The next three years were some of the most exciting years of my life, of both our lives. While I watched and taped, Shara transformed herself from a potentially great dancer into something truly awesome. She did something I'm not sure I can explain.
She became dance's analogue of the jazzman.
Dance was, for Shara, self-expression, pure and simple, first, last, and always. Once she freed herself from the attempt to fit into the world of company dance, she came to regard choreography per se as an obstacle to her self-expression, as a preprogrammed rut, inexorable as a script and as limiting. And so she devalued it.
A jazzman may blow Night in Tunisia for a dozen consecutive nights, and each evening will be a different experience, as he interprets and reinterprets the melody according to his mood of the moment. Total unity of artist and his art: spontaneous creation. The melodic starting point distinguishes the result from pure anarchy.
In just this way Shara devalued preperformance choreography to a starting point, a framework on which to build whatever the moment demanded and then jammed around it. She learned in those three busy years to dismantle the interface between herself and her dance. Dancers have always tended to sneer at improv dancing, even while they practiced it, in the studio, for the looseness it gave. They failed to see that planned improv, improv around a theme fully thought out in advance, was the natural next step in dance. Shara took the step. You must be very, very good to get away with that much freedom. She was good enough.
There's no point in detailing the professional fortunes of Drumstead Enterprises over those three years. We worked hard, we made some magnificent tapes, and we couldn't sell them for paper weights. A home video-cassette industry indeed grew—and they knew as much about Modern dance as the record industry knew about the blues when they started. The big outfits wanted credentials, and the little outfits wanted cheap talent. Finally we even got desperate enough to try the schlock houses—and learned what we already knew. They didn't have the distribution, the prestige, or the technical specs for the critics to pay any attention to them. Word-of-mouth advertising is like a gene pool—if it isn't a certain minimum size to start with, it doesn't get anywhere. "Spider" John Koerner is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter who has been making and selling his own records since 1972. How many of you have ever heard of him?
In May of 1992 I opened my mailbox in the lobby and found the letter from VisuEnt Inc., terminating our option with deepest sorrow and no severance. I went straight over to Shara's apartment, and my leg felt like the bone marrow had been replaced with thermite and ignited. It was a very long walk.
She was working on Weight Is A Verb when I got there. Converting her big living room into a studio had cost time, energy, skullsweat, and a fat bribe to the landlord, but it was cheaper than renting time in a studio considering the sets we wanted. It looked like high mountain country that day, and I hung my hat on a fake alder when I entered.
She flashed me a smile and kept moving, building up to greater and greater leaps. She looked like the most beautiful mountain goat I ever saw. I was in a foul mood and I wanted to kill the music (McLaughlin and Miles together, leaping some themselves), but I never could interrupt Shara when she was dancing. She built it gradually, with directional counterpoint, until she seemed to hurl herself into the air, stay there until she was damned good and ready, and then hurl herself down again. Sometimes she rolled when she hit and sometimes she landed on her hands, and always the energy of falling was transmuted into some new movement instead of being absorbed. It was total energy output, and by the time she was done I had calmed down enough to be almost philosophical about our mutual professional ruin.
She ended up collapsed in upon herself, head bowed exquisitely humbled in attempt to defy gravity. I couldn't help applauding. It felt corny, but I couldn't help it.
"Thank you, Charlie."
"I'll be damned. Weight is a verb. I thought you were crazy when you told me the title."
"It's one of the strongest verbs in dance—the strongest, I guess— and you can make it do anything."
"Almost anything."
"Eh?"
"VisuEnt gave us our contract back."
"Oh." Nothing showed in her eyes, but I knew what was behind them. "Well, who's next on the list?"
"There is no one left on the list."
"Oh." This time it showed. "Oh."
"We should have remembered. Great artists are never honored in their own lifetime. What we ought to do is drop dead—then we'd be all set."
In my way I was trying to be strong for her, and she knew it and tried to be strong for me.
"Maybe what we should do is go into death insurance, for artists," she said. "We pay the client premiums against a controlling interest in his estate, and we guarantee that he'll die."
"We can't lose. And if he becomes famous in his lifetime he can buy out."
