The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  Even falling in love couldn’t distract me completely from dance. After our first few days together, I resumed working for a few hours every evening. Sometimes Robert watched and helped; sometimes he stayed back in the room and designed support structures for asteroid mining colonies, or wrote letters to his son in Minneapolis. I slowly began to evolve a piece of choreography, which I took to calling Do the Next Thing.

  Kirra too made progress in her art. In the middle of the week, while we were all outside in class, she sang her second song for us, the Song of Polar Orbit. I had to get my p-suit radio overhauled that night—the applause overloaded it—and so did others. Raoul Brindle phoned more congratulations and repeated his invitation to Kirra. Within a few days, Teena reported that the recording had been downloaded by over eighty percent of the spacer community, and that audience response was one hundred percent positive. Kirra told me privately that she was tickled to death; she had never before received so much approval from non-Aboriginals and whitefellas for her singing. And according to her Earthside mentor Yarra, the Yirlandji people were equally pleased. Ben, for his part, was fiercely proud of her.

  On Sunday afternoon the four of us took a field trip together, to watch a Third-Monther enter Symbiosis. I cleared it with Reb; he had no objection. “As long as Ben and Kirra and Robert are along, you can’t get into too much trouble. They’re pretty much spacers already. But you be sure to stay close to them,” he cautioned with a smile. I smiled back and agreed that we could probably manage that.

  We left, not via the Solarium, but by a smaller personnel airlock closer to the docking end of Top Step. It was about big enough to hold three comfortably, but we left in pairs, as couples, holding hands.

  The Symbiote mass floated in a slightly higher orbit than Top Step, because Top Step routinely exhausted gases that, over a long period of time, could have damaged or killed it. I can’t explain the maneuvering we had to do to get there without using graphics prefaced by a boring lecture on orbital ballistics; just take my word for it that, counterintuitive as it might seem, to reach something ahead of you and in a higher orbit, you decelerate. Never mind: with Ben astrogating, we got there. It took a long lazy time, since we didn’t have a whole lot of thruster pressure to waste on a hurried trip.

  My parents used to have an antique lava lamp, which they loved to leave on for hours at a time. The Symbiote mass looked remarkably like a single globule of its contents: a liquid blob of softly glowing red stuff, that flexed and flowed like an amoeba. Years ago there had been so much of it that you could see it with the naked eye from Top Step. So many Stardancers had graduated since then that the remaining mass was not much bigger than an oil tanker. (That was why the Harvest Crew was fetching more from Titan.) But it was hard to tell size by eye, without other nearby objects of known size to give perspective—a common problem in space.

  As we got nearer, we picked out such objects: half a dozen Stardancers, their solar sails retracted. We came to a stop relative to the Symbiote mass, and saw perhaps a dozen p-suited humans approaching it from a slightly different angle than us. One of them had to be Bronwyn Small, the prospective graduate, and the rest her friends come to wish her well. By prior agreement, we maintained radio silence on the channel they were using, so as not to intrude. We had secured Bronwyn’s permission to be present, through Teena, but there can be few moments in anyone’s life as personal as Symbiosis.

  The p-suited figures made rendezvous with the six Stardancers. We approached, but stopped about a kilometer or so distant.

  I guess I had been expecting some sort of ceremony, the speechmaking with which humans customarily mark important events. There was none. Bronwyn said short goodbyes to her friends, hugged each of them, and then turned toward the nearest of the Stardancers and said, “I’m ready.”

  “Yes, you are,” the Stardancer agreed, and I recognized the voice: it was Jinsei Kagami. She did nothing that I could see—but all at once the Symbiote extended a pseudopod that separated from the main mass, exactly the way the blob in a lava lamp will calve little globular chunks of itself. The shimmering crimson fragment homed in on Bronwyn somehow, stopped next to her, and expanded into a bubble about four meters in radius, becoming translucent, almost transparent.

