Starseed

Chapter One

Hundreds of thoughts ran through my head as the Valkyrie song of the engines began to rise in pitch. But most of them seemed to be variations on a single theme, and the name of the theme was this: Farewell—Forever—to Weight.

So many different kinds of weight!

Physical weight, of course. I had been hauling around more than fifty kilos of muscle and bone for the better part of four decades—and like all dancers, cursing every gram, even after I switched from ballet to modern. (That’s 110 pounds, if you’re an American.) Any normal person would have considered me bone-thin…but the ghost of Balanchine, damn his eyes, has haunted dancers for over half a century.

Soon I would have no weight, for the first time in my life, and for the rest of it—only my mass would remain to convince me I existed. A purist, they had told us at Suit Camp, will insist that there is no such thing as zero gravity, anywhere in the universe…only degrees of gravity, from micro to macro. But where I was going—any second now—I would experience microgravity too faint to be perceived without subtle instruments, so it would be zero as far as I was concerned.

It should have been a dancer’s finest moment. To leap so high that you never come down again…wasn’t that what all of us wanted? Why did I feel such a powerful impulse to bolt for the nearest exit while I still could?

Weight had always been my shame, and my secret friend, and my necessary enemy—the thing I became beautiful in the act of defying. In a sense, to an extent, weight had defined me.

In the end it had beaten me. I could try to kid myself that I was outmaneuvering it…but what I was doing was escaping it, leaving the field of battle in defeat, conceding victory.

But the physical weight was probably least in my thoughts as I sat there in my comfortable seat, on my way to a place where the concept of a comfortable seat had no meaning.

Do you have any idea how many kinds of weight each human carries? Even the most fortunate of us?

The weight of two million years of history and more…

Until this century, all the humans that had ever lived walked the earth, worked to stay erect, strove to eat and drink and to get food and drink for their children, sought shelter from the elements, yearned to acquire wealth, struggled to be understood. Everyone’s every ancestor needed to eliminate their wastes and feared their deaths. Every one of us lived and died alone, locked in a bone cell, plagued by need and fear and hunger and thirst and loneliness and the certainty of pain and death. That long a heritage of sorrow is a weight, whose awful magnitude you can only begin to sense with the prospect of its ending.

And in a time measurable in months, all that weight was going to leave me, (if) when I entered Symbiosis. Allegedly forever, or some significant fraction thereof. I would never again need food or drink or shelter, never again be alone or afraid.

On the other hand, I could never again return to Earth. And some people maintained that I would no longer be a human being…

Now tell me: isn’t that a kind of dying?

Not to mention the small but unforgettable possibility that joining a telepathic community might burn out my brain—no, more accurately and more horribly: burn out my mind.

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.

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.

The aisle seat to my right was occupied by a Chinese man in his late thirties. He was clean-shaven, and like everyone else’s aboard, his hair was short. His face was impassive, and I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were smiling or not. (In zero gee, everyone looks sort of Chinese: the puffy features caused by upward migration of body fluids mimic epicanthic folds at the eyes. If you start out Chinese, your eyes end up looking like paper-cuts.) But something in those eyes responded to me, I felt; we communicated too. A little more than I wanted to; I looked away abruptly. Wave of dizziness. Not a good idea to move your head quickly in free fall.

There was a soft overall murmuring in the passenger cabin, audible even over the engine sound: the sum of everyone’s grunts and sighs and exclamations. It was a sound of optimism, of hope, of pleased surprise. I think in another minute someone would have ignored instructions and unstrapped himself…and then we all would have, no matter what the flight attendants said.

But then there was a sound like a gunshot or the crack of a bat, and a banshee was among us, and I felt a draft—

In that year, 2020, the Space Command’s traffic satellites were (as predicted since the 1980s) tracking over 20,000 known manmade objects larger than ten centimeters in diameter in the Low Earth Orbit band. Naturally no flight plan was accepted that could intersect any of them. But there were (also as predicted) countless hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of objects smaller then ten centimeters whizzing around in Low Orbit: too many to keep track of even if sensors had been able to see them. Screws, bolts, nuts, fittings, miscellaneous jettisoned trash, fragments of destroyed or damaged spacecraft, bits of dead spacemen burst by vacuum and freeze-dried by space, the assorted drifting trash of sixty years of spaceflight. Some of these little bits of cosmic shrapnel had relative velocities of more than fifteen kilometers a second. That’s 5400 kilometers an hour—or a little more than 3200 miles per hour. At that speed, a beer-can ring is a deadly missile.

