“You don’t need ’em much for Scene Two,” Norrey reminded me. “Monkey Bars, remember? Brute muscle stuff.” She paused. “And we are pushing deadline, Charlie.”
Dammit, a voice on stereo earphones seems to come from the same place that the voice of your conscience does.
“They’re right, Charlie,” Raoul said. “I spoke too soon. Come on, the night is young.”
I stared around me at an immense sphere of starry emptiness, Earth a beachball to my left and the Sun a brilliant softball beyond it. “Night don’t come any older than this,” I grumbled, and gave in. “Okay, I guess you’re right. Harry, you and Raoul strike that set and get the next one in place, okay? The rest of you warm up in place. Get sweaty.”
Raoul and Harry, as practiced and efficient as a pair of old beat cops, took the Family Car out to vacuum up the vacuum. I sat on nothing and brooded about the damned deadline. It was getting time to go dirtside again, which meant it was time to get this segment rehearsed and shot, but I didn’t have to like it. No artist likes time pressure, even those who can’t produce without it. So I brooded.
The show must go on. The show must always go on, and if you are one of those millions who have always wondered exactly why, I will tell you. The tickets have already been sold.
But it’s uniquely hard (as well as foolish) to brood in space. You hang suspended within the Big Deep, infinity in all directions, an emptiness so immense that although you know that you’re falling through it at high speed, you make no slightest visible progress. Space is God’s Throne Room, and so vasty a hall is it that no human problem has significance within it for long.
Have you ever lived by the sea? If so, you know how difficult it is to retain a griping mood while contemplating the ocean. Space is like that, only more so.
Much more so.
By the time the Monkey Bars were assembled, I was nearly in a dancing mood again. The Bars were a kind of three-dimensional gymnast’s jungle, a huge partial icosahedron composed of transparent tubes inside which neon fluoresced green and red. It enclosed an area of about 14,000 cubic meters, within which were scattered a great many tiny liquid droplets that hung like motion-less dust motes, gleaming in laserlight. Apple juice.
When Raoul and Harry had first shown me the model for the Monkey Bars, I had been struck by the aesthetic beauty of the structure. By now, after endless simulations and individual rehearsals, I saw it only as a complex collection of fulcrums and pivots for Tom, Linda, Norrey and me to dance on, an array of vector-changers designed for maximal movement with minimal thruster use. Scene Two relied almost entirely on muscle power, a paradox considering the technology implicit in its creation. We would pivot with all four limbs on the Bars and on each other, borrowing some moves from the vocabulary of trapeze acrobatics and some from our own growing experience with free-fall lovemaking, constantly forming and dissolving strange geometries that were new even to dance. (We were using choreography rather than improv techniques: the Bars and their concept were too big for the Goldfish Bowl, and you can’t afford mistakes in free space.)
Though I had taught individual dancers their parts and rehearsed some of the trickier clinches with the group, this would be our first full run-through together. I found I was anxious to assure myself that it would actually work. All the computer simulation in the world is no substitute for actually doing it; things that look lovely in compsim can dislocate shoulders in practice.
I was about to call places when Norrey left her position and jetted my way. Of course there’s only one possible reason for that, so I turned off my radio too and waited. She decelerated neatly, came to rest beside me, and touched her hood to mine.
“Charlie, I didn’t mean to crowd you. We can come back in eleven hours and—”
“No, that’s okay, hon,” I assured her. “You’re right: ‘Deadline don’t care.’ I just hope the choreography’s right.”
“It’s just the first run-through. And the simulations were great.”
“That’s not what I mean. Hell, I know it’s correct. By this point I can think spherically just fine. I just don’t know if it’s anygood.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s exactly the kind of choreography Shara would have loathed. Rigid, precisely timed, like a set of tracks.”
She locked a leg around my waist to arrest a slight drift and looked thoughtful. “She’d have loathed it for herself,” she said finally, “but I think she’d really have enjoyed watching us do it. It’s agood piece, Charlie—and you know how the critics love anything abstract.”
“Yeah, you’re right—again,” I said, and put on my best Cheerful Charlie grin. It’s not fair to have a bummer at curtain time; it brings the other dancers down. “In fact, you may have just given me a better title for this whole mess: Synapstract.”
There was relief in her answering grin. “If it’s got to be a pun, I like ImMerced better.”
“Yeah, it does have a kind of Cunningham flavor to it. Bet the old boy takes the next elevator up after he sees it.” I squeezed her arm through the p-suit, added “Thanks, hon,” cut in my radio again. “All right, boys and girls, ‘let’s shoot this turkey.’ Watch out for leg-breakers and widowmakers. Harry, those cameras locked in?”
“Program running,” he announced. “Blow a gasket.” It’s the Stardancer’s equivalent of “Break a leg.”
Norrey scooted back into position, I corrected my own, the lights came up hellbright on cameras 2 and 4, and we took our stage, while on all sides of us an enormous universe went about its business.
You can’t fake cheerfulness well enough to fool a wife like Norrey without there being something real to it; and, like I said, it’s hard to brood in space. It really was exhilarating to hurl my body around within the red and green Bars, interacting with the energy of three other dancers I happened to love, concentrating on split-second timing and perfect body placement. But an artist is capable of self-criticism even in the midst of the most involving performance. It’s the same perpetual self-scrutiny that makes so many of us so hard to get along with for any length of time—and that makes us artists in the first place. The last words Shara Drummond ever said to me were, “Do it right.”
And even in the whirling midst of a piece that demanded all my attention, there was still room for a little whispering voice that said that this was only the best I had been able to do and still meet my deadline.
I tried to comfort myself with the notion that every artist who ever worked feels exactly the same way, about nearly every piece they ever do—and it didn’t help me any more than it ever does any of us. And so I made the one small error of placement, and tried to correct with thrusters in too much of a hurry and triggered the wrong one and smacked backward hard into Tom. His back was to me as well, and our air tanks clanged and one of mine blew. A horse kicked me between the shoulder blades and the Bars came up fast and caught me across the thighs, tumbling me end over end. I was more than twenty meters from the set, heading for forever, before I had time to black out.
Happening to smack into the Bars off center was a break. It put me into an acrobat’s tumble, which centrifuged air into my hood and boots, and blood to my head and feet, bringing me out of blackout quicker. Even so, precious seconds ticked by while I groggily deduced my problem, picked my point and began to spin correctly. With the perspective that gave me I oriented myself, still groggy, figured out intuitively which thrusters would kill the spin, and used them.