  Without another word, Bronwyn jaunted straight into the bubble and entered it bodily. Within it, she could be seen to unseal her p-suit and remove it. She removed its communications gear, hung it around her neck, and then pushed the suit gently against the wall of the bubble that contained her. The Symbiote allowed the suit to emerge, sealed again behind it, and at once began to contract.

  We were too far away to see clearly, but I knew that the red stuff was enfolding her and entering her at every orifice, meeting itself within her, becoming part of her.

  She cried out, a wordless shout of unbearable astonishment that made the cosmos ring, and then was silent. She seemed to shudder and stiffen, back arched, arms and legs trembling as if she were having a seizure. She began turning slowly end over end.

  There was silence for perhaps a full minute.

  Then Jinsei said to Bronwyn’s friends, “You may leave whenever you choose. Your friend will not be aware of her immediate surroundings again for at least another day…and it might be as much as one more day before you will be able to converse with her. She has a great deal to integrate.”

  “Is she all right?” one of them asked, sounding dubious.

  “‘All right’ is inadequate,” Jinsei said, with that smile in her voice. “‘Ecstatic’ is literally correct—and even that does not do it justice. Yes, she has achieved successful Symbiosis.”

  Bronwyn’s friends expressed joy and relief at the news, and left as a group, talking quietly amongst themselves.

  Ben gestured for our attention and pointed at his ear. We four all switched to a channel on which we could chatter privately.

  “Not much of a show,” he said.

  “I dunno,” Kirra said dreamily. “I thought it was lovely.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I could almost feel it happening to her. That moment of merging.”

  “So did I,” Ben said. “I don’t know, I guess I expected there to be more to it.”

  “More what?”

  “Ceremony. Speeches. Hollywood special effects. Fanfares of trumpets. Moving last words.”

  “You men and your speechmaking,” I said. “All those things ought to happen too every time a sperm meets an egg…but they don’t.”

  “And I thought those were moving last words,” Kirra said. “She said, ‘I’m ready.’ Can’t get much more movin’ than that.”

  “You’re pretty quiet, darling,” I said to Robert. “What did you think?”

  He was slow in answering. “I think I feel a little like Bronwyn: it’s going to take me at least a week to integrate everything well enough to talk about it.”

  “Too right,” Kirra agreed. “I’ve had enough o’ words for a while. But I could use a little nonverbal communication. Come on, Benjamin, let’s go on home an’ root until sparrowfart.”

  (If you ever spend time in Oz, don’t speak of rooting for your favorite team; “root” is their slang term for “fuck.” Whether this is a corruption of “rut,” or an indication that Aussies are fond of oral sex, I couldn’t say. And “sparrowfart” is slang for “dawn.”)

  “That sounds like exactly what I’d like to do right now,” he said.

  “Me too,” I agreed. “‘Ecstatic,’ she said. I could use some of that. How about you, darling?”

  “‘I’m ready,’” he quoted simply.

  The trip back to Top Step was as long as the trip out, but there was no further conversation along the way. When we got there we found that four could fit into that airlock at once if they didn’t mind squeezing. The route back to our quarters was one we had taken only once before, on the day of our arrival at Top Step—save that we bypassed Decontam. As we jaunted across the Great Hall, I felt again many of the same confused and confusing feelings
I’d experienced on that first day, and hugged Robert tightly. He squeezed back.

  Without any discussion, we all headed for my and Kirra’s room, and entered together. Pausing only to store our p-suits and dim the lights, we went to bed.

  Actually, the euphemism is misleading: we didn’t use our sleepsacks. I did not want to be confined, needed to feel as free as a Stardancer, and it seemed Kirra did as well.

  For over an hour I was almost completely unaware of Ben and Kirra, or anything else but Robert. We caromed off walls or furniture from time to time, but barely noticed that either. Then at some point the two drifting couples bumped into each other in the middle of the room, at a perpendicular so that we formed a cross. The small of my back was against Kirra’s; our sweat mingled. I sensed her flexing her legs and tightening her shoulders, and knew kinesthetically what she was going to do and matched it without thinking: we spun and flowed and traded places. Ben blinked and smiled and kissed me, and I kissed him back. The dance went on. Ben was sweet, bonier and hairier than Robert but just as tenderly attentive. Perhaps half an hour later, we all met again at the center of the universe and made a beast with four backs; awhile later I was back in Robert’s arms, and slept there until Teena told us it was time for dinner.