"Terrific. Let's stop this before I laugh myself to death."
"Yeah."
She was silent for a long time. My own mind was racing efficiently, but the transmission seemed to be blown—it wouldn't go anywhere. Finally she got up and turned off the music machine, which had been whining softly ever since the tape ended. It made a loud click.
"Norrey's got some land in Prince Edward Island," she said, not meeting my eyes. "There's a house."
I tried to head her off with the punchline from the old joke about the kid shoveling out the elephant cage in the circus whose father offers to take him back and set him up with a decent job. "What? And leave show business?"
"Screw show business," she said softly. "If I went to PEI now, maybe I could get the land cleared and plowed in time to get a garden in." Her expression changed. "How about you?"
"Me? I'll be okay. TDT asked me to come back."
"That was six months ago."
"They asked again. Last week."
"And you said no. Moron."
"Maybe so, maybe so."
"The whole damn thing was a waste of time. All that time. All that energy. All that work. I might as well have been farming in PEI—by now the soil'd be starting to bear well. What a waste, Charlie. What a stinking waste."
"No, I don't think so, Shara. It sounds glib to say that 'nothing is wasted,' but—well, it's like that dance you just did. Maybe you can't beat gravity—but it surely is a beautiful thing to try."
"Yeah, I know. Remember the Light Brigade. Remember the Alamo. They tried." She laughed bitterly.
"Yes, and so did Jesus of Nazareth. Did you do it for material reward, or because it needed doing? If nothing else we now have several hundred thousand meters of the most magnificent dance recordings on tape, commercial value zero, real value incalculable, and by me that is no waste. It's over now, and we'll both go do the next thing, but it was not a waste." I discovered that I was shouting, and stopped.
She closed her mouth. After a while she tried a smile. "You're right, Charlie. It wasn't a waste. I'm a better dancer than I ever was."
"Damn right. You've transcended choreography."
She smiled ruefully. "Yeah. Even Norrey thinks it's a dead end."
"It is not a dead end. There's more to poetry that haiku and sonnets. Dancers don't have to be robots, delivering memorized lines with their bodies."
"They do if they want to make a living."
"We'll try it again in a few years. Maybe they'll be ready then."
"Sure. Let me get us some drinks."
I slept with her that night, for the first and last time. In the morning I broke down the set in the living room while she packed. I promised to write. I promised to come and visit when I could. I carried her bags down to the car, and stowed them inside. I kissed her and waved goodbye. I went looking for a drink, and at four o'clock the next morning a mugger decided I looked drunk enough and I broke his jaw, his nose and two ribs, and then sat down on him and cried. On Monday morning I showed up at the studio with my hat in my hand and a mouth like a bus-station ashtray and crawled back into my old job. Norrey didn't ask any questions. What with rising food prices, I gave up eating anything but bourbon, and in six months I was fired. It went like that for a long time.
I never did write to her. I kept getting bogged down after "Dear Shara . . . ."
When I got to the point of selling my video equipment for booze, a relay clicked somewhere and I took stock of myself. The stuff was all the life I had left, and so I went to the local AA instead of the pawnshop and got sober. After a while my soul got numb, and I stopped flinching when I woke up. A hundred times I began to wipe the tapes I still had of Shara—she had copies of her own—but in the end I could not. From time to time I wondered how she was doing, and I could not bear to find out. If Norrey heard anything, she didn't tell me about it. She even tried to get me my job back a third time, but it was hopeless. Reputation can be a terrible thing once you've blown it. I was lucky to land a job with an educational TV station in New Brunswick.
It was a long couple of years.
Vidphones were coming out by 1995, and I had breadboarded one of my own without the knowledge or consent of the phone company, which I still hated more than anything. When the peanut bulb I had replaced the damned bell with started glowing softly off and on one evening in June, I put the receiver on the audio pickup and energized the tube, in case the caller was also equipped. "Hello?"
She was. When Shara's face appeared, I got a cold cube of fear in the pit of my stomach, because I had quit seeing her face everywhere when I quit drinking, and I had been thinking lately of hitting the sauce again. When I blinked and she was still there, I felt a very little better and tried to speak. It didn't work.
