Starseed

Chapter Three

Our new home didn’t look too weird to us because we’d seen pictures in Suit Camp. Still it was exotic; flat pictures don’t do justice to a spherical living space. We drifted around in it for a while, staring at everything, trying out the various facilities, lights and sound and video and climate control, teaching them all to recognize our voices and so on, but the room somehow kept refusing to become real for me. It was just too strange.

There was no “upper bunk” to fight over; one half of the room was as good as the other. The hemisphere I arbitrarily chose had, as a small concession to the ancient human patterns of thought I was here to unlearn, a local vertical, a defined up and down—the Velcro desk lined up with the computer monitor and so on—but Kirra’s half had a different one, at a skewed angle to mine. Neither had any particular relationship to the axis of the corridor outside. Looking from my side of the room to Kirra’s made me slightly dizzy. My eyes wanted to ignore anything that disagreed with their personal notion of up and down. Such things did not play by the rules, were impolite, beneath notice.

Kirra and I each adapted to our own local orientation for a moment, blinked at the items and documents attached to our desks, the monitor screens that read WELCOME TO TOP STEP, and so on. Then we turned back to look at each other. Being out-of-phase was unsatisfactory; without discussion or thought we both adapted to a compromise orientation halfway between our two differing ones. We snapped into phase with an almost audible click.

And we broke up.

We could not stop laughing. There was more than a bit of hysteria in it, on both sides. It was different by an order of magnitude from the giggling we had done earlier while scrambling for our new p-suits. Since breakfast I had been literally blown off the face of the Earth, nearly killed in orbit, told that I was a forty-six-year-old child, sexually—aroused? well, intrigued—for the first time in forever, molested most intimately and impersonally by Decontam devices, dumped into a weird Caveworld where falling off a log was not possible, guided through a bunch of absurdly Freudian tunnels by a woman who wasn’t there…and now I was “home,” in a place where my bed was a holster, and I could look up and see the soles of my roommate’s feet. I can’t speak for Kirra, but it wasn’t until about halfway through that laugh that I realized just how lonely and scared and disoriented I was—which only made me laugh harder.

We laughed until the tears came, and then roared, because tears in free fall are so absurd, from both inside and outside. Kirra’s eyes exuded little elongated saline worms, that waved and broke up into tiny crystal balls. I seemed to see her through a fish-eye lens that kept changing its focal length. Every time our laughter began to slow down, one of us would gasp out something like, “Long day,” or, “Do you believe this?” and we’d dissolve again, as though something terribly funny had been said.

Our convulsions set us caroming gently around the room, and eventually we collided glancingly and climbed up each other into a hug. We squeezed each other’s laughter into submission.

“Thanks, love,” Kirra said finally. “I needed that bellybuster.”

“Me too!” We sort of did a pushup on each other: pushed apart until we held each other by the biceps at arms’ length. “Whoever decided you and I would be compatible roommates was either very good at their job or very lucky. I couldn’t have laughed like that alone, or with somebody like Glenn.”

We kept hold of each other’s upper arms in order to maintain eye contact, to match our personal verticals. But nothing is still in free fall unless anchored. To keep our lower bodies from drifting, we had instinctively invented a way of bracing our shins against each other with ankles interlocked. I became aware of it now, and admired it. Could there be such a thing as an instinctive response to zero gravity? Or was it just that bodies are a lot more adaptable than brains?

“All right,” Kirra said, “let’s get down to it. Who are you, Morgan? Why are you here?”

I was more amused than offended by her forthrightness. “You sure don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“Hell, I was born in the bush.”

I pinched her.

“But I’ll go first if you want,” she continued.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “ ‘Why am I here?’ is easy. I’m…I was a dancer. I was pretty famous, but more important I was pretty good, but most important I was married to it, it’s all I ever did, and I can’t do it anymore. I don’t mean I can’t get hired. I mean I can’t dance anymore. Not on Earth, anyway. Not for a long time now. I looked around and found out there’s nothing else on Earth I care about. And my problems are lower back and knees, and zero gee is supposed to be great for both.”

“I can see that,” Kirra agreed.

“It’s more than just the reduced stress. It’s the calcium loss. There’s this doctor thinks it will actually help.”

