Living quarters and minimal life support were rigged for us in Ring Two so that we could work around the clock if we chose, but we spent nearly half of our nominal "off-hours" in Skyfac One. Shara was required to spend half of three days a week there with Carrington, and spent a sizable portion of her remaining nominal sack time out in space, in a p-suit. At first it was a conscious attempt to overcome her gut-level fear of all that emptiness. Soon it became her meditation, her retreat, her artistic reverie—an attempt to gain from contemplation of cold black depths enough insight into the meaning of extraterrestrial existence to dance of it.
I spent my own time arguing with engineers and electricians and technicians and a damn fool union legate who insisted that the second lounge, finished or not, belonged to the hypothetical future crew and administrative personnel. Securing his permission to work there wore the lining off my throat and the insulation off my nerves. Far too many nights I spent slugging instead of sleeping. Minor example: Every interior wall in the whole damned second Ring was painted the identical shade of turquoise—and they couldn't duplicate it to cover that godforsaken video wall in the Lounge. It was McGillicuddy who saved me from gibbering apoplexy—at his suggestion I washed off the third latex job, unshipped the outboard camera that fed the wall-screen, brought the camera inboard and fixed it to scan an interior wall in an adjoining room. That made us friends again.
It was all like that: jury-rig, improvise, file to fit and paint to cover. If a camera broke down, I spent sleep time talking with off-shift engineers, finding out what parts in stock could be adapted. It was simply too expensive to have anything shipped up from Earth's immense gravity well, and Luna didn't have what I needed.
At that, Shara worked harder than I did. A body must totally recoordinate itself to function in the absence of weight—she literally had to forget everything she had ever known or learned about dance and acquire a whole new set of skills. This turned out to be even harder than we had expected. McGillicuddy had been right: what Shara had learned in her year of one-sixth gee was an exaggerated attempt to retain terrestrial patterns of coordination. Rejecting them altogether was actually easier for me.
But I couldn't keep up with her—I had to abandon any thought of handheld camera work and base my plans solely on the six fixed cameras. Fortunately GLX-5000s have a ball-and-socket mount: even behind that damned one-way glass I had about forty degrees of traverse on each one. Learning to coordinate all six simultaneously on the Hamilton Board did a truly extraordinary thing to me: It lifted me that one last step to unity with my art. I found that I could learn to be aware of all six monitors with my mind's eye, to perceive almost spherically, to—not share my attention among the six—to encompass them all, seeing like a six-eyed creature from many angles at once. My mind's eye became holographic, my awareness multilayered. I began to really understand, for the first time, three-dimensionality.
It was that fourth dimension that was the kicker. It took Shara two days to decide that she could not possibly become proficient enough in free-fall maneuvering to sustain a half-hour piece in the time required. So she rethought her work plan too, adapting her choreography to the demands of her situation. She put in six hard days under normal Earth weight.
And for her, too, the effort was that one last step toward apotheosis.
On Monday of the fourth week we began taping Liberation.
Establishing shot:
A great turquoise box, seen from within. Dimensions unknown, but the color somehow lends an impression of immensity, of vast distances. Against the far wall a swinging pendulum attests that this is a standard-gravity environment; but the pendulum swings so slowly and is so featureless in construction that it is impossible to estimate its size and so extrapolate that of the room.
Because of this trompe-l'oeil effect, the room seems rather smaller than it really is when the camera pulls back and we are wrenched into proper perspective by the appearance of Shara, inert, face down on the floor, her head toward us.
She wears beige leotard and tights. Hair the color of fine mahogany is pulled back into a loose ponytail which fans across one shoulder blade. She does not appear to breathe. She does not appear to live.
Music begins. The aging Mahavishnu, on obsolete nylon acoustic, establishes a minor E in no hurry at all. A pair of small candles in simple brass holders appear inset on either side of the room. They are larger than life, though small beside Shara. Both are unlit.
Her body . . . there is no word. It does not move, in the sense of motor activity. One might say that a ripple passes through it, save that the motion is clearly all outward from her center. She swells as if the first breath of life were being taken by her whole body at once. She lives.
The twin wicks begin to glow, oh, softly. The music takes on quiet urgency.
