The Stardance Trilogy (15 page)

She was smaller than Norrey, almost as taciturn as Harry (but for different reasons), much calmer than Raoul, and more open-hearted and giving than I will be if I live to be a thousand. In the villainous overcrowding of that first free-fall semester, amid flaring tempers and sullen rages, she was the
only
universally loved person—I honestly doubt whether we could have survived without her (I remember with some dismay that I seriously contemplated spacing a pimply young student whose only crime was a habit of saying, “There you go” at every single pause in the conversation.
There he goes,
I kept thinking to myself,
there he goes
. . .).

Some women can turn a room into an emotional maelstrom, simply by entering it, and this quality is called “provocative.” So far as I know, our language has no word for the opposite of provocative, but that is what Linda was. She had a talent for getting people high together, without drugs, a knack for resolving irreconcilable differences, a way of brightening the room she was in.

She had been raised on a farm by a spiritual community in Nova Scotia, and that probably accounted for her empathy, responsibility, and intuitive understanding of group-energy dynamics. But I think the single over-riding quality that made her magic work was inborn: she genuinely loved people. It could not have been learned behavior; it was just too clearly intrinsic in her.

I don’t mean that she was a Pollyanna, nauseatingly cheerful and syrupy. She could be blistering if she caught you trying to call irresponsibility something else. She insisted that a high truth level be maintained in her presence, and she would not allow you the luxury of a hidden grudge, what she called “holding a stash on someone.” If she caught you with such psychic dirty laundry, she would haul it right out in public and force you to clean it up. “Tact?” she said to me once. “I always understood that to mean a mutual agreement to be full of shit.”

These attributes are typical of a commune child, and usually get them heartily disliked in so-called polite society—founded, as it is, on irresponsibility, untruth, and selfishness. But again, something innate in Linda made them work for her. She could call you a jerk to your face without triggering reflex anger; she could tell you publicly that you were lying without calling you a liar. She plainly knew how to hate the sin and forgive the sinner; and I admire that, for it is a knack I never had. There was never any mistaking or denying the genuine caring in her voice, even when it was puncturing one of your favorite bubbles of rationalization.

At least, that’s what Norrey or I would have said. Tom, when he met her, had a different opinion.

“Look, Charlie, there’s Tom.”

I should have been fuming mad when I got out of Customs. I felt a little uneasy
not
being fuming mad. But after six months of extraterrestrial cabin fever, I was finding it curiously difficult to dislike
any
stranger—even a Customs man.

Besides, I was too
heavy
to be angry.

“So it is. Tom! Hey, Tom!”

“Oh my,” Norrey said, “something’s wrong.”

Tom
was fuming mad.

“Hell. What put the sand in his shorts? Hey, where’re Linda and Raoul? Maybe there’s a hassle?”

“No, they got through before we did. They must have taken a cab to the hotel already—”

Tom was upon us, eyes flashing. “So that’s your paragon? Jesus Christ! Fucking bleeding heart, I’ll wring her scrawny neck. Of all the—”

“Whoa! Who? Linda? What?”

“Oh Christ, later—here they come.” What looked like a vigilante committee was converging on us, bearing torches. “Now look,” Tom said hurriedly through his teeth, smiling as though he’d just been guaranteed an apartment in Paradise, “give these bloodsuckers your best I mean your best shot, and
maybe
I can scavenge something from this stinking mess.” And he was striding toward them, opening his arms and smiling. As he went I heard him mutter something under his breath that began with “Ms. Parsons,” contained enough additional sibilants to foil the shotgun-mikes, and moved his lips not at all.

Norrey and I exchanged a glance. “Pohl’s Law,” she said, and I nodded (Pohl’s Law, Raoul once told us, says that nothing is so good that somebody somewhere won’t hate it, and vice versa). And then the pack was upon us.

