“All right,” she said, “I’ll sleep on it and let you know.”
“You can do it, love,” Kirra called out. “I know you can!”
“Goddam right,” Ben seconded, and there were noises of agreement from others.
Glenn smiled, embarrassed but pleased. “Thanks.”
Reb dismissed class early, suggesting we all meditate privately when we felt ready.
Robert and I paused in the corridor outside the classroom, off to one side. As other Novices jaunted past us, we stared deep into each other’s eyes, communicating wordlessly.
It seemed that almost everything I’d seen outside was there to be seen in those almond hazel eyes. Perhaps more—for space was indifferent to me, and utterly cold. Effortlessly I reached a decision which had eluded me for a month.
“A lot of things came clear out there today,” I said. My voice was rusty.
“Yes.” So was his.
“Teena, is my studio free for the afternoon?”
“Yes, Morgan.”
I reached out and took Robert’s left hand with my right. “Come with me.”
He nodded, and we kicked off together.
Once inside the studio I dimmed the lights slightly, to about the level of dusk on Earth. I told Teena to hold all calls, and to see that we had privacy. I gently maneuvered Robert to a handhold near the camera I’d been calling Camera One and using for main POV.
“Stay here,” I told him.
He nodded.
It took an effort to look away. I spun and jaunted to the far side of the room. I paused there. I unsealed my p-suit and took it off, making no attempt to strip erotically, simply skinning out of my clothes like an eleven-year-old on a shielded wharf. I worked the thrusters from the suit and slid them over my bare wrists and ankles, seated the controls against my palms. I closed my eyes, and cleared my mind…
…and danced.
I had been working on a piece, but did not dance that. Nor did I quote existing works of others, although I was capable of it now. I had no choreographic plan; for the first time in over thirty-five years I simply let the dance come boiling out of me.
One of the reasons I had failed as a choreographer on Earth was that I had let them teach me too much, absorbed too many rules and conventions of dance to ever again be truly spontaneous. But here I was a child again. Once again I could create.
And what came boiling up out of me first was much the same as what had come boiling out of the eleven-year-old Rain McLeod. I can’t describe the dance to you: it was improvised, and the cameras were not rolling. But I can tell you what I was saying with it, when I began.
I was saying the same thing I had said with that first dance, back on Gambier Island. The same thing Shara Drummond had been saying in the Stardance.
Here I am, Universe! I’m here; look at me. I exist. I matter.
I was talking back to endless empty blackness spattered with shards of ancient starlight, to a universe cold and burning down forever, to all the awful immensity I had seen that morning.
At first I danced only with my muscles, maintaining my position in space while I spun and turned around my center, making shapes and changing them, stretching and contracting, hurling my spine about with the force of my limbs. Then I began to use my thrusters, first to alter attitude, and then to move me around the room. I borrowed some vocabulary from ice-skating, and adapted it to three-dimensionality, swooping in widening curves that came ever closer to the wall of the spherical gym, decorating them with axel-spins.
Robert watched, as expressionless as a sea lion, bobbing slowly in the air currents I was creating.
I made him the focal point of my dance, danced not just to him, but of him. As I did my dance began to change. I danced Robert, as I saw him. I danced quiet competence, and ready courage, and strength and self-reliance and patience and mystery and grace.
There you are! You’re there: I see you. You exist. You matter.
He understood. I saw him understand.
My dance changed again. I began to dance not of the awesome immensity of space, but of the exhilaration of being alive in it; to speak not of eternity but of now. I had proclaimed myself to the Universe; now I offered myself to him.
Here we are! We’re here: look at us. “We” exists. We will matter.
He watched, so utterly relaxed that his head began to nod slowly with his breathing, as though he were asleep with his head unsecured. Or was he nodding agreement?
Finally I was done. I had said everything that was in my arms and legs and spine, everything in my heart. I floated facing him across the room, arms outstretched, waiting.
He sighed deeply, and let go of his handhold. Eyes locked with mine, he removed his p-suit, and released it to drift. And then he came to me, and then he came into me, and soon he came in me.
We made love for hours, slow dreamy love in which orgasms were merely the punctuation in a long and unfolding statement. Zero gee changes everything about the oldest dance. Together we learned and invented, made shapes and figures impossible under gravity. Both of us kept the use of our hands; neither of us was on top. The room spun around us. We cried together, and giggled together, and planed sweat from each other’s backs with our hands. We told each other stories of our failed marriages and past lovers. Even with the freedom of three dimensions, we were unable to find any embrace in which we did not fit together as naturally as spoons. We drifted in each other’s arms between rounds of lovemaking, bumping occasionally into the wall, but never hard enough to cause us to separate.
By the time we remembered the existence of the so-called real world, it was too late to get supper at the cafeteria. Well, we might just have made it…but we had to shower first, and that turned into more lovemaking. But the grill at Le Puis is always open, so we headed there, arm in arm, aglow, kissing as we jaunted. People we passed smiled.
We stopped along the way to leave our p-suits in our rooms. We discussed dressing, but could not come up with any reasons for doing so, so we didn’t bother. (I don’t recall whether I’ve mentioned it before, but it should be obvious that Top Step had no nudity taboo. People who are uncomfortable with social nudity are not good candidates for Symbiosis.)
Fat Humphrey greeted us with a grin incredibly even bigger than usual, and a roar of delight. “So you finally got off the dime, eh? I t’ought I was gonna hafta be the one to tell you two you were in love. Hey, this makes me happy! Let’s see, you gonna want a booth—right this way!”
He led us to a booth off in what would have been a corner if Le Puis had corners—far from any other patrons, I mean. We did not bother stating requests, indeed didn’t even think about it. We gazed deep into each other’s eyes in silent communication until Fat returned with food and drink. He opaqued the booth, and sealed it behind him as he left. I was mildly surprised by the amount of food, but Fat didn’t make mistakes. Sure enough, when I next noticed, it was all gone. I don’t remember what it was…but the drink was champagne.
As we were squeezing the last sips into each other’s mouths, Fat scratched discreetly at the closure of our booth. Robert unsealed it; Fat passed in a pipe, then departed again, beaming. It turned out to contain just enough hashish for two tokes apiece. Robert took all four, and passed them to me in kisses; I drank intoxication from his mouth. We caressed each other, slowly, dreamily, not so much lustfully as affectionately. Music, selected by Fat Humphrey, began to play softly in the background. I hadn’t heard it before then, but it fit the moment perfectly: Vysotsky’s “Afterglow.” I’m terrible with song lyrics, but one verse I retain verbatim: