For we truly did have dancers coming out of our ears when we finally opened up shop. I had expected to need good PR to stimulate a demand for the expensive commodity, for although we absorbed the bulk of student expenses (we had to—how many could afford the hundred-dollar-a-kilo elevator fee alone?) we kept it expensive enough to weed out the casually curious—with a secret scholarship program for deserving needy.
Even at those prices, I had to step lively to avoid being trampled in the stampede.
The cumulative effect of Shara’s three tapes on the dance consciousness of the world had been profound and revolutionary. They came at a time when Modern dance as a whole was in the midst of an almost decade-long stasis, a period in which everyone seemed to be doing variations of the already-done, in which dozens of choreographers had beat their brains out trying to create the next New Wave breakthrough, and produced mostly gibberish. Shara’s three tapes, spaced as she had intuitively sensed they must be, had succeeded in capturing the imagination of an immense number of dancers and dance lovers the world over—as well as millions of people who had never given dance a thought before.
Dancers began to understand that free fall meant free dance, free from a lifetime in thrall to gravity. Norrey and I, in our naivete, had failed to be secretive enough about our plans. The day after we signed the lease on our dirtside studio in Toronto, students began literally arriving at our door in carloads and refusing to leave—much before we were ready for them. We hadn’t even figured out how to audition a zero-gee dancer on Earth yet. (Ultimately it proved quite simple: Dancers who survived an elimination process based on conventional dance skills were put on a plane, taken up to angels thirty, dumped out, and filmed on the way down. It’s not the same as free fall—but it’s close enough to weed out gross unsuitables.)
We were sleeping ’em like torpedomen at the dirtside school, feeding them in shifts, and I began having panicky second thoughts about calling up to Harry and putting off our deadline so he could triple the Studio’s living quarters. But Norrey convinced me to be ruthlessly selective and take ONLY the most promising ten—out of hundreds—into orbit.
Thank God—we damned near lost three of those pigeons in two separate incidents, and we conclusively washed out nine. That run of bad cards I mentioned earlier.
Most often it came down to a failure to adapt, an inability to evolve the consciousness beyond dependence on up and down (the one factor skydiving can’t simulate: a skydiver knows which way is down). It doesn’t help to tell yourself that north of your head is “up” and south of your feet is “down”—from that perspective the whole universe is in endless motion (you’re hardly ever motionless in free fall), a perception most brains simply reject. Such a dancer would persistently “lose his point,” his imaginary horizon, and become hopelessly disoriented. Side effects included mild to extreme terror, dizziness, nausea, erratic pulse and blood pressure, the grand-daddy of all headaches and involuntary bowel movement.
(Which last is uncomfortable and embarrassing. P-suit plumbing makes country outhouses look good. Men have the classic “relief tube,” of course, but for women and for defecation in either sex we rely on a strategic deployment of specially treated… oh, hell, we wear a diaper and try to hold it until we get indoors. End of first inevitable digression.)
Even in inside work, in the Goldfish Bowl or Raoul’s collapsible trampoline sphere, such dancers could not learn to overcome their perceptual distress. Having spent their whole professional lives battling gravity with every move they made, they found that they were lost without their old antagonist—or at least without the linear, right-angled perceptual set that is provided: we found that some of them could actually learn to acclimate to weightlessness inside a cube or rectangle, as long as they were allowed to think of one wall as the “ceiling” and its opposite as the “floor.”
And in the one or two cases where their vision was adequate to the new environment, their bodies, their instruments, were not. The new reflexes just failed to jell.
They simply were not meant, any of them, to live in space. In most cases they left friends—but they all left. All but one.
Linda Parsons was the tenth student, the one that didn’t wash out, and finding her was good fortune enough to make up for the run of bad cards.
She was smaller than Norrey, almost as taciturn as Harry (but for different reasons), much calmer than Raoul, and more open-hearted and giving than I will be if I live to be a thousand. In the villainous overcrowding of that first free-fall semester, amid flaring tempers and sullen rages, she was the only universally loved person—I honestly doubt whether we could have survived without her (I remember with some dismay that I seriously contemplated spacing a pimply young student whose only crime was a habit of saying, “There you go” at every single pause in the conversation. There he goes, I kept thinking to myself, there he goes…).
Some women can turn a room into an emotional maelstrom, simply by entering it, and this quality is called “provocative.” So far as I know, our language has no word for the opposite of provocative, but that is what Linda was. She had a talent for getting people high together, without drugs, a knack for resolving irreconcilable differences, a way of brightening the room she was in.
She had been raised on a farm by a spiritual community in Nova Scotia, and that probably accounted for her empathy, responsibility, and intuitive understanding of group-energy dynamics. But I think the single over-riding quality that made her magic work was inborn: she genuinely loved people. It could not have been learned behavior; it was just too clearly intrinsic in her.
I don’t mean that she was a Pollyanna, nauseatingly cheerful and syrupy. She could be blistering if she caught you trying to call irresponsibility something else. She insisted that a high truth level be maintained in her presence, and she would not allow you the luxury of a hidden grudge, what she called “holding a stash on someone.” If she caught you with such psychic dirty laundry, she would haul it right out in public and force you to clean it up. “Tact?” she said to me once. “I always understood that to mean a mutual agreement to be full of shit.”
These attributes are typical of a commune child, and usually get them heartily disliked in so-called polite society—founded, as it is, on irresponsibility, untruth, and selfishness. But again, something innate in Linda made them work for her. She could call you a jerk to your face without triggering reflex anger; she could tell you publicly that you were lying without calling you a liar. She plainly knew how to hate the sin and forgive the sinner; and I admire that, for it is a knack I never had. There was never any mistaking or denying the genuine caring in her voice, even when it was puncturing one of your favorite bubbles of rationalization.
At least, that’s what Norrey or I would have said. Tom, when he met her, had a different opinion.
“Look, Charlie, there’s Tom.”
I should have been fuming mad when I got out of Customs. I felt a little uneasy not being fuming mad. But after six months of extraterrestrial cabin fever, I was finding it curiously difficult to dislike any stranger—even a Customs man.
Besides, I was too heavy to be angry.
“So it is. Tom! Hey, Tom!”
“Oh my,” Norrey said, “something’s wrong.” Tom was fuming mad.
“Hell. What put the sand in his shorts? Hey, where’re Linda and Raoul? Maybe there’s a hassle?”