The Stardance Trilogy (36 page)

I glanced unobtrusively around. Most of the passengers I could see were looking at their own TVs, and several were swaying slightly in unison, like tall grass in a gentle breeze. The Stardance was important to all of us. We were following it into space.

Shara Drummond’s p-suited image forms and grows larger on the screen. The music swells. The camera gives that involuntary jump as Armstead, horrorstruck, recognizes her. She was just on her way back to Earth on doctor’s orders when the Fireflies arrived: any more exposure to zero gravity and her body will lose—forever—its ability to tolerate Earth-normal gravity. No one knows better than Armstead that his love is now a dead woman breathing. She has chosen to sacrifice herself, because of her Great Understanding (that the aliens communicate by dance) and her Great Misunderstanding (that they are hostile).

As always, the dialogue between her and the nearby Space Command battleship is edited down to her refusal to get out of the line of fire until she has tried to talk to the dancing Fireflies; the hour she spends in silent contemplation of them, trying to deduce their language of motion, is shrunk down to thirty seconds that always seem to take an hour to go by—

—and then it changed. At the point where she says, “Charlie…this is a take,” and he says, “Break a leg, kid,” and she begins to dance, the tape departed from the classic release version as edited by Armstead.

Charlie Armstead had four cameras in space that day, bracketing Shara and the aliens. But in cutting the Stardance, later, he used footage only from the three that were on Shara’s side. This makes sense: from the other camera’s vantage, the Fireflies are in the way. But the result is that the Stardance is seen only from a human perspective: we are either behind, or below Shara, watching as she (apparently) dances the aliens right out of the Solar System.

The version we were being shown now was from the fourth camera. I’d seen it before; years ago I had once gone to the trouble and expense of studying the raw, unedited footage from all four cameras. But I’d paid least attention to the fourth. Its footage was edited out for good artistic reasons: some of the best movements of the dance are obscured. The swarming aliens in the foreground spoil the view, glowing like embers, leaving ghost trails in their wake.

But in this context, it had a powerful impact. We saw Shara, for once, from the aliens’ point of view.

She looked much smaller, more fragile. She was no longer the greatest choreographer of her century creating her masterpiece. She was a little dog telling a big dog to get the hell out of her yard,
now.
You could almost sense the Fireflies’ amusement and admiration. And pride: Shara was the end result of something they had set in motion many millions of years before, when they seeded Earth with life.

I saw things I had missed on my last viewing. From all three other POVs Shara’s helmet is opaque with reflected glare. From this one you could see into it, see her face…and now I saw that what I had taken on my previous viewing for a proud, snarling, triumphant grin was in fact a rictus of terror. For the first time it really came home to me that this woman was dancing through a fear that should have petrified her.

I felt a powerful surge of empathy, and my own fear began to ease a little. As I watched Shara’s magnificent Stardance from this new perspective, my breathing began to slow; my heartbeat, which usually raced as the Stardance climaxed, slowed too.

Peace came to me. It was the calm, the empty mind, that I had sat zazen for countless hours to achieve for minutes. My kinesthetic awareness faded; for once I was not acutely conscious of the relative position of each muscle; my body seemed to become lighter, to melt away…

Suddenly I smiled. It wasn’t an illusion: my body
was
growing lighter! We were already entering Low Earth Orbit.

It didn’t diminish the feeling of tranquility; it enhanced it. Space was going to be a good place to go. I no longer cared how strange and dangerous this voyage was. I was where I was supposed to be.

Onscreen, the Stardance reached its brilliant coda. The Fireflies vanish, leaving only Shara, and far behind her the twinkling carousel of the factory complex where she invented zero gravity dance, where Armstead is watching her on his monitors.

She poises in space for a long time, getting her breath, then turns to the nearest camera and puffs out the famous line, “We may be puny, Charlie…but by Jesus we’re
tough
.” The music overrides their audio then, but we know he is begging her to come back inboard, and she is refusing. It’s not just that she is permanently adapted to free fall now and can never return to Earth; nor that the only place she could live indefinitely in space belongs to a man she despises with her whole heart.

