The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  “Where in Australia are you from?”

  “Not far from Suit Camp,” she said.

  “You’re saying double goodbyes today, then,” I said without thinking.

  I felt like kicking myself, but I had to explain now. “A few months ago I said goodbye to Vancouver—to my home—in my heart. All of us here left home before we came to Suit Camp. Today all we’re leaving is Earth. You’re leaving home and Earth at the same time.”

  Implausibly, her grin broadened. “You’re not wrong.” Somehow at this aperture, the grin made her look even younger, no more than twenty. “This’s the first time I been out of Oz in me life, and it feels dead strange. Probably be just as strange to go to Canada, but. Oz, Earth, all one to me. Hey, what do you say we get out of these suits and see if our new clothes fit?”

  Each of us had been issued several sets of jumpsuits, in assorted colors. It wasn’t especially surprising that they fit perfectly: after all, they’d been cut from the same set of careful measurements used to make our formfitting p-suits. We also got gloves and booties and belts, all made of material that did not feel sticky to the touch, but was sticky when placed against wall-material. Traction providers. Teena explained that although social nudity was acceptable here, it was customary for Postulants, First-Monthers like us, to wear jumpsuits if they wore anything; second-month Novices usually lived in their p-suits, for as long as it took them to make up their minds to Symbiosis. We admired ourselves in the mirror for a while, then I slid into my sleepsack and began learning how to adjust it for comfort, while Kirra got Teena to display three-dimensional maps.

  “Teena,” I said while Kirra was distracted, “where is Robert Chen billeted?” Absurdly, I tried to pitch my voice too low for Kirra to hear, without making it obvious to Teena that I was doing so. I have no idea whether Teena caught it, or if so whether it conveyed any meaning to her. How subtle was her “understanding” of humans?

  All I know is that Kirra didn’t seem to hear her reply, “P7-29.”

  Just down the corridor! “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Okay, it’s dopey to thank an electric-eye for opening the door for you. I wasn’t thinking clearly; I was too busy kicking myself for asking the question. And for being elated by the answer. What did I care where he slept? I was not going to get that involved.

  Certainly not for days yet.

  When Kirra and I got bored with exploring our new home, we discovered we were hungry. We headed for the cafeteria, following some of Teena’s pixies. And found ourselves outside in the corridor, at the end of a long line of hungry people, most hanging on to hand-rails provided for the purpose. Standing On Line is not much enhanced by zero gravity. Your feet hurt less, but there are more annoying ways for your neighbors to fidget. The line, like all lines, did not appear to be moving.

  Kirra nudged me. From up ahead, someone was waving to us. Robert.

  “You think we should join him?” she asked.

  I hesitated. “Maybe he’s just saying hello.”

  “Up to you,” she said, and waved back.

  He waved again. It was definitely an invitation for us both to join him.

  My blood sugar decided for me. I think.

  Cutting ahead on line in zero gee without actually putting my foot in anyone’s face was tricky. In fact, I didn’t manage it. Kirra and I were both cordially hated by the time we reached Robert. He ignored it and made room for us. “Morgan McLeod, Kirra—I’d like you to meet my roommate, Ben Buckley, from Sherman Oaks, California.”

  Ben was one of the strangest looking—and strangest—men I’d ever met. A big boney redhead with a conversational style reminiscent of a happy machine gun, he wore a permanent smile and huge sunglasses with very peculiar lenses. They stuck out for several centimeters on either side of his face, and flared. The temple shafts of the glasses were wide, and had small knobs and microswitches along their length. When we asked, he told us he had designed and made them himself…and his motivation just floored me.

  Their purpose was to bring him 360° vision.

  “Ever since I was a kid I loved messing with perception,” he told us, his words tumbling all over one another. “Distortions, gestalt-shifts, changing paradigms, I couldn’t get enough. New ways of seeing, hearing, grokking. My folks were die-hard hippies, I caught it from them.”

  “Mine, too,” I said, and he gave me an incandescent smile.