Shara raises her head to us. Her eyes focus somewhere beyond the camera yet short of infinity. Her body writhes, undulates, and the glowing wicks are coals (that this brightening takes place in slow motion is not apparent).
A violent contraction raises her to a crouch, spilling the ponytail across her shoulder. Mahavishnu begins a cyclical cascade of runs, in increasing tempo. Long questing tongues of yellow-orange flame begin to blossom downward from the twin wicks, whose coals are turning to blue.
The contraction's release flings her to her feet. The twin skirts of flame about the wicks curl up over themselves, writhing furiously, to become conventional candleflames, flickering now in normal time. Tablas, tambouras, and a bowed string bass join the guitar, and they segue into an energetic interplay around a minor seventh that keeps trying, fruitlessly, to find resolution in the sixth. The candles stay in perspective, but dwindle in size until they vanish.
Shara begins to explore the possibilities of motion. First she moves only perpendicular to the camera's line of sight, exploring that dimension. Every motion of arms or legs or head is clearly seen to be a defiance of gravity—of a force as inexorable as radioactive decay, as entropy itself. The most violent surges of energy succeed only for a time—the outflung leg falls, the outthrust arm drops. She must struggle or fall. She pauses in thought.
Her hands and arms reach out toward the camera, and at the instant they do we cut to a view from the lefthand wall. Seen from the right side, she reaches out into this new dimension, and soon begins to move in it. (As she moves backward out of the camera's field, its entire image shifts right on our screen, butted out of the way by the incoming image of a second camera, which picks her up as the first loses her without a visible seam.)
The new dimension too fails to fulfill Shara's desire for freedom from gravity. Combining the two, however, presents so many permutations of movement that for a while, intoxicated, she flings herself into experimentation. In the next fifteen minutes Shara's entire background and history in dance are recapitulated, in a blinding tour de force that incorporates elements of jazz, Modern, and the more graceful aspects of Olympic-level mat gymnastics. Five cameras come into play, singly and in pairs on splitscreen, as the "bag of tricks" amassed in a lifetime of study and improvisation are rediscovered and performed by a superbly trained and versatile body, in a pyrotechnic display that would shout of joy if her expression did not remain aloof, almost arrogant. This is the offering, she seems to say, which you would not accept. This, by itself, was not good enough.
And it is not. Even in its raging energy and total control her body returns again and again to the final compromise of mere erectness, that last simple refusal to fall.
Clamping her jaw, she works into a series of leaps, ever longer, ever higher. She seems at last to hang suspended for full seconds, straining to fly. When, inevitably, she falls, she falls reluctantly, only at the last possible instant tucking and rolling back onto her feet. The musicians are in a crescendoing frenzy. We see her now only with the single original camera, and the twin candles have returned, small but burning fiercely.
The leaps begin to diminish in intensity and height, and she takes longer to build to each one. She has been dancing flat out for nearly twenty minutes; as the candle flames begin to wane, so does her strength. At last she retreats to a place beneath the indifferent pendulum, gathers herself with a final desperation, and races forward toward us. She reaches incredible speed in a short space, hurls herself into a double roll and bounds up into the air off one foot, seeming a full second later to push off against empty air for a few more centimeters of height. Her body goes rigid, her eyes and mouth gape wide, the flames reach maximum brilliance, the music peaks with the tortured wail of an electric guitar and—she falls, barely snapping into a roll in time, rising only as far as a crouch. She holds there for a long moment, and gradually her head and shoulders slump, defeated, toward the floor. The candle flames draw in upon themselves in a curious way and appear to go out. The string bass saws on alone, modulating down to D.
Muscle by muscle, Shara's body gives up the struggle. The air seems to tremble around the wicks of the candles, which have now grown nearly as tall as her crouching form.
Shara lifts her face to the camera with evident effort. Her face is anguished, her eyes nearly shut. A long beat.
All at once she opens her eyes wide, squares her shoulders, and contracts. It is the most exquisite and total contraction ever dreamed of, filmed in realtime but seeming almost to be in slow motion. She holds it. Mahavishnu comes back in on guitar, building in increasing tempo from a downtuned bass string to a D chord with a flatted fourth. Shara holds.
