“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, theStardance 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, and the rest is just recoordination, like getting sea legs. Hell, if I can do it at my age, anybody can. You’ll make agood 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 chaste? 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.”