"Hello, Charlie. It's been a long time."
The second time it worked. "Seems like yesterday. Somebody else's yesterday."
"Yes, it does. It took me days to find you. Norrey's in Paris, and no one else knew where you'd gone."
"Yeah. How's farming?"
"I . . . I've put that away, Charlie. It's even more creative than dancing, but it's not the same."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Working."
"Dancing?"
"Yes. Charlie, I need you. I mean, I have a job for you. I need your cameras and your eye."
"Never mind the qualifications. Any kind of need will do. Where are you? When's the next plane there? Which cameras do I pack?"
"New York, an hour from now, and none of them. I didn't mean 'your cameras' literally unless you're using GLX-5000s and a Hamilton Board lately."
I whistled. It hurt my mouth. "Not on my budget. Besides, I'm old-fashioned—I like to hold 'em with my hands."
"For this job, you'll use a Hamilton, and it'll be a twenty-input Masterchrome, brand new."
"You grew poppies on that farm? Or just struck diamonds with the roto-tiller?"
"You'll be getting paid by Bryce Carrington."
I blinked.
"Now will you catch that plane so I can tell you about it? The New Age, ask for the Presidential Suite."
"The hell with the plane, I'll walk. Quicker." I hung up.
According to the Time magazine in my dentist's waiting room, Bryce Carrington was the genius who had become a multibillionaire by convincing a number of giants of industry to underwrite Skyfac, the great orbiting complex that kicked the bottom out of the crystals market—and seventy-'leven other markets besides. As I recalled the story, some rare poliolike disease had wasted both his legs and put him in a wheelchair. But the legs had lost strength, not function—in lessened gravity they worked well enough. So he created Skyfac, established mining crews on Luna to supply it with cheap raw materials, and spent most of his time in orbit under reduced gravity. His picture made him look like a reasonably successful author (as opposed to writer). Other than that I knew nothing about him. I paid little attention to news and none at all to space news.
The New Age was the hotel in New York in those days, built on the ruins of the Sheraton. Ultraefficient security, bulletproof windows, carpet thicker than the outside air, and a lobby of an architectural persuasion that John D. MacDonald once called "Early Dental Plate." It stank of money. I was glad I'd made the effort to locate a necktie, and I wished I'd shined my shoes. An incredible man blocked my way as I came in through the airlock. He moved and was built like the toughest, fastest bouncer I ever saw, and he dressed and acted like God's butler. He said his name was Perry, as if he didn't expect me to believe it. He asked if he could help me, as though he didn't think so.
"Yes, Perry. Would you mind lifting up one of your feet?"
"Why?"
"I'll bet twenty dollars you've shined your soles."
Half his mouth smiled, and he didn't move an inch. "Whom did you wish to see?"
"Shara Drummond."
"Not registered."
"The Presidential Suite."
"Oh." Light dawned. "Mister Carrington's lady. You should have said so. Wait here, please." While he phoned to verify that I was expected, keeping his eye on me and his hand near his pocket, I swallowed my heart and rearranged my face. So that was how it was. All right then. That was how it was.
Perry came back and gave me the little button-transmitter that would let me walk the corridors of the New Age without being cut down by automatic laser-fire, and explained carefully that it would blow a largish hole in me if I attempted to leave the building without returning it. From his manner I gathered that I had just skipped four grades in social standing. I thanked him, though I'm damned if I know why.
I followed the green fluorescent arrows that appeared on the bulbless ceiling, and came after a long and scenic walk to the Presidential Suite. Shara was waiting at the door, in something like an angel's pajamas. It made all that big body look delicate. "Hello, Charlie."
I was jovial and hearty. "Hi, babe. Swell joint. How've you been keeping yourself?"
"I haven't been."
"Well, how's Carrington been keeping you, then?" Steady, boy.
"Come in, Charlie."
I went in. It looked like where the Queen stayed when she was in town, and I'm sure she enjoyed it. You could have landed an airplane in the living room without waking anyone in the bedroom. It had two pianos. Only one fireplace, barely big enough to barbecue a buffalo—you have to scrimp somewhere, I guess. Roger Kellaway was on the quadio, and for a wild moment I thought he was actually in the suite, playing some unseen third piano. So this was how it was.