We shift for the first time to an overhead camera, looking down on her from a great height. As Mahavishnu's picking speed increases to the point where the chord seems a sustained drone, Shara slowly lifts her head, still holding the contraction, until she is staring directly up at us. She poises there for an eternity, like a spring wound to the bursting point. . .
. . . and explodes upward toward us, rising higher and faster than she possibly can in a soaring flight that is slow motion now, coming closer and closer until her hands disappear to either side and her face fills the screen, flanked by two candles which have bloomed into gouts of yellow flame in an instant. The guitar and bass are submerged in an orchestra.
Almost at once she whirls away from us, and the POV switches to the original camera, on which we see her fling herself down ten meters to the floor, reversing her attitude in mid-flight and twisting. She comes out of her roll in an absolutely flat trajectory that takes her the length of the room. She hits the far wall with a crash audible even over the music, shattering the still pendulum. Her thighs soak up the kinetic energy and then release it, and once again she is racing toward us, hair streaming straight out behind her, a broad smile of triumph growing larger on the screen.
In the next five minutes all six cameras vainly try to track her as she caroms around the immense room like a hummingbird trying to batter its way out of a cage using the walls, floor and ceiling the way a jai alai master does, existing in three dimensions. Gravity is defeated. The basic assumption of all dance is transcended.
Shara is transformed.
She comes to rest at last at vertcal center in the forefront of the cube, arms-legs-fingers-toes-face straining outward, her body turning gently end over end. All four cameras that bear on her join in a four-way splitscreen, the orchestra resolves into its final E major, and—fade out.
I had neither the time nor the equipment to create the special effects that Shara wanted. So I found ways to warp reality to my need. The first candle segment was a twinned shot of a candle being blown out from above—in ultraslow motion, and in reverse. The second segment with a simple recording of linear reality. I had lit the candle, started taping—and had the Ring's spin killed. A candle behaves oddly in zero gee. The low-density combustion gases do not rise up from the flame, allowing air to reach it from beneath. The flame does not go out: it becomes dormant. Restore gravity within a minute or so, and it blooms back to life again. All I did was monkey with speeds a bit to match in with the music and Shara's dance. I got the idea from Harry Stein, Skyfac's construction foreman, who was helping me design things Shara would need for the next dance.
I piped it to the video wall in the Ring One Lounge, and everyone in Skyfac who could cut work crowded in for the broadcast. They saw exactly what was being sent out over worldwide satellite hookup— (Carrington had arranged twenty-five minutes without commercial interruption) almost a full half second before the world did.
I spent the broadcast in the Communications Room, chewing my fingernails. But it went without a hitch, and I slapped my board dead and made it to the Lounge in time to see the last half of the standing ovation. Shara stood before the screen, Carrington sitting beside her, and I found the difference in their expressions instructive. Her face showed no embarrassment or modesty. She had had faith in herself throughout, had approved this tape for broadcast—she was aware, with that incredible detachment of which so few artists are capable, that the wild applause was only what she deserved. But her face showed that she was deeply surprised—and deeply grateful—to be given what she deserved.
Carrington, on the other hand, registered a triumph strangely admixed with relief. He too had had faith in Shara, and had backed it with a large investment—but his faith was that of a businessman in a gamble he believes will pay off, and as I watched his eyes and the glisten of sweat on his forehead, I realized that no businessman ever takes an expensive gamble without worrying that it may be the fiasco that will begin the loss of his only essential commodity: face.
Seeing his kind of triumph next to hers spoiled the moment for me, and instead of thrilling for Shara I found myself almost hating her. She spotted me, and waved me to join her before the cheering crowd, but I turned and literally flung myself from the room. I borrowed a bottle from Harry Stein and got stinking.
The next morning my head felt like a fifteen-amp fuse on a forty-amp circuit, and I seemed to be held together only by surface tension. Sudden movements frightened me. It's a long fall off that wagon, even at one-sixth gee.
The phone chimed—I hadn't had time to rewire it—and a young man I didn't know politely announced that Mr. Carrington wished to see me in his office. At once. I spoke of a barbed-wire suppository, and what Mr. Carrington might do with it, at once. Without changing expression he repeated his message and disconnected.
So I crawled into my clothes, decided to grow a beard, and left. Along the way I wondered what I had traded my independence for, and why?