  We ate together without awkwardness, talking little but making each other smile often. After the meal, Ben kissed me, Robert kissed Kirra, and Robert and I went off to my studio together, while Kirra and Ben headed for Le Puis. They were asleep in Kirra’s sleepsack when we got back: we slid into mine and were asleep almost at once.

  Glenn was murdered the next day.

  We had all been weaned from our umbilicals by that point, and were spending that class touring the exterior of Top Step. Most of the interesting stuff was down by the docking area. We were able to watch the docking of a Lunar robot freighter, carrying precious water from the ice mines. We should not have been able to: that freighter was not scheduled to arrive for another four hours, or Sulke would not have had us down there. Vessels are almost always punctual in space—the moment the initial acceleration shuts down, ETA can be predicted to the second. But while this can was on its way, the Lunar traffic control computer apparently detected a small pressure leak from the hold, and applied additional acceleration and deceleration to minimize transit time. Sulke was angry when the word came over the ops channel.

  Oh, we were safe enough: we were at least half a kilometer from the docks. Sulke’s gripe was that the event constituted an unplanned distraction from our curriculum—but we were all so eager to watch the docking that, after consultation with Reb, she reluctantly conceded that it would be instructive, and suspended lessons until it was over. I was pleased, since events had prevented me from watching my own docking five weeks earlier.

  Long before we could see the freighter itself, we saw the tongue of fire it stuck out at us as it decelerated. Then the torch shut off, and we could see a spherical-looking object the size of a pea held at arm’s length. It grew slowly to baseball size, then soccer ball, and by then it was recognizable as a cylinder seen end-on. It grew still larger, and began to visibly move relative to the stars behind it as it approached Top Step. Now it could be seen to be as large as the Symbiote mass I’d seen the day before, tiny in comparison to Top Step but huge in comparison with a human. From one side a thin plume of steam came spraying out of the hull to boil and fume in vacuum; on the opposite side you could just make out the less visible trail of the maneuvering jet that was balancing the pressure leak, keeping it from deforming the freighter’s course to one side.

  The ship was coming in about twice as fast as normal. But that’s not very fast; dockings are usually glacial. Sulke had run out of educational things to point out long before the ship had approached close enough for final maneuvers. Since our first day EVA she’d generally kept us too busy to stargaze or chatter, but now we had time to rubberneck at the cosmos and ask questions.

  “What’s that, Sulke?” Soon Li asked, pointing to a far distant object in a higher orbit than our own.

  Sulke followed her pointing arm. “Oh. That’s Mir.”

  “Oh.” Silence. Then: “I think someone ought to…I don’t know, tear it down or blow it up or something.”

  “Would you want your grave disturbed?” Dmitri asked.

  More silence.

  “What are those people doing?” Dmitri wanted to know.

  We looked where he was pointing, at the docking area itself. At first I saw nothing: those docks are huge, designed to accommodate earth-to-orbit vehicles, orbit-to-orbit barges or taxis, and Lunar shuttles like the one we were watching—as many as two of each at one time. But then I saw the two p-suited figures Dmitri meant, just emerging from a personnel lock between the two biggest docking collars.

  “Those are wranglers,” Sulke said. “As soon as that bucket docks, they’ll hook up power feeds and refueling hoses and so on. If there’s a nesting problem, they’ve got enough thruster mass to do some shoehorning too.”

  “What’s wrong with that star?” Glenn asked, pointing in the direction of the slowly approaching freighters. She happened to be closest of us to it.

  “Which one?” Sulke replied.

  “That big one, a little Three-ish of the ship.”