"Can I get you something, Charlie?"
"Oh, sure. Hash Oil, Citrolli Supreme. Dom Perignon for the pipe."
Without cracking a smile she went to a cabinet that looked like a midget cathedral, and produced precisely what I had ordered. I kept my own features impassive and lit up. The bubbles tickled my throat, and the rush was exquisite. I felt myself relaxing, and when we had passed the narghile's mouthpiece a few times I felt her relax. We looked at each other then—really looked at each other—then at the room around us and then at each other again. Simultaneously we roared with laughter, a laughter that blew all the wealth out of the room and let in richness. Her laugh was the same whooping, braying belly laugh I remembered so well, an unselfconscious and lusty laugh, and it reassured me tremendously. I was so relieved I couldn't stop laughing myself, and that kept her going, and just as we might have stopped she pursed her lips and blew a stuttered arpeggio. There's an old audio recording called the Spike Jones Laughing Record, where the tuba player tries to play "The Flight Of The Bumblebee" and falls down laughing, and the whole band breaks up and horselaughs for a full two minutes, and every time they run out of air the tuba player tries another flutter and roars and they all break up again, and once when Shara was blue I bet her ten dollars that she couldn't listen to that record without at least giggling and I won. When I understood now that she was quoting it, I shuddered and dissolved into great whoops of new laughter, and a minute later we had reached the stage where we literally laughed ourselves out of our chairs and lay on the floor in agonies of mirth, weakly pounding the floor and howling. I take that laugh out of my memory now and then and rerun it—but not often, for such records deteriorate drastically with play.
At last we dopplered back down to panting grins, and I helped her to her feet.
"What a perfectly dreadful place," I said, still chuckling.
She glanced around and shuddered. "Oh God, it is, Charlie. It must be awful to need this much front."
"For a horrid while I thought you did."
She sobered, and met my eyes. "Charlie, I wish I could resent that. In a way I do need it."
My eyes narrowed. "Just what do you mean?"
"I need Bryce Carrington."
"This time you can trot out the qualifiers. How do you need him?"
"I need his money," she cried.
How can you relax and tense up at the same time?
"Oh, damn it, Shara! Is that how you're going to get to dance? Buy your way in? What does a critic go for, these days?"
"Charlie, stop it. I need Carrington to get seen. He's going to rent me a hall, that's all."
"If that's all, let's get out of this dump right now. I can bor—get enough cash to rent you any hall in the world, and I'm just as willing to risk my money."
"Can you get me Skyfac?"
"Uh?"
I couldn't for the life of me imagine why she proposed to go to Skyfac to dance. Why not Antarctica?
"Shara, you know even less about space than I do, but you must know that a satellite broadcast doesn't have to be made from a satellite?"
"Idiot. It's the setting I want."
I thought about it. "Moon'd be better, visually. Mountains. Light. Contrast."
"The visual aspect is secondary. I don't want one-sixth gee, Charlie. I want zero gravity."
My mouth hung open.
"And I want you to be my video man."
God, she was a rare one. What I needed then was to sit there with my mouth open and think for several minutes. She let me do just that, waiting patiently for me to work it all out.
"Weight isn't a verb anymore, Charlie," she said finally. "That dance ended on the assertion that you can't beat gravity—you said so yourself. Well, that statement is incorrect—obsolete. The dance of the twenty-first century will have to acknowledge that."
"And it's just what you need to make it. A new kind of dance for a new kind of dancer. Unique. It'll catch the public eye, and you should have the field entirely to yourself for years. I like it, Shara. I like it. But can you pull it off?"
"I thought about what you said: that you can't beat gravity but it's beautiful to try. It stayed in my head for months, and then one day I was visiting a neighbor with a TV and I saw newsreels of the crew working on Skyfac Two. I was up all night thinking, and the next morning I came up to the States and got in Skyfac One. I've been up there for nearly a year, getting next to Carrington. I can do it, Charlie, I can make it work." There was a ripple in her jaw that I had seen before—when she'd told me off in Le Maintenant. It was a ripple of determination.
