For the first time I gained some real sense of the size of Top Step. It looked like a mountain that had decided to fly, a mountain the size of Mount Baker back where I came from. (Already I had stopped thinking, “back home.”) Even though at that point in history something over a quarter of it had been tunneled out and put to assorted uses, the only externally prominent sign of human occupancy was the mammoth docking complex at the tip—and it had the relative dimensions of the hole in the tip of a fat cigar.
And at the same time all of Top Step was less than a dust mote. So vast is space that mighty Earth itself, off Three-ish, was a pebble, and the Sun was a coal floating in an eternal sea of ink. That made me some kind of subatomic particle. A pun awful enough to be worthy of Ben came to me: it had been too long since I’d been lepton. That made me think of Robert, and I recalled vaguely that the force that keeps leptons together is called the Weak Force. I was rummaging through my forebrain, looking for wordgames to anchor me to reality, cerebral pacifiers.
I looked around for Robert, spotted his turquoise p-suit coming into my field of vision perhaps twenty meters away—why, we were practically rubbing elbows. As in the classroom simulation holo, half of him was in darkness…but here in real space, there was enough backscatter of light from Top Step to make his dark side just barely visible. Other students floated beyond him; I picked out Kirra and Ben, holding hands. Jaunting as a couple is trickier than jaunting solo, but they had learned the knack.
Reb and Sulke let us all just be there in silence for a measureless time.
A forest of faint white umbilicals, like particle tracks from a cyclotron, led back to the Solarium we’d come from. Its huge window now seemed a pore in the skin of Top Step. All around us, stars burned without twinkling, infinitely far away. I became acutely aware of my breath whistling in and out, of the movement of my chest and belly as I breathed, of my pulse chugging in my ears, of the food making its way along my digestive tract and the sensation of air flowing across my skin. I felt a powerful spontaneous urge to try a dance step I’d been working on, something like an arabesque crossed with an Immelman roll. I squelched the urge firmly. Right place, wrong time.
I seemed to be at the center of the Universe, turning lazily end over end. My breathing slowed. Time stopped.
“I’m sorry, Reb,” Yoji Kuramatso said sadly.
“It’s all right, Yoji-san,” Reb said at once. “Daijôbu-da!” he jetted toward Yoji, flipped over halfway there and decelerated, came to a stop beside him.
“I really thought I could handle it,” Yoji said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Simpai suru-na, Yoji-san,” Reb said soothingly. “Switch to Channel Six now.”
They both switched their radios to a more private channel, and Reb began conducting Yoji back to Top Step, letting their umbilicals reel them slowly in rather than trying to use thrusters.
There was a murmur of embarrassment and sympathy. Yoji was liked.
“He did that great,” Sulke said. “If you’re going to panic, that’s the way to do it. Quietly. Slowly. Is anyone else having trouble?”
No one spoke.
“Okay, we’ll marinate until Reb gets back, and then we’ll get to work.”
Robert was passing through my visual field again. I didn’t want to break radio silence, so I waited until he was facing my way and made a tentative come-here gesture. He worked himself into the right attitude, pointed his hands down at his feet and gave a short blast on both wrist thrusters. He glided toward me in ultraslow motion, stretching his hands out toward me as he came. I oriented myself to him. When he arrived, we locked hands like trapeze acrobats, only pressing instead of pulling, and I gave an identical blast in the opposite direction with my ankle-thrusters to kill his velocity. Maybe it was because we got it right that Sulke didn’t chew us out for maneuvering without permission…or she may have had other reasons.
We drifted, facing each other, holding hands. The sun was at my back, so there was too much glare from his hood for me to see his face clearly. He must have seen mine well in the reflected light.
By mutual consent we moved to a new position, side to side, each with an arm around the other, facing infinity together. Part of me wanted to switch off my radio and talk with him hood-to-hood. But Sulke would have skinned me…and there really were no words, anyway.
If you are going to fall through endless darkness for timeless time, it is nice to have someone’s arm around you.
After a while, Reb returned and we started doing simple maneuvers. Even classwork didn’t break the mood, pop the bubble of our dreamlike state of awe and wonder. I don’t mean we were in a trance—at all times we remained mindful, of our tethers and our thruster placement and our air supply—but at the same time we experienced something like rapture, a three-dimensional awareness. I had been in a similar mental/physical state before, often…but only onstage. I wondered which of the others had anything in their experience to liken this to.
I was going to like this. This had been a good idea. Way to go, Morgan.
We stayed out there until lunch time—and still it was over much too soon.
I demolished twice as much food as usual at lunch; I’d have eaten more but they ran out. Most of the group was keyed up, happy, darting around like hummingbirds and chattering like magpies. Robert and I did not chatter. We touched hands, and legs, and ate together in silence, totally aware of each other.
That afternoon’s class was with Reb only, in the cubic where he’d always held morning classes during the first month. For the first time, he allowed the gathering to devolve into a gabfest, encouraging us all to speak of what we had felt and thought that morning, to tell each other what it had meant to us. I was surprised at the diversity of things different people likened the experience to. Taking LSD, being in combat, falling in love, kensho, orgasm, electroshock, dying, being born, giving birth, writing when the Muse is flowing, doing math, an Irish coffee drunk…the variations were endless. For Robert it was the instant when a new design leaped into his head and began explaining itself.
One thing surprised me even more. Three of us reported that there was nothing in their previous lives to compare space to. They were the most profoundly affected of all of us, all three close to tears. This had been their first taste of transcendence. It seemed hard to believe, and terribly sad, to have lived so long without wonder.
Glenn confessed that she had several times come near giving up like Yoji and going back indoors. “I can take it as long as I’m perfectly still,” she said. “I just tell myself I’m watching an Imax movie. But the minute I start to move the least little bit, and it all starts spinning around me, I just lose it. I lose my place. I lose my self. I can handle it okay indoors, even in the simulations, but out there is different…”
“But you didn’t panic,” Reb said.
“I came damned close!”
“So did I,” Yumiko said softly.
“Da. Me too,” Dmitri chimed in.
She stared at them. “You did?”
They nodded.
“Experienced spacers have been known to panic,” Reb said. “Glenn, don’t worry. You may simply not be ready yet to have a revelation of the scale you were given this morning. That is not a failure. You don’t have to go back out tomorrow if you decide you’re not ready. You may need to spend more time in meditation first. I’ll be glad to spend private time with you if you like. Don’t force yourself to continue if you feel it is harmful to you. Charlotte Joko Beck once said, ‘A premature enlightenment experience is not necessarily good.’ Looked at from a certain angle, enlightenment is a kind of annihilation—a radical self-emptying. There is time, plenty of time.”