“This way Mister when does your next tape come over here please tell our viewers what it’s really believe that this this new artform is a valid passport or did you look this way Ms. Drummond is it true that you haven’t been able to smile for the cameraman for the
Stardance
, weren’t you going to look this way to please continue or are readers would simply love to no but didn’t you miss Drummond pardon me Miz Drummond do you think you’re as good as your sister Sharon in the profits in their own country are without honor to welcome you back to Earth
this
way please,” said the mob, over the sound of clicking, whirring, snapping, and whining machinery and through the blinding glare of what looked like an explosion at the galactic core seen from close up. And I smiled and nodded and said urbanely witty things and answered the rudest questions with good humor and by the time we could get a cab I
was
fuming mad. Raoul and Linda had indeed gone ahead, and Tom had found our luggage; we left at high speed.

“Bleeding Christ, Tom,” I said as the cab pulled away, “next time schedule a press conference for the next day, will you?”

“God damn it,”
he blazed, “you can have this job back any time you want it!”

His volume startled even the cabbie. Norrey grabbed his hands and forced him to look at her.

“Tom,” she said gently, “we’re your friends. We don’t want to yell at you; we don’t want you to yell at us. Okay?”

He took an extra deep breath, held it, let it out in one great sigh and nodded. “Okay.”

“Now I know that reporters can be hard to deal with. I understand that, Tom. But I’m tired and hungry and my feet hurt like hell and my body’s convinced it weighs three hundred and thirteen kilos and next time could we maybe just lie to them a little?”

He paused before replying, and his voice came out calm. “Norrey, I am really not an idiot. All that madness to the contrary, I
did
schedule a press conference for tomorrow, and I
did
tell everybody to have a heart and leave you alone today. Those jerks back there were the ones who ignored me, the sons of—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Then why the hell did we give
them
a command performance?”

“Do you think I wanted to?” Tom growled. “What the hell am I going to say tomorrow to the honorable ones who got scooped? But I had no
choice
, Charlie. That dizzy bitch left me no choice. I had to give those crumbs
some
thing, or they’d have run what they had already.”

“Tom, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Linda Parsons, that’s what I’m talking about, your new wonder discovery. Christ, Norrey, the way you went on about her over the phone, I was expecting…I don’t know, anyway a professional.”

“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?” I suggested.

Tom snorted. “First she calls me a tight-ass. Practically the first words out of her mouth. Then she says I’m ignorant, and I’m not treating her right. Treating her right, for Christ’s sake. Then she chews me out for having reporters there—Charlie, I’ll take that from you and Norrey, I
should
’ve had those jerks thrown out, but I don’t have to take that crap from a rookie. So I start to explain about the reporters, and
then
she says I’m being defensive. Christ on the pogie, if there’s anything I hate it’s somebody that comes on aggressive and then says you’re being defensive, smiling and looking you right in the eye and trying to rub my fucking
neck
!”

I figured he’d let off enough steam by now, and I was losing count of the grains of salt. “So Norrey and I made nice for the newsies because they taped you two squabbling in public?”

“No!”

We got the story out of him eventually. It was the old Linda magic at work again, and I can offer you no more typical example. Somehow a seventeen-year-old girl had threaded her way through the hundreds of people in the spaceport terminal straight to Linda and collapsed in her arms, sobbing that she was tripping and losing control and would Linda please make it all
stop
? It was at that point that the mob of reporters had spotted Linda as a Stardancer and closed in. Even considering that she weighed six times normal, had just been poked full of holes by Medical and insulted by Immigration, and was striking large sparks off of Tom, I’m inclined to doubt that Linda lost her temper; I think she abandoned it. Whatever, she apparently scorched a large hole through that pack of ghouls, bundled the poor girl into it and got her a cab. While they were getting in, some clown stuck a camera in the girl’s face and Linda decked him.

“Hell, Tom, I might have done the same thing myself,” I said when I got it straight.

“God’s teeth, Charlie!”
he began; then with a superhuman effort he got control of his voice (at least). “Look. Listen. This is not some four-bit kids’ game we are playing here. Megabucks pass through my fingers, Charlie, megabucks! You are not a bum any more, you don’t have the privileges of a bum. Do you—”

“Tom,” Norrey said, shocked.

“—have any
idea
how fickle the public has become in the last twenty years? Maybe I’ve got to tell you how much public opinion has to do with the
existence
of that orbiting junkheap you just left? Or maybe you’re going to tell me that those tapes in your suitcase are as good as the
Stardance
, that you’ve got something so hot you can beat up reporters and get away with it. Oh
Jesus
, what a mess!”