Still I frowned. "With Carrington's backing."
Her eyes left mine. "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
"What does he charge?"
She failed to answer, for long enough to answer me. In that instant I began believing in God again, for the first time in years, just to be able to hate Him.
But I kept my mouth shut. She was old enough to manage her own finances. The price of a dream gets higher every year. Hell, I'd half expected it from the moment she'd called me.
But only half.
"Charlie, don't just sit there with your face all knotted up. Say something. Cuss me out, call me a whore, something."
"Nuts. You be your own conscience; I have trouble enough being my own. You want to dance, you've got a patron. So now you've got a video man."
I hadn't intended to say that last sentence at all.
Strangely, it almost seemed to disappoint her at first. But then she relaxed and smiled. "Thank you, Charlie. Can you get out of whatever you're doing right away?"
"I'm working for an educational station in Shediac. I even got to shoot some dance footage. A dancing bear from the London Zoo. The amazing thing was how well he danced." She grinned. "I can get free."
"I'm glad. I don't think I could pull this off without you."
"I'm working for you. Not for Carrington."
"All right."
"Where is the great man, anyway? Scuba diving in the bathtub?"
"No," came a quiet voice from the doorway. "I've been sky diving in the lobby."
His wheelchair was a mobile throne. He wore a five-hundred-dollar suit the color of strawberry ice cream, a powder-blue turtleneck and one gold earring. The shoes were genuine leather. The watch was the newfangled bandless kind that literally tells you the time. He wasn't tall enough for her, and his shoulders were absurdly broad, although the suit tried to deny both. His eyes were like twin blueberries. His smile was that of a shark wondering which part will taste best. I wanted to crush his head between two boulders.
Shara was on her feet. "Bryce, this is Charles Armstead. I told you. . . ."
"Oh yes. The video chap." He rolled forward and extended an impeccably manicured hand. "I'm Bryce Carrington, Armstead."
I remained in my seat, hands in my lap. "Ah yes. The rich chap."
One eyebrow rose an urbane quarter inch. "Oh my. Another rude one. Well, if you're as good as Shara says you are, you're entitled."
"I'm rotten."
The smile faded. "Let's stop fencing, Armstead. I don't expect manners from creative people, but I have far more significant contempt than yours available if I need any. Now I'm tired of this damned gravity and I've had a rotten day testifying for a friend and it looks like they're going to recall me tomorrow. Do you want the job or don't you?"
He had me there. I did. "Yeah."
"All right, then. Your room is 2772. We'll be going up to Skyfac in two days. Be here at eight A.M."
"I'll want to talk with you about what you'll be needing, Charlie," Shara said. "Give me a call tomorrow."
I whirled to face her, and she flinched from my eyes.
Carrington failed to notice. "Yes, make a list of your requirements by tonight, so it can go up with us. Don't scrimp—if you don't fetch it, you'll do without. Good night, Armstead."
I faced him. "Good night, Mr. Carrington." Suh.
He turned toward the narghile, and Shara hurried to refill the chamber and bowl. I turned away hastily and made for the door. My leg hurt so much I nearly fell on the way, but I set my jaw and made it. When I reached the door I said to myself, you will now open the door and go through it, and then I spun on my heel. "Carrington!"
He blinked, surprised to discover I still existed. "Yes?"
"Are you aware that she doesn't love you in the slightest? Does that matter to you in any way?" My voice was high, and my fists were surely clenched.
"Oh," he said, and then again, "Oh. So that's what it is. I didn't think success alone merited that much contempt." He put down the mouthpiece and folded his fingers together. "Let me tell you something, Armstead. No one has ever loved me, to my knowledge. This suite does not love me." His voice took on human feeling for the first time. "But it is mine. Now get out."
I opened my mouth to tell him where to put his job, and then I saw Shara's face, and the pain in it suddenly made me deeply ashamed. I left at once, and when the door closed behind me I vomited on a rug that was worth slightly less than a Hamilton Masterchrome board. I was sorry then that I'd worn a necktie.