  “Then you know those funny faceted yellow specs they used to have, gave you bee’s eyes? Most people keep them on for about ten seconds; a really spaced-out doper might leave ’em on for the duration of an acid trip, but I used to wear ’em for days, ’til my parents got nervous. And my dad had this colour organ, turned music into light patterns, and I spent time with that sucker until I could not only name the tune with the speakers disconnected, I could harmonize, and enjoy it.” I’m putting periods at the ends of his sentences so you can follow them, but he never really paused longer than a comma’s worth. “Learning to read spinning record labels, eyeglasses with inverting lenses, I loved all that stuff. When I was fourteen, I built a pair of headphones that played ambient sound to me backwards, a word at a time, so fast that once I learned to understand it the lip-synch lag was just barely noticeable. That’s the kind of stuff that’s fun to me. Then one day a year ago I thought, hey, what do I need a blind side for? so I built these glasses.” Robert was looking very interested. “They’re dual mode. I can get about 300° on straight optical—glasses like that were available back in the Nineties, although they didn’t sell well—or I can kick on the fiber-optics in the earpieces and get full surround. I like to switch back and forth for fun. I like to put the front hemisphere into one eye, and the back half into the other—and switch them back and forth—but I can get something like full stereo parallax in both eyes at once with a heads-up-display like fighter pilots use.”

  Kirra managed to get in a word in edgewise. “Could I look through ’em, Ben?”

  He smiled. “Sure. But if you’re a normal person, it’d take you about three months to learn to interpret the data. It’d look like a funhouse mirror.”

  “Oh. Turn round, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said again, and did so.

  “Now: what am I doing?”

  “Being somewhat rude,” he reported accurately. “And that fingernail needs trimming.”

  Robert looked thoughtful…and tossed a pen at Ben’s back. Ben reached around behind himself and caught it…then tumbled awkwardly from the effect of moving his arm. “See what I mean?” he said, stabilizing himself. “It has survival advantage: you can’t sneak up on me. But I just enjoy it, you know?”

  Kirra was getting excited. “I’ll bet you’re the only one in the class that really likes this zero-gee stuff, aren’t you? It’s what you enjoy best: bein’ confused. Gosh, that must be a great thing to enjoy!”

  He stared. “I like you,” he said suddenly.

  “Sure,” she said.

  They smiled at each other.

  “Kirra’s right,” Robert said. “This ‘thinking spherically’ business that the rest of us are having so much trouble with must be the kind of thing you’ve been dreaming of all your life. Why did it take you so long to come to space?”

  “I think I know,” Kirra said.

  Ben looked at her expectantly.

  “You didn’t want to use it up too quick,” she said.

  He smiled and nodded. “I held off as long as I could stand it,” he agreed. His smile broadened. “God, it’s great, too. Do you believe they gave us unlimited Net access?”

  It was not sparks flying, not a mutual sexual awareness. It was a new friendship taking root. It was nice to watch. Yet as I watched them I felt vaguely melancholy. I wished I had a friend of the opposite sex. Robert and I might just be friends some day…but if so I could tell we were going to have to go through being lovers first, and I just didn’t know if I had the energy.

  A lover of mine used to have a quote
on his bedroom wall, from some old novel: It’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.

  My melancholy lasted right up until Kirra said, “Hey, the bloody queue’s movin’!” Starving dancers are too busy for melancholy…the only reason their suicide rate isn’t higher than it already is.

  The cafeteria took some getting used to. But there was plenty of assistance; without any apparent formal structure to it, Second-Monthers (identifiable because they wore p-suits rather than our First-Monther’s jumpsuits, but lacked the Spacer’s Earring of EVA-qualified Third-Monthers) seemed to take it on themselves to be helpful to newcomers. They were extraordinarily patient about it, I thought. We must have been more nuisance than a flock of flying puppies. Maybe we were vastly entertaining.

