“It’s one of the strongest verbs in dance—the strongest, I guess—and you can make it do anything.”
“Almost anything.”
“Eh?”
“VisuEnt gave us our contract back.”
“Oh.” Nothing showed in her eyes, but I knew what was behind them. “Well, who’s next on the list?”
“There is no one left on the list.”
“Oh.” This time it showed. “Oh.”
“We should have remembered. Great artists are never honored in their own lifetime. What we ought to do is drop dead—then we’d be all set.”
In my way I was trying to be strong for her, and she knew it and tried to be strong for me.
“Maybe what we should do is go into death insurance, for artists,” she said. “We pay the client premiums against a controlling interest in his estate, and we guarantee that he’ll die.”
“We can’t lose. And if he becomes famous in his lifetime he can buy out.”
“Terrific. Let’s stop this before I laugh myself to death.”
“Yeah.”
She was silent for a long time. My own mind was racing efficiently, but the transmission seemed to be blown—it wouldn’t go anywhere. Finally she got up and turned off the music machine, which had been whining softly ever since the tape ended. It made a loud click.
“Norrey’s got some land in Prince Edward Island,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “There’s a house.”
I tried to head her off with the punchline from the old joke about the kid shoveling out the elephant cage in the circus whose father offers to take him back and set him up with a decent job. “What? And leave show business?”
“Screw show business,” she said softly. “If I went to PEI now, maybe I could get the land cleared and plowed in time to get a garden in.” Her expression changed. “How about you?”
“Me? I’ll be okay. TDT asked me to come back.”
“That was six months ago.”
“They asked again. Last week.”
“And you said no. Moron.”
“Maybe so, maybe so.”
“The whole damn thing was a waste of time. All that time. All that energy. All that work. I might as well have been farming in PEI—by now the soil’d be starting to bear well. What a waste, Charlie, what a stinking waste.”
“No, I don’t think so, Shara. It sounds glib to say that ‘nothing is wasted,’ but—well, it’s like that dance you just did. Maybe you can’t beat gravity—but it surely is a beautiful thing to try.”
“Yeah, I know. Remember the Light Brigade. Remember the Alamo. They tried.” She laughed bitterly.
“Yes, and so did Jesus of Nazareth. Did you do it for material reward, or because it needed doing? If nothing else we now have several hundred thousand meters of the most magnificent dance recordings on tape, commercial value zero, real value incalculable, and by me that is no waste. It’s over now, and we’ll both go do the next thing, but it was not a waste.” I discovered that I was shouting, and stopped.
She closed her mouth. After a while she tried a smile. “You’re right, Charlie. It wasn’t a waste. I’m a better dancer than I ever was.”
“Damn right. You’ve transcended choreography.” She smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Even Norrey thinks it’s a dead end.”
“It is not a dead end. There’s more to poetry than haiku and sonnets. Dancers don’t have to be robots, delivering memorized lines with their bodies.”
“They do if they want to make a living.”
“We’ll try it again in a few years. Maybe they’ll be ready then.”
“Sure. Let me get us some drinks.”
I slept with her that night, for the first and last time. In the morning I broke down the set in the living room while she packed. I promised to write. I promised to come and visit when I could. I carried her bags down to the car, and stowed them inside. I kissed her and waved goodbye. I went looking for a drink, and at four o’clock the next morning a mugger decided I looked drunk enough and I broke his jaw, his nose and two ribs, and then sat down on him and cried. On Monday morning I showed up at the studio with my hat in my hand and a mouth like a bus-station ashtray and crawled back into my old job. Norrey didn’t ask any questions. What with rising food prices, I gave up eating anything but bourbon, and in six months I was fired. It went like that for a long time.
I never did write to her. I kept getting bogged down after “Dear Shara....”
When I got to the point of selling my video equipment for booze, a relay clicked somewhere and I took stock of myself. The stuff was all the life I had left, and so I went to the local AlAnon instead of the pawnshop and got sober. After a while my soul got numb, and I stopped flinching when I woke up. A hundred times I began to wipe the tapes I still had of Shara—she had copies of her own—but in the end I could not. From time to time I wondered how she was doing, and I could not bear to find out. If Norrey heard anything, she didn’t tell me about it. She even tried to get me my job back a third time, but it was hopeless. Reputation can be a terrible thing once you’ve blown it. I was lucky to land a job with an educational TV station in New Brunswick.
It was a long couple of years.
Vidphones were coming out by 1995, and I had bread-boarded one of my own without the knowledge or consent of the phone company, which I still hated more than anything. When the peanut bulb I had replaced the damned bell with started glowing softly off and on one evening in June, I put the receiver on the audio pickup and energized the tube, in case the caller was also equipped. “Hello?”
She was. When Shara’s face appeared, I got a cold cube of fear in the pit of my stomach, because I had quit seeing her face everywhere when I quit drinking, and I had been thinking lately of hitting the sauce again. When I blinked and she was still there, I felt a very little better and tried to speak. It didn’t work.
“Hello, Charlie. It’s been a long time.”
The second time it worked. “Seems like yesterday. Somebody else’s yesterday.”
“Yes, it does. It took me days to find you. Norrey’s in Paris, and no one else knew where you’d gone.”
“Yeah. How’s farming?”
“I...I’ve put that away, Charlie. It’s even more creative than dancing, but it’s not the same.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Working.”
“Dancing?”
“Yes. Charlie, I need you. I mean, I have a job for you. I need your cameras and your eye.”
“Never mind the qualifications. Any kind of need will do. Where are you? When’s the next plane there? Which cameras do I pack?”
“New York, an hour from now, and none of them. I didn’t mean ‘your cameras’ literally—unless you’re using GLX-5000s and a Hamilton Board lately.”
I whistled. It hurt my mouth. “Not on my budget. Besides, I’m old-fashioned—I like to hold ’em with my hands.”
“For this job you’ll use a Hamilton, and it’ll be a twenty-input Masterchrome, brand new.”
“You grew poppies on that farm? Or just struck diamonds with the roto-tiller?”
“You’ll be getting paid by Bryce Carrington.” I blinked.
“Now will you catch that plane so I can tell you about it? The New Age, ask for the Presidential Suite.”
“The hell with the plane, I’ll walk. Quicker.” I hung up.
According to the Time magazine in my dentist’s waiting room, Bryce Carrington was the genius who had become a multibillionaire by convincing a number of giants of industry to underwrite Skyfac, the great orbiting complex that kicked the bottom out of the crystals market—and seventy-’leven other markets besides. As I recalled the story, some rare poliolike disease had wasted both his legs and put him in a wheelchair. But the legs had lost strength, not function—in lessened gravity they worked well enough. So he created Skyfac, establishing mining crews on Luna to supply it with cheap raw materials, and spent most of his time in orbit under reduced gravity. His picture made him look like a reasonably successful author (as opposed to writer). Other than that I knew nothing about him. I paid little attention to news and none at all to space news.