But methodical disciplines of breath-control and muscle-control and self-hypnosis do help, and practice helps most of all. Once you get past the terror part, the disorientation diminishes quickly. We played orientation and navigation games. For instance: three of you crawl along the walls of the classroom in the dark, humming to each other, until your ears tell you that you’re all roughly equidistant in the spherical room; then you jaunt for where you think the center of the room is, and try to meet your mates there…ideally without cracking your skull or putting someone’s eye out. It was fun, once we all started getting good at it.
And it took us that last step toward being comfortable without even an imaginary local vertical. We lost our tendency to line up with whomever we were talking to or working with, and started living three-dimensionally without having to make a mental effort.
And that started to affect us all in subtle psychological ways, broadening us, opening us up, undoing other sorts of equally rigid preconceptions about the universe. Up/down may be the first dichotomy a baby perceives (even before self/notself), the beginning of duality, or either/or, yes/no logic. Hierarchy depends on the words “high” and “low” having meaning. Floating free of gravity is just as exhilarating in space as it is in dreams, and constant exhilaration can help solve a lot of human problems. The therapeutic value of skydiving has long been known, and we never had to snap out of the reverie and pull our ripcords.
One by one, we became more pleasant people to be with than we had been back on terra firma. Glenn, for instance, lost a great deal of her dogmatism, became more flexible, started making friendships with people she had considered airheads back in Suit Camp. Eventually she even lost the frown that had seemed her natural expression.
Yes, it was our time of Leavetaking, of saying goodbye to our earthly lives, and yes, some of it was spent in solemn meditation in Solarium or zendo or chapel or temple. But the solemnity was balanced by an equal and opposite quantum of gaiety.
Dorothy Gerstenfeld had been right, back on that first day: zero gee tended to make us childlike again in significant ways. We were doing some of the same sort of metaprogramming that a small child does—redoing it, really, with different assumptions—and do you remember how much fun it was being a small child?
We had the kind of late-night bull sessions I hadn’t had with anyone since college, full of flat-out laughter and deep-down tears, like kids around an eternal campfire with all the grownups gone to bed.
There are so many games you can play in zero gee. Acrobatics; spherical handball, billiards, and tennis; monkey bars; tag…the list is endless. Even a moderately good frisbee thrower becomes a prodigy. You’d be astonished how many solid hours of entertainment you can get from a simple glass of water, coaxing it into loops and ropes and bubbles and lenses with the help of surface tension. A man named Jim Bullard devised a marvelous game involving a hollow ball within which a small quantity of mercury floated free, causing it to wobble unpredictably in flight; in gravity it would have just been a nuisance, but in zero gee it was an almost-alive antagonist. I used my Canadian background to invent one of my own: 3-D curling. The idea was to scale pucks so gently that air resistance caused them to come to rest in an imaginary sphere in the center of the room, while knocking away your opponent’s pucks. Your teammate tried to help by altering the puck’s trajectory inflight with a small compressed-air pen—with strictly limited air which had to last him the whole round. As in curling, it took forever to find out how good your shot was…and you all had to keep moving while you waited, since the room’s air-circulation had to be shut off. Robert and I teamed up at it and soon were beating all corners. Ben invented a three-dimensional version of baseball—but it was so complicated that he never managed to teach it to enough people to get a game going. With assistance from Teena, Kirra actually managed to locate a piece of genuine wood somewhere inboard (at a guess, I’d say there isn’t enough real wood in all of space to build a decent barn; even the legendary Shimizu Hotel uses a superb fake), and borrowed tools to work it from one of the construction gangs who daily burrowed ever deeper into the rock heart of Top Step. When she was done, she got permission from Chief Administrator Mgabi, and took her creation down to the Great Hall. A small crowd went along to watch. She tested the breeze, locked her feet under a handrail to steady herself, and threw the thing with considerable care and skill. That boomerang was still circling the Hall when she reached out and caught it three hours later. I wanted her to let it keep going, but she and I and the volunteers at the major tunnel mouths who kept passing pedestrians from jaunting out into the thing’s flight path all had to get to class.
One of the best games of all could be played solo in your room without working up a sweat: browsing through the Net. We all had Total Access, like the most respected and funded scholars in the Solar System, and could research to exhaustion any subject that interested us, initiate datasearches on a whim which would have bankrupted us back on Earth, download music and literature and visual art to our heart’s content. Ben in particular was heavily addicted to Netwalking, and it was a common occurrence for Kirra to have to drag him away from his terminal to go eat…whereupon he would begin babbling to her about what he’d just been doing or reading. Glenn too binged heavily, as did several others. As for myself, all I really used my access for was to watch hour after hour of Stardancer works, especially the ones that Shara Drummond and the Armsteads performed in. They were unquestionably the best dancers in space, and not just because they had been the first. By that point in history, all Stardancer dances were officially choreographed by the Starmind as a whole, in concert…and that must have been to a large extent true. But from time to time I was sure I recognized phrases or concepts that were pure Shara or pure Charlie/Norrey, even in works in which they didn’t physically appear.
On the last day of week three, Kirra sprang a surprise on us. Reb called her up beside him in class that morning, and told us that she had something special to share with all of us. Most of us knew by then about her background and reason for being here; for the benefit of those who didn’t know all the details, she briefly sketched out the history of the Dreamtime, and the Songlines, and the importance of Song in the Aboriginal universe.
“My people want to start movin’ out into space,” she finished up, “and so my job is to start sussin’ out the Songs for all this territory, so’s we can come make Walkabout here without bein’ afraid it’ll all up and turn imaginary on us.”
“How’re you doing?” someone asked.
“Well, that’s what I’m doin’ here in front of you. It’s been a lot slower goin’ than I expected…I got the Song o’ Top Step now, but. An’ I want to sing it for all you bastards.” (By now we had all learned that to an Australian, “bastard” held no negative connotations, meaning simply “person,” usually but not always male. Similarly, “tart” merely meant “female person.”)
A surprised and delighted murmur went through the room: most of us knew how much her responsibility weighed on her. I was thrilled.
“I just finished it this mornin’ before brekkie, even Ben an’ me roomie haven’t heard it yet. You all been here as long as I have, you ought to hear it. This ain’t just a tabi, a personal song, this is a proper corroboree Song, an’ it calls for an audience. Anyway I wanted you all to hear it, an’ Reb said it was all right with him if I did it here.”