The chances of a collision depended on whose figures you accepted. The most optimistic estimate at that point in history was one chance in twenty; the most pessimistic, one in four. But even the pessimists conceded that the probability of a life-threatening collision was much lower than that.

Our number came up, that’s all.

Whatever it was hulled us forward and from the left, just aft of the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the cockpit.

Two months of training kicked in: nearly all of us got our p-suit hoods over our heads and sealed in a matter of seconds. The banshee wail was cut off, and the roar of air overridden by a softer hissing behind my head. Within moments I could feel my suit expanding. I could see now why they’d been so tight about carry-on items; even with the strict security, the air was filled with a skirling vortex of smuggled items: tissues, gum wrappers, a rabbit’s foot, a pen and postcard dancing in lockstep, all converging on the source of the pressure leak. Small lighted panels in each seatback began blinking urgently in unison, as though the whole plane had acquired a visible pulse, doubtless telling us to fasten our seatbelts and return our seatbacks to the upright position. In my earphones grew the white noise of dozens of passengers talking at once in assorted languages and dialects. I tried to switch to Emergency channel…but for some reason this suit was not like the ones I had trained in: it had no channel selector switch.

I was not especially afraid. The warm glow of the Stardance was still on me, and we had rehearsed this dozens of times. There was nothing to worry about. Any second now, automatic machinery would begin dispensing globules of blue sticky stuff. The globs would be sucked onto the hole in the hull, and burst there. When enough of them had burst, the hole would be patched.

The hurricane went on, and there were no globs of blue sticky. I spotted one of the nozzles that should have been emitting them.

Okay, failsafes fail; that was why we had live flight attendants. Now they would converge on the leak with a pressure patch, and—

—where were the attendants?

I strained to see over the seats in front of me. Seconds ticked by and I could see no one moving. Finally I had to see what was going on: I unstrapped myself and tried to stand.

But my reflexes were obsolete. I rose with alarming speed, got my hands up too slowly, smacked my skull against the overhead hard enough to cross my eyes, ricocheted downward, hit the seat, bounced back upward, cracked my head again, and clutched desperately at the arms of my seat as I plumped back into it; the girl on my left grabbed my arm firmly to steady me. The seat to my right was empty; at the apex of my flight I had seen my other seatmate, the young Chinese, soaring forward down the aisle, graceful as a slow-motion acrobat.

I had also spotted the chief attendant, strapped into the front row aisle seat he had taken after giving us the standard preflight ritual. He was leaning to his left, arms waving lazily, like a dreaming conductor. His p-suit was slowly turning red from the hood down, and from the left side of the hood a fluid red rope issued. It rippled like a water snake, and ran with all the other airborne objects toward the hole in the hull, breaking up into red spheroids just before being sucked out into space. By great bad fortune the chief attendant’s head had been in the path of whatever had hulled us…

Moving carefully, I managed to wedge myself into an equilibrium between the back of my seat and the overhead, and looked aft. I saw at once what was keeping the other attendant: Murphy’s Law. She was struggling with her jammed seatbelt, weeping and shouting something I couldn’t hear.

I looked forward again in time to see the young Chinese land feet first like a cat against the forward bulkhead, absorb the impact with his thighs so that he did not bounce from it, and instantly position all four limbs correctly to brace himself against the draft. Suddenly some other, powerful force pulled on him briefly, trying to yank him sideways and up, but he sensed it and corrected for it at once. (The same force acted on me and the others; I could not figure out how to correct, and settled for clutching the seatback and overhead as tightly as I could until it passed.) A part of me wondered if he gave lessons. He had obviously been in free fall before.

But not in this vessel! The pressure patches could have been in any of four separate locker-sections—a total of more than two dozen small compartments, identified only by numbers.

