by Spider
I’ve become too sophisticated to remember the steps I improvised. They must have been some mutant amalgamation of what I thought ballet was, and all the Other Kinds of dance I’d felt in my body but had no names for then. Nomenclature doesn’t matter to an eleven-year-old. I danced, and what was in my heart came out my limbs and torso. I’ve wished since that I could still dance like that, but I’ve lost the necessary ignorance. I do remember that I was very happy. Complete.
Someone in the back row coughed—
Zalophus Californianus. A sea lion. Distinguished from harbor seals, even at that distance, by the distinct ears. Passing Gambier on his way back home from a day of raiding. Fishermen hate sea lions, call them pirates of the sea. They’ll take one bite from each fish in your net, spoiling the whole catch…then leave with the best one, waving it at you mockingly as they go. I always secretly liked them. They always danced: so it seemed to me. Drama and tragedy in the water; slapstick comedy when they were on land. He was perhaps fifty meters due east of the dock, treading water and staring at me. He coughed again, sounding very much like Grandfather.
I didn’t let him interrupt me. I worked a friendly hello wave into what I was doing, and kept on dancing. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye from time to time, watching me in apparent puzzlement, but he was no more distraction than a cloud or gull would have been—
—until there were two of him.
For a moment I “treaded water” myself, planting my feet so I faced them and dancing only with torso and arms. They were identical, grey and wet, a few meters apart, their eyes and slick heads glistening with reflected sunset. The new one gave a cough of its own, softer and higher. Grandfather and Grandmother Meade. They watched me with no discernible expression at all, giving me their complete attention, perfect bobbing Buddhas.
So I danced for them.
Well, at them. I made no attempt to “translate” what I was feeling into Sea Lion dance, to mimic the body-language I’d seen them use, so they could understand better. Even at eleven I was arrogant enough to be more interested in teaching them my dance language, telling them who I was. When you’re that young, expressing yourself is better than being understood. So I continued to dance in Human, and for the whole cycloramic world of sea and sunset—but began subtly aiming it at the sea lions, as though they were the two important critics in a packed theatre, or my actual grandparents come to see my solo debut.
What luck, to have spent my childhood so far from Vancouver’s ballet classes that no one had yet told me how I was supposed to move. I was still able to move the way I needed to, to invent anything my heart required. It felt good, that’s all this highly trained forty-six-year-old can remember. For a time machine and video gear, you can have anything I own.
The sea lions were twenty meters closer, and there were four of them now.
They were treading water in ragged formation, close enough for me to see whiskers. By logical extension of my original whimsy, the new arrivals were the paternal grandparents I’d never met, the McLeods. Ghosts in the audience. It gave an added layer of meaning to what I was doing, as much awareness of mortality and eternity as an eleven-year-old is capable of. I danced on.
The first breezes of evening found the sweat under my hair and on my chest and chilled them. I increased my energy output to compensate. I was grinning, spinning.
Seven sea lions. Twenty meters away, faces absolutely blank, staring.
Everything came together—sea, sky, purple clouds of sunset, sea lions—to generate that special magic always sought and so seldom found. I lost myself; the dance began dancing me. It burst out of me like laughter or tears, without thought or effort. My legs were strong, wind infinite, ideas came, every experiment worked and suggested the next. There’s a special state of being, the backwards of a trance, where you transcend yourself and become a part of everything—where you seem to stand still, while the world dances around and through you. Many dancers never experience it. I’d been to that level a few times before, for fleeting moments. This time I knew I could stay as long as I wanted.
Time stopped; I went on.
Even an eleven-year-old body has limits; every dance has a natural, logical end. Eventually, with warm contentment and mild regret, I left Nirvana and returned to the world of illusion again. I was still, upright, arms upthrust toward the clouds, reaching for the unseen stars.
The float was ringed by more than a dozen sea lions, the farthest within five meters of me. I looked round at them all, half-expecting them to clap and bark like cartoon seals. They stared at me. Bobbing in silent syncopation, seeming to be thinking about what they’d just seen. My first applause…
I bowed, deeply.
And then waved, grandly.
Darkness was falling fast. Sweat dripped from me, my soles tingled, and many muscles announced their intention to wake up stiff tomorrow. I was perfectly happy.
This, I thought, is what I’m supposed to do. My Thing, as Mom was always calling it: what I would do with my life. I understood now what I had always sensed, that Mom was going to hate it (though I didn’t yet understand why)…but that didn’t matter anymore.
Maybe that’s when you become an adult. When your parents’ opinions no longer control.
I kept silent when I returned home that night. But the next day I called Grandmother in Vancouver, and told her that she had won the tug of war with my mother. I moved into her huge house on the mainland, and let her enroll me in ballet class, and in normal school, like other kids. Within weeks I had been teased so much over the name “Rain M’Cloud” (which had never struck anyone on Gambier Island as odd) that I changed it to Morgan. It seemed to me a much more dignified name for a ballerina.
It was a long time before I saw Gambier Island again.
