I glanced unobtrusively around. Most of the passengers I could see were looking at their own TVs, and several were swaying slightly in unison, like tall grass in a gentle breeze. The Stardance was important to all of us. We were following it into space.
Shara Drummond’s p-suited image forms and grows larger on the screen. The music swells. The camera gives that involuntary jump as Armstead, horrorstruck, recognizes her. She was just on her way back to Earth on doctor’s orders when the Fireflies arrived: any more exposure to zero gravity and her body will lose—forever—its ability to tolerate Earth-normal gravity. No one knows better than Armstead that his love is now a dead woman breathing. She has chosen to sacrifice herself, because of her Great Understanding (that the aliens communicate by dance) and her Great Misunderstanding (that they are hostile).
As always, the dialogue between her and the nearby Space Command battleship is edited down to her refusal to get out of the line of fire until she has tried to talk to the dancing Fireflies; the hour she spends in silent contemplation of them, trying to deduce their language of motion, is shrunk down to thirty seconds that always seem to take an hour to go by—
—and then it changed. At the point where she says, “Charlie…this is a take,” and he says, “Break a leg, kid,” and she begins to dance, the tape departed from the classic release version as edited by Armstead.
Charlie Armstead had four cameras in space that day, bracketing Shara and the aliens. But in cutting the Stardance, later, he used footage only from the three that were on Shara’s side. This makes sense: from the other camera’s vantage, the Fireflies are in the way. But the result is that the Stardance is seen only from a human perspective: we are either behind, or below Shara, watching as she (apparently) dances the aliens right out of the Solar System.
The version we were being shown now was from the fourth camera. I’d seen it before; years ago I had once gone to the trouble and expense of studying the raw, unedited footage from all four cameras. But I’d paid least attention to the fourth. Its footage was edited out for good artistic reasons: some of the best movements of the dance are obscured. The swarming aliens in the foreground spoil the view, glowing like embers, leaving ghost trails in their wake.
But in this context, it had a powerful impact. We saw Shara, for once, from the aliens’ point of view.
She looked much smaller, more fragile. She was no longer the greatest choreographer of her century creating her masterpiece. She was a little dog telling a big dog to get the hell out of her yard, now. You could almost sense the Fireflies’ amusement and admiration. And pride: Shara was the end result of something they had set in motion many millions of years before, when they seeded Earth with life.
I saw things I had missed on my last viewing. From all three other POVs Shara’s helmet is opaque with reflected glare. From this one you could see into it, see her face…and now I saw that what I had taken on my previous viewing for a proud, snarling, triumphant grin was in fact a rictus of terror. For the first time it really came home to me that this woman was dancing through a fear that should have petrified her.
I felt a powerful surge of empathy, and my own fear began to ease a little. As I watched Shara’s magnificent Stardance from this new perspective, my breathing began to slow; my heartbeat, which usually raced as the Stardance climaxed, slowed too.
Peace came to me. It was the calm, the empty mind, that I had sat zazen for countless hours to achieve for minutes. My kinesthetic awareness faded; for once I was not acutely conscious of the relative position of each muscle; my body seemed to become lighter, to melt away…
Suddenly I smiled. It wasn’t an illusion: my body was growing lighter! We were already entering Low Earth Orbit.
It didn’t diminish the feeling of tranquility; it enhanced it. Space was going to be a good place to go. I no longer cared how strange and dangerous this voyage was. I was where I was supposed to be.
Onscreen, the Stardance reached its brilliant coda. The Fireflies vanish, leaving only Shara, and far behind her the twinkling carousel of the factory complex where she invented zero gravity dance, where Armstead is watching her on his monitors.
She poises in space for a long time, getting her breath, then turns to the nearest camera and puffs out the famous line, “We may be puny, Charlie…but by Jesus we’re tough.” The music overrides their audio then, but we know he is begging her to come back inboard, and she is refusing. It’s not just that she is permanently adapted to free fall now and can never return to Earth; nor that the only place she could live indefinitely in space belongs to a man she despises with her whole heart.
She is done now. She has accomplished everything she was born to do. Or so she believes.
She waves at the camera, all four thrusters go off, and she arcs down toward Earth, visible in frame now for the first time. Brindle’s score swells for the last time, we follow her down toward the killing atmosphere—
—and again it changed. I’d never seen this footage before. It must have been shot by some distant Space Command satellite peace-camera, hastily tracking her as she fell through Low Orbit. The image was of inferior quality, had the grainy look of maximum enlargement and the jerkiness you get when a machine is doing the tracking. But it provided a closer look at those last moments than Armstead’s cameras had from back up in a higher, slower orbit.
And so we saw now what everyone had missed then, what the world was not to know about for over three more years. Whoever examined that tape for the Space Command at the time must have just refused to believe either his eyes or his equipment, but there was no mistaking it. Shara Drummond simply disappeared. When her p-suit tumbled and burned in the upper atmosphere, it was limp, empty.
The next time any human would see her, years later, she would be a crimson-winged immortal orbiting one of the moons of Saturn, no more in need of a pressure suit than a Firefly. The first human ever to enter Symbiosis. The first and greatest Stardancer.
I felt awed and humble. As the credits rolled I reached out to shut off the set so I could savor the sensation—and knew at once that we were all the way into zero gravity. My arm did not fall when I told it it could; my center of mass pivoted loosely around my seatbelt.
The main engines had fallen silent, unnoticed, while I’d watched. We were more than halfway through our journey, officially in space. Now there would be a period of free fall before we began matching orbits with Top Step. I realized that my face felt flushed, and that my sinuses were filling up, just as I’d been told to expect. I was pleased to feel no stirrings of the dreaded dropsickness. Apparently the drugs they’d given us worked, for me at least.
Part of me wanted to unstrap and play, couldn’t wait to explore this new environment, begin learning whether or not I could really dance in it. I hadn’t danced in so long!
I saw other passengers experimenting with their limbs, grinning at each other. Why should it be surprising that in zero gee, one is lighthearted? No one seemed bothered by dropsickness. I turned and grinned at each of the seatmates I’d been ignoring.
To my left, in what would have been the window seat if spaceplanes had windows, was a black girl whose answering grin was spectacular; she had the whitest, most perfect teeth I’d ever seen. Zero gee made her already round cheeks cherubic. She was not a North American black but something more exotic; her hair was both wavy and curly, and her skin was the color of bitter chocolate. She looked startlingly young, no more than twenty-five, when I had understood the cutoff age was thirty; but for the instant our gazes met we communicated perfectly across cultural and generational distance.