I could see him pleading for silence, but no one could hear him above the general roar. I could see him gesturing for silence, but almost no one else could. The aft attendant could tell him which locker, but he could not hear her. He looked at me pleadingly.

I spun back to her, and wondered for a moment if she had gone mad with frustration: she had torn her hood back over her head and was waving furiously. Then I got it and pulled my own hood off. The babble of the earphones went away, and I could hear her shouting.

Just barely. The air was getting thin in here. But it was also coming my way: I could just make out a high distant Donald Duck voice, squawking the same word over and over again.

I should have been terrified that the word made absolutely no sense to me, but I did not seem to have time. Once I was sure I’d heard it right, I whirled and dutifully began braying it as loud as I could toward the Chinese.

“Before,” I screamed, “Before, before, before, before—”

It felt good to scream: pressure change was trying to explode my lungs, and emptying them that way probably saved them serious damage. He already had his own hood off, he was quick; no, he was better than quick, because he instantly solved the puzzle that had baffled me; he yanked his hood back over his head, oriented himself and kicked off, and within seconds he was pulling the most beautiful pressure patch I’d ever seen out of Compartment B-4.

By then I was so dizzy from spinning my head back and forth I felt as though my eyeballs were about to pop out of their sockets—as indeed they probably were—and I had to pull my hood back on and let my seatmate haul me back down into my seat…where I spent some minutes concentrating on not soiling my p-suit. The internal suit pressure rose quickly, but at least as much of it came from my intestines as from my airtanks, and it got ripe enough in there to steam up my hood and make my eyes water for a few moments.

I became aware that my seatmate was shaking my shoulder gently. I opened my eyes, and some of the dizziness went away.

She was pointing to her ears, then to her belt control panel, and shaking her head. I nodded, and fumbled until I found the shutoff switch for my suit radio. The babbling sound of dozens of frightened passengers went away. I noticed for the first time that all the blinking seatback signs were saying, not “FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS,” but “MAINTAIN RADIO SILENCE.”

She touched her hood to mine. “Are ya right?” she called.

“Occasionally,” I said lightheadedly, but I got it. Several weeks in Australia, even in the multilingual environments of Suit Camp, will give you a working familiarity with Aussie slang. She was an Aborigine. Now that I thought about it, I had noticed her once or twice in Camp, had wondered vaguely why, in the midst of one of the largest remaining Aboriginal reserves in Australia, she seemed to be the only Abo who was actually taking Suit Camp training. All the others I’d seen had been outside the Camp, in town and at the Cairns airport.

“You took an awful bloody chance,” she said.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I called back.

“Too right! You saved us all, I reckon—you and the Chinese bloke. Fast as a scalded cat he was, eh? Hold on, here he comes.”

The Chinese rejoined us. He was moving more slowly now that the emergency was past. The delicate grace with which he docked himself back in his chair, without a wasted motion or a bounce, pleased my dancer’s eyes. I resolved to ask him at the first opportunity to tutor me in “jaunting,” the spacer’s term for moving about in zero gee.

He joined his hood to ours. “Thank you,” he said to me.

As our eyes met I felt the old familiar tingle in the pit of the stomach that I had not felt in ages.

And suppressed it. I thanked him right back—but without putting any topspin on it. I’m too old to climb these stairs again, I told myself, even in zero gee…

“I thank you both,” the Aborigine girl said. “Best put our ears on, but. I think they’re getting it sorted out.”

The seatbacks were now flashing, “MONITOR YOUR RADIO.” We separated, and I switched my radio back on in time to hear the surviving attendant say, “—xt person that makes a sound, I am personally going to drag aft and cycle through the airlock, is that fucking well understood?”

She sounded sincere; the only sound in response was dozens of people breathing at different rates.

“Passenger in seat 1-E: is Mr. Henderson dead?”

“Uh…no. I’ve got my hand over the leak and the…the entry wound. His chest is still—”

“Jesus! Wait…uh…ten more seconds for cabin pressure to come back up and then get his hood off. Gently! Passenger 1-F, there’s a first-aid kit in Compartment D-7 in front of you; get a pressure bandage and give it to 1-E; then try to get a pulse rate. Is anyone here a doctor or a paramedic?”