The trip to Pike's Peak Spaceport, at least was aesthetically pleasurable. I enjoy air travel, gliding among stately clouds, watching the rolling procession of mountains and plains, vast jigsaws of farmland, and intricate mosaics of suburbia unfolding below.
But the jump to Skyfac in Carrington's personal shuttle, That First Step, might as well have been an old Space Commando rerun. I know they can't put portholes in space ships—but dammit, a shipboard video relay conveys no better resolution, color values, or presence than you get on your living room tube. The only differences are that the stars don't "move" to give the illusion of travel, and there's no director editing the POV to give you dramatically interesting shots.
Aesthetically speaking. The experiential difference is that they do not, while you are watching the Space Commando sell hemorrhoid remedies, trap you into a couch, batter you with thunders, make you weigh better than half a megagram for an unreasonably long time, and then drop you off the edge of the world into weightlessness. Body fluids began rising into my upper half: my ears sang, my nose flooded, and I "blushed" deep red. I had been prepared far nausea, but what I got was even more shocking: the sudden, unprecedented, total absence of pain in my leg. Shara got the nausea for both of us, barely managing to deploy her dropsickness bag in time. Carrington unstrapped and administered an antinausea injection with sure movements. It seemed to take forever to hit her, but when it did there was an enormous change—color and strength returned rapidly, and she was apparently fully recovered by the time the pilot announced that we were commencing docking and would everyone please strap in and shut up? I half expected Carrington to bark manners into him, but apparently the industrial magnate was not that sort of fool. He shut up and strapped himself down.
My leg didn't hurt in the slightest. Not at all.
The Skyfac complex looked like a disorderly heap of bicycle tires and beach balls of various sizes. The one our pilot made for was more like a tractor tire. We matched course, became its axle, and matched spin, and the damned thing grew a spoke that caught us square in the airlock. The airlock was "overhead" of our couches, but we entered and left it feet first. A few yards into the spoke, the direction we traveled became "down," and handholds became a ladder. Weight increased with every step, but even when we had emerged into a rather large cubical compartment it was far less than Earth normal. Nonetheless my leg resumed nibbling at me.
The room tried to be a classic reception room, high-level ("Please be seated. His Majesty will see you shortly"), but the low gee and the p-suits racked along two walls spoiled the effect. Unlike the Space Commando's armor, a real pressure suit looked like nothing so much as a people-shaped baggie, and they look particularly silly in repose. A young dark-haired man in tweed rose from behind a splendidly gadgeted desk and smiled. "Good to see you, Mr. Carrington. I hope you had a pleasant jump."
"Fine thanks, Tom. You remember Shara, of course. This is Charles Armstead. Tom McGillicuddy." We both displayed our teeth and said we were delighted to meet one another. I could see that beneath the pleasantries, McGillicuddy was upset about something.
"Nils and Mr. Longmire are waiting in your office, sir. There's . . . there's been another sighting."
"God damn it," Carrington began, and cut himself off. I stared at him. The full force of my best sarcasm had failed to anger this man. "All right. Take care of my guests while I go hear what Longmire has to say." He started for the door, moving like a beach ball in slow motion but under his own power. "Oh yes—the Step is loaded to the gun'ls with bulky equipment, Tom. Have her brought round to the cargo bays. Store the equipment in Six." He left, looking worried. McGillicuddy activated his desk and gave the necessary orders.
"What's going on, Tom?" Shara asked when he was through.
He looked at me before replying. "Pardon my asking, Mr. Armstead, but are you a newsman?"
"Charlie. No, I'm not. I am a video man, but I work for Shara."
"Mmmm. Well, you'll hear about it sooner or later. About two weeks ago an object appeared within the orbit of Neptune, just appeared out of nowhere. There were . . . certain other anomalies. It stayed put for half a day and then vanished again. The Space Command slapped a hush on it, but it's common knowledge on board Skyfac."
"And the thing has appeared again?" Shara asked.
"Just beyond the orbit of Saturn."
