Perhaps we did, but no one spoke.
“One of the reasons I brought you to this Solarium, when I could just as easily have had video piped into the classroom, is that here in this room you were as close to Harry as you could possibly get—you’d be little closer EVA, since a p-suit is a layer too—and it made a difference. You’ve all seen high-quality video and holo of Stardancers, dozens of hours of it in Suit Camp alone…but God, that was the Harry Stein himself, one of the original Six, right there, inches away, and it made a difference, didn’t it?” There were nods and murmurs of agreement. Everyone in the room knew it made a difference. “Just what that difference was is one of those things—like the phenomenon of ‘contact high’—that defy explanation unless you admit the existence of the thing I’ve labeled ‘spirituality.’ And your personal religion, whatever it may be, had nothing to do with it, did it?”
We left in a very quiet, thoughtful mood.
There was a food fight at lunch. A zero-gee food fight is amazing. Almost everybody misses, because they can’t help aiming too high. Robert, having “space legs,” did well—but his roommate Ben did almost as well, despite his klutziness. You couldn’t sneak up on him…
Glenn, I noticed, was infuriated at both the food fight, and how badly she lost. I could tell, just from her expression, that she believed handling oneself in free fall was something best conquered by intellect—and therefore, she ought to be one of the best at it. I’d seen the expression before, on the faces of beginner dance students who were also intellectuals. They see people they consider their inferiors picking up the essentials of movement quicker than they can, and it forces them to admit there are kinds of intelligence that do not live in the forebrain.
I didn’t do very well in the food fight myself. I found that just as infuriating as Glenn did. But I covered it better.
Glenn’s and my problem was addressed almost immediately. The schedule called for spending our afternoons in Jaunting class, learning how to move in zero gee.
Our instructor was Sulke Drager, a powerfully built woman whose primary job, I later learned, was rock-rat: one of the hardboiled types who blasted new tunnels and cubics into Top Step when needed. In between, she worked in the Garden and taught Jaunting, and worked two more jobs in other space habitats. She was not here for Symbiosis, like us; she was a spacer. A permanent transient, citizen of the biggest small town in human history. I think she privately thought we were all crazy.
I thought she was crazy. She had chosen a life with all the disadvantages of a Stardancer, and none of the advantages, it seemed to me. She could never go back to Earth; her body was long since permanently adapted to free fall. But she was not a telepathic immortal as we hoped to be. Just a human a long way from home, hustling for air money, hoping to bank enough to buy her retirement air. Talk about wage slaves! Sulke was as dependent as a goldfish.
Most of us were disappointed when she confirmed that it would be a good month before we got any EVA time. For about the first fifteen minutes, we were disappointed. That’s how long it took us to convince ourselves that we weren’t ready to go outdoors yet, Suit Camp or no Suit Camp. Theory is not practice.
(One thing I had never anticipated, for instance, in all the hours I’d spent trying to imagine movement in this environment: sweat that trickled up. Or refused to trickle at all, and just sort of pooled up in the small of your back until you flung or toweled it off. What a weird sensation!)
We were given wrist and ankle thruster-bracelets, but Sulke only allowed us to use them to correct mistakes: the first step was to learn to be as proficient as possible without external aids.
As I had been during the food fight—hell, since I’d arrived in space—I was dismayed to learn how clumsy I was in this environment. Like Glenn, I had assumed I had a secret weapon that would allow me to outstrip all the others. Instead, it seemed I had more to unlearn than most: inappropriate habits of movement were more deeply ingrained in me.
This infuriated me. So much that I probably worked twice as hard as anyone else in the class, using all the discipline and concentration I’d learned in thirty years of professional dance.
“No, no McLeod,” Sulke said. “Stop trying to swim in air, you look like a drunken octopus.” She jaunted to me and stopped my tumble, without putting herself into one. “Use your spine, not your limbs!”
It was a particularly galling admonition: in transitioning from ballet to modern dance, I had spent countless hours learning to use my spine. In one gee. “I thought I was.” Someone giggled.
“Watch Chen, there, see how he does it? Chen, pitch forward half a rev, and yaw half.” Robert performed the maneuver requested: in effect he stood on his head, spinning on his long axis so he was still facing her when he was done. His legs barely flexed, and his arms left his sides only at the end of the maneuver. “See what he did with his spine?”
“Yes, but I didn’t understand it,” I admitted.
“Put your hands on him, here, and here.” She indicated her abdomen and the small of her back.
I refused myself permission to blush. I used my thrusters to jaunt to him, and was relieved to do a near-perfect job, canceling all my velocity just as I reached him, without tumbling myself again. He was upside down with reference to me; I couldn’t read his expression. I put my hands where I’d been told.
“Keep a light contact as he begins, then pull your hands away,” Sulke directed. “Reverse the maneuver, Chen.”
So I didn’t get my hands quite far enough out of the way, quite fast enough. As he spun backwards, his groin brushed down across the palm I’d had on his belly. Now I was blushing. When he finished—a little awkwardly this time—he wore that inscrutable-Asian face of his. But he was blushing a little too. The giggles from the rest of the class didn’t help. “You’re jumping ahead,” Sulke called. “We don’t get to mating for days, yet.”
In free fall maneuvering, mating simply means interacting with another body. We’d all heard dozens of puns on the terms before we’d left Suit Camp, but this feeble one put the class in stitches. I thought wistfully about putting a few of them in traction. Then I did a quarter-yaw, to face Sulke, and copied Robert’s maneuver, very nearly perfectly. The giggling became applause.
“Much better,” Sulke said. “It must be a question of motivation. Buckley, you try it.”
Robert and I exchanged a meaningful glance…and as I was trying to decide just what meaning to put into my half, something cracked me across the skull. It was one of Ben’s elbows. Without cafeteria tables to hold on to and brace himself against, his enhanced visual perception was little help to him: he would be one of the klutziest in our class—that day, anyway. “Sorry, Morgan!”
I welcomed the distraction. “Forget it.”
“Uh…could I…I mean, would you mind…?”
For the next five or ten minutes, an orgy of belly-and-back-touching spread outwards from Robert and me, until everyone had mastered the forward half-pitch. (At least one other male was as careless with his hands as I had been with Robert. I pretended not to notice.) Then Sulke turned our collective attention to the roll and yaw techniques, which took up the rest of the class period.
After class there were a couple of free hours before dinner. I had Teena guide me back to Solarium One, where we’d seen Harry Stein—where Norrey Armstead had addressed me by my name!—and sat kûkanzen for a timeless time, seeking some clarity, some balance. There were about a half dozen of us there, all doing the same thing. I don’t know about the others; I left as confused and scattered as I’d arrived.