The flight from Washington was miserable. How can a man who's worked in free fall get airsick? Worse, I had awakened that morning with the same stinking cold I had had ever since returning Earthside, and so I spent the whole flight anticipating the knives that would be thrust through my ears when we landed. But I turned down the proffered drink as well as the meal.
I was not even depressed. Too much had happened to me in the last few weeks. I was wrung out, drained, just sort of . . . on standby, taking disinterested notes while my automatic pilot steered my body around. It helped to be in a familiar place—why, come to think, hadn't I once thought of Toronto, about a thousand years ago, as "home?"
There were reporters when I got through Customs, of course, but not nearly as many as there had been at first. Once, as a kid, I spent a summer working in a mental hospital, and I learned an extraordinary thing: I learned that anyone, no matter how determined, whom you utterly ignore will eventually stop pestering you and go away. I had been practicing the technique so consistently for the last three weeks that the word had gone out, and now only the most Skinnerian newstapers even troubled to stick microphones in my face. Eventually there was a cab in front of me and I took it. Toronto cabbies can be relied upon not to recognize anybody, thank God.
I was "free" now.
Reentering the TDT studio was a strong déjá vu experience, strong enough almost to penetrate my armor. Once, geologic ages ago, I had worked here for three years, and briefly again thereafter. And once, in this building, I had seen Shara Drummond dance for the first time. I had came full circle.
I felt nothing.
Always excepting, of course, the god damned leg. After all the time in free fall it hurt much worse than I'd remembered, more than it had hurt since the original days of its ruining, unimaginably far in the past. I had to pause twice on the way upstairs, and I was soaking with sweat by the time I made the top. (Ever wonder why dance studios are always up at least one flight of stairs? Did you ever try to rent that much square footage on ground level?) I waited on the landing, regularizing my breathing, until I decided that my color had returned, and then a few seconds more. I knew I should feel agitated now, but I was still on standby.
I opened the door, and déjá vu smacked at me again. Norrey was across the old familiar room, and just as before she was putting a group of students through their paces. They might have been the same students. Only Shara was missing. Shara would always be missing. Shara was air pollution now, upper atmosphere pollution, much more widely distributed than most corpses get to be.
She had been cremated at the top of the atmosphere, and by it.
But her older sister was very much alive. She was in the midst of demonstrating a series of suspensions on half-toe as I entered, and I just had time to absorb an impression of glowing skin, healthy sweat, and superb muscle tone before she glanced up and saw me. She stiffened like a stop-frame shot, then literally fell out of an extension. Automatically her body tucked and rolled, and she came out of it at a dead run, crying and swearing as she came, arms outstretched. I barely had time to brace the good leg before she cannoned into me, and then we were rocking in each other's arms like tipsy giants, and she was swearing like a sailor and crying my name. We hugged for an endless time before I became aware that I was holding her clear of the floor and that my shoulders were shrieking nearly as loud as my leg. Six months ago it would have buckled, I thought vaguely, and set her down.
"All right, are you all right, are you all right?" her voice was saying in my ear.
I pulled back and tried to grin. "My leg is killing me. And I think I've got the flu."
"Damn you, Charlie, don't you dare misunderstand me. Are you all right?" Her fingers gripped my neck as if she intended to chin herself.
My hands dropped to her waist and I looked her in the eyes, abandoning the grin. All at once I realized I was no longer on standby. My cocoon was ruptured, blood sang in my ears, and I could feel the very air impinging on my skin. For the first time I thought about why I had come here, and partly I understood. "Norrey," I said simply, "I'm okay. Some ways I think I'm in better shape than I've been in twenty years."
The second sentence just slipped out, but I knew as I said it that it was true. Norrey read the truth in my eyes, and somehow managed to relax all over without loosing her embrace. "Oh, thank God," she sobbed, and pulled me closer. After a time her sobs lessened, and she said, almost petulantly, her voice tiny, "I'd have broken your neck," and we were both grinning like idiots and laughing aloud. We laughed ourselves right out of our embrace, and then Norrey said "Oh!" suddenly and turned bright red and spun around to her class.