Human bones lose calcium rapidly in zero gravity—one of many reasons why people who stay in space too long are stuck there for life. The bones become too frail to return to terrestrial gravity. Many of my fellow Postulants would be taking calcium supplements, just in case they decided to change their minds and return to Earth. But it happened that overcalcification was a factor in both my back trouble and my knee problems.

“So space is a place where one out of the three doctors says maybe I could dance again. For one chance in three of dancing again, I would skin myself with a can opener. If I have to put up with great longevity and freedom from all human suffering and telepathic union with a bunch of saints and geniuses to get that chance…well, I can live with that, I guess.” I grinned. “That sounds weird, huh?”

“Not to me. Well, what do you think? Can you dance here?”

“Well…I won’t know until I’ve had time alone to experiment. I won’t really know until I wake up the next morning. And I won’t be sure for at least a week or two. But it feels good, Kirra. I don’t know, it really does. I think it’s going to work, maybe. Oh shit, I’m excited!”

She squeezed my arms and showed me every one of those perfect teeth. “That’s great, love. I’m glad for you. Good luck, eh?”

The trite words sounded real in her mouth. “Thanks, hon. Okay, your turn now. What brings you to Top Step?”

“Well…do you know anything about Aborigines, Morgan?” she asked. “The Dreamtime? The Songlines?”

I admitted I did not.

“This is gonna take a while…you sure you want to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“Back before the world got started was the Dreamtime, my people reckon. All the Ancestors dreamed themselves alive, then, created themselves out of clay, created themselves as people and all the kinds of animals and birds and insects there are. And the first thing they did was go walkabout, singin’—makin’ the world by singin’ it into existence. Sing up a river here, sing a mountain there. Wherever they went, they left a Songline behind ’em, and the Song made the world around there, see? So there’s Songlines criss-crossin’ the world, and everyplace is on or near a Songline, with a Song of its own that makes it what it is. That’s why we go Walkabout—to follow the Songlines and sing the Songs and keep recreating the world so’s it doesn’t melt away. Get it?”

“I think so. All Aboriginals believe this?”

“Most of us that’s left. Our Dreaming ain’t like whitefella religions. Our Songs were maps, trade routes, alliances, history: they held the whole country together, kept hundreds of tribes and clans living together in peace for generations. Even the whitefella couldn’t completely change that. Those of us they didn’t kill outright had trouble keepin’ our faith, but. Some of us went to the towns, tried on European ideas. Railroads were cuttin’ across Songlines. Our beliefs didn’t seem to account for the world we saw anymore, so we had to change ’em a bit. But we never got the Dreamtime out of our bones and teeth. Tribes that did…well, they’re gone, see?

“So the last few generations, a mob of us left the reserves, left the cities and towns. We’ve gone back to the bush, gone back to bein’ nomads, followin’ the Songlines. There’s not many of us left, see. We want to touch where we came from before we go from the world.

“If we’re gonna try to keep our beliefs alive, we got to make ’em account for the world we see. And space is part of that world now. We’ve got to weave it into our world-picture somehow. Some o’ the old stories speak of Sky-Heroes, spirit Ancestors departed into the sky. If that’s so, they left Songlines, and Aborigines can follow them to space. That’s my job: to try and find the Songlines of the Sky-Heroes.”

I was fascinated. The bravery, the audacity of trying to make an ancient pagan religion fit the modern world was breathtaking. “Why you?”

“It’s my Dreaming.” She saw that I did not understand, and tried again: “Like you with dancin’. It’s what I was born for. My mob, the Yirlandji, we’re reckoned the best singers. And I’m the best o’ the lot.” There was neither boasting nor false modesty in her voice.

“Sing me something.”

“I can sing you a tabi,” she said. “A personal song. But you’ll have to back off: I gotta slap me legs.”

We let each other go, and drifted about a decimeter apart. She closed her eyes in thought for perhaps ten seconds, filling her lungs the whole time. Then she brought her thighs up and slapped them in slow rhythm as she sang:

Her voice was indeed eerily beautiful. It had the rich tone of an old acoustic saxophone, but it was not at all like a jazz singer’s voice. It had the precision and the perfect vibrato of a MIDI-controlled synthesizer, but it was natural as riversong, human as a baby’s cry, a million years older than the bone flute. It was warm, and alive, and magical.