Breathing sounds. Someone grunting softly. A cough.

“Damn. Passenger in 6-B, answer yes or no, do you require medical assistance?”

Breathing sounds.

“Dammit, the woman who passed the word!—do you need help?”

Whoops—she meant me! I started to reply…and my body picked that moment to finish restoring equilibrium, with prolonged and noisy eructations at both ends of my alimentary canal.

“…no-o-o…” I finished, and everyone, myself included, began to howl with tension-breaking laughter—

—everyone except the attendant. “SILENCE!” she roared, loud enough to make my earphones distort, and the laughter fell apart. “It is past time you started acting like spacers. A real spacer is dying while you giggle. We all nearly died because none of you could read a flashing sign six inches from your face! You in 1-E—” That passenger was muttering sotto voce to someone who was helping him remove the injured attendant’s hood. “—switch off your radios and chatter hood to hood if you must. Does anyone else need medical aid? No? Then listen up! I want all of you to keep your hoods on—even after you’re certain the pressure has come back up. I’m going to switch to command channel now and report. You won’t be able to hear it. I’ll fill you all in the moment I am good and God damned ready…but not if I hear one word on this channel when I come back on. And if you switch off your radio, for Christ’s sake watch your seatback signs this time.”

The moment she switched frequencies, several people began chattering. But they were loudly shushed; finally even the most determined—the loudmouth who’d been making jokes before takeoff—had been persuaded to shut up. The attendant’s anger had sobered, humbled us. Despite weeks of training, we had screwed up, in our first crisis. Now we had to sit in silence like chastened children while the grown-ups straightened things out.

I switched my own mike off, and huddled with my seatmates until our three hoods were touching. There was an awkward silence. We all grinned at each other nervously.

“What happens now?” I said finally. “Losing all that air must have pushed us off course, right? Spoiled our vector, or whatever?”

“So we miss our bus,” the Aborigine girl said. “Question is, how many go-rounds does it take to match up with it again—and how much air have we got to drink while we wait?”

“I think we’ll be all right,” the Chinese said. “The pilot maneuvered to correct, and I think she did a good job.” His voice was a pleasant tenor. His English was utterly unaccented, newscaster’s English.

“How do you reckon?” she asked.

“She didn’t blast too quickly, and she didn’t blast too slowly. And it was one short blast. I think she’s good. We might make the original rendezvous, or something close to it.”

His confidence was very reassuring. I thought again about asking him to teach me how to jaunt. And decided against it. There would be plenty of qualified instructors around…and I was here to simplify my life, not complicate it again.

The attendant came swimming down the aisle past us as he spoke. We sat up to watch. She checked the pressure patch first, popping a little round membrane of blue sticky between her fingers and watching to see if any of its droplets migrated toward the patch. Only when she was satisfied did she turn and check on Mr. Henderson, holding a brief hood-to-hood conference with the passenger who was taking care of him. Then she drifted aimlessly in a half crouch, talking to the pilot on the channel we couldn’t hear. Finally she nodded and did something to her belt. The seatback signs began flashing “MONITOR YOUR RADIO” again. I switched mine on.

“Make sure your neighbor has his ears on,” she said. “Is everybody listening? Okay, here’s the word. Captain de Brandt is going to attempt to salvage our original rendezvous window. In about fifteen minutes the main engines will fire. You can expect about a half gee for about two minutes. There may be additional maneuvering after that, so remain strapped in and braced until I tell you otherwise. Expect acceleration warning in twelve minutes; until then I want you to take your hoods off to save your suit air. But be ready to seal up fast!”

“When will Channel One be coming back on TV?” someone asked. “I want to watch the docking.” It was the compulsive joker, aft.

“We can’t spare the bytes.”

“Huh? That’s not—”

“Shut up.” She switched back to command frequency.

I took off my hood. The cabin pressure was lower now than it had been before the blowout. Which was good: all the foul air gushed out of my suit as I unsealed it. I was briefly embarrassed, but in low pressure no one can smell anything very well; it passed without comment, as it were.