He had me there. All the choreography plans we had brought into orbit with us had been based on the assumption that we would have between eight and twelve dancers. We had thought we were being pessimistic. We had to junk everything and start from scratch. The resulting tapes relied heavily on solos—our weakest area at that point—and while I was confident that I could do a lot with editing, well…

“It’s okay, Tom. Those bums got something their editors’ll like better than a five-foot lady making gorillas look like gorillas—they worry a little about public opinion, too.”

“And what do I tell Westbrook tomorrow? And Mortie and Barbara Frum and UPI and AP and—”

“Tom,” Norrey interrupted gently, “it’ll be all right.”

“All right? How it is all right? Tell me how it’s all right.”

I saw where she was going. “Hell, yeah. I never thought of that, hon, of
course
. That pack o’ jackals drove it clean out of my mind. Serves ’em right.” I began to chuckle. “Serves ’em bloody right.”

“If you don’t mind, darling.”

“Huh? Oh. No…no, I don’t mind.” I grinned. “It’s been long enough coming. Let’s do it up.”

“Will somebody
please
tell me what the hell is—”

“Tom,” I said expansively, “don’t worry about a thing. I’ll tell your scooped friends the same thing I told my father at the age of thirteen, when he caught me in the cellar with the mailman’s daughter.”

“What the hell is that?” he snapped, beginning to grin in spite of himself and unsure why.

I put an arm around Norrey. “It’s okay, Pa. We’re gettin’ married tomorrow.”

He stared at us blankly for several seconds, the grin fading, and then it returned full force.

“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” he cried. “Congratulations! That’s terrific, Charlie, Norrey, oh congratulations you two—it’s about time.” He tried to hug us both, but at that moment the cabbie had to dodge a psychopath and Tom was flung backwards, arms outstretched. “That’s tremendous, that’s…you know, I think that’ll do it—I think it’ll work.” He had the grace to blush. “I mean, the hell with the reporters, I just—I mean—”

“You may always,” Norrey said gravely, “leave these little things to us.”

The desk phoned me when Linda checked in, as I had asked them to. I grunted, hung the phone up on thin air, stepped out of bed and into a hotel wastebasket, cannoned into the bedside table destroying table and accompanying lamp, and ended up prone on the floor with my chin sunk deep into the pile rug and my nose a couple of centimeters from a glowing clockface that said it was 4:42. In the morning. At the moment that I came completely awake, the clock expired and its glow went out.

Now it was
pitch
dark.

Incredibly, Norrey still had not awakened. I got up, dressed in the dark, and left, leaving the wreckage for the morning. Fortunately the good leg had sustained most of the damage; I could walk, albeit with a kind of double limp.

“Linda? It’s me, Charlie.”

She opened up at once. “Charlie, I’m sorry—”

“Skip it. You done good. How’s the girl?” I stepped in.

She closed the door behind me and made a face. “Not terrific. But her people are with her now. I think she’s going to be okay.”

“That’s good. I remember the first time a trip went sour on me.”

She nodded. “You know it’s going to stop in eight hours, but that doesn’t help; your time rate’s gone eternal.”

“Yeah. Look, about Tom—”

She made another face. “Boy, Charlie, what a jerk.”

“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?”

“I just tried to tell him that he was being too uptight, and he came on like he couldn’t imagine what I was talking about. So I told him he wasn’t as ignorant as he gave himself credit for, and asked him to treat me like a friend instead of a stranger—from all you told me about him, that seemed right. ‘Okay,’ he says, so I ask him as a friend to try and keep those reporters off of us for a day or so and he blows right up at me. He was so defensive, Charlie.”

“Look, Linda,” I began, “there was this screwup that—”

“Honestly, Charlie, I tried to calm him down, I tried to show him I wasn’t
blaming
him. I—I was rubbing his neck and shoulders, trying to loosen him up, and he, he pushed me away. I mean, really, Charlie, you and Norrey said he was so nice and what a creep.”

“Linda, I’m sorry you didn’t get along. Tom is a nice guy, it’s just—”