The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “Gravity yoga will be a trial after freefall yoga,” Guru Ishpingham opined, shifting from padmasana to a position that put his knees behind his ears in a fashion that made the proctor look away. The tall, though presently much folded and intertwined, Briton was as thin as Fats Jordan was stout. (In space the number of thins and fats tends to increase sharply, as neither overweight nor under-musculature carries the penalties it does on the surface of a planet.)

  “And mobiles will be trivial after space stabiles,” Erica Janes threw under her shoulder. The husky sculptress had just put the finishing touches to one of her three-dimensional free montages—an arrangement of gold, blue and red balls—and was snapping a stereophoto of it. “What really hurts,” she added, “is that our kids will have to try to comprehend Newton’s Three Laws of Motion in an environment limited by a gravity field. Elementary physics should never be taught anywhere except in freefall.”

  “No more space diving, no more water sculpture, no more vacuum chemistry,” chanted the Brain, fourteen-year-old fugitive from a brilliant but much broken home down below.

  “No more space pong, no more space pool,” chimed in the Brainess, his sister. (Space pool, likewise billiards, is played on the inner surface of a stripped balloon. The balls, when properly cued, follow it by reason of centrifugal force.)

  “Ah well, we all knew this bubble would someday burst,” Gussy Friml summed up, pinwheeling lazily in her black leotards. (There is something particularly beautiful about girls in space, where gravity doesn’t tug at their curves. Even fat folk don’t sag in freefall. Luscious curves become truly remarkable.)

  “Yes!” Knave Grayson agreed savagely. He’d seemed lost in brooding since his first remarks. Now as if he’d abruptly reached conclusions, he whipped out his knife and drove it through the taut sealingsilk at his elbow.

  The proctor knew he shouldn’t have winced so convulsively. There was only the briefest whistle of escaping air before the edge-tension in the sealingsilk closed the hole with an audible snap.

  Knave smiled wickedly at the proctor. “Just testing,” he explained. “I knew a roustabout who lost a foot stepping through sealingsilk. Edge-tension cut it off clean at the ankle. The foot’s still orbiting around the satellite, in a brown boot with needle-sharp hobnails. This is one spot where a boy’s got to remember not to put his finger in the dike.”

  At that moment Fats Jordan, who’d seemed lost in brooding too, struck a chilling but authoritative chord on his guitar.

  “Gonna be a pang

  Leavin’ space,” (he sang)

  “Gonna be a pang!”

  The proctor couldn’t help wincing again. “That’s all very well,” he said sharply, “and I’m glad you’re taking this realistically. But hadn’t you better be getting a move on?”

  Fats Jordan paused with his hand above the strings. “How do you mean, Mr. Proctor?” he asked.

  “I mean getting your first fifty ready for the down jump!”

  “Oh, that,” Fats said and paused reflectively. “Well, now, Mr. Proctor, that’s going to take a little time.”

  The proctor snorted. ‘Two hours!” he said sharply and, grabbing at the nylon line he’d had the foresight to trail into the Beat Cluster behind him (rather like Theseus venturing into the Minotaur’s probably equally smelly labyrinth) , he swiftly made his way out of the Big Igloo, hand over hand, by way of the green tunnel.

  The Brainess giggled. Fats frowned at her solemnly. The giggling was cut off. To cover her embarrassment the Brainess began to hum one of her semi-private songs:

  “Eskimos of space are we

  In our igloos falling free.

  We are space’s Esquimaux,

  Fearless vacuum-chewing hawks.”

  Fats tossed Gussy his guitar, which set him spinning very slowly. As he rotated, precessing a little, he ticked off points to his comrades on his stubby, ripe-banana-clustered fingers.

  “Somebody gonna have to tell the research boys we’re callin’ off the art show an’ the ballet an’ terminatin’ jazz Fridays. Likewise the Great Books course an’ Saturday poker. Might as well inform our friends of Edison and Convair at the same time that they’re gonna have to hold the 3D chess and 3D go tournaments at their place, unless they can get the new Administrator to donate them our quarters when we leave—which I doubt. I imagine he’ll tote the Cluster off a ways and use the igloos for target practice. With the self-sealin’ they should hold shape a long time.

  “But don’t exactly tell the research boys when we’re goin’ or why. Play it mysterioso.

  “Meanwhile the gals gotta start sewin’ us some ground clothes. Warm and decent. And we all gotta get our papers ready for the customs men, though I’m afraid most of us ain’t kept nothin’ but Davis passports. Heck, some of you are probably here on Nansen passports.

  “An’ we better pool our credits to buy wheelchairs and dollies groundside for such of us as are gonna ‘need ‘em.” Fats looked back and forth dolefully from Guru Ishpingham’s interwoven emaciation to his own hyper-portliness.

  Meanwhile a space-diver had approached the Big Igloo from the direction of the satellite, entered the folds of a limp blister, zipped it shut behind him and unzipped the slit leading inside. The blister filled with a dull pop and the diver pushed inside through the lips. With a sharp effort he zipped them shut, then threw back his helmet.

