learn together,” he said.

  “We’ll all learn together,” I said. “Maybe we are other than human, but we’re not that different. But I would like to say that you are about the bravest folks I know, all of you. If anybody—wups! Th
ere goes the alarm again. Let’s get some real dancing done, so we come home sweaty. We’ll do this again in a couple of days. Harry, take that heavy-breathing tape out of circuit and we’ll boost our signal strength together at three, two, one, mark.”

  I repeat the above conversation in its entirety partly because it is one of the few events in this chronicle of which I possess a complete audio recording. But also partly because it contains most of the significant information you need to know about that one-year trip to Saturn. There is no point in describing the interior of Siegfried, or the day-to-day schedules or the month-by-month objectives or the interpersonal frictions that filled up one of the most busy, boring years of my life.

  As is common and perhaps inevitable on expeditions of this kind, crew, diplomats, and dancers formed three reasonably tight cliques outside working hours, and maintained an uneasy peace during them. Each group had its own interests and amusements—the diplomats, for instance, spent much of their free time (and a substantial percentage of their working time) fencing, politely and otherwise. DeLaTorre’s patience soon earned the respect of every person aboard. Read any decent book on life in a submarine, then throw in free fall, and you’ve got that year. Raoul’s music helped keep us all sane, though; he became the only other universally respected passenger.

  The six of us somehow never discussed the “new species” line of thought again together, although I know Norrey and I kicked it around hood-to-hood a few times, and Linda and I spoke of it occasionally. And of course we never mentioned it at all anywhere aboard Siegfried—spaceships are supposed to be thoroughly bugged. The notion that we six dancers were somehow other-than-human was not one that even DeLaTorre would have cared for—and he was about the only one who treated us as anything but hired hands, “mere interpreters” (Silverman’s expression). Dmirov and Li knew better, I believe, but they couldn’t help it; as experienced diplomats they were not conditioned to accept interpreters as social equals. Silverman thought dance was that stuff they did on variety shows, and why couldn’t we translate the concept of Manifest Destiny into a dance?