I wondered how much air I had left, if I should need it. These were cheap tourist p-suits we were wearing, with just enough air to survive a disaster like we’d just had, in four small cylinders fitted along our upper arms and shins. (In proper p-suits with full-size tanks at our backs, we’d have needed awfully complicated seats.)

There was a subdued murmur of conversation. Suddenly the attendant’s strident voice overrode it; she must have pulled off her hood. “You! Nine-D, sit down and buckle up!”

“What the hell for? You said we’ve got twelve minutes—”

“Sit down!”

It was the joker again. “See here,” he said, “we’re not soldiers and we’re not convicts. I’ve been looking forward to free fall for a long time, and I have a right to enjoy it. You have no authority—”

“Don’t tell me: you’re an American, right? This vessel is in a state of emergency; I have authority to break your spine! Sit or be restrained.”

“Come, come, the emergency is passed, you said so yourself. Stop being hysterical and lighten up a little.” He drifted experimentally out into the aisle. “We have a perfect right to Jesus!”

She had pushed off much too hard, I thought, with the full force of terrestrial muscles. She came up the aisle not in graceful slow motion, as my seatmate had earlier, but like a stone fired from a sling. Even I knew not to jump that hard in zero gee: you bash your head. But as she came she was tucking, rolling—

—she flashed past me quickly, but it’s just about impossible to move too fast for a dancer to follow: I spun my head and tracked her. She ended her trajectory heels foremost, smacked those heels against the seats on either side of him, took all the kinetic energy of her hurtling body on her thighs, and came to a dead stop with her nose an inch from his, drifting just perceptibly to her left.

Try it yourself sometime: drop from a third-story window, and land in a sitting position without a grunt of impact, without a bruise.

I may had been the only one present equipped to fully appreciate what a feat she had just accomplished—but it made the loudmouthed American cross his eyes and shut up.

“You have the right to remain silent,” she told him, loud enough to be heard all over the vessel; he flinched. “If you give up that right, I will break your arm. You have no right to counsel until such time as we match orbits with or land upon UN soil—which we don’t plan to do.” I don’t think he was hearing her. He was busy with the tricky mechanics of getting back into his seat. “Does anyone else have any questions? No? You—strap him in there.”

She kicked off backwards, repeated her feat by flipping in midair and braking herself against the first row of seats, came to rest with her back against the forward bulkhead, and glared around at us. Suddenly her expression softened.

“Look, people,” she called, her voice harsh in the low air pressure, “I know how you feel. I remember my first time in free fall. But you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy it later. Right now I want you strapped in. We’re in a new orbit, one we didn’t pick: there’s no telling when the Captain may have to dodge some new piece of junk.” She sighed. “I know you’re not military personnel. But in space you take orders from anyone who has more experience than you, and ask questions later. A lot later. I’ve logged over six thousand hours in space, half of them in this very can, and I will space the next jerk who gives me any shit.”

“Fair go,” my Aborigine seatmate called. “We’re with you!”

There was a rumble of agreement in which I joined.

“Look, Miss—” she added.

“Yes?”

“You asked for a doctor before. I ain’t no whitefella doctor. My people reckon me a healer, but. Can I come see the bloke?”

The attendant started to answer, frowned and hesitated.

“I won’t hurt him any.”

“All right, come ahead. But be careful! Come slow. And headfirst—don’t try to flip on the way, you’re too green.”

She unstrapped and clambered over me with some difficulty, clutching comically in all directions. A few people tittered. The Chinese steadied her and helped. Presently she was floating in the aisle like someone swimming in a dream…except that her swimming motions accomplished nothing. She looked over her shoulder to the Chinese. “Give us a hand then, will you, mate?”

He hesitated momentarily…then put his hand where he had to and gave her a gentle, measured push.

If a male dancer had done that in the studio, in a lift, I’d have thought nothing of it. But he wasn’t a dancer, and this wasn’t a studio. That’s how I explained my sudden blush to myself.

“Ta,” she called as she slowly sailed away. This time the titters were louder.

No, maybe I would not ask him for lessons in free fall movement.