She is
done now.
She has accomplished everything she was born to do. Or so she believes.

She waves at the camera, all four thrusters go off, and she arcs down toward Earth, visible in frame now for the first time. Brindle’s score swells for the last time, we follow her down toward the killing atmosphere—

—and again it changed. I’d never seen this footage before. It must have been shot by some distant Space Command satellite peace-camera, hastily tracking her as she fell through Low Orbit. The image was of inferior quality, had the grainy look of maximum enlargement and the jerkiness you get when a machine is doing the tracking. But it provided a closer look at those last moments than Armstead’s cameras had from back up in a higher, slower orbit.

And so we saw now what everyone had missed then, what the world was not to know about for over three more years. Whoever examined that tape for the Space Command at the time must have just refused to believe either his eyes or his equipment, but there was no mistaking it. Shara Drummond simply disappeared. When her p-suit tumbled and burned in the upper atmosphere, it was limp, empty.

The next time any human would see her, years later, she would be a crimson-winged immortal orbiting one of the moons of Saturn, no more in need of a pressure suit than a Firefly. The first human ever to enter Symbiosis. The first and greatest Stardancer.

I felt awed and humble. As the credits rolled I reached out to shut off the set so I could savor the sensation—and knew at once that we were all the way into zero gravity. My arm did not fall when I told it it could; my center of mass pivoted loosely around my seatbelt.

The main engines had fallen silent, unnoticed, while I’d watched. We were more than halfway through our journey, officially in space. Now there would be a period of free fall before we began matching orbits with Top Step. I realized that my face felt flushed, and that my sinuses were filling up, just as I’d been told to expect. I was pleased to feel no stirrings of the dreaded dropsickness. Apparently the drugs they’d given us worked, for me at least.

Part of me wanted to unstrap and play, couldn’t wait to explore this new environment, begin learning whether or not I could really dance in it. I hadn’t danced in so long!

I saw other passengers experimenting with their limbs, grinning at each other. Why should it be surprising that in zero gee, one is lighthearted? No one seemed bothered by dropsickness. I turned and grinned at each of the seatmates I’d been ignoring.

To my left, in what would have been the window seat if spaceplanes had windows, was a black girl whose answering grin was spectacular; she had the whitest, most perfect teeth I’d ever seen. Zero gee made her already round cheeks cherubic. She was not a North American black but something more exotic; her hair was both wavy and curly, and her skin was the color of bitter chocolate. She looked startlingly young, no more than twenty-five, when I had understood the cutoff age was thirty; but for the instant our gazes met we communicated perfectly across cultural and generational distance.

The aisle seat to my right was occupied by a Chinese man in his late thirties. He was clean-shaven, and like everyone else’s aboard, his hair was short. His face was impassive, and I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were smiling or not. (In zero gee,
everyone
looks sort of Chinese: the puffy features caused by upward migration of body fluids mimic epicanthic folds at the eyes. If you
start out
Chinese, your eyes end up looking like paper-cuts.) But something in those eyes responded to me, I felt; we communicated too. A little more than I wanted to; I looked away abruptly. Wave of dizziness. Not a good idea to move your head quickly in free fall.

There was a soft overall murmuring in the passenger cabin, audible even over the engine sound: the sum of everyone’s grunts and sighs and exclamations. It was a sound of optimism, of hope, of pleased surprise. I think in another minute someone would have ignored instructions and unstrapped himself…and then we all would have, no matter what the flight attendants said.

But then there was a sound like a gunshot or the crack of a bat, and a banshee was among us, and I felt a draft—

In that year, 2020, the Space Command’s traffic satellites were (as predicted since the 1980s) tracking over 20,000 known manmade objects larger than ten centimeters in diameter in the Low Earth Orbit band. Naturally no flight plan was accepted that could intersect any of them. But there were (also as predicted) countless
hundreds
of thousands, perhaps millions, of objects
smaller
then ten centimeters whizzing around in Low Orbit: too many to keep track of even if sensors had been able to see them. Screws, bolts, nuts, fittings, miscellaneous jettisoned trash, fragments of destroyed or damaged spacecraft, bits of dead spacemen burst by vacuum and freeze-dried by space, the assorted drifting trash of sixty years of spaceflight. Some of these little bits of cosmic shrapnel had relative velocities of more than fifteen kilometers a second. That’s 5400 kilometers an hour—or a little more than 3200 miles per hour. At that speed, a beer-can ring is a deadly missile.