It seemed that we were occupying the only portion of the room that was not intensely fascinating. They knew. They watched TV, they read the papers. Even as we watched, one of the students stepped out in front of the rest. "All right," she said to them, "let's take it from the top, I'll give you three for nothing and—one," and the whole group resumed their workout. The new leader would not meet Norrey's eyes, refused to accept or even acknowledge the gratitude there—but she seemed to be smiling gently, as she danced, at nothing in particular.
Norrey turned back to me. "I'll have to change."
"Not much, I hope."
She grinned again and was gone. My cheeks itched, and when I absently scratched them I discovered that they were soaking wet.
The afternoon outdoors struck us both with wonder. New colors seemed to boil up out of the spectrum and splash themselves everywhere in celebration of fall. It was one of those October days of which, in Toronto anyway, one can say either "Gee, it's chilly" or "Gee, it's warm" and be agreed with. We walked through it together arm in arm, speaking only occasionally and then only with our eyes. My stuffed head began to clear; my leg throbbed less.
Le Maintenant was still there then, but it looked shabbier than ever. Fat Humphrey caught sight of us through the kitchen window as we entered and came out to greet us. He is both the fattest happy man and the happiest fat man I've ever seen. I've seen him outdoors in February in his shirt sleeves, and they say that once a would-be burglar stabbed him three times without effect. He burst through the swinging doors and rushed toward us, a mountain with a smile on top. "Mist' Asmstead, Miz Drummond! Welcome!"
"Hey there, Fat," I called out, removing my filters, "God bless your face. Got a good table?"
"Sure thing, in the cellar somewheres, I'll bring it up."
"I'm sorry I brought it up."
There's certainly something wrong with your upbringing," Norrey agreed drily.
Fat Humphrey laughing aloud is like an earthquake in the Canadian Rockies. "Good to see you, good to see you both. You been away to long, Mist' Armstead."
"Tell you about it later, Fat, okay?"
"Sure thing. Lemme see: you look like about a pound of sirloin, some bake' potato, peas Italian hold the garlic and a bucket of milk. Miz Drummond, I figure you for tuna salad on whole wheat toast, side of slice' tomatoes and a glass of skim milk. Salad all around, Eh?"
We both burst out laughing. "Right again, as usual. Why do you bother to print menus?"
"Would you believe it? There's a law. How would you like that steak cooked?"
"Gee, that'd be terrific," I agreed, and took Norrey's coat and filtermask. Fat Humphrey howled and slapped his mighty thigh, and took my own gear while I was hanging Norrey's. "Been missin' you in this joint, Mist' Armstead. None of these other turkeys know a straight line when they hear it. This way." He led us to a small table in the back, and as I sat down I realized that it was the same table Norrey and Shara and I had shared so long ago. That didn't hurt a bit: it felt right. Fat Humphrey rolled us a joint by hand from his personal stash, and left the bag and a packet of Drums on the table. "Smoke hearty," he said and returned to the kitchen, his retreating buttocks like wrestling zeppelins.
I had not smoked in weeks; at the first taste I started to buzz. Norrey's fingers brushed mine as we passed the digit, and their touch was warm and electric. My nose, which had started to fill as we came indoors, flooded, and between toking and honking the joint was gone before a word had been spoken. I was acutely aware of how silly I must look, but too exhilarated to fret about it. I tried to review mentally all that must be said and all that must be asked, but I kept falling into Norrey's warm brown eyes and getting lost. The candle put highlights in them, and in her brown hair. I rummaged in my head for the right words.
"Well, here we are," is what I came up with.
Norrey half smiled. "That's a hell of a cold."
"My nose clamped down twenty hours after I hit dirt, and I've never properly thanked it. Do you have any idea how rotten this planet smells?"
"I'd have thought a closed system'd smell worse."
I shook my head. "There's a smell to space, to a space station I mean. And a p-suit can get pretty ripe. But Earth is a stew of smells, mostly bad."
She nodded judiciously. "No smokestacks in space."
"No garbage dumps."
"No sewage."
"No cow farts."
"How did she die, Charlie?"
Oof. "Magnificently."
"I read the papers. I know that's bullshit, and . . . and you were there."
"Yeah." I had told the story over a hundred times in the last three weeks—but I had never told a friend, and I discovered I needed to. And Norrey certainly deserved to know of her sister's dying.
