The New Age was the hotel in New York in those days, built on the ruins of the Sheraton. Ultraefficient security, bulletproof windows, carpet thicker than the outside air, and a lobby of an architectural persuasion that John D. MacDonald once called “Early Dental Plate.” It stank of money. I was glad I’d made the effort to locate a necktie, and I wished I’d shined my shoes. An incredible man blocked my way as I came in through the airlock. He moved and was built like the toughest, fastest bouncer I ever saw, and he dressed and acted like God’s butler. He said his name was Perry, as if he didn’t expect me to believe it. He asked if he could help me, as though he didn’t think so.
“Yes, Perry. Would you mind lifting up one of your feet?”
“Why?”
“I’ll bet twenty dollars you’ve shined your soles.” Half his mouth smiled, and he didn’t move an inch. “Whom did you wish to see?”
“Shara Drummond.”
“Not registered.”
“The Presidential Suite.”
“Oh.” Light dawned. “Mister Carrington’s lady. You should have said so. Wait here, please.” While he phoned to verify that I was expected, keeping his eye on me and his hand near his pocket, I swallowed my heart and rearranged my face. So that was how it was. All right then. That was how it was.
Perry came back and gave me the little button-transmitter that would let me walk the corridors of the New Age without being cut down by automatic laser-fire, and explained carefully that it would blow a largish hole in me if I attempted to leave the building without returning it. From his manner I gathered that I had just skipped four grades in social standing. I thanked him, though I’m damned if I know why.
I followed the green fluorescent arrows that appeared on the bulbless ceiling, and came after a long and scenic walk to the Presidential Suite. Shara was waiting at the door, in something like an angel’s pajamas. It made all that big body look delicate. “Hello, Charlie.”
I was jovial and hearty. “Hi, babe. Swell joint. How’ve you been keeping yourself?”
“I haven’t been.”
“Well, how’s Carrington been keeping you, then?” Steady, boy.
“Come in, Charlie.”
I went in. It looked like where the Queen stayed when she was in town, and I’m sure she enjoyed it. You could have landed an airplane in the living room without waking anyone in the bedroom. It had two pianos. Only one fireplace, barely big enough to barbecue a buffalo—you have to scrimp somewhere, I guess. Roger Kellaway was on the quadio, and for a wild moment I thought he was actually in the suite, playing some unseen third piano. So this was how it was.
“Can I get you something, Charlie?”
“Oh, sure. Hash Oil, Citrolli Supreme. Dom Perignon for the pipe.”
Without cracking a smile she went to a cabinet that looked like a midget cathedral, and produced precisely what I had ordered. I kept my own features impressive and lit up. The bubbles tickled my throat, and the rush was exquisite. I felt myself relaxing, and when we had passed the narghile’s mouthpiece a few times I felt her relax. We looked at each other then—really looked at each other—then at the room around us and then at each other again. Simultaneously we roared with laughter, a laughter that blew all the wealth out of the room and let in richness. Her laugh was the same whooping, braying belly laugh I remembered so well, an unselfconscious and lusty laugh, and it reassured me tremendously. I was so relieved I couldn’t stop laughing myself, and that kept her going, and just as we might have stopped she pursed her lips and blew a stuttered arpeggio. There’s an old audio recording called the Spike Jones Laughing Record, where the tuba player tries to play “The Flight Of The Bumblebee” and falls down laughing, and the whole band breaks up and horselaughs for a full two minutes, and every time they run out of air the tuba player tries another flutter and roars and they all break up again, and once when Shara was blue I bet her ten dollars that she couldn’t listen to that record without at least giggling and I won. When I understood now that she was quoting it, I shuddered and dissolved into great whoops of new laughter, and a minute later we had reached the stage where we literally laughed ourselves out of our chairs and lay on the floor in agonies of mirth, weakly pounding the floor and howling. I take that laugh out of my memory now and then and rerun it—but not often, for such records deteriorate drastically with play.
At last we dopplered back down to panting grins, and I helped her to her feet.
“What a perfectly dreadful place,” I said, still chuckling.
She glanced around and shuddered. “Oh God, it is, Charlie. It must be awful to need this much front.”
“For a horrid while I thought you did.”
She sobered, and met my eyes. “Charlie, I wish I could resent that. In a way I do need it.”
My eyes narrowed. “Just what do you mean?”
“I need Bryce Carrington.”
“This time you can trot out the qualifiers. How do you need him?”
“I need his money,” she cried.
How can you relax and tense up at the same time?
“Oh, damn it, Shara! Is that how you’re going to get to dance? Buy your way in? What does a critic go for, these days?”
“Charlie, stop it. I need Carrington to get seen. He’s going to rent me a hall, that’s all.”
“If that’s all, let’s get out of this dump right now. I can bor—get enough cash to rent you any hall in the world, and I’m just as willing to risk my money.”
“Can you get me Skyfac?”
“Uh?”
I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why she proposed to go to Skyfac to dance. Why not Antarctica?
“Shara, you know even less about space than I do, but you must know that a satellite broadcast doesn’t have to be made from a satellite?”
“Idiot. It’s the setting I want.”
I thought about it. “Moon’d be better, visually. Mountains. Light. Contrast.”
“The visual aspect is secondary. I don’t want one-sixth gee, Charlie. I want zero gravity.”
My mouth hung open.
“And I want you to be my video man.”
God, she was a rare one. What I needed then was to sit there with my mouth open and think for several minutes. She let me do just that, waiting patiently for me to work it all out.
“Weight isn’t a verb anymore, Charlie,” she said finally. “That dance ended on the assertion that you can’t beat gravity—you said so yourself. Well, that statement is incorrect—obsolete. The dance of the twenty-first century will have to acknowledge that.”
“And it’s just what you need to make it. A new kind of dance for a new kind of dancer. Unique. It’ll catch the public eye, and you should have the field entirely to yourself for years. I like it, Shara. I like it. But can you pull it off?”
“I thought about what you said: that you can’t beat gravity but it’s beautiful to try. It stayed in my head for months, and then one day I was visiting a neighbor with a TV and I saw newsreels of the crew working on Skyfac Two. I was up all night thinking, and the next morning I came up to the States and got in Skyfac One. I’ve been up there for nearly a year, getting next to Carrington. I can do it, Charlie, I can make it work.” There was a ripple in her jaw that I had seen before—when she’d told me off in Le Maintenant. It was a ripple of determination.