I always danced. But from the day of the sea lions, dancing was just about all I did, all I was. For thirty-two years. Until the day came when my body simply would not do it anymore. The day in April of 2017 when Doctor Thompson and Doctor Immega told me that even more surgery would not help, that I could never dance again. My lower back and knees were spent.
I tried the dancer’s classic escape hatches for a few years. Choreography. Teaching. When they didn’t work for me, I tried living without dance. I even tried relationships again. Nothing worked.
Including me. There were lots of trained, experienced professionals looking for work, as technological progress made more and more occupational specialties obsolete. There were few job openings for a forty-six-year-old who couldn’t even type. Even the traditional unskilled-labour jobs were increasingly being done by robots. Sure, I could go back to school, and in only a few years of drudgery acquire a new profession—ideally, one which would not be obsolete by the time I graduated. But what for? Nothing interested me.
The salt of the earth had lost its savor.
I went back to Gambier Island. By now it was becoming a suburb of Vancouver; even in winter there were stores and cars and paved roads and burglaries. There was talk of a condominium complex. I sat for six months in the cabin where I had been born, waiting for some great answer to come from out of the sky. I visited my parents’ graves frequently. Sat zazen in the woods. Split cords of wood. Read the first twenty pages of a dozen books. Walked the parts of the Island that were still wild, by day and night. Nature accepted my presence amiably enough, but offered no answers. Nothing.
I went down to the wharf and consulted the sea lions, as I had many times. They had nothing to say. They just looked at me, as if waiting for me to begin dancing.
After enough days of that, “nothing” started to look good to me. I filled out the Euthanasia application I had brought with me, putting down “earliest possible” for Date and leaving the space for Reason blank. I’d have a response within a week or two; by the end of the month, unless I changed my mind, my problems would be over.
In my bones, I was a dancer. And I couldn’t dance anymore.
Not anywhere on Earth…
; That very night I was lying in the hammock behind the house, watching the stars, when my eye was caught by a large bright one. It moved relative to the other stars, so it was a satellite. It moved roughly north to south, and was quite large: it had to be Top Step. Funny I’d never thought of it before. The House the Stardance Built, as the media called it. Transplanted asteroid, parting gift of alien gods—the place where they made angels out of people. Hollow stone cigar, phallic womb in High Orbit. Gateway to immortality, to the stars, to freedom from every kind of human fear or need there was…and all it cost was everything you had, forever.
Dancers say, you go where the work is. Suddenly, at age forty-six, I had nowhere to go but up.
CHAPTER ONE
What shall it harm a man
If he loseth the whole world,
Yet gaineth his soul?
—Linda Parsons
14th Epistle to the Corinthians
And Anyone Else Who Might Be Listening;
transmission received 8 May 2005
HUNDREDS OF THOUGHTS ran through my head as the Valkyrie song of the engines began to rise in pitch. But most of them seemed to be variations on a single theme, and the name of the theme was this: Farewell—Forever—to Weight.
So many different kinds of weight!
Physical weight, of course. I had been hauling around more than fifty kilos of muscle and bone for the better part of four decades—and like all dancers, cursing every gram, even after I switched from ballet to modern. (That’s 110 pounds, if you’re an American.) Any normal person would have considered me bone-thin…but the ghost of Balanchine, damn his eyes, has haunted dancers for over half a century.
Soon I would have no weight, for the first time in my life, and for the rest of it—only my mass would remain to convince me I existed. A purist, they had told us at Suit Camp, will insist that there is no such thing as zero gravity, anywhere in the universe…only degrees of gravity, from micro to macro. But where I was going—any second now—I would experience microgravity too faint to be perceived without subtle instruments, so it would be zero as far as I was concerned.
It should have been a dancer’s finest moment. To leap so high that you never come down again…wasn’t that what all of us wanted? Why did I feel such a powerful impulse to bolt for the nearest exit while I still could?
Weight had always been my shame, and my secret friend, and my necessary enemy—the thing I became beautiful in the act of defying. In a sense, to an extent, weight had defined me.
In the end it had beaten me. I could try to kid myself that I was outmaneuvering it…but what I was doing was escaping it, leaving the field of battle in defeat, conceding victory.
But the physical weight was probably least in my thoughts as I sat there in my comfortable seat, on my way to a place where the concept of a comfortable seat had no meaning.
Do you have any idea how many kinds of weight each human carries? Even the most fortunate of us?
The weight of two million years of history and more…
Until this century, all the humans that had ever lived walked the earth, worked to stay erect, strove to eat and drink and to get food and drink for their children, sought shelter from the elements, yearned to acquire wealth, struggled to be understood. Everyone’s every ancestor needed to eliminate their wastes and feared their deaths. Every one of us lived and died alone, locked in a bone cell, plagued by need and fear and hunger and thirst and loneliness and the certainty of pain and death. That long a heritage of sorrow is a weight, whose awful magnitude you can only begin to sense with the prospect of its ending.
And in a time measurable in months, all that weight was going to leave me, (if) when I entered Symbiosis. Allegedly forever, or some significant fraction thereof. I would never again need food or drink or shelter, never again be alone or afraid.
On the other hand, I could never again return to Earth. And some people maintained that I would no longer be a human being…
Now tell me: isn’t that a kind of dying?