The chances of a collision depended on whose figures you accepted. The most optimistic estimate at that point in history was one chance in twenty; the most pessimistic, one in four. But even the pessimists conceded that the probability of a
life-threatening
collision was much lower than that.

Our number came up, that’s all.

Whatever it was hulled us forward and from the left, just aft of the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the cockpit.

Two months of training kicked in: nearly all of us got our p-suit hoods over our heads and sealed in a matter of seconds. The banshee wail was cut off, and the roar of air overridden by a softer hissing behind my head. Within moments I could feel my suit expanding. I could see now why they’d been so tight about carry-on items; even with the strict security, the air was filled with a skirling vortex of smuggled items: tissues, gum wrappers, a rabbit’s foot, a pen and postcard dancing in lockstep, all converging on the source of the pressure leak. Small lighted panels in each seatback began blinking urgently in unison, as though the whole plane had acquired a visible pulse, doubtless telling us to fasten our seatbelts and return our seatbacks to the upright position. In my earphones grew the white noise of dozens of passengers talking at once in assorted languages and dialects. I tried to switch to Emergency channel…but for some reason this suit was not like the ones I had trained in: it had no channel selector switch.

I was not especially afraid. The warm glow of the Stardance was still on me, and we had rehearsed this dozens of times. There was nothing to worry about. Any second now, automatic machinery would begin dispensing globules of blue sticky stuff. The globs would be sucked onto the hole in the hull, and burst there. When enough of them had burst, the hole would be patched.

The hurricane went on, and there were no globs of blue sticky. I spotted one of the nozzles that should have been emitting them.

Okay, failsafes fail; that was why we had live flight attendants. Now they would converge on the leak with a pressure patch, and—

—where were the attendants?

I strained to see over the seats in front of me. Seconds ticked by and I could see no one moving. Finally I had to see what was going on: I unstrapped myself and tried to stand.

But my reflexes were obsolete. I rose with alarming speed, got my hands up too slowly, smacked my skull against the overhead hard enough to cross my eyes, ricocheted downward, hit the seat, bounced back upward, cracked my head again, and clutched desperately at the arms of my seat as I plumped back into it; the girl on my left grabbed my arm firmly to steady me. The seat to my right was empty; at the apex of my flight I had seen my other seatmate, the young Chinese, soaring forward down the aisle, graceful as a slow-motion acrobat.

I had also spotted the chief attendant, strapped into the front row aisle seat he had taken after giving us the standard preflight ritual. He was leaning to his left, arms waving lazily, like a dreaming conductor. His p-suit was slowly turning red from the hood down, and from the left side of the hood a fluid red rope issued. It rippled like a water snake, and ran with all the other airborne objects toward the hole in the hull, breaking up into red spheroids just before being sucked out into space. By great bad fortune the chief attendant’s head had been in the path of whatever had hulled us…

Moving carefully, I managed to wedge myself into an equilibrium between the back of my seat and the overhead, and looked aft. I saw at once what was keeping the other attendant: Murphy’s Law. She was struggling with her jammed seatbelt, weeping and shouting something I couldn’t hear.

I looked forward again in time to see the young Chinese land feet first like a cat against the forward bulkhead, absorb the impact with his thighs so that he did not bounce from it, and instantly position all four limbs correctly to brace himself against the draft. Suddenly some other, powerful force pulled on him briefly, trying to yank him sideways and up, but he sensed it and corrected for it at once. (The same force acted on me and the others; I could not figure out how to correct, and settled for clutching the seatback and overhead as tightly as I could until it passed.) A part of me wondered if he gave lessons. He had obviously been in free fall before.