I was only mildly interested. No doubt there was an explanation for the phenomenon, and since Isaac Asimov wasn't around I would doubtless never understand a word of it. Most of us gave up on intelligent nonhuman life when Project Ozma came up empty. "Little green men, I suppose. Can you show us the Lounge, Tom? I understand it's just like the one we'll be working in."
He seemed to welcome this change of subject. "Sure thing."
McGillicuddy led us through a p-door opposite the one Carrington had used, through long halls whose floors curved up ahead of and behind us. Each was outfitted differently, each was full of busy, purposeful people, and each reminded me somehow of the lobby of the New Age, or perhaps of the old movie 2001. Futuristic Opulence, so understated as to fairly shriek. Wall Street lifted bodily into orbit—the clocks were on Wall Street time. I tried to make myself believe that cold, empty space lay a short distance away in any direction, but it was impossible. I decided it was a good thing spacecraft didn't have portholes—once he got used to the low gravity, a man might forget and open one to throw out a cigar.
I studied McGillicuddy as we walked. He was immaculate in every respect, from necktie knot to nail polish, and he wore no jewelry at all. His hair was short and black, his beard inhibited, and his eyes surprisingly warm in a professionally sterile face. I wondered what he had sold his soul for. I hoped he had gotten his price.
We had to descend two levels to get to the Lounge. The gravity on the upper level was kept at one-sixth normal, partly for the convenience of the Lunar personnel who were Skyfac's only regular commuters, and mostly (of course) for the convenience of Carrington. But descending brought a subtle increase in weight, to perhaps a fifth or a quarter normal. My leg complained bitterly, but I found to my surprise that I preferred the pain to its absence. It's a little scary when an old friend goes away like that.
The Lounge was a larger room than I had expected, quite big enough for our purposes. It encompassed all three levels, and one whole wall was an immense video screen, across which stars wheeled dizzily, joined with occasional regularity by a slice of mother Terra. The floor was crowded with chairs and tables in various groupings, but I could see that, stripped, it would provide Shara with entirely adequate room to dance. From long habit my feet began to report on the suitability of the floor as a dancing surface. Then I remembered how little use the floor was liable to get.
"Well," Shara said to me with a smile, "this is what home will look like for the next six months. The Ring Two Lounge is identical to this one."
"Six?" McGillicuddy said. "Not a chance."
"What do you mean?" Shara and I said together.
He blinked at our combined volume. "Well, you'd probably be good for that long, Charlie. But Shara's already had a year of low gee, while she was in the typing pool."
"So what?"
"Look, you expect to be in free fall for long periods of time, if I understand this correctly?"
"Twelve hours a day," Shara agreed.
He grimaced. "Shara I hate to say this . . . but I'll be surprised if you last a month. A body designed for a one-gee environment doesn't work properly in zero gee."
"But it will adapt, won't it?"
He laughed mirthlessly. "Sure. That's why we rotate all personnel Earthside every fourteen months. Your body will adapt. One way. No return. Once you've fully adapted, returning to Earth will stop your heart—if some other major systemic failure doesn't occur first. Look, you were just Earthside for three days—did you have any chest pains? Dizziness? Bowel trouble? Dropsickness on the way up?"
"All of the above," she admitted.
"There you go. You were close to the nominal fourteen-month limit when you left. And your body will adapt even faster under no gravity at all. The successful free-fall endurance record of about eighteen months was set by a Skyfac construction gang with bad deadline problems—and they hadn't spent a year in one-sixth gee first, and they weren't straining their hearts the way you will be. Hell, there are four men in Luna now, from the original mining team, who will never see Earth again. Eight of their teammates tried. Don't you two know anything about space? Didn't Carrington tell you?"
I had wondered why Carrington had gone to the trouble of having our preflight physicals waived.
"But I've got to have at least four months. Four months of solid work, every day. I must." She was dismayed, but fighting hard for control.
McGillicuddy started to shake his head, and then thought better of it. His warm eyes were studying Shara's face. I knew exactly what he was thinking, and I liked him for it.
He was thinking, How to tell a lovely lady her dearest dream is hopeless?
He didn't know the half of it. I knew how much Shara had already—irrevocably—invested in this dream, and something in me screamed.