Not to mention the small but unforgettable possibility that joining a telepathic community might burn out my brain—no, more accurately and more horribly: burn out my mind.
Then there was the weight of my own personal emotional and spiritual baggage. Perhaps that should have been as nothing beside the weight of two million years, but it didn’t feel that way. I was forty-six and my lifework was irrevocably finished, and I was the only person in all the world to whom that mattered. Why not go become a god? Or at least some kind of weird red angel…
Somewhere in there, among all my tumbling thoughts, was a little joke about the extremes some women will go to in order to lose weight, but no matter how many times that joke went through my head—and it was easily dozens—it refused to be funny, even once.
The Completist’s Diet: you give up everything. That was another.
There were quite a few jokes in that cascade of last-minute thoughts, but none of them was funny, and I knew that none of my seventy-one fellow passengers wanted to hear them. There was a compulsive joker aboard, at the back of the cabin and to my right, loudly telling jokes, but no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to him. He didn’t seem to mind. Even he didn’t laugh at any of his witticisms.
The engine song which was the score for my thoughts reached a crescendo, and the joker shut up in mid-punchline. I vaguely recognized his voice; he’d been in my Section at Suit Camp; he was an American and his name was something Irish.
Just my luck. The wave of food poisoning that had run through Camp just days before graduation, cutting our Section down by over 30 percent, had spared this clown—and knocked out my roommate Phyllis, with whom I’d intended to keep on rooming at Top Step, and every other person I’d met whom I could imagine living with. Now I would probably end up paired off at random with some stranger who had the same problem. I hoped we’d be compatible. I’m not good at compatible.
I glanced around for the hundredth time for the nonexistent window…and my inner ear informed me that we were in motion.
Goodbye, world…
I felt a twinge of panic. Not yet! I’m not ready…
When I was a girl, travel to space always involved a rocket launch, with its familiar trappings of acceleration couches and countdowns and crushing gee forces on blastoff. I’d been vaguely aware of modern developments, but they hadn’t really percolated through yet. So subconsciously I was expecting the irony of having my liberation from so many kinds of weight preceded by a whopping if temporary overdose of weight.
As usual, life served me up a subtler irony. The technology had improved. My last moments on Earth were spent sitting upright in something which differed from a commercial airliner mostly in its lack of windows and its considerably smaller dimensions—and the takeoff, when it came, yielded no more sense of acceleration than you get taking a methanol car from zero to sixty when you’re first thinking of switching from fossil fuel.
I felt the spaceplane’s wheels leave the ground, understood that my last connection with my mother planet was severed. Forever, unless I changed my mind in the next few months.
I fought down my growing sense of panic, flailing at it with big clumsy bladders full of logic. What had Earth ever done for me, that was worth sorrowing over its loss? What place on it was still fit for human habitation, and for how long? What did it have to offer, compared to greatly extended lifespan and freedom from every kind of suffering I knew—and the chance that I might dance again?
Like all babies leaving the womb, I felt the overwhelming impulse to burst into tears. Being mature enough to be self-conscious, I strove to suppress the urge. Apparently so did my fellow passengers; the engine song crescendoed without any harmonies from us. It began to diminish slightly as we passed the speed of sound and outran all but the vibrations that conduction carried through the hullplates.
It was then that my panic blossomed into full-grown terror.
It caught me by surprise. I had thought I’d already mast
ered this kind of fear, by preparing for it and educating it to death. All at once my gut did not care how confident I was of modern technology. It dimly understood that it was being taken to a place where any trivial mistake or malfunction could interrupt its all-important job, the production of feces and urine, and it reacted like a labor union, by convulsing with rage and threatening to shut down the whole system, right now. Other sister unions—heart, lungs, adrenals, sweat glands, autonomic nervous system—threatened to join the walkout, in the name of solidarity but on a wildcat basis. And management—my brain—had nothing to say except what management always says: I’m sorry, it’s too late now, we’re committed; let’s pull together and try to salvage the situation.
Salvage the situation? said my body. You’re kidding. Remember Gambier Island in the winter, before you went to live in town with Grandmother? How silly it seemed to live someplace where all the heat could spill out through leaks, and if you couldn’t make more fast enough you’d die? You’re taking us to someplace where the air can leak out. And the heat. Any time some piece of machinery goes wrong. The definition of machine is, a thing that goes wrong the moment you start to depend on it. Get us out of this, now!
To both this line of reasoning, and the specific sanctions my body threatened if it were thwarted, I could only reply like a long-suffering mother, You should have thought of that before you left the house. I could not even get the poor thing to a toilet for another hour, and I didn’t care how good everybody said p-suit plumbing was these days. Like management every-when, I had to dig in and try to tough out the strike, even if it meant sending goon-squads to hold the sphincters by force.
I tried Zen breath control; I had none. I tried the mantra they’d given me at Suit Camp; it was only a meaningless series of syllables, and they kept speeding up in my head rather than slowing down. I tried all of what I call my Wings Things—the little rituals you perform in the wings to suppress stage fright, just before taking your stage—and none of them worked.