And so I told her of the aliens' coming, of Shara's intuitive understanding that the beings communicated by dance, and her instant decision to reply to them. I told her of Shara's slow realization that the aliens were hostile, territorially aggressive, determined to have our planet for a spawning ground. And I told her, as best I could, of the Stardance.
"She danced them right out of the solar system, Norrey. She danced everything she had in her—and she had all of us in her. She danced what we are, what she was, and she scared them silly. They weren't afraid of military lasers, but she scared 'em right the hell back to deep space. Oh, they'll be back some day—I don't know why, but I feel it in my bones. But it might not be in our lifetime. She told them what it is to be human. She gave them the Stardance."
Norrey was silent a long time, and then she nodded. "Uh huh." Her face twisted suddenly. "But why did she have to die, Charlie?"
"She was done, honey," I said and took her hand. "She was acclimated all the way to free fall by then, and it's a one-way street. She could never have returned to Earth, not even to the one-sixth gee in Skyfac. Oh, she could have lived in free fall. But Carrington owns everything in free fall except military hardware—and she didn't have any more reason to take anything from him. She'd danced her Stardance, and I'd taped it, and she was done."
"Carrington," she said, and her fingers gripped my hand fiercely. "Where is he now?"
"I just found out myself this morning. He tried to grab all the tapes and all the money for Skyfac Incorporated, i.e., him. But he'd neglected to have Shara sign an actual contract, and Tom McGillicuddy found an airtight holograph will in her effects. It leaves everything fifty-fifty to you and me. So Carrington tried to buy a probate judge, and he picked the wrong judge. It would have hit the news this afternoon. The thought of even a short sentence in one gee was more than he could take. I think at the last he convinced himself that he had actually loved her, because he tried to copy her exit. He bungled it. He didn't know anything about leaving a rotating Ring, and he let go too late. It's the most common beginner's error."
Norrey looked puzzled.
"Instead of becoming a meteorite like her, he was last seen heading in the general direction of Betelgeuse. I imagine it's on the news by now." I glanced at my watch. "In fact, I would estimate that he's just running out of air about now—if he had the guts to wait."
Norrey smiled, and her fingers relaxed. "Let's hold that thought," she purred.
If captured—don't let them give you to the women.
The salad arrived then. Thousand Islands for Norrey and French for me, just as we would have ordered if we'd thought of it. The portions were unequal, and each was precisely as much as the recipient felt like eating. I don't know how Fat Humphrey does it. At what point does that kind of empathy become telepathy?
There was further sporadic conversation as we ate, but nothing significant. Fat Humphrey's cuisine demanded respectful attention. The meal itself arrived as we were finishing the salad, and when we had eaten our fill, both plates were empty and the coffee was cool enough to drink. Slices of Fat's fresh apricot pie were produced warm from the oven, and reverently dealt with. More coffee was poured. I took some pseudoephedrine for my nose. The conversation reawoke groggily, and there was only one question left for her to ask now so I asked her first.
"So what's happening with you, Norrey?"
She made a face. "Nothing much."
Lovely answer. Push.
"Norrey, on the day there is nothing much happening in your life, there'll be honest government in Ottawa. I hear you stood still, once, for over an hour—but the guy that said it was a famous liar. Come on, you know I've been out of touch."
She frowned, and that was it for me, that was the trigger. I had been thinking furiously ever since I came off standby in Norrey's arms back at the studio, and I had already figured out a lot of things. But the sight of that frown completed the process; all at once the jumble in my subconscious fell into shape with an almost audible click. They can come that way, you know. Flashes of insight. In the middle of a sentence, in a microsecond, you make a quantum jump in understanding. You look back on twenty years of blind stupidity without wincing, and perceive the immediate future in detail. Later you will marvel—at that instant you only accept and nod. The Sicilians have a thing like it, that they call the thunder bolt. It is said to bring deep calm and great gravity. It made me break up.
"What's so funny?"
"Don't know if I can explain it, hon. I guess I just figured out how Fat Humphrey does it."
"Huh?"
"Tell you later. You were saying. . . ."
The frown returned. "Mostly I wasn't saying. What's happening with me, in twenty-five words or less? I haven't asked myself in quite a while. Maybe too long." She sipped coffee. "Okay. You know that John Koerner album, the last commercial one he made? Running Jumping Standing Still? That's what I've been doing, I think. I've been putting out a lot of energy, doing satisfying things, and I'm not satisfied. I'm . . . I'm almost bored."
