Kirra and I each adapted to our own local orientation for a moment, blinked at the items and documents attached to our desks, the monitor screens that read WELCOME TO TOP STEP, and so on. Then we turned back to look at each other. Being out-of-phase was unsatisfactory; without discussion or thought we both adapted to a compromise orientation halfway between our two differing ones. We snapped into phase with an almost audible click.
And we broke up.
We could not stop laughing. There was more than a bit of hysteria in it, on both sides. It was different by an order of magnitude from the giggling we had done earlier while scrambling for our new p-suits. Since breakfast I had been literally blown off the face of the Earth, nearly killed in orbit, told that I was a forty-six-year-old child, sexually—aroused? well, intrigued—for the first time in forever, molested most intimately and impersonally by Decontam devices, dumped into a weird Caveworld where falling off a log was not possible, guided through a bunch of absurdly Freudian tunnels by a woman who wasn’t there…and now I was “home,” in a place where my bed was a holster, and I could look up and see the soles of my roommate’s feet. I can’t speak for Kirra, but it wasn’t until about halfway through that laugh that I realized just how lonely and scared and disoriented I was—which only made me laugh harder.
We laughed until the tears came, and then roared, because tears in free fall are so absurd, from both inside and outside. Kirra’s eyes exuded little elongated saline worms, that waved and broke up into tiny crystal balls. I seemed to see her through a fish-eye lens that kept changing its focal length. Every time our laughter began to slow down, one of us would gasp out something like, “Long day,” or, “Do you believe this?” and we’d dissolve again, as though something terribly funny had been said.
Our convulsions set us caroming gently around the room, and eventually we collided glancingly and climbed up each other into a hug. We squeezed each other’s laughter into submission.
“Thanks, love,” Kirra said finally. “I needed that bellybuster.”
“Me too!” We sort of did a pushup on each other: pushed apart until we held each other by the biceps at arms’ length. “Whoever decided you and I would be compatible roommates was either very good at their job or very lucky. I couldn’t have laughed like that alone, or with somebody like Glenn.”
We kept hold of each other’s upper arms in order to maintain eye contact, to match our personal verticals. But nothing is still in free fall unless anchored. To keep our lower bodies from drifting, we had instinctively invented a way of bracing our shins against each other with ankles interlocked. I became aware of it now, and admired it. Could there be such a thing as an instinctive response to zero gravity? Or was it just that bodies are a lot more adaptable than brains?
“All right,” Kirra said, “let’s get down to it. Who are you, Morgan? Why are you here?”
I was more amused than offended by her forthrightness. “You sure don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“Hell, I was born in the bush.”
I pinched her.
“But I’ll go first if you want,” she continued.
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “ ‘Why am I here?’ is easy. I’m…I was a dancer. I was pretty famous, but more important I was pretty good, but most important I was married to it, it’s all I ever did, and I can’t do it anymore. I don’t mean I can’t get hired. I mean I can’t dance anymore. Not on Earth, anyway. Not for a long time now. I looked around and found out there’s nothing else on Earth I care about. And my problems are lower back and knees, and zero gee is supposed to be great for both.”
“I can see that,” Kirra agreed.
“It’s more than just the reduced stress. It’s the calcium loss. There’s this doctor thinks it will actually help.”
Human bones lose calcium rapidly in zero gravity—one of many reasons why people who stay in space too long are stuck there for life. The bones become too frail to return to terrestrial gravity. Many of my fellow Postulants would be taking calcium supplements, just in case they decided to change their minds and return to Earth. But it happened that overcalcification was a factor in both my back trouble and my knee problems.
“So space is a place where one out of the three doctors says maybe I could dance again. For one chance in three of dancing again, I would skin myself with a can opener. If I have to put up with great longevity and freedom from all human suffering and telepathic union with a bunch of saints and geniuses to get that chance…well, I can live with that, I guess.” I grinned. “That sounds weird, huh?”
“Not to me. Well, what do you think? Can you dance here?”
“Well…I won’t know until I’ve had time alone to experiment. I won’t really know until I wake up the next morning. And I won’t be sure for at least a week or two. But it feels good, Kirra. I don’t know, it really does. I think it’s going to work, maybe. Oh shit, I’m excited!”
She squeezed my arms and showed me every one of those perfect teeth. “That’s great, love. I’m glad for you. Good luck, eh?”
The trite words sounded real in her mouth. “Thanks, hon. Okay, your turn now. What brings you to Top Step?”
“Well…do you know anything about Aborigines, Morgan?” she asked. “The Dreamtime? The Songlines?”
I admitted I did not.
“This is gonna take a while…you sure you want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“Back before the world got started was the Dreamtime, my people reckon. All the Ancestors dreamed themselves alive, then, created themselves out of clay, created themselves as people and all the kinds of animals and birds and insects there are. And the first thing they did was go walkabout, singin’—makin’ the world by singin’ it into existence. Sing up a river here, sing a mountain there. Wherever they went, they left a Songline behind ’em, and the Song made the world around there, see? So there’s Songlines criss-crossin’ the world, and everyplace is on or near a Songline, with a Song of its own that makes it what it is. That’s why we go Walkabout—to follow the Songlines and sing the Songs and keep recreating the world so’s it doesn’t melt away. Get it?”
“I think so. All Aboriginals believe this?”
“Most of us that’s left. Our Dreaming ain’t like whitefella religions. Our Songs were maps, trade routes, alliances, history: they held the whole country together, kept hundreds of tribes and clans living together in peace for generations. Even the whitefella couldn’t completely change that. Those of us they didn’t kill outright had trouble keepin’ our faith, but. Some of us went to the towns, tried on European ideas. Railroads were cuttin’ across Songlines. Our beliefs didn’t seem to account for the world we saw anymore, so we had to change ’em a bit. But we never got the Dreamtime out of our bones and teeth. Tribes that did…well, they’re gone, see?
“So the last few generations, a mob of us left the reserves, left the cities and towns. We’ve gone back to the bush, gone back to bein’ nomads, followin’ the Songlines. There’s not many of us left, see. We want to touch where we came from before we go from the world.
“If we’re gonna try to keep our beliefs alive, we got to make ’em account for the world we see. And space is part of that world now. We’ve got to weave it into our world-picture somehow. Some o’ the old stories speak of Sky-Heroes, spirit Ancestors departed into the sky. If that’s so, they left Songlines, and Aborigines can follow them to space. That’s my job: to try and find the Songlines of the Sky-Heroes.”