He turned to me. “Excuse me,” he said politely.

“No, no,” I said, “I understand. If you’d pushed on her feet, she’d have pushed back and spoiled your aim. You’re a spacer, aren’t you?”

Even for a Chinese, his poker face was terrific. “Thank you for the compliment. But no, I’m not.”

“Oh, but you handle yourself so well in free fall—”

“I have spent a little time in space, but I’m hardly a spacer.”

Usually a set of features I can’t read annoys me…but his were at least pleasant to look at while I was trying. Eyes set close, but not too close, together, their long lashes like the spread fins of some small fish, or the fletching of an arrow. Nose slightly, endearingly pugged; mouth almost too small, nearly too full, not quite feminine, chin just strong enough to support that mouth. I caught myself wondering what it would feel like to “Kissing cousin to one at the very least. My name is Morgan McLeod.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Morgan. I’m Robert Chen.”

We shook hands. His grip was warm and strong. The skin of his hand felt horny, calloused—the hand of a martial arts student. That meant that his body would be lean and muscular, his belly hard and “Flattery aside, Robert, you move beautifully. By any chance, have you ever been a dancer?” Definitely not going to ask this one for private movement lessons…

“Not really. I’ve studied some contact improv, but I’ve never performed. And if I’d spent my life at it, I wouldn’t be in your league. I’ve seen you perform, several times. It’s an honour to meet you.”

Well. It is nice to be recognized. And, for a dancer, so rare.

“Thank you, Robert, but I’d say your own performance left little to be desired.” Oh my God, I was speaking in double-entendres. Clumsy ones! “Uh…do you think you could teach me a little about how to move in zero gee?”

Well, hell. I was in space, and I was alive. Within the last hour I had been morbidly depressed, terrified, exalted, very nearly killed, and flattered. I was no longer afraid of anything at all. What harm could there be in a little extracurricular instruction?

The Aborigine returned before Robert could reply, sailing over the seat tops, hands waving comically for balance. When she reached us she stopped herself against her seat, tried to do a one and a half gainer to end up seated, and botched it completely. She managed to kick both me and the man in front of her in the head. “Sorry. Sorry,” she kept chirping. We all smiled. She was like a tumbling puppy. I found myself warming to her. She had the oddest way of carrying off clumsiness gracefully. Since I’d spent my life carrying off gracefulness clumsily, I found it appealing.

Finally she was strapped back in. She grinned infectiously. “I keep lookin’ for the bloody fish,” she said. “Like divin’ the Barrier Reef, y’know? I’nt it marvelous? My name’s Kirra; what’s yours then?”

“Morgan McLeod, Kirra; I’m pleased to meet you. And this is Robert Chen.”

“G’day, mate,” she said to him, “that was good work you done before. You’re fast as a jackrabbit.”

“Thanks, Kirra,” he said. “But I had the same inspiration rabbits do: mortal terror. How’s Mr. Henderson?”

Her face smoothed over; for a moment she could have been her grandmother, or her own remotest ancestor. “Bloke’s in a bad way,” she said. “You could say he’s gone and not be wrong. Oh, his motor’s still turnin’ over, and I reckon it might keep on. Nobody’s at the wheel, but. His mind’s changed forever.” She fingered the thorax of her p-suit absently. I sensed she was looking for an amulet or necklace of some kind that usually hung there. “I tried to sing with him…,” she said softly, in a distant, sing-song voice. “We couldn’t sing the same…was like a bag of notes was broken on the floor.” She sighed, and squared her shoulders. “He needs a better healer than me, that’s sure.”

“They’ll have good doctors at Top Step,” Robert assured her.

She looked dubious, but politely agreed.

“I’m sorry, Morgan,” he said to me. “You asked me a question before, whether I’d work with you on jaunting. I wanted to say—”

The pilot maneuvered without warning.

For a few instants there was a faint suggestion of an up and down to the world. A sixth of a gee or so. Coincidentally it was lined up roughly with our seatbacks in one axis, so the effect was to push us gently down into our seats. But if you considered the round bulkhead up front as a clock, “down” was at about 8:30: we all tilted to the right like bus passengers on a long curve. I found my face pressed gently against Robert’s, my weight supported by his strong shoulder, with Kirra’s head on my lap. A few complaints were raised, and one clear, happy, “Wheeee!” came from somewhere aft. His hair smelled good.

