Sulke called both Ben and me aside after class. Kirra and Robert both drifted a polite distance away to wait for us. “You still go a lot to learn—but you got damn good damn fast,” she told him. “How?”
The trouble with asking Ben a question is, he’s liable to answer. “Well, you know that psych experiment where they tape inverting lenses over your eyes, and for a while you’re blind and then on the second day suddenly you can see again? Your brain tears down the whole visual system and rebuilds it upside down in two days; well I’ve been doing that kind of stuff for fun for almost thirty years, rewiring my brain for new paradigms; two days is what it usually takes me, I’m right on schedule. It’s amazing what you can do with your own brain when you start messing around with the circuitry—do you know about the time The Great Woz rebuilt his own memory after an accident? He said he thought his brain from the zero to the one state. Sometimes I think I know what he means—”
Sulke got a word in edgewise. “Whatever. McLeod here needs some tutoring evenings. Why don’t you help her out?”
He smiled at me sheepishly. “Gee, Morgan, I’d love to help you, but I’m kind of busy myself just now. I’ve got this little project I just started this morning; I’m working with Teena on memorizing Top Step; I want to get to the place where I can close my eyes and point to anyplace in the rock and get it right. And I want to spend more time with Kirra too. Uh, could I get back to you in two days?” While I was trying to cope with the enormity of his assumption that he could master the three-dimensional geography of this huge place in another two days, and wondering whether I could stand to study jaunting with this happy madman, he got a brainstorm. “No, you know what you should do? Robert! Hey, Robert—c’mere. You should ask Robert to help you, hey, that’s a great idea, he’s good at this stuff too, hey Robert, Morgan needs somebody to teach her jaunting and I’m booked: why don’t you help her?”
Robert and I looked at each other. We both wanted to kick Ben, and neither wanted to show it. “I’ve offered,” he said expressionlessly.
Sulke was studying us. “Well,” she said, “I have to jet.” She kicked away and left.
“Well, there you go, then,” Ben said, hugely pleased with himself.
“Ben, love,” Kirra said, “let’s you and me go get some tucker and let them talk it over, eh?” You can’t kick somebody in the shin surreptitiously in zero gee: you bounce away.
“Huh? Oh, sure. See you at supper, folks.” He and Kirra left us alone.
I wanted to join them. But I suddenly realized I couldn’t. I had carelessly let go of my handhold to let Sulke by, then failed to regain it in time. We’d all handed in our thruster units at the close of class. I was adrift; unless Robert helped me, it’d be at least a couple of minutes before I drifted near another wall. Damn!
He kept his position near the hatch and watched me. When the silence had stretched out for oh, half of forever, he said, “So what time tonight is good for you?”
“Robert,” I said slowly, “we have to talk.”
“Yes.”
I was spinning very slowly; soon I’d be facing away from him. I knew the maneuver to correct for that. But if I screwed it up I’d put myself into a tumble from which he’d more or less have to rescue me. “Look…can we skip past a lot of bullshit?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly do you want from me? I’ve been around, I know you’re interested. But interested in what? I’ve got too much on my mind for high school guessing games: I’m busy. You want a quick roll in the hay, you want to go steady, you want my autograph, you want to have my baby, what?”
There are probably a thousand wrong answers to that question. The only right one I can think of is the one he came up with. “I want to get to know you better.”
I sighed and studied his strange, beautiful face. I wanted to get to know him better. And I needed the distraction like a hole in the head.
I was having to crane my neck now to keep eye contact. So I tried to reverse my spin, and of course I bungled it and went into a slow tumble. They say you’re not supposed to get dizzy in free fall, because your semicircular canals fill up completely and your sense of balance shuts down. But I’d only been in space a few days; the room whirled, I lost all reference points, I got dizzy.
“Stiffen up,” Robert called, his voice coming closer. “Don’t try to help me.” I tensed all my limbs. He took me by the wrists, we pivoted around each other like trapeze artists and headed for the far wall together. He changed his grip and did something and we were in a loose embrace, feet toward our destination. “Ready? Landing…now.” We let our legs soak up most of our momentum, ended up headed back toward the hatch, but moving slowly. We were touching at hands and knees. His eyes were a meter from mine.
“Look,” I said, “the timing is lousy.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“See, I came here to dance. That’s all, I came here to dance. Anything else comes second. I can’t dance anymore on Earth. If I can’t dance here either, I don’t know if I’m going through with Symbiosis. And I don’t know if I can dance here or not. I thought I could, but I can’t even seem to learn the equivalent of crawling on all fours. Maybe I’m one of the ones who just can’t get it. I can’t give you any kind of an answer until I know. Does that make any sense?”
He thought about it as we reached the midpoint of the room and he led us through our turnover. “It makes me want to teach you everything I can, as fast as possible. What time is good tonight?”
“Did you hear what I—”
“We Chinese are a notoriously patient people.”
I sighed in exasperation.
“Let me help you, as a friend. No obligations. I’ve admired your work for a long time; allow me this honour.”
What the hell can you say to something like that? That evening we spent two hours working out together in “my” gym.
And it was a fiasco.
Early on we identified my major problem: an unconscious, instinctive tendency to select one of the possible local verticals and stubbornly declare it the “correct” one in my mind, so that I became disoriented when out of phase with it. It is the most common problem of a neophyte in free fall. Ten million years of evolution insist on knowing which way “down” is, just in case this weightlessness business should suddenly fail. Even a false answer is preferable to no answer.
Identifying the problem didn’t help solve it at all. Robert was indeed patient, but I must have tried his patience. Finally I thanked him, politely kicked him out, and spent another couple of hours alone, trying to dance.
It wasn’t a total disaster. But damn close. In the last ten minutes I managed to put together one eight-second sequence that didn’t stink. The first time I did it was dumb luck, an accident with serendipitous results. But I was able to reproduce it again…and again. About three times out of five. If I didn’t crash into something while I was trying. In playback, it looked good from five of the six camera angles.
But I could not connect that eight seconds up with anything. The third time I had to stop to towel away sweat from the middle of my back I said the hell with it, got in and out of the shower bag, and went back to my room. Kirra was out. I climbed into my sleepsack, dimmed the lights, and studied holograms of some of my favorite Stardancer dance pieces, trying to understand how they made what they did look so effortless. I even went back as far as the oldest zero-gee dance there is, Shara Drummond’s Liberation. She’d only been dancing in space for three weeks when Armstead recorded it. Until now, I’d never fully appreciated just how good it was.