The song she sang was made of nine tones that repeated, but with each repetition they changed so much in interval and intonation and delivery as to seem completely different phrases. Considering that I didn’t understand a word, I found it oddly, powerfully, astonishingly moving; whatever she was saying, it was coming directly from her heart to my ears. As I listened, I was radically reevaluating my new roommate. This cute little puppy I’d been mentally patronizing was someone special, deserving of respect. She was at least as good at her art as I had ever been at mine.

When her song was over I said nothing for ten seconds or more. Her eyes fluttered open and found mine, and still I was silent. There was no need to flatter her. She knew how good she was, and knew that I knew it now.

Then I was speaking quickly: “Teena! Did you hear Kirra’s song just now? I mean, do you still have it in memory?”

“Yes, Morgan.”

“Would you save it for me, please? And download it to my personal memory?”

“Name this file,” Teena requested.

“ ‘Kirra, Opus One.’ ”

“Saved.” And that’s why I can give you the words now—though I can’t vouch for the spelling.

“Do you mind, Kirra? If I keep a copy of that—just for myself?”

“Shit no, mate. I sang it to you, di’n I?” she looked thoughtful. “Hoy, Teena, would you put a copy in my spare brain as well? Label it ‘Bodalla,’ and put it in a folder named ‘Tabi.’ ”

“Done.”

She returned her attention to me. “I was singin’ about—”

I interrupted her softly. “—about saying goodbye to Earth, about coming to space, something about it being scary, but such a wonderful thing to do that you just have to do it. Yes?”

She just nodded. Maybe people always understood her when she sang. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’ve since asked Teena for a translation of “Bodalla.” She offered three, a literal transposition and two colloquial versions. The one I like goes:

“But that’s just a tabi,” Kirra said. “Just a personal song of my own, like. That’s not why I got sent here. See, what I’m special good at is feelin’ the Songlines. Been that way since I was a little girl. Whenever my mob’d move to a new place, I always knew the Song of it before anybody taught me. Yarra, the…well, a woman that taught me, this priestess, like…she used to blindfold me and drive me to strange country, some place I’d never been. And when I’d been there a while, sometimes an hour, sometimes overnight, I could sing her the Song of that place, and I always got it right. I got famous for it. Tribes that had forgotten parts of their own Songs, or had pieces cut out of ’em by whitefella doin’s, would send for me to come help ’em. So when the Men and Women of Power figured out this job here needed doing, there never was any question whose job it was.”

“And you don’t mind?” I asked. It was sounding to me a little as though she’d been drafted, and was too patriotic to complain.

“Mind?” she said. “Morgan, most of us do pretty good if we can get through life without screwin’ anybody else up too bad. How many get even a chance to do somethin’ important, for a whole people? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Oh Christ, I made a pun. That’s just what I’m doin’: not missin’ it for the world.”

“Where in Australia are you from?”

“Not far from Suit Camp,” she said.

“You’re saying double goodbyes today, then,” I said without thinking.

I felt like kicking myself, but I had to explain now. “A few months ago I said goodbye to Vancouver—to my home—in my heart. All of us here left home before we came to Suit Camp. Today all we’re leaving is Earth. You’re leaving home and Earth at the same time.”

Implausibly, her grin broadened. “You’re not wrong.” Somehow at this aperture, the grin made her look even younger, no more than twenty. “This’s the first time I been out of Oz in me life, and it feels dead strange. Probably be just as strange to go to Canada, but. Oz, Earth, all one to me. Hey, what do you say we get out of these suits and see if our new clothes fit?”

Each of us had been issued several sets of jumpsuits, in assorted colors. It wasn’t especially surprising that they fit perfectly: after all, they’d been cut from the same set of careful measurements used to make our formfitting p-suits. We also got gloves and booties and belts, all made of material that did not feel sticky to the touch, but was sticky when placed against wall-material. Traction providers. Teena explained that although social nudity was acceptable here, it was customary for Postulants, First-Monthers like us, to wear jumpsuits if they wore anything; second-month Novices usually lived in their p-suits, for as long as it took them to make up their minds to Symbiosis. We admired ourselves in the mirror for a while, then I slid into my sleepsack and began learning how to adjust it for comfort, while Kirra got Teena to display three-dimensional maps.