Carrington's office was oppressively tasteful, but at least the lighting was subdued. Best of all, its filter system would handle smoke— the sweet musk of pot lay on the air. I accepted a macrojoint of "Maoi-Zowie" from Carrington with something approaching gratitude, and began melting my hangover.
Shara sat next to his desk, wearing a leotard and a layer of sweat. She had obviously spent the morning rehearsing for the next dance. I felt ashamed, and consequently snappish, avoiding her eyes and her hello. Panzella and McGillicuddy came in on my heels, chattering about the latest sighting of the mysterious object from deep space, which had appeared this time in the Asteroid Belt. They were arguing over whether or not it displayed signs of sentience, and I wished they'd shut up.
Carrington waited until we had all seated ourselves and lit up, then rested a hip on his desk and smiled. "Well, Tom?"
McGillicuddy beamed. "Better than we expected, sir. All the ratings agree we had about 74 percent of the world audience. . . ."
"The hell with the Nielsens," I snapped. "What did the critics say?"
McGillicuddy blinked. "Well, the general reaction so far is that Shara was a smash. The Times. . . ."
I cut him off again. "What was the less-than-general reaction?"
"Well, nothing is ever unanimous."
"Specifics. The dance press? Liz Zimmer? Migdalski?"
"Uh. Not as good. Praise yes—only a blind man could've panned that show. But guarded praise. Uh, Zimmer called it a magnificent dance spoiled by a gimmicky ending."
"And Migdalski?" I insisted.
"He headed his review, 'But What Do You Do for An Encore?'" McGillicuddy admitted. "His basic thesis was that it was a charming one-shot. But the Times. . . ."
"Thank you, Tom." Carrington said quietly. "About what we expected, isn't it, my dear? A big splash, but no one's willing to call it a tidal wave yet."
She nodded. "But they will, Bryce. The next two dances will sew it up."
Panzella spoke up. "Ms. Drummond, may I ask you why you played it the way you did? Using the null-gee interlude only as a brief adjunct to conventional dance—surely you must have expected the critics to call it gimmickry."
Shara smiled and answered. "To be honest, Doctor, I had no choice. I'm learning to use my body in free fall, but it's still a conscious effort, almost a pantomime. I need another few weeks to make it second nature, and it has to be if I'm to sustain a whole piece in it. So I dug a conventional dance out of the trunk, tacked on a five-minute ending that used every zero-gee move I knew, and found to my extreme relief that they made thematic sense together. I told Charlie my notion, and he made it work visually and dramatically— the whole business of the candles was his, and it underlined what I was trying to say better than any set we could have built."
"So you have not yet completed what you came here to do?" Panzella asked her.
"Oh, no. Not by any means. The next dance will show the world that dance is more than controlled falling. And the third . . . the third will be what this has all been for." Her face lit, became animated. "The third dance will be the one I have wanted to dance all my life. I can't entirely picture it, yet—but I know that when I become capable of dancing it, I will create it, and it will be my greatest dance."
Panzella cleared his throat. "How long will it take you?"
"Not long," she said. "I'll be ready to tape the next dance in two weeks, and I can start on the last one almost at once. With luck, I'll have it in the can before my month is up."
"Ms. Drummond," Panzella said gravely, "I'm afraid you don't have another month."
Shara went white as snow, and I half rose from my seat. Carrington looked intrigued.
"How much time?" Shara asked.
"Your latest tests have not been encouraging. I had assumed that the sustained exercise of rehearsal and practice would tend to slow your system's adaptation. But most of your work has been in total weightlessness. And I failed to realize the extent to which your body is accustomed to sustained exertion—in a terrestrial environment. There are already signs of Davis's Syndrome in—"
"How much time?"
"Two weeks. Possibly three, if you spend three separate hours a day at hard exercise in two gravities. We can arrange that by—"
"That's ridiculous." I burst out. "Don't you understand about dancers' spines? She could ruin herself in two gees."
"I've got to have four weeks," Shara said.
"Ms. Drummond, I am very sorry."
"I've got to have four weeks."
Panzella had that same look of helpless sorrow that McGillicuddy and I had had in our turn, and I was suddenly sick to death of a universe in which people had to keep looking at Shara that way. "Dammit," I roared, "she needs four weeks."