  “Condition Red!” he cried. “The new Administrator’s planning to ship us all groundside! I got it straight from the Police Chief. The new A’s taking those old deportation orders seriously and he’s holding the—”

  “We know all about that, Trace Davis,” Fats interrupted him. “The new A’s proctor’s been here.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” the other demanded.

  “Nothin’,” Fats serenely informed the flushed and shock-headed diver. “We’re complyin’. You, Trace”—he pointed a finger—”get out of that suit. We’re auctionin’ it off ‘long with all the rest of our unworldly goods. The research boys’ll be eager to bid on it. For fun-diving our space-suits are the pinnacle.”

  A carrot-topped head thrust out of the blue tunnel. “Hey, Fats, we’re broadcasting,” its freckled owner called accusingly. “You’re on in thirty seconds!”

  “Baby, I clean forgot,” Fats said. He sighed and shrugged. “Guess I gotta tell our downside fans the inglorious news. Remember all my special instructions, chillun. Share ‘em out among you.” He grabbed Gussy Friml’s black ankle as it swung past him and shoved off on it, coasting toward the blue tunnel at about one fifth the velocity with which Gussy receded from him in the opposite direction.

  “Hey, Fats,” Gussy called to him as she bounced gently off the sun-quilt, “you got any general message for us?”

  “Yeah,” Fats replied, still rotating as he coasted and smiling as he rotated. “Make more guk, chillun. Yeah,” he repeated as he disappeared into the blue tunnel, “take off the growth checks an’ make mo’ guk.”

  Seven seconds later he was floating beside the spherical mike of the Beat Cluster’s shortwave station. The bright instruments and heads of the Small Jazz Ensemble were all clustered in, sounding a last chord, while their foreshortened feet waved around the periphery. The half dozen of them, counting Fats, were like friendly fish nosing up to the single black olive of the mike. Fats had his eyes on the Earth, a little more than half night now and about as big as the snare drum standing out from the percussion rack Jordy had his legs scissored around. It was good, Fats thought, to see who you were talking to.

  “Greetings, groundsiders,” he said softly when the last echo had come back from the sealingsilk and died in the sun-quilt. “This is that ever-hateful voice from outer space, the voice of your old tormentor Fats Jordan, advertising no pickle juice.” Fats actually said “advertising,” not “advertisin’”—his diction always improved when he was on vacuum.

  “And for a change, folks, I’m going to take this space to tell you something about us. No jo
kes this time, just tedious talk. I got a reason, a real serious reason, but I ain’t saying what it is for a minute.”

  He continued, “You look mighty cozy down there, mighty cozy from where we’re floating. Because we’re way out here, you know. Out of this world, to quote the man. A good twenty thousand miles out, Captain Nemo.

  “Or we’re up here, if it sounds better to you that way. Way over your head. Up here with the stars and the flaming sun and the hot-cold vacuum, orbiting around Earth in our crazy balloons that look like a cluster of dingy glass grapes.”

  The band had begun to blow softly again, weaving a cool background to Fats’ lazy phrases.

  “Yes, the boys and girls are in space now, groundsiders. We’ve found the cheap way here, the back door. The wild ones who yesterday would have headed for the Village or the Quarter or Big Sur, the Left Bank or North Beach, or just packed up their Zen Buddhism and hit the road, are out here now, digging cool sounds as they fall round and round Dear Old Dirty. And, folks, ain’t you just a little glad we’re gone?”

  The band coasted into a phrase that was like the lazy swing of a hammock.

  “Our cold-water flats have climbed. Our lofts have gone aloft. We’ve cut our pads loose from the cities and floated them above the stratosphere. It was a stiff drag for our motorcycles, Dad, but we made it. And ain’t you a mite delighted to be rid of us? I know we’re not all up here. But the worst of us are.

  “You know, people once pictured the conquest of space entirely in terms of military outposts and machine precision.” Here Burr’s trumpet blew a crooked little battle cry. “They didn’t leave any room in their pictures for the drifters and dreamers, the rebels and no-goods (like me, folks!) who are up here right now, orbiting with a few pounds of oxygen and a couple of gobs of guk (and a few cockroaches, sure, and maybe even a few mice, though we keep a cat) inside a cluster of smelly old balloons.

  “That’s a laugh in itself: the antique vehicle that first took man off the ground also being the first to give him cheap living quarters outside the atmosphere. Primitive balloons floated free in the grip of the wind; we fall free in the clutch of gravity. A balloon’s a symbol, you know, folks. A symbol of dreams and hopes and easily punctured illusions. Because a balloon’s a kind of bubble. But bubbles can be tough.”

  Led by Jordy’s drums, the band worked into the Blue Ox theme from the Paul Bunyan Suite.

  “Tough the same way the hemlock tents and sod huts of the American settlers were tough. We got out into space, a lot of us did, the same way the Irish and Finns got west. They built the long railroads. We built the big satellites.”

  Here the band shifted to the Axe theme.