  I spotted the one she meant. Indeed, there were three things odd about it. It was just slightly bigger than a star ought to be, and it was the only one in the Universe that was twinkling, the way stars appear to on Earth, and it had a little round black dot right smack in the center of it. That certainly was odd. It grew perceptibly as I watched; could it be a supernova? What luck, to happen to see one with the naked eye…

  “Jesus Christ!” Sulke cried out. “Reb—”

  “I see it,” he said calmly. “Everyone, listen carefully: I want you to follow me at maximum acceleration, right now.” He spun and blasted directly away from the docking freighter, all four thrusters flaring.

  We wasted precious seconds reacting, and Sulke roared, “Run for your fucking lives!” That did it: we all took to our heels, slowly but with growing speed. I cannoned into someone and nearly tumbled, but managed to save myself and continue; so did the other.

  “Operations—Mayday, Mayday!” Reb was saying. “Incoming ASAT, ETA five seconds. Wranglers—” He broke off. There was nothing to be said to the wranglers.

  The antique antisatellite hunter-killer slammed into the freighter at that instant. There was no sound or concussion, of course. I caught reflected glare from the flash off Top Step in my peripheral vision, and tried to crane my neck around to look behind me, but I couldn’t do it and stay on course, so I gave up. I’m almost sorry about that; it must have been something to see.

  The water-ship was torn apart by the blast, transformed instantly into an expanding sphere of incandescent plasma, shrapnel and boiling water. It killed Ronald Frayn and Sirikit Pibulsonggram, the two wranglers, instantly. A half-second later it killed a Third-Monther named Arthur Von Brandenstein who had been meditating around the other side of Top Step, and had come to watch the docking like us, but had approached closer than Sulke would let us.

  And a second later it caught up to our hindmost straggler, Glenn.

  I’ll remember the sound of her death until my dying day, because there was so little to it. It was a sound that would mean nothing to a groundhog, meant nothing to me then, and that every spacer dreads to hear: a short high whistle, with an undertone of crashing surf, lasting for no more than a second and ending with a curious croaking. It is the sound of a p-suit losing its integrity, and its inhabitant’s final exhalation blowing past the radio microphone.

  Later examination of tapes showed that the first thing to hit her was a hunk of shrapnel with sharp edges; it took both legs off above the knees, and that might well have sufficed to kill her, emptying her suit of air instantly. But you can live longer in a vacuum than most groundhogs would suspect, and it is just barely possible that we might have been able to get her inboard alive. But a split second later
a mass of superheated steam struck her around the head and shoulders. P-suits were never designed to take that kind of punishment: the hood and most of the shoulders simply vanished, and the steam washed across her bare face—just as she was trying desperately to inhale air that was no longer there. When Sulke had us decelerate and regroup, she kept on going, spinning like a top. A couple of people started off after her, but Sulke called them back.

  No one else died, but there were more than a dozen minor injuries. The most seriously injured was Soon Li, who lost two fingers from her left hand; she would have died, but while she was gawking at her fountaining glove, Sulke slapped sealant over it and dragged her to the nearest airlock. She suffered some tissue damage from exposure to vacuum, but not enough to cost her the rest of the hand. Antonio Gonella managed to crash into Top Step in his panicked flight, acquiring a spectacular bruise on his shoulder and a mild concussion. Two people collided more decisively than I had, and broke unimportant bones.

  But the casualty that meant the most to me was Robert.

  CHAPTER 10

  Once is happenstance;

  twice is coincidence;

  three times is enemy action.

  —Ian Fleming

  A SMALL PIECE of shrapnel, the size and shape of a stylus, was blown right through his left foot from bottom to top. It was a clean wound, and his p-suit was able to self-seal around the two pinhole punctures. If he cried out, it was drowned out by the white noise of dozens of others shouting at once, and when Sulke called for casualty reports, he kept silent. I didn’t know he’d been hurt until we were approaching the airlock, several minutes after the explosion, and I saw that the left foot of his p-suit had turned red. My first crazy thought was that some Symbiote had gotten into his p-suit somehow; when I realized it was blood I came damned near to fainting.