Panzella shook his shaggy head. "If she stays in zero gee for four working weeks, she may die."
Shara sprang from her chair. "Then I'll die," she cried. "I'll take that chance. I have to."
Carrington coughed. "I'm afraid I can't permit you to, darling."
She whirled on him furiously.
"This dance of yours is excellent PR for Skyfac," he said calmly, "but if it were to kill you it might boomerang, don't you think?"
Her mouth worked, and she fought desperately for control. My own head whirled. Die? Shara?
"Besides," he added, "I've grown quite fond of you."
"Then I'll stay up here in space," she burst out.
"Where? The only areas of sustained weightlessness are factories, and you're not qualified to work in one."
"Then for God's sake give me one of the new pods, the smaller spheres. Bryce, I'll give you a higher return on your investment than a factory pod, and I'll. . . ." Her voice changed. "I'll be available to you always."
He smiled lazily. "Yes, but I might not want you always, darling. My mother warned me strongly against making irrevocable decisions about women. Especially informal ones. Besides, I find zero-gee sex rather too exhausting as a steady diet."
I had almost found my voice, and now I lost it again. I was glad Carrington was turning her down—but the way he did it made me yearn to drink his blood.
Shara too was speechless for a time. When she spoke, her voice was low, intense, almost pleading. "Bryce, it's a matter of timing. If I broadcast two more dances in the next four weeks, I'll have a world to return to. If I have to go Earthside and wait a year or two, that third dance will sink without a trace—no one'll be looking, and they won't have the memory of the first two. This is my only option, Bryce—let me take the chance. Panzella can't guarantee four weeks will kill me."
"I can't guarantee your survival," the doctor said.
"You can't guarantee that any of us will live out the day," she snapped. She whirled back to Carrington, held him with her eyes. "Bryce, let me risk it." Her face underwent a massive effort, produced a smile that put a knife through my heart. "I'll make it worth your while."
Carrington savored that smile and the utter surrender in her voice like a man enjoying a fine claret. I wanted to slay him with my hands and teeth, and I prayed that he would add the final cruelty of turning her down. But I had underestimated his true capacity for cruelty.
"Go ahead with your rehearsal, my dear," he said at last. "We'll make a final decision when the time comes. I shall have to think about it."
I don't think I've ever felt so hopeless, so . . . impotent in my life. Knowing it was futile, I said, "Shara, I can't let you risk your life—"
"I'm going to do this, Charlie," she cut me off, "with or without you. No one else knows my work well enough to tape it properly, but if you want out I can't stop you." "Well?" she prodded.
I said a filthy word.
"You know the answer."
"Then let's get to work."
Tyros are transported on the pregnant broomsticks. Old hands hang outside the airlock, dangling from handholds on the outer surface of the spinning Ring (not hard in less than half a gee). They face in the direction of their spin, and when their destination comes under the horizon, they just drop off. Thruster units built into gloves and boots supply the necessary course corrections. The distances involved are small. Still, there are very few old hands.
Shara and I were old hands, having spent more hours in weightlessness than some technicians who'd been working in Skyfac for years. We made scant and efficient use of our thrusters, chiefly in canceling the energy imparted to us by the spin of the Ring we left. We had throat mikes and hearing-aid-sized receivers, but there was no conversation on the way across the void. Being without a local vertical—a defined "up" and "down"—is more confusing and distressing than can possibly be imagined by anyone who has never left Earth. For that very reason, all Skyfac structures are aligned to the same imaginary "ecliptic," but it doesn't help very much. I wondered if I would ever get used to it—and even more I wondered whether I would ever get used to the cessation of pain in my leg. It even seemed to hurt less under spin these days.
We grounded, with much less force than a skydiver does, on the surface of the new studio. It was an enormous steel globe, studded with sunpower screens and heat losers, tethered to three more spheres in various stages of construction on which Harry Stein's boys were even now working. McGillicuddy had told me that the complex when completed would be used for "controlled density processing," and when I said, "How nice," he added, "Dispersion foaming and variable density casting," as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. Right at the moment, it was Shara's studio.