“Hang on, people,” the attendant called. “Nothing to worry about.”

In a matter of seconds the acceleration went away, and we drifted freely again. We all waited a few moments for a bang or bump to signal docking. Nothing happened.

As the three of us started to say embarrassment-melting things to each other, thrust returned again—in precisely the opposite direction. I suppose it made sense: first you turn the wheel, and then you straighten the wheel. But even Robert was caught by surprise. This time we were hanging upside down and sideways from our seats, Kirra and I with wrists locked like arm wrestlers and Robert’s head in my lap. It felt dismayingly good there. Even through a cheap p-suit. Again the thrust went away.

“I wonder how long it’ll be before we—” Kirra began, when an acceleration warning finally sounded, a mournful hooting noise. The attendant had time to call out, “All right, I want everybody to—” Then the big one hit.

Well, maybe a half gee, or a little more. But half a gee is a lot more than none, and it came on fast, and in an unexpected and disturbing direction. The pilot was blasting directly forward, along our axis, as though backing violently away from danger. The whole vessel shuddered. We all fell forward toward the seatbacks in front of us—“below” us now—and held a pushup together for perhaps thirty or forty seconds. There were loud complaints above the blast noise.

The acceleration faded slowly down to nothing again. There were two or three seconds of silence…and then there was a series of authoritative but gentle thumps on the hull, fore and aft, as though men with padded hammers were surreptitiously checking the welds. The seatbacks began flashing PLEASE REMAIN SEATED.

“We’re here,” Robert said. “A very nice docking. A little abrupt, but clean.” I thought he was being ironic but wasn’t sure.

“Keep your seatbelts buckled,” the attendant called. “We’ll disembark after Doctor Kolchar has cleared Mr. Henderson to be moved.”

“That’s it?” Kirra said.

I knew what she’d meant. On TV the docking of spacecraft is always seen from a convenient adjacent camera that gives the metal mating dance a stately Olympian perspective, an elephantine grace. A trip to space—especially one’s first and last—should begin with trumpets, and end with the Blue Danube. This had been like riding a Greyhound bus through an endless tunnel…blowing a tire…riding on the rim for a while…and then running out of gas in the middle of the tunnel.

“That’s it,” Robert agreed. “Even if they’d had the video feed running, it wouldn’t have looked like much up until the very end. To really appreciate a docking you’ve got to speak radar. But we’re here, all right.”

“We truly have reached the Top Step,” I said wonderingly.

“That we have,” Robert said. “Here comes the doctor.” The red light was on over the airlock up front.

The hatch opened explosively, with a popping sound, and the airlock spat out a white-haired man in Bermuda shorts and a loud yellow Hawaiian shirt. His body orientation, fluttering hair and clothes, and the pack affixed somehow to his midsection made him look like a skydiver. The attendant caught him, began to warn him that this pressure was not secure, but he shushed her and began examining Mr. Henderson with various items taken from his belly pack. After a time I heard him say, “Okay, Shannon, let’s move him. You help me with him. We’re going to do it nice and slow.”

“You!” the attendant called up the aisle. “The Chinese spacer in Row Six: you’re in command.” Robert blinked. “Come forward and take over, now. Breathing and digestion are permitted; limited thinking will be tolerated; everything else is forbidden, savvy?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he called forward.

Our eyes met briefly as he was unbuckling. For the first time I was able to see past that impassive expression, guess his thoughts. He was embarrassed, flattered…disappointed? At what?

“To be continued in our next,” he murmured, and vaulted away.

At the interruption of our conversation?

“I hope so,” I heard myself call after him.

Come to think of it, he still hadn’t said whether or not he’d give me lessons in jaunting.

Oh God. What was I doing? What good could possibly come of this? Even for me, this was rotten timing.

“You want to mind that top step, they say,” Kirra said softly, and when I turned to look at her she was grinning.