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 any more. 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 crack-brained 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 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 An 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 on Children of the Lens—which Imightily 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?” Iexclaimed, 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 Igotta design those sets.”
Norrey cut him off with a gentle, compassionate hand over his mouth. “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 microcassette 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.”