The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  (We use sleeping webs and cocoons when we sleep, even though everything in a free-fall domicile is well padded. It’s not as restful—but without any restraints, you keep waking up when you bump in to the air grille. One idiot student had wanted to nap in Town Hall, which has no sleeping gear, so he turned off the air conditioning. Fortunately someone came in before he could suffocate in the carbon dioxide sphere of his own exhalations. I paid for an unscheduled elevator and had him dirtside twenty hours later.)

  And so nearly everyone found time to hang themselves in front of a video monitor and eyeball Titan.

  From the extensive briefing we all studied, this abstract:

  Titan is the sixth of Saturn’s moons, and quite the largest. I had been expecting something vaguely Luna-sized—but the damned thing has a diameter of almost 5,800 klicks, roughly that of the planet Mercury, or about four tenths that of Earth! At that incredible size its mass is only about .002 that of Earth’s. Its orbital inclination is negligible, less than a degree—that is, it orbits almost precisely around the equator of Saturn (as does the Ring), at a mean distance of just over ten planetary diameters. It is tidally locked, so that it always presents the same face to its primary, like Luna, and it takes only about sixteen days to circle Saturn—a speedy moon indeed for its size. (But then Saturn itself has a ten-and-a-quarter-hour day.)

  From the time that it had been close enough to eyeball it had looked reddish, and now it looked like Mars on fire, girdled with vast clouds like thunderheads of blood. Through them lunarlike mountains and valleys glowed a slightly cooler red, as though lit by a gobo with a red gel—which, essentially, they were. The overall effect was of hellfire and damnation.

  That preternatural red color was one of the principal reasons why Cox and Song went into emergency overdrive the moment we were locked into orbit. The world scientific community had gone in to apoplexy when its expensive Saturn probe had been hijacked by the military, for a diplomatic mission, and into double apoplexy when they understood that the scientific complement of the voyage would consist of a single Space Command physicist and an engineer. So Bill and Col. Song spent the twenty-four hours we remained in that orbit working like fishermen when the tide makes, taking the absolute minimum of measurements and recordings that would satisfy Siegfried’s original planners. Led by Susan Pha Song, they worked from taped instructions and under the waspish direction of embittered scientists on Terra (with a transmission lag of an hour and a quarter, which improved no one’s temper), and they did a good, dogged job. It is a little difficult to imagine the kind of mind that would find chatting with extrasolar plasmoids less exciting than studying Saturn’s sixth moon, but there are some—and the startling thing is, they’re not entirely crazy.

  It’s that red color. Titan should look sort of blue-greenish. Yet even from Earth it is clearly red. Why? Well, the thing that had professors in a flutter was that Titan’s atmosphere (mostly methane) and temperature characteristics made it about the last place in the Solar System where theory grudgingly admitted the possibility of “life as we know it.” Experiments with a Titan-normal chamber produced Miller’s “primal flash” chemical reactions, a good sign, and the unspoken but dearly beloved theory was that maybe the red cloud-cover was organic matter of some kind—or even conceivably whatever kind of pollution a methane-breather would produce. I couldn’t follow even Raoul’s popularization of the by-play, and I was only peripherally interested, but I gathered that by the end of twenty-four hours, a pessimist would have said “no” and an optimist “maybe.” Raoul mentioned a lot of ambiguous data, stuff that seemed self-contradictory—which didn’t surprise me in light of how prematurely Siegfried had been rushed into commission.

  I divided my own attention between Titan and Saturn, which the scientists wouldn’t be interested in until after the conference, when they could get a closer look. From where we were it took up about a 6 or 7° piece of sky (for reference, Luna seen from Earth subtends an angle of about half a degree; Earth seen from Luna is about 2° wide. Your fist at arm’s length is about 10°), and the Ring, edge on to us, added another couple of planetary diameters or almost 14°. Call it a total package of 20°, two fists’ width. Not cosmic; at home, at the Studio, I’ve seen Mother Terra take up more than half the sky at perigee. But when Earth did take up 20°, we were about 22,000 klicks from its surface. Saturn was 1.2 million klicks away.

