I’m not sure whether this next part is something he implied or I inferred, but the progression seemed logical. He found that he liked space—the more time he spent there, the more he liked it. In time he came to resent being forced to return to Earth regularly just to keep his body acclimated to gravity. The obvious question Why not just stay in space, like a Stardancer? had led naturally to Why not become a Stardancer? At this point in the history of human enterprise in space, a free-lance spacer’s life is usually one of total insecurity…and a Stardancer’s life is one of great and lasting security. And so, wanting to stay in space without having to scramble every moment to buy air, Robert found himself here on Top Step.
It seemed a rather shallow reason to come all this way. To abandon a whole planet and the whole human race, just to save on overhead while he pursued his art…
On the other hand, who was I to judge? He wasn’t fleeing defeat, like me. Maybe architecture was as exciting an art as dance; maybe for him it was making elements dance. Maybe space was just an environment he liked.
Maybe there were no shallow reasons to become a Stardancer.
Maybe it didn’t matter what your reasons were.
As all this was going through my mind, Robert went on: “But there’s a little more to it than that. Another part of it is that when I started spending time in space, I found myself watching Earth a lot, thinking about what a mess it’s in, how close it is to blowing itself up. I read somewhere once, Earth is just too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. We’ve got to get more established in space, soon.
“I know you can say Stardancers aren’t part of the human race anymore, but I don’t buy that. They all came from human eggs and sperm, and they’ve done more for Earth than the rest of the race put together. They fixed the hole in the ozone layer, they put the brakes on the greenhouse effect, they built the mirror farms and set up the Asteroid Pipeline, they mad the Safe Lab so we can experiment with nanotechnology without being afraid the wrong little replicator will get loose and turn the world into grey goo—they can afford to be altruistic, because they don’t need anything but each other. I think without the Starseed Foundation, there’d have been an all-out nuclear war years ago.
“So I guess I decided it was time I put some back in. From all I can learn, there aren’t many architects in the Starmind, so I think I can be of help. I want to design and build things a little more useful to mankind than another damn factory or dormitory or luxury hotel.”
“And the eternal life without want part doesn’t hurt, does it?” Ben said, grinning, and Robert smiled back. It was the first real smile of his I’d seen. I tend to trust people or not trust them on the basis of their smiles; I decided I trusted Robert.
But I wished he’d smile more often.
Chapter Four
How is it possible that mystics 3,000 years ago have plagiarized what we scientists are doing today?
I could write a whole chapter about my first free fall cafeteria meal, my first free fall sleep, my first free fall pee…but you can get that sort of thing from any traveler’s account. The next event of significance, the morning after our arrival at Top Step, was my first class with Reb Hawkins-roshi.
The course was titled “Beginner’s Mind”—a clue to me that I would like it, since my mother’s battered old copy of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind had been my own introduction to Buddhism. There are as many different flavors of Buddhism—even just of Zen!—as there are flavors of Christianity, and some of them give me hives…but if this Hawkins’s path was even tangent to Suzuki’s, I felt confident I could walk it without too much discomfort.
You couldn’t really have called me a Buddhist. I had no teacher, didn’t even really sit zazen on any regular basis. I’d never so much as been on a retreat, let alone done a five-day sesshin. My mother taught me how to sit, and a little of the philosophy behind it, was all. By that point in my life I mostly used Zen as a sort of nonprescription tranquilizer.
Robert, on the other hand, approached it with skepticism. He was not, I’d learned the night before, a Buddhist—it’s silly, I know, but for some reason I kept expecting every Asian I meet to be a Buddhist—but he had mentioned in passing that if he were going to be one, he’d follow the Rinzai school of Zen. (A rather harsh and overintellectual bunch, for my taste.) Pretty personal conversation for two strangers, I know; somehow we hadn’t gotten around to less intimate things, like how we liked to have sex. Nonetheless, I was proud of myself: I hadn’t physically touched him even once.
Well, okay: once. But I hadn’t kissed him goodnight before returning to my place! (Kirra kissed Ben…)
And I didn’t look for him in the cafeteria crowd during breakfast—and didn’t kiss him good morning when we met accidentally in the corridor on the way to class. I was too irritated: I’d had to stall around for over three minutes to bring about that accidental encounter, and I was mildly annoyed that he hadn’t looked me up during breakfast. God, lust makes you infantile!
But he was adequately pleased to encounter me, so I let him take my arm and show me a couple of jaunting tricks I’d already figured out on the way to breakfast—with the net result that we were nearly late for class, and I arrived in exactly the wrong frame of mind: distracted. So a nice thing happened.
As the door of the classroom silently irised shut behind us, my pulse began to race. What could be more disorienting than being inside your headful of racing thoughts, toying with the tingles of distant horniness—and suddenly finding yourself face to face with a holy man?
He was in his fifties, shaven-headed and clean-shaven, slender and quite handsome, and utterly centered and composed. He was not dressed as a Zen abbot, he wore white shorts and singlet, but his face, body language and manner all quietly proclaimed his office. I think I experienced every nuance of embarrassment there is.
He met my eyes, and his face glowed briefly with the infectious Suzuki-roshi grin that told me he was a saint, and he murmured the single word, “Later,” in a way that told me I was forgiven for being late and I had not given offense and we were going to be good friends as soon as we both had time; meanwhile, lighten up.
All of this in an instant; then his eyes swept past me to Robert, they exchanged an equally information-packed glance which I could not read, and he returned his attention to the group as a whole.
If I hadn’t arrived for class in an inappropriate mental state, it might have taken me minutes to realize how special Reb was.
Most of the spiritual teachers I’ve known had a tendency to sit silently for a minute or two after the arrival of the last pupils, as if to convey the impression that their meditation was so profound it took them a moment to shift gears. But Reb was a genuinely mindful man: he was aware Robert and I were the last ones coming, and the moment we had ourselves securely anchored to one of the ubiquitous bungee cords, he bowed to the group—somehow without disturbing his position in space—and began to speak.