“Teena,” I said while Kirra was distracted, “where is Robert Chen billeted?” Absurdly, I tried to pitch my voice too low for Kirra to hear, without making it obvious to Teena that I was doing so. I have no idea whether Teena caught it, or if so whether it conveyed any meaning to her. How subtle was her “understanding” of humans?

All I know is that Kirra didn’t seem to hear her reply, “P7-29.”

Just down the corridor! “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Okay, it’s dopey to thank an electric-eye for opening the door for you. I wasn’t thinking clearly; I was too busy kicking myself for asking the question. And for being elated by the answer. What did I care where he slept? I was not going to get that involved.

Certainly not for days yet.

When Kirra and I got bored with exploring our new home, we discovered we were hungry. We headed for the cafeteria, following some of Teena’s pixies. And found ourselves outside in the corridor, at the end of a long line of hungry people, most hanging on to hand-rails provided for the purpose. Standing On Line is not much enhanced by zero gravity. Your feet hurt less, but there are more annoying ways for your neighbors to fidget. The line, like all lines, did not appear to be moving.

Kirra nudged me. From up ahead, someone was waving to us. Robert.

“You think we should join him?” she asked.

I hesitated. “Maybe he’s just saying hello.”

“Up to you,” she said, and waved back.

He waved again. It was definitely an invitation for us both to join him.

My blood sugar decided for me. I think.

Cutting ahead on line in zero gee without actually putting my foot in anyone’s face was tricky. In fact, I didn’t manage it. Kirra and I were both cordially hated by the time we reached Robert. He ignored it and made room for us. “Morgan McLeod, Kirra—I’d like you to meet my roommate, Ben Buckley, from Sherman Oaks, California.”

Ben was one of the strangest looking—and strangest—men I’d ever met. A big boney redhead with a conversational style reminiscent of a happy machine gun, he wore a permanent smile and huge sunglasses with very peculiar lenses. They stuck out for several centimeters on either side of his face, and flared. The temple shafts of the glasses were wide, and had small knobs and microswitches along their length. When we asked, he told us he had designed and made them himself…and his motivation just floored me.

Their purpose was to bring him 360° vision.

“Ever since I was a kid I loved messing with perception,” he told us, his words tumbling all over one another. “Distortions, gestalt-shifts, changing paradigms, I couldn’t get enough. New ways of seeing, hearing, grokking. My folks were die-hard hippies, I caught it from them.”

“Mine, too,” I said, and he gave me an incandescent smile.

“Then you know those funny faceted yellow specs they used to have, gave you bee’s eyes? Most people keep them on for about ten seconds; a really spaced-out doper might leave ’em on for the duration of an acid trip, but I used to wear ’em for days, ’til my parents got nervous. And my dad had this colour organ, turned music into light patterns, and I spent time with that sucker until I could not only name the tune with the speakers disconnected, I could harmonize, and enjoy it.” I’m putting periods at the ends of his sentences so you can follow them, but he never really paused longer than a comma’s worth. “Learning to read spinning record labels, eyeglasses with inverting lenses, I loved all that stuff. When I was fourteen, I built a pair of headphones that played ambient sound to me backwards, a word at a time, so fast that once I learned to understand it the lip-synch lag was just barely noticeable. That’s the kind of stuff that’s fun to me. Then one day a year ago I thought, hey, what do I need a blind side for? so I built these glasses.” Robert was looking very interested. “They’re dual mode. I can get about 300° on straight optical—glasses like that were available back in the Nineties, although they didn’t sell well—or I can kick on the fiber-optics in the earpieces and get full surround. I like to switch back and forth for fun. I like to put the front hemisphere into one eye, and the back half into the other—and switch them back and forth—but I can get something like full stereo parallax in both eyes at once with a heads-up-display like fighter pilots use.”

Kirra managed to get in a word in edgewise. “Could I look through ’em, Ben?”

He smiled. “Sure. But if you’re a normal person, it’d take you about three months to learn to interpret the data. It’d look like a funhouse mirror.”