  Tables lined with docking rails jutted out from five of the six walls. The inner sides of the rails were lined with Velcro, like our belts, so you could back yourself up to one end and be held in reasonable proximity to your food; there was a thin footrail on which to brace your feet—both “above” and “below” the table. Both sides of the tables were used. It provided an odd and interesting solution to the problem of sharing a table with strangers; you adopted the opposite vertical to theirs, and your conversation never clashed. On the other hand, especially clumsy footwork in docking at table could kick your neighbor’s dinner clear across the room. And you came to really appreciate the fact that in free fall, feet don’t smell.

  Eventually we got down to the real business of a meal: talking.

  You hesitate to ask a new chum, so why did you come to Top Step? The answer may be that they’re running away from some defeat on Earth. You’re especially hesitant if you’re there because you’re running from some defeat on Earth yourself.

  I didn’t exactly question Robert over dinner, and he didn’t exactly volunteer autobiography, but information transfer occurred by some mysterious kind of osmosis. In between the distractions of learning to eat in zero gravity, I learned that he had a fifteen-year-old son, who lived with his mother; she and Robert had divorced eight years before. I also found out how he had acquired his “spacer’s legs.” He was an architect; apparently he had already established himself as a successful traditional architect in San Francisco…when suddenly the new field of space architecture had opened up. The technical challenge had excited him; he had followed the challenge into orbit, found he had the knack for it, and prospered.

  I’m not sure whether this next part is something he implied or I inferred, but the progression seemed logical. He found that he liked space—the more time he spent there, the more he liked it. In time he came to resent being forced to return to Earth regularly just to keep his body acclimated to gravity. The obvious question Why not just stay in space, like a Stardancer? had led naturally to Why not become a Stardancer? At this point in the history of human enterprise in space, a free-lance spacer’s life is usually one of total insecurity…and a Stardancer’s life is one of great and lasting security. And so, wanting to stay in space without having to scramble every moment to buy air, Robert found himself here on Top Step.

  It seemed a rather shallow reason to come all this way. To abandon a whole planet and the whole human race, just to save on overhead while he pursued his art…

  On the other hand, who was I to judge? He wasn’t fleeing defeat, like me. Maybe architecture was as exciting an art as dance; maybe for him it was making elements dance. Maybe space was just an environment he liked.

  Maybe there were no shallow reasons to become a Stardancer.

  Maybe it didn’t matter what your reasons were.

  As all this was going through my mind, Robert went on: “But there’s a little more to it than that. Another part of it is that when I started spending time in space, I found myself watching Earth a lot, thinking about what a mess it’s in, how close it is to blowing itself up. I read somewhere once, Earth is just too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. We’ve got to get more established in space, soon.

  “I know you can say Stardancers aren’t part of the human race anymore, but I don’t buy that. They all came from human eggs and sperm, and they’ve done more for Earth than the rest of the race put together. They fixed the hole in the ozone layer, they put the brakes on the greenhouse effect, they built the mirror farms and set up the Asteroid Pipeline, they mad the Safe Lab so we can experiment with nanotechnology without being afraid the wrong little replicator will get loose and turn the world into grey goo—they can afford to be altruistic, because they don’t need anything but each other. I think without the Starseed Foundation, there’d have been an all-out nuclear war years ago.

  “So I guess I decided it was time I put some back in. From all I can learn, there aren’t many architects in the Starmind, so I think I can be of help. I want to design and build things a little more useful to mankind than another damn factory or dormitory or luxury hotel.”

  “And the eternal life without want part doesn’t hurt, does it?” Ben said, grinning, and Robert smiled back. It was the first real smile of his I’d seen. I tend to trust people or not trust them on the basis of their smiles; I decided I trusted Robert.

  But I wished he’d smile more often.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  How is it possible that mystics 3,000 years ago have plagiarized what we scientists are doing today?

  —Karl Pribram

  I COULD WRITE a whole chapter about my first free fall cafeteria meal, my first free fall sleep, my first free fall pee…but you can get that sort of thing from any traveler’s account. The next event of significance, the morning after our arrival at Top Step, was my first class with Reb Hawkins-roshi.