The airlock led to a rather small working space around a smaller interior sphere some fifty meters in diameter. It too was pressurized, intended to contain a vacuum, but its locks stood open. We removed our p-suits, and Shara unstrapped her thruster bracelets from a bracing strut and put them on, hanging by her ankles from the strut while she did so. The anklets went on next. As jewelry they were a shade bulky—but they had twenty minutes' continuous use each, and their operation was not visible in normal atmosphere and lighting. Zero-gee dance without them would have been enormously more difficult.
As she was fastening the last strap I drifted over in front of her and grabbed the strut. "Shara. . .."
"Charlie, I can beat it. I'll exercise in three gravities, and I'll sleep in two, and I'll make this body last. I know I can."
"You could skip Mass Is A Verb and go right to the Stardance."
She shook her head. "I'm not ready yet—and neither is the audience. I've to lead myself and them through dance in a sphere first— in a contained space—before I'll be ready to dance in empty space, or they to appreciate it. I have to free my mind, and theirs, from just about every preconception of dance, change all the postulates. Even two stages is too few—but it's the irreducible minimum." Her eyes softened. "Charlie—I must."
"I know," I said gruffly and turned away. Tears are a nuisance in free fall—they don't go anywhere, just form silly-looking expanding spherical contact lenses, in which the world swims. I began hauling myself around the surface of the inner sphere toward the camera emplacement I was working on, and Shara entered the inner sphere to begin rehearsal.
I prayed as I worked on my equipment, snaking cables among the bracing struts and connecting them to drifting terminals. For the first time in years I prayed, prayed that Shara would make it. That we both would.
The next twelve days were the toughest half of my life. Shara worked as hard as I did. She spent half of every day working in the studio, half of the rest in exercise under two and a quarter gravities (the most Dr. Panzella would permit), and half of the rest in Carrington's bed, trying to make him contented enough to let her stretch her time limit. Perhaps she slept in the few hours left over. I only know that she never looked tired, never lost her composure or her dogged determination. Stubbornly, reluctantly, her body lost its awkwardness, took on grace even in an environment where grace required enormous concentration. Like a child learning how to walk, Shara learned how to fly.
I even began to get used to the absence of pain in my leg.
What can I tell you of Mass, if you have not seen it? It cannot be described, even badly, in mechanistic terms, the way a symphony could be written out in words. Conventional dance terminology is by its built-in assumptions, worse than useless, and if you are at all familiar with the new nomenclature you must be familiar with Mass Is A Verb, from which it draws its built-in assumptions.
Nor is there much I can say about the technical aspects of Mass. There were no special effects; not even music. Raoul Brindle's superb score was composed from the dance, and added to the tape with my permission two years later, but it was for the original, silent version that I was given the Emmy. My entire contribution, aside from editing and installing the two trampolines, was to camouflage batteries of wide-dispersion light sources in clusters around each camera eye, and wire them so that they energized only when they were out-offrame with respect to whichever camera was on at the time— ensuring that Shara was always lit from the front, presenting two (not always congruent) shadows. I made no attempt to employ flashy camera work; I simply recorded what Shara danced, changing POV only as she did.
No, Mass Is A Verb can be described only in symbolic terms, and then poorly. I can say that Shara demonstrated that mass and inertia are as able as gravity to supply the dynamic conflict essential to dance. I can tell you that from them she distilled a kind of dance that could only have been imagined by a group-head consisting of an acrobat, a stunt-diver, a skywriter and an underwater ballerina. I can tell you that she dismantled the last interface between herself and utter freedom of motion, subduing her body to her will and space itself to her need.
And still I will have told less than nothing. For Shara sought more than freedom—she sought meaning. Mass was, above all, a spiritual event—its title pun reflecting its thematic ambiguity between the technological and the theological. Shara made the human confrontation with existence a transitive act, literally meeting God halfway. I do not mean to imply that her dance at any time addressed an exterior God, a discrete entity with or without white beard. Her dance addressed reality, gave successive expression to the Three Eternal Questions asked by every human being who ever lived.
Her dance observed her self, and asked, "How have I come to be here?"
Her dance observed the universe in which self existed, and asked, "How did all this come to be here with me?"
And at last, observing her self in relation to its universe, "Why am I so alone?"