And then I saw her jaw ripple and I dared to hope.
Doctor Panzella was a wiry old man with eyebrows like two fuzzy caterpillars. He wore a tight-fitting jump-suit which would not foul a p-suit's seals should he have to get into one in a hurry. His shoulder-length hair, which should have been a mane on that great skull, was clipped securely back against a sudden absence of gravity. A cautious man. To employ an obsolete metaphor, he was a suspender-and-belt type. He looked Shara over, ran tests on the spot, and gave her just under a month and a half. Shara said some things. I said some things. McGillicuddy said some things. Panzella shrugged, made further, very careful tests, and reluctantly cut loose of the suspenders. Two months. Not a day over. Possibly less, depending on subsequent monitoring of her body's reactions to extended weightlessness. Then a year Earthside before risking it again. Shara seemed satisfied.
I didn't see how we could do it.
McGillicuddy had assured us that it would take Shara at least a month simply to learn to handle herself competently in zero gee, much less dance. Her familiarity with one-sixth gee would, he predicted, be a liability rather than an asset. Then figure three weeks of choreography and rehearsal, a week of taping and just maybe we could broadcast one dance before Shara had to return to Earth. Not good enough. She and I had calculated that we would need three successive shows, each well received, to make a big enough dent in the dance world for Shara to squeeze into it. A year was far too big a spacing to be effective—and who knew how soon Carrington might tire of her? So I hollered at Panzella.
"Mr. Armstead," he said hotly, "I am specifically contractually forbidden to allow this young lady to commit suicide." He grimaced sourly. "I'm told it's terrible public relations."
"Charlie, it's okay," Shara insisted. "I can fit in three dances. We may lose some sleep, but we can do it."
"I once told a man nothing was impossible. He asked me if I could ski through a revolving door. You haven't got . . ."
My brain slammed into hyperdrive, thought about things, kicked itself in the ass a few times, and returned to realtime in time to hear my mouth finish without a break: ". . . much choice, though. Okay Tom, have that damned Ring Two Lounge cleaned out, I want it naked and spotless and have somebody paint over that damned video wall, the same shade as the other three and I mean the same. Shara, get out of those clothes and into your leotard. Doctor, we'll be seeing you in twelve hours; quit gaping and move, Tom—we'll be going over there at once; where the hell are my cameras?"
McGillicuddy spluttered.
"Get me a torch crew—I'll want holes cut through the walls, cameras behind them, one-way glass, six locations, a room adjacent to the Lounge for a mixer console the size of a jetliner cockpit, and bolt a Norelco coffee machine next to the chair. I'll need another room for editing, complete privacy and total darkness, size of any efficiency kitchen, another Norelco."
McGillicuddy finally drowned me out. "Mister Armstead, this is the Main Ring of the Skyfac One complex, the administrative offices of one of the wealthiest corporations in existence. If you think this whole Ring is going to stand on its head for you. . . ."
So we brought the problem to Carrington. He told McGillicuddy that henceforth Ring Two was ours, as well as any assistance whatsoever that we requested. He looked rather distracted. McGillicuddy started to tell him by how many weeks all this would put off the opening of the Skyfac Two complex. Carrington replied very quietly that he could add and subtract quite well, thank you, and McGillicuddy got white and quiet.
I'll give Carrington that much. He gave us a free hand.
Panzella ferried over to Skyfac Two with us. We were chauffeured by lean-jawed astronaut types, on vehicles looking for all the world like pregnant broomsticks. It was as well that we had the doctor with us—Shara fainted on the way over. I nearly did myself, and I'm sure that broomstick has my thigh-prints on it yet. Falling through space is a scary experience the first time. Some people never get used to it. Most people. Shara responded splendidly once we had her inboard again, and fortunately her dropsickness did not return. Nausea can be a nuisance in free fall, a disaster in a p-suit. By the time my cameras and mixer had arrived, she was on her feet and sheepish. And while I browbeat a sweating crew of borrowed techs into installing them faster than was humanly possible, Shara began learning how to move in zero gee.
We were ready for the first taping in three weeks.