The next twelve days were the toughest half of my life. Shara worked as hard as I did. She spent half of every day working in the studio, half of the rest in exercise under two and a quarter gravities (the most Dr. Panzella would permit), and half of the rest in Carrington’s bed, trying to make him contented enough to let her stretch her time limit. Perhaps she slept in the few hours left over. I only know that she never looked tired, never lost her composure or her dogged determination. Stubbornly, reluctantly, her body lost its awkwardness, took on grace even in an environment where grace required enormous concentration. Like a child learning how to walk, Shara learned how to fly.
I even began to get used to the absence of pain in my leg.
What can I tell you of Mass, if you have not seen it? It cannot be described, even badly, in mechanistic terms, the way a symphony could be written out in words. Conventional dance terminology is, by its built-in assumptions, worse than useless, and if you are at all familiar with the new nomenclature you must be familiar with Mass Is A Verb, from which it draws its built-in assumptions.
Nor is there much I can say about the technical aspects of Mass. There were no special effects; not even music. Raoul Brindle’s superb score was composed from the dance, and added to the tape with my permission two years later, but it was for the original, silent version that I was given the Emmy. My entire contribution, aside from editing and installing the two trampolines, was to camouflage batteries of wide-dispersion light sources in clusters around each camera eye, and wire them so that they energized only when they were out-of-frame with respect to whichever camera was on at the time—ensuring that Shara was always lit from the front, presenting two (not always congruent) shadows. I made no attempt to employ flashy camera work; I simply recorded what Shara danced, changing POV only as she did.
No, Mass Is A Verb can be described only in symbolic terms, and then poorly. I can say that Shara demonstrated that mass and inertia are as able as gravity to supply the dynamic conflict essential to dance. I can tell you that from them she distilled a kind of dance that could only have been imagined by a group-head consisting of an acrobat, a stunt-diver, a skywriter and an underwater ballerina. I can tell you that she dismantled the last interface between herself and utter freedom of motion, subduing her body to her will and space itself to her need.
And still I will have told less than nothing. For Shara sought more than freedom—she sought meaning. Mass was, above all, a spiritual event—its title pun reflecting its thematic ambiguity between the technological and the theological. Shara made the human confrontation with existence a transitive act, literally meeting God halfway. I do not mean to imply that her dance at any time addressed an exterior God, a discrete entity with or without white beard. Her dance addressed reality, gave successive expression to the Three Eternal Questions asked by every human being who ever lived.
Her dance observed her self, and asked, “How have I come to be here?”
Her dance observed the universe in which self existed, and asked, “How did all this come to be here with me?”
And at last, observing her self in relation to its universe, “Why am I so alone?”
And having asked these questions with every muscle and sinew she possessed, she paused, hung suspended in the center of the sphere, her body and soul open to the universe, and when no answer came, she contracted. Not in a dramatic, coiling-spring sense as she had in Liberation, a compressing of energy and tension. This was physically similar, but an utterly different phenomenon. It was an act of introspection, a turning of the mind’s (soul’s?) eye in upon itself, to seek answers that lay nowhere else. Her body too, therefore, seemed to fold in upon itself, compacting her mass, so evenly that her position in space was not disturbed.
And reaching within herself, she closed on emptiness.
The camera faded out, leaving her alone, rigid, encapsulated, yearning. The dance ended, leaving her three questions unanswered, the tension of their asking unresolved. Only the expression of patient waiting on her face blunted the shocking edge of the non-ending, made it bearable, a small, blessed sign whispering, “To be continued.”
By the eighteenth day we had it in the can, in rough form. Shara put it immediately out of her mind and began choreographing Stardance, but I spent two hard days of editing before I was ready to release the tape for broadcast. I had four days until the half-hour of prime time Carrington had purchased—but that wasn’t the deadline I felt breathing down the back of my neck.
McGillicuddy came into my workroom while I was editing, and although he saw the tears running down my face he said no word. I let the tape run, and he watched in silence, and soon his face was wet too. When the tape had been over for a long time he said, very softly, “One of these days I’m going to have to quit this stinking job.”
I said nothing.
“I used to be a karate instructor. I was pretty good. I could teach again, maybe do some exhibition work, make ten percent of what I do now.”
I said nothing.
“The whole damned Ring’s bugged, Charlie. The desk in my office can activate and tap my vidphone in Skyfac. Four at a time, actually.”
I said nothing.
“I saw you both in the airlock, when you came back the last time. I saw her collapse. I saw you bringing her around. I heard her make you promise not to tell Dr. Panzella.”
I waited. Hope stirred.
He dried his face. “I came in here to tell you I was going to Panzella, to tell him what I saw. He’d bully Carrington into sending her home right away.”
“And now?” I said.
“I’ve seen that tape.”
“And you know that the Stardance will probably kill her?”
“Yes.”
“And you know we have to let her do it?”
“Yes.”
Hope died. I nodded. “Then get out of here and let me work.”
He left.
On Wall Street and aboard Skyfac it was late afternoon when I finally had the tape edited to my satisfaction. I called Carrington, told him to expect me in half an hour, showered, shaved, dressed, and left.
A major of the Space Command was there with him when I arrived, but he was not introduced and so I ignored him. Shara was there too, wearing a thing made of orange smoke that left her breasts bare. Carrington had obviously made her wear it, as an urchin writes filthy words on an altar, but she wore it with a perverse and curious dignity that I sensed annoyed him. I looked her in the eye and smiled. “Hi, kid. It’s a good tape.”
“Let’s see,” Carrington said. He and the major took seats behind the desk, and Shara sat beside it.
I fed the tape into the video rig built into the office wall, dimmed the lights, and sat across from Shara. It ran twenty minutes, uninterrupted, no soundtrack, stark naked.
It was terrific.
“Aghast,” is a funny word. To make you aghast, a thing must hit you in a place you haven’t armored over with cynicism yet. I seem to have been born cynical; I have been aghast three times that I can remember. The first was when I learned, at the age of three, that there were people who could deliberately hurt kittens. The second was when I learned, at age seventeen, that there were people who could actually take LSD and then hurt other people for fun. The third was when Mass Is A Verb ended and Carrington said in perfectly conversational tones, “Very pleasant; very graceful. I like it,” when I learned, at age forty-five, that there were men, not fools or cretins but intelligent men, who could watch Shara Drummond dance and fail to see. We all, even the most cynical of us, always have some illusion which we cherish.