Space turned around me.
Tom and Linda came into view. I didn’t call out to them—their breathing told me that they were in deep meditative trance, and my eyes told me how they had got there. You take that oldest and most enduring of children’s toys, the Slinky. You weld thin flat plates on either end, and bring the accordionlike result out into free space. You place the plates together, so that the Slinky describes a circle. Then you let go. Watch the result for long enough, and you will go into deep trance. The Worm Ourobouros endlessly copulating with himself. They would hear me if I called them by name; they would hear nothing else.
Raoul came into frame next, seen side-on to me. With deadly, matter-of-fact accuracy, he and Harry were hurling that other most durable of toys—a Frisbee (neon-rimmed for visibility)—back and forth across a couple of kilometers of emptiness. This too was more a meditational exercise than anything else; there is next to no skill involved. A flying saucer, it turns out, really is the most dynamically stable shape for a spacecraft. (Take a missile shaped like the old science fiction spaceships, fins and all, and throw it any way you want, with “Kentucky rifle” spin or without; sooner or later it will tumble. A sphere is okay—but unless it was formed in free fall, it’s imperfect: it’ll wobble, worse and worse as it goes.) They were practiced partners; their thruster was minimal.
Norrey was skipping rope with a bight of her lifeline. Naturally she was rotating in the opposite direction. It was incredibly beautiful to watch, and I canceled my rotation to enjoy it. Perhaps, I thought lazily, we could work that into a dance someday. Dynamic balance, yin and yang, as simple and as complex as a hydrogen atom.
“Don’t atoms dance, Charlie?”
I stiffened, then grinned at myself and relaxed. You can’t haunt me, Shara, I told the hallucinatory voice. You and I are at peace. Without me you could never have done the thing you did; without you I might never have been whole again. Rest in peace.
I watched Norrey some more, in a curiously detached state of mind. Considered objectively, my wife was nowhere near as stunningly beautiful as her dead sister had been. Just strikingly beautiful. And never once in the decades of our bizarre relationship had I ever felt for Norrey the kind of helpless consuming passion I had felt for Shara every minute of the few years I knew her. Thank God. I remembered that passion, that mindless worship that sees a scuff on an apartment floor and says There she placed her foot, that sees a battered camera and says With that I taped her. The sleepless nights and the rivers of scotch and the insulted hookers and the terrible awakenings; through it all the continuous yearning that nothing will abate and only the presence of the loved one will assuage. My passion for Shara had died, vanished forever, almost at the same moment that she did. Norrey had been right, two years ago in Le Maintenant: you only conceive a passion like that for someone you think you can’t have. And the very worst thing that can happen to you is to be wrong.
Shara had been very kind to me.
The love I now shared with Norrey was much quieter, much gentler on the nervous system. Why, I’d managed to overlook it for years. But it was a richer kind of love in the end.
Look, I used this metaphor before I ever dreamed of coming to space, and it’s still good. Picture us all as being in free fall, all of us that are alive. Literally falling freely, at one gee, down a tube so unimaginably long that its ultimate bottom cannot be seen. The vast tube is studded with occasional obstacles—and the law of averages says that at some finite future time you will smash into one: you will die. There are literally billions of us in this tube, all falling, all sure to hit some day; we carom off each other all the time, whirling more or less at random in and out of lives and groups of lives. Most of us construct belief-structures which deny either the falling or the obstacles, and place them underneath our feet like skateboards. A good rider can stay on for a lifetime.
Occasionally you reach out and take a stranger’s hand, and fall together for a while. It’s not so bad, then. Sometimes if you’re really desperate with fear, you clutch someone like a drowning man clinging to an anchor, or you strive hopelessly to reach someone in a different trajectory, someone you can’t possibly reach, just to be doing something to make you forget that your death is rushing up toward you.
That was the kind of need I had had for Shara. I had learned better, from her and from space, and finally from my Last Ride with Norrey a week ago. I had reconciled myself to falling. Norrey and I now fell through life together with great serenity, enjoying the view with a truly binocular vision.
“Has it occurred to any of you,” I asked lazily, “that living in space has just about matured us to the point of early childhood?”
Norrey giggled and stopped skipping. “What do you mean, love?”
Raoul laughed. “It’s obvious. Look at us--A Slinky, a Frisbee, and a jump rope. The thrusting apex of modem culture, kids in the biggest playground God ever made.”
“On tethers,” Norrey said, “like country kids, to keep us out of the garden.”
“Feels good to me,” Harry put in.
Linda was coming out of meditation; her voice was slow, soft. “Charlie is right. We have matured enough to become childlike.”
“That’s closer to what I meant,” I said approvingly. “Play is play, whether it’s a tennis racquet or a rattle. I’m not talking about the kinds of toys we choose, so much. It’s more like…” I paused to think, and they waited. “Listen, it seems to me that I have felt like an old old man since I was about, what, nine years old. This past few years has been the adolescence I never had, and now I’m happy as a child again.”
Linda began to sing:
“It’s an old Nova Scotia song,” she finished quietly.
“Teach it to me,” Raoul said.
“Later. I want to pursue this thought.”
So did I—but just then my alarm watch went off. I fumbled the stud home through the p-suit, and it subsided. “Sorry, gang. Halfway through our air. Let’s get together for the group exercises. Form up on Linda and we’ll try the Pulsing Snowflake.”
“Shit—work again?”
“Phooey—we’ve got a year to get into shape,”
“Wait’ll I catch this sonumbitch, boss,” and “Let’s get it over with,” were the entirely natural-sounding responses to the code phrase. We closed ranks and diddled with our radios.
“There we go,” I said as I closed. “Right, and Harry, you cross over and take Tom’s… that’s right. Wait, look out! Oh Christ!” I screamed.
“No!” Harry shouted.
“Ohmigod,” Raoul bubbled, “Ohmigod his suit’s ripped his suit’s ripped. Somebody do something, ohmigod—”
“May Day,” I roared. “Siegfried from Stardancers, May Day, God damn it. We’ve got a blown suit, I don’t think I can fix it, answer me, will you?”
Silence, except for Harry’s horrible gurgling.
“Siegfried, for the love of God, come in. One of your precious interpreters is dying out here!”
Silence.
Raoul swore and raged, Linda said calming things to him, Norrey prayed softly.