  “I was a welder myself. I came into space with a bunch of other galoots to help stitch together Research Satellite One. I didn’t like the barracks they put us in, so I made myself a little private home of sealingsilk, a material which then was used only for storing liquids and gases—nobody’d even thought of it for human habitation. I started to meditate there in my bubble and I came to grips with a few half-ultimates and I got to like it real well in space. Same thing happened to a few of the others. You know, folks, a guy who’s wacky enough to wrestle sheet aluminum in vacuum in a spider suit may very well be wacky enough to get to really like stars and weightlessness and all the rest of it.

  “When the construction job was done and the big research outfits moved in, we balloon men stayed on. It took some wangling but we managed. We weren’t costing the Government much. And it was mighty convenient for them to have us around for odd jobs.

  “That was the nucleus of our squatter cluster. The space roustabouts and roughnecks came first. The artists and oddballs, who have a different kind of toughness, followed. They got wind of what our life was like and they bought, bummed or conned their way up here. Some got space research jobs and shifted over to us at the ends of their stints. Others came up on awards trips and managed to get lost from their parties and accidentally find us. They brought their tapes and instruments with them, their sketchbooks and typers; some even smuggled up their own balloons. Most of them learned to do some sort of space work—it’s good insurance on staying aloft. But don’t get me wrong. We’re none of us work-crazy. Actually we’re the laziest cats in the cosmos: the ones who couldn’t bear the thought of carrying their own weight around every day of their lives! We mostly only toil when we have to have money for extras or when there’s a job that’s just got to be done. We’re the dreamers and funsters, the singers and studiers. We leave the ‘to the stars by hard ways’ business to our friends the space marines. When we use the ‘ad astra per aspera’ motto (was it your high school’s too?) we change the last word to asparagus—maybe partly to honor the green guk we grow to get us oxygen (so we won’t be chiseling too much gas from the Government) and to commemorate the food-yeasts and the other stuff we grow from our garbage.

  “What sort of life do we have up here? How can we stand it cooped up in a lot of stinking balloons? Man, we’re free out here, really free for the first time. We’re floating, literally. Gravity can’t bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it’s only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else—it’s the right environment for them.

  “Anybody can get into space if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.

  “That’s our story, folks. We took the space road because it was the only frontier left. We had to come out, just because space was here, like the man who climbed the mountain, like the first man who skin-dove into the green deeps. Like the first man who envied a bird or a shooting star.”

  The music had softly soared with Fats’ words. Now it died with them and when he spoke again it was without accompaniment, just a flat lonely voice.

  “But that isn’t quite the end of the story, folks. I told you I had something serious to impart—serious to us anyway. It looks like we’re not going to be able to stay in space, folks. We’ve been told to get out. Because we’re the wrong sort of people. Because we don’t have the legal right to stay here, only the right that’s conveyed by a dream.

  “Maybe there’s real justice in it. Maybe we’ve sat too long in the starbird seat. Maybe the beat generation doesn’t belong in space. Maybe space belongs to soldiers and the civil service, with a slice of it for the research boys. Maybe there’s somebody who wants to be in space more than we do. Maybe we deserve our comedownance. I wouldn’t know.

  “So get ready for a jolt, folks. We’re coming back! If you don’t want to see us, or if you think we ought to be kept safely cooped up here for any reason, you just might let the President know.

  “This is the Beat Cluster, folks, signing off.”

  * * * *

  As Fats and the band pushed away from each other, Fats saw that the little local audience in the sending balloon had grown and that not all new arrivals were fellow floaters.

  “Fats, what’s this nonsense about you people privatizing your activities and excluding research personnel?” a grizzle-haired stringbean demanded. “You can’t cut off recreation that way. I depend on the Cluster to keep my electron bugs happily abnormal. We even mention it downside in recruiting personnel—though we don’t put it in print.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thoms,” Fats said. “No offense meant to you or to General Electric. But I got no time to explain. Ask somebody else.”

  “Whatdya mean, no offense?” the other demanded, grabbing at the purple shorts. “What are you trying to do, segregate the squares in space? What’s wrong with research? Aren’t we good enough for you?”

  “Yes,” put in Rumpleman of Convair, “and while you’re doing that would you kindly throw some light on this directive we just received from the new A—that the Cluster’s off-bounds to us and that all dating between research personnel and Cluster girls must stop? Did you put the new A up to that, Fats?”

  “Not exactly,” Fats said. “Look,
boys, let up on me. I got work to do.”

  “Work!” Rumpleman snorted.

  “Don’t think you’re going to get away with it,” Thorns warned Fats. “We’re going to protest. Why, the Old Man is frantic about the 3D chess tournament. He says the Brain’s the only real competition he has up here.” (The Old Man was Hubert Willis, guiding genius of the open bevatron on the other side of the satellite.)

  “The other research outfits are kicking up a fuss too,” Trace Davis put in. “We spread the news like you said, and they say we can’t walk out on them this way.”

  “Allied Microbiotics,” Gussy Friml said, “wants to know who’s going to take over the experiments on unshielded guk societies in freefall that we’ve been running for them in the Cluster.”

  Two of the newcomers had slightly more confidential messages for Fats.

  Allison of Convair said, “I wouldn’t tell you, except I think you’ve guessed, that I’ve been using the Beat Cluster as a pilot study in the psychology of anarchic human societies in freefall. If you cut yourself off from us, I’m in a hole.”