I bowed, deeply.
And then waved, grandly.
Darkness was falling fast. Sweat dripped from me, my soles tingled, and many muscles announced their intention to wake up stiff tomorrow. I was perfectly happy.
This, I thought, is what I’m supposed to do. My Thing, as Mom was always calling it: what I would do with my life. I understood now what I had always sensed, that Mom was going to hate it (though I didn’t yet understand why)…but that didn’t matter anymore.
Maybe that’s when you become an adult. When your parents’ opinions no longer control.
I kept silent when I returned home that night. But the next day I called Grandmother in Vancouver, and told her that she had won the tug of war with my mother. I moved into her huge house on the mainland, and let her enroll me in ballet class, and in normal school, like other kids. Within weeks I had been teased so much over the name “Rain M’Cloud” (which had never struck anyone on Gambier Island as odd) that I changed it to Morgan. It seemed to me a much more dignified name for a ballerina.
It was a long time before I saw Gambier Island again.
I always danced. But from the day of the sea lions, dancing was just about all I did, all I was. For thirty-two years. Until the day came when my body simply would not do it anymore. The day in April of 2017 when Doctor Thompson and Doctor Immega told me that even more surgery would not help, that I could never dance again. My lower back and knees were spent.
I tried the dancer’s classic escape hatches for a few years. Choreography. Teaching. When they didn’t work for me, I tried living without dance. I even tried relationships again. Nothing worked.
Including me. There were lots of trained, experienced professionals looking for work, as technological progress made more and more occupational specialties obsolete. There were few job openings for a forty-six-year-old who couldn’t even type. Even the traditional unskilled-labour jobs were increasingly being done by robots. Sure, I could go back to school, and in only a few years of drudgery acquire a new profession—ideally, one which would not be obsolete by the time I graduated. But what for? Nothing interested me.
The salt of the earth had lost its savor.
I went back to Gambier Island. By now it was becoming a suburb of Vancouver; even in winter there were stores and cars and paved roads and burglaries. There was talk of a condominium complex. I sat for six months in the cabin where I had been born, waiting for some great answer to come from out of the sky. I visited my parents’ graves frequently. Sat zazen in the woods. Split cords of wood. Read the first twenty pages of a dozen books. Walked the parts of the Island that were still wild, by day and night. Nature accepted my presence amiably enough, but offered no answers. Nothing.
I went down to the wharf and consulted the sea lions, as I had many times. They had nothing to say. They just looked at me, as if waiting for me to begin dancing.
After enough days of that, “nothing” started to look good to me. I filled out the Euthanasia application I had brought with me, putting down “earliest possible” for Date and leaving the space for Reason blank. I’d have a response within a week or two; by the end of the month, unless I changed my mind, my problems would be over.
In my bones, I was a dancer. And I couldn’t dance anymore.
Not anywhere on Earth…
That very night I was lying in the hammock behind the house, watching the stars, when my eye was caught by a large bright one. It moved relative to the other stars, so it was a satellite. It moved roughly north to south, and was quite large: it had to be Top Step. Funny I’d never thought of it before. The House the Stardance Built, as the media called it. Transplanted asteroid, parting gift of alien gods—the place where they made angels out of people. Hollow stone cigar, phallic womb in High Orbit. Gateway to immortality, to the stars, to freedom from every kind of human fear or need there was…and all it cost was everything you had, forever.
Dancers say, you go where the work is. Suddenly, at age forty-six, I had nowhere to go but up.
Chapter One
What shall it harm a man
If he loseth the whole world,
Yet gaineth his soul?
Hundreds of thoughts ran through my head as the Valkyrie song of the engines began to rise in pitch. But most of them seemed to be variations on a single theme, and the name of the theme was this: Farewell—Forever—to Weight.
So many different kinds of weight!
Physical weight, of course. I had been hauling around more than fifty kilos of muscle and bone for the better part of four decades—and like all dancers, cursing every gram, even after I switched from ballet to modern. (That’s 110 pounds, if you’re an American.) Any normal person would have considered me bone-thin…but the ghost of Balanchine, damn his eyes, has haunted dancers for over half a century.
Soon I would have no weight, for the first time in my life, and for the rest of it—only my mass would remain to convince me I existed. A purist, they had told us at Suit Camp, will insist that there is no such thing as zero gravity, anywhere in the universe…only degrees of gravity, from micro to macro. But where I was going—any second now—I would experience microgravity too faint to be perceived without subtle instruments, so it would be zero as far as I was concerned.
It should have been a dancer’s finest moment. To leap so high that you never come down again…wasn’t that what all of us wanted? Why did I feel such a powerful impulse to bolt for the nearest exit while I still could?
Weight had always been my shame, and my secret friend, and my necessary enemy—the thing I became beautiful in the act of defying. In a sense, to an extent, weight had defined me.
In the end it had beaten me. I could try to kid myself that I was outmaneuvering it…but what I was doing was escaping it, leaving the field of battle in defeat, conceding victory.
But the physical weight was probably least in my thoughts as I sat there in my comfortable seat, on my way to a place where the concept of a comfortable seat had no meaning.
Do you have any idea how many kinds of weight each human carries? Even the most fortunate of us?
The weight of two million years of history and more…
Until this century, all the humans that had ever lived walked the earth, worked to stay erect, strove to eat and drink and to get food and drink for their children, sought shelter from the elements, yearned to acquire wealth, struggled to be understood. Everyone’s every ancestor needed to eliminate their wastes and feared their deaths. Every one of us lived and died alone, locked in a bone cell, plagued by need and fear and hunger and thirst and loneliness and the certainty of pain and death. That long a heritage of sorrow is a weight, whose awful magnitude you can only begin to sense with the prospect of its ending.
And in a time measurable in months, all that weight was going to leave me, (if) when I entered Symbiosis. Allegedly forever, or some significant fraction thereof. I would never again need food or drink or shelter, never again be alone or afraid.
On the other hand, I could never again return to Earth. And some people maintained that I would no longer be a human being…
Now tell me: isn’t that a kind of dying?
Not to mention the small but unforgettable possibility that joining a telepathic community might burn out my brain—no, more accurately and more horribly: burn out my mind.