Then there was the weight of my own personal emotional and spiritual baggage. Perhaps that should have been as nothing beside the weight of two million years, but it didn’t feel that way. I was forty-six and my lifework was irrevocably finished, and I was the only person in all the world to whom that mattered. Why not go become a god? Or at least some kind of weird red angel…
Somewhere in there, among all my tumbling thoughts, was a little joke about the extremes some women will go to in order to lose weight, but no matter how many times that joke went through my head—and it was easily dozens—it refused to be funny, even once.
The Completist’s Diet: you give up everything. That was another.
There were quite a few jokes in that cascade of last-minute thoughts, but none of them was funny, and I knew that none of my seventy-one fellow passengers wanted to hear them. There was a compulsive joker aboard, at the back of the cabin and to my right, loudly telling jokes, but no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to him. He didn’t seem to mind. Even he didn’t laugh at any of his witticisms.
The engine song which was the score for my thoughts reached a crescendo, and the joker shut up in mid-punchline. I vaguely recognized his voice; he’d been in my Section at Suit Camp; he was an American and his name was something Irish.
Just my luck. The wave of food poisoning that had run through Camp just days before graduation, cutting our Section down by over 30 percent, had spared this clown—and knocked out my roommate Phyllis, with whom I’d intended to keep on rooming at Top Step, and every other person I’d met whom I could imagine living with. Now I would probably end up paired off at random with some stranger who had the same problem. I hoped we’d be compatible. I’m not good at compatible.
I glanced around for the hundredth time for the nonexistent window…and my inner ear informed me that we were in motion.
Goodbye, world…
I felt a twinge of panic. Not yet! I’m not ready…
When I was a girl, travel to space always involved a rocket launch, with its familiar trappings of acceleration couches and countdowns and crushing gee forces on blastoff. I’d been vaguely aware of modern developments, but they hadn’t really percolated through yet. So subconsciously I was expecting the irony of having my liberation from so many kinds of weight preceded by a whopping if temporary overdose of weight.
As usual, life served me up a subtler irony. The technology had improved. My last moments on Earth were spent sitting upright in something which differed from a commercial airliner mostly in its lack of windows and its considerably smaller dimensions—and the takeoff, when it came, yielded no more sense of acceleration than you get taking a methanol car from zero to sixty when you’re first thinking of switching from fossil fuel.
I felt the spaceplane’s wheels leave the ground, understood that my last connection with my mother planet was severed. Forever, unless I changed my mind in the next few months.
I fought down my growing sense of panic, flailing at it with big clumsy bladders full of logic. What had Earth ever done for me, that was worth sorrowing over its loss? What place on it was still fit for human habitation, and for how long? What did it have to offer, compared to greatly extended lifespan and freedom from every kind of suffering I knew—and the chance that I might dance again?
Like all babies leaving the womb, I felt the overwhelming impulse to burst into tears. Being mature enough to be self-conscious, I strove to suppress the urge. Apparently so did my fellow passengers; the engine song crescendoed without any harmonies from us. It began to diminish slightly as we passed the speed of sound and outran all but the vibrations that conduction carried through the hullplates.
It was then that my panic blossomed into full-grown terror.
It caught me by surprise. I had thought I’d already mastered this kind of fear, by preparing for it and educating it to death. All at once my gut did not care how confident I was of modern technology. It dimly understood that it was being taken to a place where any trivial mistake or malfunction could interrupt its all-important job, the production of feces and urine, and it reacted like a labor union, by convulsing with rage and threatening to shut down the whole system, right now. Other sister unions—heart, lungs, adrenals, sweat glands, autonomic nervous system—threatened to join the walkout, in the name of solidarity but on a wildcat basis. And management—my brain—had nothing to say except what management always says: I’m sorry, it’s too late now, we’re committed; let’s pull together and try to salvage the situation.
Salvage the situation? said my body. You’re kidding. Remember Gambier Island in the winter, before you went to live in town with Grandmother? How silly it seemed to live someplace where all the heat could spill out through leaks, and if you couldn’t make more fast enough you’d die? You’re taking us to someplace where the air can leak out. And the heat. Any time some piece of machinery goes wrong. The definition of machine is, a thing that goes wrong the moment you start to depend on it. Get us out of this, now!
To both this line of reasoning, and the specific sanctions my body threatened if it were thwarted, I could only reply like a long-suffering mother, You should have thought of that before you left the house. I could not even get the poor thing to a toilet for another hour, and I didn’t care how good everybody said p-suit plumbing was these days. Like management every-when, I had to dig in and try to tough out the strike, even if it meant sending goon-squads to hold the sphincters by force.
I tried Zen breath control; I had none. I tried the mantra they’d given me at Suit Camp; it was only a meaningless series of syllables, and they kept speeding up in my head rather than slowing down. I tried all of what I call my Wings Things—the little rituals you perform in the wings to suppress stage fright, just before taking your stage—and none of them worked.
I was ignoring my two seatmates because I didn’t know them and was too wound up to deal with small talk, and we hadn’t been allowed carry-on luggage even as small as a book, and they don’t put windows on spacecraft. That left only one source of diversion. I leaned forward and turned on the TV.
Because it looked just like a conventional airliner’s flat-screen seatback TV, I was expecting the usual “choice” of six banal 2-D channels. There were only two—and I did not want the video feed from the bridge that mimicked a window; I switched it off hastily. But the other channel was carrying the one program—out of all the millions the human race has produced—that I would have wished for. I suppose I should have been expecting it.
The Stardance, of course.
That piece has always been a kind of personal visual mantra for me. For millions, yes, but especially for me. It turned my whole life upside down, once, triggered both my divorce and my switch from ballet to modern dance when I first saw it at twenty-two. It made me realize that my marriage was dead and that something had to be done about that, and it forced me to rethink dance and dancing completely. It consoled me at the end of a dozen ruined love affairs, got me through a thousand bad nights. I had seen it on flatscreen and in simulated holo, with and without Brindle’s score; I’d once wasted three months trying to translate the entire piece into a modified Labanotation. I knew every frame, every step, every gesture.
It was midway through the prologue, when no one knows the Stardance is about to happen, and Armstead is just trying to study, with his four cameras, the aliens who’ve appeared without warning nearby in High Earth Orbit. Seen from different angles: a barely visible bubble containing half a hundred swarming red fireflies, glowing like hot coals, dancing like bees in a hive, like electrons in orbit around some nonexistent nucleus. Brindle’s music is still soft and hypnotic, Glass-like; it will be a few more five-counts before Shara enters.