  It’s a hellacious big planet—the biggest in the System if you don’t call Jupiter a planet (I don’t call it at all. It might answer). Its diameter is a little over 116,000 klicks, roughly nine Earths, and it masses a whopping ninety-five Earths. This makes its surface gee of 1.15 Earth normal seem absurdly low—but it must be borne in mind that Saturn is only .69 as dense as a comparable sphere of water (while Earth has more than five times the density of water.) Even that low a gee field was more than enough to kill a Homo caelestis or a Homo excastra, were we silly enough to land on Saturn. And the escape velocity is more than three times that for Earth (a weak gravity well—but a big one).

  It doesn’t exactly have a surface, though, as I understand it. Oh, there’s probably rock down there somewhere. But long before you got down that far, you’d come to rest, floating on methane, which is what Saturn (and its “atmosphere”) mostly is.

  Its mighty Ring appears to be a moon that didn’t make it, uncountable trillions of orbiting rocks from sand-to boulder-size, covered with water ice.

  Together they present an indescribably beautiful appearance. Saturn is a kind of dreamy ocher yellow with wide bands of dark, almost chocolate brown, and it is quite bright as planets go. The Ring, being dirty ice, incorporates literally every color in the visible spectrum, sparkling and shifting as the independent orbits of its component parts change relation. The overall impression is of an immense agate or tiger-eye circled by the shattered remnants of a mighty rainbow. Smaller, literal rainbows come and go randomly within the orbiting mass, like lights seen through wet glasses.

  It was a sight I never tired of, will never forget as long as I live, and it alone was worth the trip from Earth and the loss of my heritage. I couldn’t decide whether it was more beautiful at the height of our orbit, when we were above the Ring, or at the other end when we were edge-on; both had their points. Raoul spent virtually every minute of his free time glued to the bulkhead across from his video screen, his Musicmaster on his lap, its headphones over his ears, fingers seeking and questioning among its keys. He would not let us put the speakers on—but he gave Harry the auxiliary ’phones. I have subsequently heard the symphony he derived from that working tape, and I would have traded Earth for that.

  The aliens, of course, were the utter and total center of Bill Cox’s attention. Their high-energy emissions nearly overloaded his instruments, though they were too far away to be seen. About a million klicks, give or take a few hundred thousand, waiting with apparent patience at the approximate forward Trojan point for Saturn-Titan. The actual locating of that point was extremely complicated by the presence of eight other moons, and I’m told that no Trojan point would be stable in the long term—even if the O’Neill Colony movement ever gets going at L-5, it’ll never spread to Saturn. But what it came down to was that the aliens were waiting about 60° “down the line” of titan’s orbit, at a sensible place for a conference. Which made it even more probable that that was their intention.

  So our next move was to go say howdy. Siegfried and all: the Trojan point was a good four light-seconds away, and the lag was not acceptable to any of us.

  We dancers also had business of our own to occupy us while Bill and Col. Song were slaving, of course. We didn’t spend all our time rubbernecking.

  The Limousine had been fully supplied and outfitted, field- and board-tested down to the last circuit, and secured long since, in transit. So naturally the first thing we did was to check the supplies and fittings and board-test down to the last circuit again. If we should buy the emptiest of farms, the next expedition would be two or three ye
ars in arriving at the very least—and maybe by then the aliens’ Trojan stability would have decayed enough to irritate them and they’d have gone home.

  Besides, I wanted personal words with them.

  And that was the root of the last thing we did before blasting for their location, which was to hold the last several hours of a year-long quarrel with the diplomats over choreography.

  I finally jaunted right out on them, prepared to float in my room and let them dance. I hadn’t lost my temper; only my will to argue. DeLaTorre waited a polite interval and then buzzed at my door.

  “Come in.”