She floundered, so I decided to play devil's advocate. "But you're right where you've always wanted to be," I said, and began rolling a joint.
She grimaced. "Maybe that's the trouble. Maybe a life's ambition shouldn't be something that can be achieved—because what do you do then? You remember Koerner's movie?"
"Yeah. The Sound of Sleep. Nutball flick, nice cherries on top."
"Remember what he said the meaning of life was?"
"Sure. 'Do the next thing.'" I suited action to the word, licked it, sealed it and twisted the ends, then lit it. "Always thought it was terrific advice. It got me through some tough spots."
She toked, held it and exhaled before replying. "I'm ready to do the next thing—but I'm not sure what that is. I've toured with the company, I've soloed in New York, I've choreographed, I've directed the whole damn school and now I'm an artistic director. I've got full autonomy now; I can even teach a class again if I feel like it. Every year from now until Hell freezes TDT's repertoire will include one of my pieces, and I'll always have superb bodies to work with. I've been working on childhood dreams all my life, Charlie, and I hadn't thought ahead any farther than this when I was a kid. I don't know what 'the next thing' is. I need a new dream."
She toked again, passed it to me. I stared at the glowing tip conspiratorially, and it winked at me. "Any clues? Directions at least?"
She exhaled carefully, spoke to her hands. "I thought I might like to try working one of those commune-companies, where everybody choreographs every piece. I'd like to try working with a group-head. But there's really no one here I could start one with, and the only existing group-head that suits me is New Pilobolus—and for that I'd have to live in America."
"Forget that."
"Hell, yes. I . . . Charlie, I don't know, I've even thought of chucking it all and going out to PEI to farm. I always meant to, and never really did. Shara left the place in good shape, I could . . . oh, that's crazy. I don't really want to farm. I just want something new. Something different. Unmapped territory, something that—Charlie Armstead, what the hell are you grinning about?"
"Sometimes it's purely magical."
"What?"
"Listen. Can you hear them up there?"
"Hear who?"
"I oughta tell Humphrey. There's gonna be reindeer shit all over his roof."
"Charlie!"
"Go ahead, little girl, tug on the whiskers all you want—they're real. Sit right here on my lap and place your order. Ho ho ho. Pick a number from one to two."
She was giggling now; she didn't know why but she was giggling. "Charlie. . . ."
"Pick a number from one to two."
"Two."
"That's a very good number. A very good number. You have just won one perfectly good factory-fresh dream, with all accessories and no warranty at all. This offer is not available through the stores. A very good number. How soon can you leave town?"
"Leave town! Charlie. . . ." She was beginning to get a glimmer. "You can't mean—"
"How would you like a half interest in a lot of vacuum, baby? I got plenty o' nuttin', or at least the use of it, and you're welcome to all you want. Talk about being on top of the world!"
The giggle was gone. "Charlie, you can't mean what I think you—"
"I'm offering you a simple partnership in a commune company— a real commune company. I mean, we'll all have to live together for the first season at least. Lots of real estate, but a bit of a housing shortage at first. We'll spring for expenses, and it's a free fall."
She leaned across the table, put one elbow in her coffee and the other in her apricot pie, grabbed my turtleneck and shook me. "Stop babbling and tell me straight, dammit."
"I am, honey, I am. I'm proposing a company of choreographers, a true commune. It'll have to be. Company members will live together, share equally in the profits, and I'll put up all the expenses just for the hell of it. Oh yeah, we're rich, did I tell you? About to be, anyway."
"Charlie—"
"I'm straight, I tell you. I'm starting a company. And a school. I'm offering you a half interest and a full-time, year-round job, dead serious, and I'll need you to start right away. Norrey, I want you to come dance in free fall."
Her face went blank. "How?"
"I want to build a studio in orbit and form a company. We'll alternate performing with school like so: three months of classes dirtside— essentially auditions—and the graduates get to come study for three months in orbit. Any that are any good, we work into the next three months of performance taping. By then we've been in low or no gee for a long time, our bodies are starting to adapt, so we take three months vacation on Earth and then start the process over again. We can use the vacations to hunt out likely talent and recruit 'em—go concert-hopping, in other words. It'll be fun, Norrey. We'll make history and money both."