  The course was titled “Beginner’s Mind”—a clue to me that I would like it, since my mother’s battered old copy of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind had been my own introduction to Buddhism. There are as many different flavors of Buddhism—even just of Zen!—as there are flavors of Christianity, and some of them give me hives…but if this Hawkins’s path was even tangent to Suzuki’s, I felt confident I could walk it without too much discomfort.

  You couldn’t really have called me a Buddhist. I had no teacher, didn’t even really sit zazen on any regular basis. I’d never so much as been on a retreat, let alone done a five-day sesshin. My mother taught me how to sit, and a little of the philosophy behind it, was all. By that point in my life I mostly used Zen as a sort of nonprescription tranquilizer.

  Robert, on the other hand, approached it with skepticism. He was not, I’d learned the night before, a Buddhist—it’s silly, I know, but for some reason I kept expecting every Asian I meet to be a Buddhist—but he had mentioned in passing that if he were going to be one, he’d follow the Rinzai school of Zen. (A rather harsh and overintellectual bunch, for my taste.) Pretty personal conversation for two strangers, I know; somehow we hadn’t gotten around to less intimate things, like how we liked to have sex. Nonetheless, I was proud of myself: I hadn’t physically touched him even once.

  Well, okay: once. But I hadn’t kissed him goodnight before returning to my place! (Kirra kissed Ben…)

  And I didn’t look for him in the cafeteria crowd during breakfast—and didn’t kiss him good morning when we met accidentally in the corridor on the way to class. I was too irritated: I’d had to stall around for over three minutes to bring about that accidental encounter, and I was mildly annoyed that he hadn’t looked me up during breakfast. God, lust makes you infantile!

  But he was adequately pleased to encounter me, so I let him take my arm and show me a couple of jaunting tricks I’d already figured out on the way to breakfast—with the net result that we were nearly late for class, and I arrived in exactly the wrong frame of mind: distracted. So a nice thing happened.

  As the door of the classroom silently irised shut behind us, my pulse began to race. What could be more disorienting than being inside your headful of racing thoughts, toying with the tingles of distant horniness—and suddenly finding yoursel
f face to face with a holy man?

  He was in his fifties, shaven-headed and clean-shaven, slender and quite handsome, and utterly centered and composed. He was not dressed as a Zen abbot, he wore white shorts and singlet, but his face, body language and manner all quietly proclaimed his office. I think I experienced every nuance of embarrassment there is.

  He met my eyes, and his face glowed briefly with the infectious Suzuki-roshi grin that told me he was a saint, and he murmured the single word, “Later,” in a way that told me I was forgiven for being late and I had not given offense and we were going to be good friends as soon as we both had time; meanwhile, lighten up.

  All of this in an instant; then his eyes swept past me to Robert, they exchanged an equally information-packed glance which I could not read, and he returned his attention to the group as a whole.

  If I hadn’t arrived for class in an inappropriate mental state, it might have taken me minutes to realize how special Reb was.

  Most of the spiritual teachers I’ve known had a tendency to sit silently for a minute or two after the arrival of the last pupils, as if to convey the impression that their meditation was so profound it took them a moment to shift gears. But Reb was a genuinely mindful man: he was aware Robert and I were the last ones coming, and the moment we had ourselves securely anchored to one of the ubiquitous bungee cords, he bowed to the group—somehow without disturbing his position in space—and began to speak.

  “Hello,” he said in a husky baritone. “My name is Reb Hawkins, and I’ll be your student for the next eight to twelve weeks.”

  Inevitably someone spoke up, a New Yorker by her accent. “‘Student’? I thought you were supposed to be the teacher.”

  “I am supposed, by many, to be a teacher,” he agreed pleasantly. “Sometimes they are correct. But I am always a student.”

  “Aah,” said the New Yorker, in the tones of one who has spotted the hook in a commercial.