And having asked these questions with every muscle and sinew she possessed, she paused hung suspended in the center of the sphere, her body and soul open to the universe, and when no answer came, she contracted. Not in a dramatic, coiling-spring sense as she had in Liberation, a compressing of energy and tension. This was physically similar, but an utterly different phenomenon. It was an act of introspection, a turning of the mind's (soul's?) eye in upon itself, to seek answers that lay nowhere else. Her body too, therefore, seemed to fold in upon itself, compacting her mass, so evenly that her position in space was not disturbed.
And reaching within herself, she closed on emptiness.
The camera faded out leaving her alone, rigid, encapsulated, yearning. The dance ended, leaving her three questions unanswered, the tension of their asking unresolved. Only the expression of patient waiting on her face blunted the shocking edge of the non-ending, made it bearable, a small, blessed sign whispering, "To be continued."
By the eighteenth day we had it in the can, in rough form. Shara put it immediately out of her mind and began choreographing Stardance, but I spent two hard days of editing before I was ready to release the tape for broadcast. I had four days until the half-hour of prime time Carrington had purchased—but that wasn't the deadline I felt breathing down the back of my neck.
McGillicuddy came into my workroom while I was editing, and although he saw the tears running down my face he said no word. I let the tape run, and he watched in silence, and soon his face was wet too. When the tape had been over for a long time he said, very softly, "One of these days I'm going to have to quit this stinking job."
I said nothing.
"I used to be a karate instructor. I was pretty good. I could teach again, maybe do some exhibition work, make ten percent of what I do now."
I said nothing.
"The whole damned Ring's bugged, Charlie. The desk in my office can activate and tap my vidphone in Skyfac. Four at a time, actually."
I said nothing.
"I saw you both in the airlock, when you came back the last time. I saw her collapse. I saw you bringing her around. I heard her make you promise not to tell Dr. Panzella."
I waited. Hope stirred.
He dried his face. "I came in here to tell you I was going to Panzella, to tell him what I saw. He'd bully Carrington into sending her home right away."
"And now?" I said.
"I've seen that tape."
"And you know that the Stardance will probably kill her?"
"Yes."
"And you know we have to let her do it?"
"Yes."
Hope died. I nodded. "Then get out of here and let me work."
He left.
On Wall Street and aboard Skyfac it was late afternoon when I finally had the tape edited to my satisfaction. I called Carrington, told him to expect me in half an hour, showered, shaved, dressed, and left.
A major of the Space Command was there with him when I arrived, but he was not introduced and so I ignored him. Shara was there too, wearing a thing made of orange smoke that left her breasts bare. Carrington had obviously made her wear it, as an urchin writes filthy words on an altar, but she wore it with a perverse and curious dignity that I sensed annoyed him. I looked her in the eye and smiled. "Hi, kid. It's a good tape."
"Let's see," Carrington said. He and the major took seats behind the desk and Shara sat beside it.
I fed the tape into the video rig built into the office wall, dimmed the lights, and sat across from Shara. It ran twenty minutes, uninterrupted, no soundtrack, stark naked.
It was terrific.
"Aghast" is a funny word. To make you aghast, a thing must hit you in a place you haven't armored over with cynicism yet. I seem to have been born cynical; I have been aghast three times that I can remember. The first was when I learned, at the age of three, that there were people who could deliberately hurt kittens. The second was when I learned, at age seventeen, that there were people who could actually take LSD and then hurt other people for fun. The third was when Mass Is A Verb ended and Carrington said in perfectly conversational tones, "Very pleasant; very graceful. I like it," when I learned, at age forty-five, that there were men, not fools or cretins but intelligent men, who could watch Shara Drummond dance and fail to see. We all, even the most cynical of us, always have some illusion which we cherish.
Shara simply let it bounce off her somehow, but I could see that the major was as aghast as I, controlling his features with a visible effort.
Suddenly welcoming a distraction from my horror and dismay, I studied him more closely, wondering for the first time what he was doing here. He was my age, lean and more hard bitten than I am, with silver fuzz on top of his skull and an extremely tidy mustache on the front. I'd taken him for a crony of Carrington's, but three things changed my mind. Something indefinable about his eyes told me that he was a military man of long combat experience. Something equally indefinable about his carriage told me that he was on duty at the moment. And something quite definable about the line his mouth made told me that he was disgusted with the duty he had drawn.