"How, Charlie? How are you going to get the backing for all this? Carrington's dead, and I won't work for his associates. Who else but Skyfac and the Space Command have space capacity?"
"Us."
"?"
"You and me. We own the Stardance tape, Norrey. I'll show it to you later, I have a dub in my pouch. At this point maybe a hundred people on Earth and a few dozen in space have seen that tape in its entirety. One of them was the president of Sony. He offered me a blank check."
"A blank—"
"Literally. Norrey, the Stardance may be the single most magnificent artistic utterance of man—irrespective of its historical importance and news value. I would estimate that within five years every sighted person in the solar system will know it. And we own the only tape. And, I own the only existing footage of Shara dancing on Earth, commercial value incalculable. Rich? Hell, we're powerful! Skyfac Incorporated is so anxious to come out of this looking good that if I phone up to Ring One and ask Tokugawa for the time, he'll take the next elevator down and give me his watch."
Her hands dropped from my sweater. I wiped apricot from one limp elbow, dried the other.
"I don't feel squeamish about profiting from Shara's death. We made the Stardance, together, she and I; I earned my half and she left you hers. The only thing wrong with that is that it leaves me filthy rich, and I don't want to be rich—not on this planet. The only way I can think of to piss away that kind of money in a way Shara would have approved is to start a company and a school. We'll specialize in misfits, the ones who for one reason or another don't fit into the mold here on Earth. Like Shara. The less than classically perfect dancer's bodies. That stuff is just irrelevant in space. More important is the ability to open yourself, to learn a whole new kind of dance, to . . . I don't know if this will make any sense . . . to encompass three hundred and sixty degrees. We'll be making the rules as we go along—and we'll employ a lot of dancers that aren't working now. I figure our investment capital is good for about five years. By that time the performing company should be making enough to cover the nut, underwrite the school, and still show a profit. All the company members share equally. Are you in?"
She blinked, sat back, and took a deep breath. "In what? What have you got?"
"Not a damn thing," I said cheerily. "But I know what I need. It'll take us a couple of years to get started at the very least. We'll need a business manager, a stage manager, three or four other dancers who can teach. A construction crew to get started, of course, and an elevator operator, but they're just employees. My cameras run themselves, by Christ, and I'll be my own gaffer. I can do it, Norrey—if you'll help me. Come on—join my company and see the world— from a decent perspective."
"Charlie, I . . . I don't even know if I can imagine free fall dance, I mean, I've seen both of Shara's shows several times of course, and I liked them a lot—but I still don't know where you could go from there. I can't picture it."
"Of course not! You're still hobbled with 'up' and 'down,' warped by a lifetime in a gravity well. But you'll catch on as soon as you can get up there, believe me." (A year from now my blithe confidence would haunt me.) "You can learn to think spherically, I know you can, the rest is just recoordination, like getting sea legs. Hell, if I can do it at my age, anybody can. You'll make a good dancing partner."
She had missed it the first time. Now her eyes enlarged.
"A good what?"
Norrey and I go back a long time, and I'd have to tell you about most of it to explain how I felt just then. Remember when Alistair Sim, as Scrooge, has just awakened from his nightmare and vowed to make amends? And the more nice things he does, and the more people gape at him in bafflement, the more he giggles? And finally he slaps himself in the face and says, "I don't deserve to be this happy," and tries to get properly chastened? And then he giggles again and says, "but I just can't help myself" and breaks up all over again? That's how I felt. When a hangup of yours has been a burden to a friend for so many years, and all at once you not only realize that, but know that the burden is lifted, for both of you, there is an exquisite joy in sharing the news.
Remember how Scrooge sprung it on Bob Cratchit, by surprise? ". . . leaving me no alternative—but to raise your salary!" In the same childish way I had saved this, my real surprise Santa Claus announcement, for last. I intended to savor the moment.
But then I saw her eyes and I just said it flat out.
"The leg is functional in free fall, Norrey. I've been working out, hard, every day since I got back dirtside. It's a little stiff, and I'll—we'll—always have to choreograph around it to some extent. But it does everything a weightless dancer needs it to. I can dance again."