  The free-fall haircut spoiled his appearance; he should have had hair like Mark Twain. He had had to shave his beard too—there’s no room for one in a helmet—and hating shaving he did it badly; but it actually improved his looks, almost enough to compensate for the big fuzzy skull. His warm brown eyes showed unspeakable fatigue, their lids raisinlike with wrinkles. He stuck himself to the wall, moving with the exaggerated care of the bone-tired, so that he was aligned with the local vertical built into it by its terrestrial designers (when Harry builds his first billion-dollar spaceship, he’ll be more imaginative).

  DeLaTorre would, at his age, never make a Space Man. Out of respect, I assumed the same orientation. What little anger I had had was gone; my determination remained.

  “Charles, an accommodation must be reached.”

  “Ezequiel, don’t tell me you’re as blind as the rest of them.”

  “They only feel that the first movement might more properly be respectful, rather than stern; solemn rather than emotional. Once we have established communication, opened relations with these beings in mutual dignity, then would be the time to state our grievances. The third or fourth movement, perhaps.”

  “Dammit, it doesn’t feel right that way.”

  “Charles, forgive me, but—surely you will admit that your emotional judgment might be clouded in this matter?”

  I sighed. “Ezequiel, look me in the eye. I have not been in love with Shara Drummond since shortly before she died. I have examined my soul and the dance that came out of it, and I feel no urge for personal vengeance, no thirst for retribution.”

  “No, your dance is not vengeful,” he agreed.

  “But I do have a grievance—not as a bereaved lover but as a bereaved human being. I want those aliens to know what they cost my race when they wrought the death of Shara Drummond, when they forced her hand and made her into Homo caelestis before there was any place or any way for one to live—” I broke off, realizing that I had blundered, but DeLaTorre did not even blink.

  “Was she not already Homo caelestis, or ala anima, when they arrived, Charles?” he asked as blandly as if he was supposed to know those terms. “Would she not have died on her return to Earth in any case, by that point?”

  I recognized and accepted the sudden rise in our truth level, distracted by his question. “Perhaps, Ezequiel. Her body must have been on the borderline of permanent adaptation. I have lain awake many nights, thinking about this, talking it over with my wife. I keep thinking: Had Shara visualized what her Stardance would do financially, she might have endured a brief wait at Skyfac, might have survived to be a more worthy leader for our Studio. I keep thinking: Had she thought things through, she might not have chosen to burn her wings, so high above her lost planet. I keep thinking: Had she known, she might have lived.”

  I sucked rotten coffee from a bulb and made a face. “But all the fighting spirit had been sucked out of her, drained into the Stardance and hurled at those red fireflies with the last of her strength. All of her life, right up to Carrington, had been slowly draining the will to live out of her, and threw all that she had left at those things, because that was what it took to scare them back to interstellar space, to frighten them so bad that their nearest subsequent approach was a billion klicks away. There was no will to live left after that, not enough to sustain her.

  “I want to convey to those creatures the value of the entity their careless footstep crushed, the enormity of her people’s loss. If grief or remorse are in their emotional repertoire, I want to see some. Most of all, I think, I want to forgive them. And so I have to state my complaint first. I believe that their reaction will tell us quicker than anything else whether we can ever learn to communicate and peacefully coexist with them.

  “They respect dance, Ezequiel, and they cost us the greatest artist of our time. A race that could open with any other statement is one I don’t much want to represent. That’d be Montezuma’s Mistake all over again. Norrey and the others agree with me: this is a deal-breaker.”

  He was silent a long time. The last thing a diplomat will concede is that compromise is impossible. But at last he said, “I follow your thought, Charles. And I admit that it leads me to the same conclusions.” He sighed. “You are right. I will make the others accept this.” He pushed free and jaunted to me, taking both my shoulders in his wrinkled, mottled hands. “Thank you for explaining to me. Come, let us prepare to go and state our grievance.”

  He was closeted with the other three for a little over twenty minutes, and emerged with an extremely grudging accord. He was indeed the best man Wertheimer could have chosen. Half an hour later we were on our way.