When Carrington went on, "What do you think, Major?" in polite tones, the man paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts and choosing his words. When he did speak, it was not to Carrington.
"Ms. Drummond," he said quietly, "I am Major William Cox, commander of S.C. Champion, and I am honored to meet you. That was the most profoundly moving thing I have ever seen."
Shara thanked him most gravely. "This is Charles Armstead, Major Cox. He made the tape."
Cox regarded me with new respect. "A magnificent job, Mister Armstead." He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
Carrington was beginning to understand that we three shared a thing which excluded him. "I'm glad you enjoyed it, Major," he said with no visible trace of sincerity. "You can see it again on your television tomorrow night, if you chance to be off duty. And eventually, of course, cassettes will be made available. Now perhaps we can get to the matter at hand."
Cox's face closed as if it had been zippered up, became stiffly formal. "As you wish, sir."
Puzzled, I began what I thought was the matter at hand. "I'd like your own Comm Chief to supervise the actual transmission this time, Mr. Carrington. Shara and I will be too busy to—"
"My Comm Chief will supervise the broadcast, Armstead," Carrington interrupted, "but I don't think you'll be particularly busy."
I was groggy from lack of sleep; my uptake was slow.
He touched his desk delicately. "McGillicuddy, report at once," he said, and released it. "You see, Armstead you and Shara are both returning to Earth. At once."
"What?"
"Bryce, you can't," Shara cried. "You promised."
"Did I? My dear, there were no witnesses present last night. Altogether for the best, don't you agree?"
I was speechless with rage.
McGillicuddy entered. "Hello, Tom," Carrington said pleasantly. "You're fired. You'll be returning to Earth at once, with Ms. Drummond and Mr. Armstead, aboard Major Cox's vessel. Departure in one hour, and don't leave anything you're fond of." He glanced from McGillicuddy to me. "From Tom's desk you can tap any vidphone in Skyfac. From my desk you can tap Tom's desk."
Shara's voice was low. "Bryce, two days. God damn you, name your price."
He smiled slightly. "I'm sorry, darling. When informed of your collapse, Dr. Panzella became most specific. Not even one more day. Alive you are a distinct plus for Skyfac's image—you are my gift to the world. Dead you are an albatross around my neck. I cannot allow you to die on my property. I anticipated that you might resist leaving, and so I spoke to a friend in the," he glanced at Cox, "higher echelons of the Space Command, who was good enough to send the Major here to escort you home. You are not under arrest in the legal sense—but I assure you that you have no choice. Something like protective custody applies. Goodbye, Shara." He reached for a stack of reports on his desk, and I surprised myself considerably.
I cleared the desk entirely, tucked head catching him squarely in the sternum. His chair was bolted to the deck and so it snapped clean. I recovered so well that I had time for one glorious right. Do you know how, if you punch a basketball squarely, it will bounce up from the floor? That's what his head did, in low gee slow motion.
Then Cox had hauled me to my feet and shoved me into the far corner of the room. "Don't," he said to me, and his voice must have held a lot of that "habit of command" they talk about because it stopped me cold. I stood breathing in great gasps while Cox helped Carrington to his feet.
The multibillionaire felt his smashed nose, examined the blood on his fingers, and looked at me with raw hatred. "You'll never work in video again, Armstead. You're through. Finished. Un-em-ployed, you got that?"
Cox tapped him on the shoulder, and Carrington spun on him. "What the hell do you want?" he barked.
Cox smiled. "Carrington, my late father once said, 'Bill, make your enemies by choice, not by accident.' Over the years I have found that to be excellent advice. You suck."
"And not particularly well," Shara agreed.
Carrington blinked. Then his absurdly broad shoulders swelled and he roared, "Out all of you! Off my property at once!"
By unspoken consent, we waited for Tom, who knew his cue. "Mister Carrington, it is a rare privilege and a great honor to have been fired by you. I shall think of it always as a Pyrrhic defeat." And he half-bowed and we left, each buoyed by a juvenile feeling of triumph that must have lasted ten seconds.