I know that Cox and Tom were still alive, because I saw them afterwards, and that means they were probably saying and doing things in my hearing and presence, but I neither heard them nor saw them then; they were as dead to me as everything except Shara. I called out her name, and she approached the camera that was lit, until I could make out her face behind the plastic hood of her p-suit.
“We may be puny, Charlie,” she puffed, gasping for breath. “But by Jesus we’re tough.”
“Shara—come on in now.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Carrington’ll have to give you a free-fall place to live now.”
“A life of exile? For what? To dance? Charlie, I haven’t got anything more to say.”
“Then I’ll come out there.”
“Don’t be silly. Why? So you can hug a p-suit? Tenderly bump hoods one last time? Balls. It’s a good exit so far—let’s not blow it.”
“Shara!” Ibroke completely, just caved in on myself and collapsed into great racking sobs.
“Charlie, listen now,” she said softly, but with an urgency that reached me even in my despair. “Listen now, for I haven’t much time. I have something to give you. I hoped you’d find it for yourself, but… will you listen?”
“Y—yes.”
“Charlie, zero-gee dance is going to get awful popular all of a sudden. I’ve opened the door. But you know how fads are, they’ll bitch it all up unless you move fast. I’m leaving it in your hands.”
“What… what are you talking about?”
“About you, Charlie. You’re going to dance again.” Oxygen starvation, I thought. But she can’t be that low on air already.
“Okay. Sure thing.”
“For God’s sake stop humoring me—I’m straight, I tell you. You’d have seen it yourself if you weren’t so damned stupid. Don’t you understand? There’s nothing wrong with your leg in free fall!”
My jaw dropped.
“Do you hear me, Charlie? You can dance again!”
“No,” I said, and searched for a reason why not. “I… you can’t… it’s… dammit, the leg’s not strong enough for inside work.”
“Forget for the moment that inside work’ll be less than half of what you do. Forget it and remember that smack in the nose you gave Carrington. Charlie, when you leaped over the desk: you pushed off with your right leg.”
I sputtered for a while and shut up.
“There you go, Charlie. My farewell gift. You know I’ve never been in love with you… but you must know that I’ve always loved you. Still do.”
“I love you, Shara.”
“So long, Charlie. Do it right.”
And all four thrusters went off at once. I watched her go down. A while after she was too far to see, there was a long golden flame that arced above the face of the globe, waned, and then flared again as the airtanks went up.
The Stardancers
I
The flight from Washington was miserable. How can a man who’s worked in free fall get airsick? Worse, I had awakened that morning with the same stinking cold I had had ever since returning Earthside, and so I spent the whole flight anticipating the knives that would be thrust through my ears when we landed. But I turned down the proffered drink as well as the meal.
I was not even depressed. Too much had happened to me in the last few weeks. I was wrung out, drained, just sort of… on standby, taking disinterested notes while my automatic pilot steered my body around. It helped to be in a familiar place—why, come to think, hadn’t I once thought of Toronto, about a thousand years ago, as “home”?
There were reporters when I got through Customs, of course, but not nearly as many as there had been at first. Once, as a kid, I spent a summer working in a mental hospital, and I learned an extraordinary thing: I learned that anyone, no matter how determined, whom you utterly ignore will eventually stun pestering you and go away. I had been practicing the technique so consistently for the last three weeks that the word had gone out, and now only the most Skinnerian newstapers even troubled to stick microphones in my face. Eventually there was a cab in front of me and I took it. Toronto cabbies can be relied upon not to recognize anybody, thank God.
I was “free” now.
Reentering the TDT studio was a strong deja vu experience, strong enough almost to penetrate my armor. Once, geologic ages ago, I had worked here for three years, and briefly again thereafter. And once, in this building, I had seen Shara Drummond dance for the first time. I had come full circle.
I felt nothing.
Always excepting, of course, the god damned leg. After all the time in free fall it hurt much worse than I’d remembered, more than it had hurt since the original days of its ruining, unimaginably far in the past. I had to pause twice on the way upstairs, and I was soaking with sweat by the time I made the top. (Ever wonder why dance studios are alwaysup at least one flight of stairs? Did you ever try to rent that much square footage at ground level?) I waited on the landing, regularizing my breathing, until I decided that my color had returned, and then a few seconds more. I knew I should feel agitated now, but I was still on standby.
I opened the door, and deja vu smacked at me again. Norrey was across the old familiar room, and just as before she was putting a group of students through their paces. They might have been the same students. Only Shara was missing. Shara would always be missing. Shara was air pollution now, upper atmosphere pollution, much more widely distributed than most corpses get to be.
She had been cremated at the top of the atmosphere, and by it.
But her older sister was very much alive. She was in the midst of demonstrating a series of suspensions on half-toe as I entered, and I just had time to absorb an impression of glowing skin, healthy sweat, and superb muscle tone before she glanced up and saw me. She stiffened like a stop-frame shot, then literally fell out of an extension. Automatically her body tucked and rolled, and she came out of it at a dead run, crying and swearing as she came, arms outstretched. I barely had time to brace the good leg before she cannoned into me, and then we were rocking in each other’s arms like tipsy giants, and she was swearing like a sailor and crying my name. We hugged for an endless time before I became aware that I was holding her clear of the floor and that my shoulders were shrieking nearly as loud as my leg. Six months ago it would have buckled, I thought vaguely, and set her down.
“All right, are you all right, are you all right?” her voice was saying in my ear.
I pulled back and tried to grin. “My leg is killing me. And I think I’ve got the flu.”
“Damn you, Charlie, don’t you dare misunderstand me. Are you all right?” Her fingers gripped my neck as if she intended to chin herself.
My hands dropped to her waist and I looked her in the eyes, abandoning the grin. All at once I realized I was no longer on standby. My cocoon was ruptured, blood sang in my ears, and I could feel the very air impinging on my skin. For the first time I thought about why I had come here, and partly I understood. “Norrey,” I said simply, “I’m okay. Some ways I think I’m in better shape than I’ve been in twenty years.”
The second sentence just slipped out, but I knew as I said it that it was true. Norrey read the truth in my eyes, and somehow managed to relax all over without loosing her embrace. “Oh, thank God,” she sobbed, and pulled me closer. After a time her sobs lessened, and she said, almost petulantly, her voice tiny, “I’d have broken your neck,” and we were both grinning like idiots and laughing aloud. We laughed ourselves right out of our embrace, and then Norrey said “Oh!” suddenly and turned bright red and spun around to her class.