“G’night.”
My last drifting thought was something about how lucky I’d been lately. Two life-threatening emergencies in forty-eight hours, and I’d lived through them both.
There weren’t any more for weeks.
Chapter Six
Tom Seaver: What time is it, Yogi?
Yogi Berra: You mean now?
A company manager I toured Nova Scotia with once summed up that province as follows: “Too many churches; not enough bars.” I’m afraid the same could be said of Top Step.
That overgrown cigar had churches and temples of almost every possible kind in its granite guts, over three dozen, including three different zendos; if I had wanted to do nothing but kûkanzen “sitting” or Rinzai chanting with my free time, I could have. But I’d never been all that committed as a Buddhist—I’d never been fully committed to anything except the dance—and somehow it felt wrong to spend all of my last three months as a human being pursuing no-thought. I intended to do a lot of thinking, before I stepped outdoors and jaunted into a big glob of red goo and opened up my p-suit. I still wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to go through with this.
I tended to spend my free time in one of four places: Solarium Three, Le Puis, my room, and the gym I came to think of as my studio.
Sol Three was a popular hangout for just about everyone in my class, and for some from the two classes ahead of us and some of the staff as well. Not Sol One, where I’d met Harry Stein and three others of The Six: this Solarium was, as its number indicates, all the way round the other side of Top Step. An accidental pun, for that’s the side facing Earth: Sol Three overlooking Sol III. It was more commonly and informally known as the Café du Ciel—a reference I understood the first time I saw its spectacular view.
Have you ever been to New Orleans, to the old French Quarter? Do you know the Café du Monde? You sit outdoors and sip chicoried café au lait, and eat fresh hot beignets smothered with so much powdered sugar you mustn’t inhale while biting, and you watch the world go by. Look one way, and there’s the Mississippi, Old Man River himself, just rolling along. Look another and you’re seeing Jackson Square, another and you’re looking at the French Market. Street buskers play alto sax, or vibes, or clarinet, very well. They say if you sit in the Café du Monde long enough, sooner or later you’ll see everyone you know pass by.
The same is said of the Café du Ciel—and it’s literal truth.
It tended to have a lot of people in it, and it tended to be rather quiet, although there was no rule about noise. There were no buskers there. There were no beignets available either—powdered sugar isn’t practical in free fall—but you could bring a bulb of coffee from the cafeteria. What made the Solarium reminiscent of the Café du Monde was the view.
The scenery was so majestic it was like being in some great cathedral. When the Fireflies originally whisked Top Step from the asteroid belt into High Earth Orbit as their final parting gift to humanity, they picked a polar orbit concentric to the day/night terminator, to keep the big stone cigar in perpetual sunlight. So the Earth we saw from Solarium Three was always half in sunlight and half in darkness, an immense yin-yang symbol. Our orbit was high enough that you could just see the entire globe at once. The slow grandeur of the dance it did I cannot describe, spinning end-on when we were passing over one of the Poles, then seeming to lurch crazily sideways as our orbit flung us toward the Equator and the opposite Pole. A whole planet endlessly executing the same arabesque turn. If you haven’t got graphic software that’ll simulate it, get an old-fashioned globe and see it for yourself, it’s the grandest roller coaster I know, endlessly absorbing. We all felt its pulclass="underline" there in the big window was everything we were about to say goodbye to.
Second-month Postulants generally seemed to graduate into being attracted more by Solariums One and Four, which faced raw empty space: everything they were about to say hello to. I visited those cubics a few times; they had even more of that cathedral-hush feel. Too much for me, then.
(Only dedicated tanners spent much time in Sol Two—the only true solarium, the one which always faced the Sun—and for them I suppose it must have been Paradise. You could put a spin on yourself, go to sleep, and toast evenly on all sides without effort. But I never got the habit; skin cancer aside, a dancer with a tan is a dancer who’s out of work.)
But sometimes looking at Earth made you want to make noise and have a little fun. So if I wasn’t in Sol Three I could usually be found in Le Puis, our only tavern, where things were livelier.
To serve its several purposes, a tavern should have both places where one can be seen, and places where one cannot be seen. The designer of Le Puis had accomplished this splendidly. Being there was a little like being inside a stupendous honeycomb made of dozens of transparent globes, with a large spherical clearing at the center, in which danced two or three dozen small table-spheres, fuzzy with Velcro. The tables kept perfect station with each other; you could not move one more than a few inches before it maneuvered to correct, with little semivisible squirts of steering gas. (Odorless, I’m happy to report.) The pattern the tables made in space was not a simple grid, more of a starburst effect. You could hang around one of the tables (literally) until you met someone you liked, then adjourn for more private conversation to one of the dozens of surrounding sphericles—a word exactly analogous to “cubicle.” By simply pulling the lips of the door closed, you soundproofed your sphericle. If you found that you wanted to get really private, the walls could be opaqued. It reminded me a little of the private chambers you sometimes find in really first-rate Japanese restaurants, with rice-paper-and-bamboo walls, soft cushions, and a door that sometimes slides open to admit attentive servers, fragrant food, and the chuckle of a nearby fountain.
I was with Kirra on my first visit to Le Puis; I guess it was our third or fourth day in Top Step. As we emerged from the igloo-tunnel that led from the main corridor into the heart of the honeycomb, we were approached by the largest and happiest human being I’ve ever seen, before or since.
“Crikey,” Kirra said, watching him draw near. “Is that—?”
“God, I think it is,” I said. “I should have guessed when I heard the name of this place.”
“Hello, ladies,” the apparition boomed as he came to a halt beside us. He wore an expression of barely contained glee. When he smiled, his cheeks looked like grapefruits. “Welcome to my joint. I got a nice little table for you. If you’ll follow me…” He spun and jaunted gracefully away.
I’ve met a lot of celebrities in my time, but I felt a touch of awe. It was Fat Humphrey Pappadopolous, who used to own Le Maintenant, the Toronto restaurant in which Stardancers Incorporated was founded at the turn of the century. He was every bit as colorful and extraordinary as Charlie Armstead made him sound in the famous Titan Transmission of 1999.
Armstead says Humphrey was very fat when he was a groundhog. But I don’t think he could have been as big then as he was the day I met him. I don’t think you can be that fat in a one-gee field. In free fall, he was as graceful as any ballerina, and moved with stately elegance, like an extremely well-bred zeppelin.
He docked at a table with a good view of the room—even his bulk could not displace the table much—and we docked there too. “Let’s see,” he said to me, “you look to me like a nice dry white wine, maybe a Carrington 2004. And for you,” he said to Kirra, “I got some Thomas Cooper, fresh from Oz. Peanuts and a little sharp cheese and some of those little oyster cracker things, right?” He drifted away, beaming.