She closed her eyes, and the lids quivered. "Oh my God." Then she opened them and laughed and cried at once, "Oh my God, Charlie, oh my God, oh my God," and she reached across the table and grabbed my neck and pulled me close and I got apricot and coffee on my own elbows, and oh her tears were hot on my neck.
The place had gotten busy while we talked; no one seemed to notice us. I held her head in the hollow of my throat, and marveled. The only true measure of pain is relief—only in that moment, as layers of scar tissue sloughed off my heart, did I perceive their true weight for the first time.
Finally we were both cried out, and I pulled back and sought her eyes. "I can dance again, Norrey. It was Shara who showed me, I was too damn dumb to notice, too blocked to see it. It was about the last thing she ever did. I can't throw that away now; I've got to dance again, you see? I'm going to go back to space and dance, on my own property and on my own terms and fucking dance again.
"And I want to dance with you, Norrey. I want you to be my partner. I want you to come dance with me. Will you come?"
She sat up straight and looked me in the eye. "Do you know what you are asking me?"
Hang on—here we go! I took a deep breath. "Yes. I'm asking for a full partnership."
She sat back in her chair and got a faraway look. "How many years have we known each other, Charlie?"
I had to think. "I make it twenty-four years, off and on."
She smiled. "Yeah. Off and on." She retrieved the forgotten joint and relit it, took a long hit. "How much of that time do you estimate we've spent living together?"
More arithmetic; I toked while I computed. "Call it six or seven years." Exhale. "Maybe eight."
She nodded reflectively and took the joint back. "Some pretty crumby times."
"Norrey—"
"Shut up, Charlie. You waited twenty-four years to propose to me, you can shut up and wait while I give you my answer. How many times would you estimate I came down to the drunk tank and bailed you out?"
I didn't flinch. "Too many."
She shook her head. "One less than too many. I've taken you in when you needed it and thrown you out when you needed it and never once said the word 'love,' because I knew it would scare you away. You were so damned afraid that anyone might love you, because then they'd have to pity you for being a cripple. So I've sat by and watched you give your heart only to people who wouldn't take it—and then picked up the pieces every time."
"Norrey—"
"Shut up," she said. "Smoke this digit and shut up. I've loved you since before you knew me, Charlie, before your leg got chopped up, when you were still dancing. I knew you before you were a cripple. I loved you before I ever saw you offstage. I knew you before you were a lush, and I've loved you all the years since in the way that you wanted me to.
"Now you come before me on two legs. You still limp, but you're not a cripple anymore. Fat Humphrey the telepath doesn't give you wine with your meal, and when I kiss you at the studio I notice you didn't have a drink on the plane. You buy me dinner and you babble about being rich and powerful and you try to sell me some crackbrained scheme for dancing in space, you have the goddam audacity to lay all this on me and never once say the word 'love' with your mouth and ask me to be your other half again." She snatched the roach out of my hand. "God dammit, Cratchit, you leave me no alternative. . . ."
And she actually paused and toked and held it and exhaled before she let the smile begin.
". . . but to raise your fucking salary."
And we were both holding hands in the apricots and grinning like gibbons. Blood roared in my ears; I literally shuddered with emotion too intense to bear. I groped for a cathartic wisecrack. "Who said I was buying dinner?"
A high, nasal voice from nearby said, "I'm buying, Mr. Armstead."
We looked up, startled to discover that the world still existed around us, and were further startled.
He was a short, slight young man. My first impression was of cascades of ringlets of exceedingly curly black hair, behind which lurked a face like a Brian Froud drawing of a puckish elf. His glasses were twin rectangles of wire and glass, thicker than the glass in airlock doors, and at the moment they were on the end of his nose. He squinted down past them at us, doing his best to look dignified. This was considerably difficult, as Fat Humphrey was holding him a clear foot off the floor, one big sausage-plate fist clutching his collar. His clothes were expensive and in excellent taste, but his boots were splendidly shabby. He was trying, unsuccessfully, not to kick his feet.
"Every time I pass your table I keep steppin' on his ears," Humphrey explained, bringing the little guy closer and lowering his voice. "So I figure him for a snoop or a newsie and I'm just givin' him the bum's rush. But if he's talkin' about buyin', it's your decision."
"How about it, friend? Snoop or newsie?"
Insofar as it was possible, he drew himself up. "I am an artist."
