“But what are we supposed to do with all this free time?”
“You will know,” Reb told her. “You will know.”
Chapter Seven
When the ordinary man attains knowledge
He is a sage;
When the sage attains understanding
He is an ordinary man.
I certainly knew what to do with my time. Each night Robert tutored me for an hour, then I spent the rest of the evening dancing in private until I couldn’t move anymore. I hadn’t worked so hard in years. But my back and knees continued to hold up, thanks to free fall…and as the days turned into weeks, I began to get somewhere. By the end of the second week I could do a fair imitation of Liberation, and I could quote sections of Mass Is a Verb. More important, I was making some progress on a new piece of my own. Choreography had never been my strong suit—but there was something about zero gee that made it come easier. I still wasn’t ready to show anything to an audience, but I was content to be making progress, however slow it might be. I had thought, for an endless time, that I was finished as a dancer. It was like a miracle, like being reborn, to get another chance; there was no hurry. I luxuriated in each painful minute.
Ben and Kirra knew what to do with their time too—and I don’t just mean making love. Ben did not fully acquire all the fundamentals of jaunting in two days—much less the fine points—but he did become the star pupil in our shift, and under his tutelage Kirra too became something of prodigy. They progressed just as fast in morning class, learning less tangible skills like spherical thinking, spatial orientation and conscious control of their own metabolisms and mental states. By the third week Reb admitted that they were good enough to start EVA instruction right away…but the system wasn’t set up to allow it, and they stayed behind with the rest of us dummies, serving as assistant instructors in Sulke’s class. (And, at Reb’s insistence, getting paid for doing so. They both donated their unwanted salaries to the Distressed Spacer’s Fund, which made Sulke happy.)
Robert was almost as adept when he arrived as Ben became, but seemed disinterested in teaching the group. He spent most of his free time, according to Ben, designing free fall structures on his computer terminal in his room. I rarely saw him in Le Puis. Occasionally I ran across him in Sol Three. He was always by himself. We would chat quietly, then part. Part of me had hoped that he’d take me off the hook by becoming involved with some other woman. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had; most of our fellow students seemed to be pairing up. He continued to tutor me every night, without pressing me for further intimacy. We remained aware of each other, slowly building a charge.
It had been a long time since a man had courted me with that kind of mixture of determination and patience. I liked it.
According to Teena, our class had one of the most painless, trouble-free Postulancies in the history of Top Step. Only three of us dropped out and went back to Earth during the first two weeks (all three for the most common of reasons: persistent inability to tolerate a nonlinear environment, to live without up and down). None of us got so crazy that we had to be sent home. None of us died, or sustained serious injuries. There were no incidents of violence, even on the level of a fistfight. Six of us got married—all at once, to each other. (Ben and Kirra were that kind of committed, but never bothered with any formal ceremony or celebration.) All of us formed friendships, which expanded in informal affinity groups, which somehow did not become exclusionary cliques. Dorothy Gerstenfeld logged an all-time record minimum of complaints and emergencies. As Reb said one day, smiling his Buddha smile, “Good fellowship seems to be metastasizing.” People who wanted them gravitated to temple or zendo or shrink or encounter group or whatever it took to ease their pain or enhance their mindfulness, and Le Puis became the first bar I’d ever seen that rarely seemed to have anything but happy drunks.
All this was in sorry contrast to the planet we orbited. From the great window in Sol Three, Earth looked peaceful, serene. But we all followed Earthside news, and knew just what an anthill in turmoil it really was. That was the month that China and Argentina were making war noises, and none of the other major players could figure out which side to back. For one three-day period we honestly thought they might start setting off Big Ones down there at any moment. Who really knew whether the UN-SDI net would actually work? One afternoon when I was meditating in Sol Three I mistook a sudden flare of reflected sunlight off Mar Chiquita, a huge Argentinian lake, for a nuke signature—just for an instant, but it was a scary instant.
I was surprised to find that political upheaval on Earth did not carry over to Top Step. We had several ethnic Chinese besides Robert in our class, and close to a hundred inboard altogether, as well as an equal number of Hispanophones and four actual Argentinians. (One of the three Suit Camps was located in Ecuador.) If there was ever so much as a harsh word exchanged among any of them, I didn’t hear about it—and any space habitat has a grapevine that verges on telepathy.
I did some reading, guided by Teena, and learned that from the very beginnings of space exploration, spacers have always tended to feel themselves literally above the petty political squabbles of the groundhogs below. Immigrants to a new country can continue to cling to their ethnic or national or religious identity for a generation or two, but immigrants to space quite often seem to leave theirs on the launchpad. And Stardancer-candidates have even less reason to get agitated about the doings of nations than most spacers. In a matter of weeks, we’d all be surrendering our passports.
As for myself, I’d never felt especially patriotic about being a Canadian. But then, that was a notorious characteristic of most Canadians. The only thing we were proud of was not being Americans.
We all followed Earth news…but even as the drama below us began to get dangerously interesting, it became less and less relevant to us. We spent less and less time watching Earth in Sol Three. We retained concern for the suffering of human beings—but for humans as a species: the labels and abstractions they used to separate themselves seemed more and more absurd.
We weren’t spacers yet. But we were no longer Terrans.
By the end of the third week, Reb and Sulke between them had brought us former groundhogs to the point where we could not only stand to be in the dark in zero gee, but could navigate reliably in darkness.
Do you have any idea how incredibly far that was?
One of the first humans ever to live in space, a member of the Skylab crew, woke one night to find that the light in his sleeping compartment had failed. That compartment compared with a coffin for roominess. He knew exactly where the switch for the emergency backup lighting was located. It took him nearly half an hour to find it, half an hour on the trembling verge of fullblown panic. And he was a hypertrained jock. The first time Reb doused the lights, for not more than a minute, the classroom rang with screams, and about a third of us ended up having to go change our clothes. In the total absence of either visual or kinesthetic cues, your hindbrain decides that the sensation of falling is literal truth, and you just come unstuck. All the rational thought in the world doesn’t help. You clutch the first wall or structure or person you encounter like a panicking drowner, and hang on for dear life, heart hammering. Five of us dropped out that night.