And two of the damned idiots killed themselves through thoughtlessness.
They were all well coached in free-fall survival, endlessly drilled in the basic rules of space life. We used a double-buddy system with every student who went EVA until they had demonstrated competence, and we took every precaution I could or can think of. But Inge Sjoberg could not be bothered to spend a whole hour a day inspecting and maintaining her p-suit. She managed to miss all six classic signs of incipient coolant failure, and one sunrise she boiled. And nothing could induce Alexi Nikolski to cut off his huge mane of brown hair. Against all advice he insisted on tying it back in a kind of doubled-up pony tail, “as he had always done.” The arrangement depended on a single hairband. Sure as hell it failed in the middle of a class, and quite naturally he gasped. We were minutes away from pressure; he would surely have drowned in his own hair. But as Harry and I were towing him to Town Hall he unzipped his p-suit to deal with the problem.
Both times we were forced to store the bodies in the Closet for a gruesomely long time, while next-of-kin debated whether to have the remains shipped to the nearest spaceport or go through the legal complication of arranging for burial in space. Macabre humor saved our sanity (Raoul took to calling it Travis McGee’s Closet), but it soured the season.
And it wasn’t much more fun to say good-bye to the last of the live ones. On the day that Yeng and DuBois left, I nearly bottomed out. I saw them off personally, and the “coitus with a condom” imagery of shaking hands with p-suits on was just too ironically appropriate. The whole semester, like the first, had been coitus with a condom—hard work, no product—and I returned to Town Hall in the blackest depression I had known since… since Shara died. By association, my leg hurt; I wanted to bark at someone. But as I came in through the airlock Norrey, Harry and Linda were watching Raoul make magic.
He was not aware of them, of anything external, and Norrey held up a warning hand without meeting my eyes. I put my temper on hold and my back against the wall beside the airlock; the velcro pad between my shoulderblades held me securely. (The whole sphere is carpeted in “female” velcro; pads of “male” are sewn into our slippers—which also have “thumbs”—our seats, thighs, backs, and the backs of our gloves. Velcro is the cheapest furniture there is.)
Raoul was making magic with common household ingredients. His most esoteric tool was what he referred to as his “hyperdermic needle.” It looked like a doctor’s hypo with elephantiasis: the chamber and plunger were oversized, but the spike itself was standard size. In his hands it was a magic wand.
Tethered to his skinny waist were all the rest of the ingredients: five drinking bulbs, each holding a different colored liquid. At once I identified a source of sub-conscious unease, and relaxed: I had been missing the vibration of the air conditioner, missing the draft. Twin radial tethers held Raoul at the center of the sphere, in the slight crouch typical of free fall, and he wanted still air—even though it severely limited his working time. (Shortly, exhaled carbon dioxide would form a sphere around his head; he would spin gently around his tethers and the sphere would become a donut; by then he must be finished. Or move. I would have to be careful myself to keep moving, spiderlike, as would the others.)
He speared one of the bulbs with his syringe, drew off a measured amount. Apple juice, by the color of it, ad-mixed with water. He emptied the syringe gently, thin knuckly fingers working with great delicacy, forming a translucent golden ball that hung motionless before him, perfectly spherical. He pulled the syringe free, and the ball… shimmered… in spherically symmetrical waves that took a long time to ebb.
He filled his syringe with air, jabbed it into the heart of the ball and squeezed. The bulb filled with a measured amount of air, expanding into a nearly transparent golden bubble, around which iridescent patterns chased each other in lazy swirls. It was about a meter in diameter. Again Raoul disengaged the syringe.
Filling it in turn from bulbs of grape juice, tomato juice and unset lime jello, he filled the interior of the golden bubble with spherical beads of purple, red, and green, pumping them into bubbles as he formed them. They shone, glistened, jostling but declining to absorb each other. Presently the golden bubble was filled with Christmas-tree balls in various sizes from grape to grapefruit, shimmering, borrowing colors from each other. Marangoni Flow—gradients in surface tension—made them spin and tumble around each other like struggling kittens. Occasional bubbles were pure water, and these were rainbow scintillations that the eye ached to fragment and follow individually.
Raoul was drifting for air now, holding the macro-bubble in tow with the palm of his hand, to which the whole thing adhered happily. If he were to strike it sharply now, I knew, the whole cluster would snap at once into a single, large bubble around the surface of which streaks of colors would run like tears (again, by Marangoni Flow). I thought that was his intention.
The master lighting panel was velcro’d to his chest. He dialed for six tight spots, focusing them on the bubble-jewel with sure fingers. Other lights dimmed, winked out. The room was spangled with colors and with color, as the facets of the manmade jewel flung light in all-directions. With a seemingly careless wave of his hand, Raoul set the scintillating globe spinning, and Town Hall swam in its eerie rainbow fire.
Drifting before the thing, Raoul set his Musicmaster for external speaker mode, velcro’d it to his thighs, and began to play.
Long, sustained warm tones first. The globe thrilled to them, responding to their vibrations, expressing the music visually. Then liquid trills in a higher register, with pseudowoodwind chords sustained by memory-loop beneath. The globe seemed to ripple, to pulse with energy. A simple melody emerged, mutated, returned, mutated again. The globe spangled in perfect counterpoint. The tone of the melody changed as it played, from brass to violin to organ to frankly electronic and back again, and the globe reflected each change with exquisite subtlety. A bass line appeared. Horns. I kicked myself free of the wall, both to escape my own exhalations and to get a different perspective on the jewel. The others were doing likewise, drifting gently, trying to become organic with Raoul’s art. Spontaneously we danced, tossed by the music like the glistening jewel, by the riot of color it flung around the spherical room. An orchestra was strapped to Raoul’s thighs now, and it made us free-fall puppets.
Improv only; not up to concert standard. Simple group exercises, luxuriating in the sheer physical comfort of free fall and sharing that awareness. Singing around the campfire, if you will, trying to out unfamiliar harmonies on each other’s favorite songs. Only Harry abstained, drifting somehow “to one side” with the odd, incongruous grace of a polar bear in the water. He became thereby a kind of second focus of the dance, became the camera eye toward which Raoul aimed his creation, and we ours. (Raoul and Harry had become the fastest of friends, the chatterbox and the sphinx. They admired each other’s hands.) Harry floated placidly, absorbing our joy and radiating it back.