I queried Norrey with my eyes and was answered.
"Set that man down and get him a chair, Fat. We'll discuss the check later."
This was done, and the kid accepted the last of the roach, hitching his tunic into shape and pushing his glasses back up.
"Mr. Armstead, you don't know me, and I don't know this lady here, but I've got these terrific ears and no shame at all. Mr. Pappadopolous is right, I was eavesdropping just great. My name is Raoul Brindle, and—"
"I've heard of you," Norrey said. "I have a few of your albums."
"I do too," I agreed. "The next to the last one was terrific."
"Charlie, that's a terrible thing to say."
Raoul blinked furiously. "No, he's right. The last one was trash. I owed a pound and paid."
"Well, I liked it. I'm Norrey Drummond."
"You're Norrey Drummond?"
Norrey got a familiar look. "Yes. Her sister."
"Norrey Drummond of TDT, that choreographed Shifting Gears and danced the Question A Dancer variations at the Vancouver conference, that—" He stopped, and his glasses slid down his nose. "Ohmigod. Shara Drummond is your sister? Ohmigod, of course. Drummond. Drummond, sisters, imbecile." He sat on his excitement and hitched up his glasses and tried to look dignified some more.
For my money he pulled it off. I knew something about Raoul Brindle, and I was impressed. He'd been a child-genius composer, and then in his college days he'd decided music was no way to make a living and became one of the best special effects men in Hollywood. Right after Time did a half-page sidebar on his work of Children of the Lens— which I mightily admired—he released a video-cassette album composed entirely of extraordinary visuals, laser optics and color effects, with synthesizer accompaniment of his own. It was sort of Yellow Submarine cubed, and it had sold like hell and been followed by a half dozen more occasionally brilliant albums. He had designed and programmed the legendary million-dollar lightshow system for the Beatles' reunion as a favor for McCartney, and one of his audio-only tapes followed my deck everywhere it went. I resolved to buy his dinner.
"So how do you know me well enough to spot me in a restaurant, Raoul, and why have you been dropping eaves?"
"I didn't spot you here. I followed you here."
"Sonofabitch, I never saw you. Well, what did you follow me for?"
"To offer you my life."
"Eh?"
"I've seen the Stardance."
"You have?" I exclaimed, genuinely impressed. "How did you pull that off?"
He looked up at the ceiling. "Large weather we're having, isn't it? So I saw the Stardance and I made it my business to find you and follow you, and now you're going back to space to dance and I'm going with you. If I have to walk."
"And do what?"
"You said yourself, you're going to need a stage manager. But you haven't thought it through. I'm going to create a new art form for you. I'm going to beat my brains to peanut butter for you. I'm going to design free-fall sets and visuals and do the scores, and they'll both work integrally together and with the dances. I'll work for coffee and cakes, you don't even have to use my music if you don't want to, but I gotta design those sets."
Norrey cut him off with a gentle, compassionate hand over his month. "How do you mean, free-fall sets?" She took her hand away.
"It's free fall, don't you understand? I'll design you a sphere of trampolines, with cameras at the joints, and the framework'll be tubes of colored neon. For free-space work I'll give you rings of laser-lit metal flakes, loops of luminous gas, modified fireworks, giant blobs of colored liquid hanging in space to dance around and through—singing Jesus, as a special effects man I've been waiting all my life for zero gravity. It—it makes the Dykstraflex obsolete, don't you see?"
He was blinking hard enough to keep the insides of his glasses swept, glancing rapidly back and forth from Norrey to me. I was flabbergasted, and so was she.
"Look, I've got a microcasssette deck here. I'll give it to you, Mister Armstead—"
"Charlie," I corrected absently.
"—and you take it home and listen. It's just a few tracks I cut after I saw the Stardance. It's just audio, just first impressions. I mean, it's not even the frame of a score, but I thought it . . . I mean, I thought maybe you'd. . . it's completely shitful, here, take it."
"You're hired," I said.
"Just promise me you'll—hired?"
"Hired. Hey, Fat! You got a VCR in the joint somewhere?"
So we went into the back room where Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous lives, and I fed the Stardance tape into his personal television, and the four of us watched it together while Maria ran the restaurant, and when it was over it was half an hour before any of us could speak.