The snowflake broke up as Linda kicked free, and we all grabbed whatever was handiest or drifted. Tom reversed his attitude with practiced ease so that he tracked Linda, continued to speak directly to her.
“I stayed there for a week or so,” he went on steadily, “and then I went to New York and signed up for dance classes. I studied dance when I was a kid, as part of karate discipline; it came back, and I worked hard. But I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with zero-gee dance—so I sneaked up to Skyfac without telling any of you, and I’ve been working like hell over there ever since, in a factory sphere I rented with my own money.”
“Who’s minding the store?” I asked mildly.
“The best trained seals money can buy,” he said shortly. “Our affairs haven’t suffered. But I have. I hadn’t intended to tell you any of this for another year or so. But I was in Panzella’s office when the Termination of Monitoring notices came in on Yeng and DuBois. I knew you were hurting for bodies. I’m self-taught and clumsy as a pig on ice and on Earth it’d take me another five years to become a fourth-rate dancer, but I think I can do the kind of stuff you’re doing here.”
He wriggled to face me and Norrey. “I’d like to study under you. I’ll pay my own tuition. I’d like to work with you people, besides just on paper, and be part of your company. I think I can make a Stardancer.” He turned back to Linda. “And I’d like to start courting you, by your customs.”
Then it was that the totality of my stupidity truly did become apparent to me. I was speechless. It was Norrey who said, “We accept,” on behalf of the company, at the same instant that Linda said the same thing for herself. And the snowflake reformed, much smaller in diameter.
Our company was formed.
As to the nature of our dance itself, there is not much to be said that the tapes themselves don’t already say. We borrowed a lot of vocabulary from New Pilobolus and the Contact Imnrov movement (which had been among the last spasms of inventiveness before that decade-long stasis in dance I mentioned earlier), but we had to radically adapt almost everything we borrowed. Although the Contact Improv people say they’re into “free fall,” this is a semantic confusion: they mean “falling freely”; we mean “free of falling.” But a lot of their discoveries do work, at least in some fashion, in zero gee—and we used what worked.
Linda’s own dance background included four years with the New Pilobolus company: if you don’t know them, or the legendary Pilobolus company they sprang from, they’re sort of Contact Improv without the improv—carefully choreographed stuff. But they too are into “using each other as the set”—dancing on, over, and around one another, cooperating in changing each other’s vectors. Dancing acrobats, if you will. We ourselves tried to achieve a balanced blend of both choreographed and spontaneous dance in the stuff we taped.
Linda was able to teach us a lot about mutually interreacting masses, hyperfulcrums, and the like—and a lot more about the attitude they require. To truly interact with another dancer, to spontaneously create shapes together, you must attempt to attune yourself to them empathically. You must know them—how they dance and how they’re feeling at the moment—to be able to sense what their next move will be, or how they will likely react to yours. When it works, it’s the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever known.
It’s much harder with more than one partner, but the exhilaration increases exponentially.
Because free fall requires mutual cooperation, mutual awareness on a spherical level, our dance became an essentially spiritual exercise.
And so, with a company of adequate size and an increasing grasp of what zero-gee dance was really about, we began our second and last season of taping.
IV
I fell through starry space, balanced like an inbound comet on a tail of fluorescent gas, concentrating on keeping my spine straight and my knees and ankles locked. It helped me forget how nervous I was.
“Five,” Raoul chanted steadily, “four, three, two, now,” and a ring of his bright orange “flame” flared soundlessly all around me. I threaded it like a needle.
“Beautiful,” Norrey whispered in my ear, from her vantage point a kilometer away. At once I lifted my arms straight over my head and bit down hard on a contact. As I passed through the ring of orange “flame,” my “tail” turned a rich, deep purple, expanding lazily and symmetrically behind me. Within the purple wake, tiny novae sparkled and died at irregular intervals: Raoul magic. Just before the dye canisters on my calves emptied, I fired my belly thruster and let it warp me “upward” in an ever-increasing curve while I counted seconds.
“Light it up, Harry,” I said sharply. “I can’t see you.” The red lights winked into being above my imaginary horizon and I relaxed, cutting the ventral thrust in plenty of time. I was not heading precisely for the camera, but the necessary corrections were minor and would not visibly spoil the curve. Orienting myself by a method I can only call informed writhing, I cut main drive and selected my point.
On Earth you can turn forever without getting dizzy if you select a point and keep your eyes locked on it, whipping your head around at the last possible second for each rotation. In space the technique is unnecessary: once out of a gravity well, your semicirculars fill up and your whole balance system shuts down; you can’t get dizzy. But old habit dies hard. Once I had my point star I tumbled, and when I had counted ten rotations the camera was close enough to see and coming up fast. At once I came out of my spin, oriented, and braked sharply—maybe three gees—with all thrusters. I had cut it fine: I came to rest relative to the camera barely fifty meters away. I cut all power instantly, went from the natural contraction of high acceleration to full release, giving it everything I had left, held it for a five-count and whispered, “Cut!”
The red lights winked out, and Norrey, Raoul, Tom, and Linda cheered softly (nobody does anything loudly in a p-suit).
“Okay, Harry, let’s see the playback.”
“Coming up, boss.”
There was a pause while he rewound, and then a large square section of distant space lit up around the edges. The stars within it rearranged themselves and took on motion. My image came into frame, went through the maneuver I had just finished. I was pleased. I had hit the ring of orange “flame” dead center and triggered the purple smoke at just the right instant. The peelout curve was a little ragged, but it would do. The sudden growth of my oncoming image was so startling that I actually flinched—which is pretty silly. The deceleration was nearly as breathtaking to watch as it had been to do, the pullout was fine, and the final triumphant extension was frankly terrific.
“That’s a take,” I said contentedly. “Which way’s the bar?”
“Just up the street,” Raoul answered. “I’m buying.”
“Always a pleasure to meet a patron of the arts. How much did you say your name was?”
Harry’s massive construction-man’s spacesuit, festooned with tools, appeared from behind and “beneath” the camera. “Hey,” he said, “not yet. Gotta at least run through the second scene.”
“Oh hell,” I protested. “My air’s low, my belly’s empty, and I’m swimming around in this overgrown galosh.”
“Deadline’s coming,” was all Harry said.
I wanted to shower so bad I could taste it. Dancers are all different; the only thing we all have in common is that we all sweat—and in a p-suit there’s nowhere for it to go. “My thrusters’re shot,” I said weakly.