  Chapter 3

  It took the better part of a day to coax Siegfried from Titan orbit to the Trojan point, without employing accelerations that would kill us all. Titan is a mighty moon, harder to break free of than Luna. Fortunately we didn’t want to break free of it—quite. We essentially widened the circle of our orbit until it intersected the Trojan point—decelerating like hell all the way so that we’d be at rest relative to it when we got there. It had to be at least partly by-guess-and-by-God, because any transit in Saturn’s system is a ten-body problem (don’t even think about the Ring), and Bill was an equal partner with the computer in that astrogating job. He did a world-class job, as I had known he would, wasting no fuel and, more important, no passengers. The worst we had to endure was about fifteen seconds at about .6 gee, mere agony.

  Any properly oriented wall will do for an acceleration couch—since everything in a true spaceship is well padded (billion-dollar spaceprobe designers aren’t that unimaginative.) I don’t know about all the others, but Norrey and I and anybody sensible customarily underwent acceleration naked. If you’ve got to lie flat on your back under gravity, you don’t want wrinkly clothes and bulky velcro pads between you and the padding.

  When we drifted free of the wall and the “acceleration over” horn sounded, we dressed in the same p-suits we had worn on our Last Ride together, a year before. Of the five models of custom-made suits we use, they are the closest to total nudity, resembling abbreviated topless bathing suits with a collared hood. The transparent sections are formfitted and scarcely noticeable; the “trunks” are not for taboo but for sanitary reasons; and the hood-and-collar section is mostly to conceal the unaesthetic amount of hardware that must be built into a p-suit hood. The thrusters are ornate wrist and ankle jewelry; their controls golfing gloves. The group had decided unanimously that we would use these suits for our performance. Perhaps by the overt image of naked humans in space we were unconsciously trying to assert our humanity, to deny the concept of ourselves as other than human by displaying the evidence to the contrary. See? Navel. See? Nipples. See? Toes.

  “The trouble with these suits, my love,” I said as I sealed my own, “is that the sight of you in yours always threatens to dislodge my catheter tube.”

  She grinned and made an unnecessary adjustment of her left breast. “Steady, boy. Keep your mind on business.”

  “Especially now that the bloody weight is gone. How did you women put up with it for centuries? Having some great clod lay on you like that?”

  “Stoically,” she said, and jaunted for the phone. She diddled its controls, and said, “Linda—how’s the baby?”

  Linda and Tom appeared on the screen, in the midst of helping each other suit up. “Fine,” Lind
a called happily. “Nary a quiver.”

  Tom grinned at the phone and said, “What’s to worry? She still fits into her p-suit, for crying out loud.”

  His composure impressed and deeply pleased me. When we left Skyfac I would have predicted that at this pre-curtain moment, with a pregnant wife to worry about, Tom would be agitated enough to chew pieces off his shoulder blades. But free space, as I have said, is a tranquilizing environment—and more important, he had allowed Linda to teach him much. Not just the dance, and the breathing and meditational exercises for relaxation—we had all learned these things. Not even the extensive spiritual instruction she had given that ex-businessman (which had begun with loud arguments, and calmed down when he finally got it through his head that she had no creed to attack, no brand label to discredit), though that helped of course.

  Mostly it was her love and her loving that had finally unsnarled all the knots in Tom’s troubled soul. Her love was so transparently genuine, and heartfelt that it forced him to take it at face value, forced him therefore to love himself a little more—which is all anyone really needs to relax. Opening up to another frees you at least temporarily of all that armor you’ve been lugging, and your disposition invariably improves. Sometimes you decide to scrap the armor altogether.

  Norrey and I shared all of this in a smile and a glance, and then she said, “That’s great, you two. See you at the Garage,” and cleared the screen.

  She drifted round in space, her lovely breasts majestic in free fall, till she was facing me. “Tom and Linda will be good partners for us,” she said, and was silent.

  We hung at opposite ends of the room for a few seconds, lost in each other’s eyes, and then we kicked off at the same instant and met, hard, at the center of the room. Our embrace was four-limbed and fierce, a spasmodic attempt to break through the boundaries of flesh and bone and plastic and touch hearts.