“Oh. Turn round, okay?”

“Sure,” he said again, and did so.

“Now: what am I doing?”

“Being somewhat rude,” he reported accurately. “And that fingernail needs trimming.”

Robert looked thoughtful…and tossed a pen at Ben’s back. Ben reached around behind himself and caught it…then tumbled awkwardly from the effect of moving his arm. “See what I mean?” he said, stabilizing himself. “It has survival advantage: you can’t sneak up on me. But I just enjoy it, you know?”

Kirra was getting excited. “I’ll bet you’re the only one in the class that really likes this zero-gee stuff, aren’t you? It’s what you enjoy best: bein’ confused. Gosh, that must be a great thing to enjoy!”

He stared. “I like you,” he said suddenly.

“Sure,” she said.

They smiled at each other.

“Kirra’s right,” Robert said. “This ‘thinking spherically’ business that the rest of us are having so much trouble with must be the kind of thing you’ve been dreaming of all your life. Why did it take you so long to come to space?”

“I think I know,” Kirra said.

Ben looked at her expectantly.

“You didn’t want to use it up too quick,” she said.

He smiled and nodded. “I held off as long as I could stand it,” he agreed. His smile broadened. “God, it’s great, too. Do you believe they gave us unlimited Net access?”

It was not sparks flying, not a mutual sexual awareness. It was a new friendship taking root. It was nice to watch. Yet as I watched them I felt vaguely melancholy. I wished I had a friend of the opposite sex. Robert and I might just be friends some day…but if so I could tell we were going to have to go through being lovers first, and I just didn’t know if I had the energy.

A lover of mine used to have a quote on his bedroom wall, from some old novel: It’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.

My melancholy lasted right up until Kirra said, “Hey, the bloody queue’s movin’!” Starving dancers are too busy for melancholy…the only reason their suicide rate isn’t higher than it already is.

The cafeteria took some getting used to. But there was plenty of assistance; without any apparent formal structure to it, Second-Monthers (identifiable because they wore p-suits rather than our First-Monther’s jumpsuits, but lacked the Spacer’s Earring of EVA-qualified Third-Monthers) seemed to take it on themselves to be helpful to newcomers. They were extraordinarily patient about it, I thought. We must have been more nuisance than a flock of flying puppies. Maybe we were vastly entertaining.

Tables lined with docking rails jutted out from five of the six walls. The inner sides of the rails were lined with Velcro, like our belts, so you could back yourself up to one end and be held in reasonable proximity to your food; there was a thin footrail on which to brace your feet—both “above” and “below” the table. Both sides of the tables were used. It provided an odd and interesting solution to the problem of sharing a table with strangers; you adopted the opposite vertical to theirs, and your conversation never clashed. On the other hand, especially clumsy footwork in docking at table could kick your neighbor’s dinner clear across the room. And you came to really appreciate the fact that in free fall, feet don’t smell.

Eventually we got down to the real business of a meal: talking.

You hesitate to ask a new chum, so why did you come to Top Step? The answer may be that they’re running away from some defeat on Earth. You’re especially hesitant if you’re there because you’re running from some defeat on Earth yourself.

I didn’t exactly question Robert over dinner, and he didn’t exactly volunteer autobiography, but information transfer occurred by some mysterious kind of osmosis. In between the distractions of learning to eat in zero gravity, I learned that he had a fifteen-year-old son, who lived with his mother; she and Robert had divorced eight years before. I also found out how he had acquired his “spacer’s legs.” He was an architect; apparently he had already established himself as a successful traditional architect in San Francisco…when suddenly the new field of space architecture had opened up. The technical challenge had excited him; he had followed the challenge into orbit, found he had the knack for it, and prospered.

I’m not sure whether this next part is something he implied or I inferred, but the progression seemed logical. He found that he liked space—the more time he spent there, the more he liked it. In time he came to resent being forced to return to Earth regularly just to keep his body acclimated to gravity. The obvious question Why not just stay in space, like a Stardancer? had led naturally to Why not become a Stardancer? At this point in the history of human enterprise in space, a free-lance spacer’s life is usually one of total insecurity…and a Stardancer’s life is one of great and lasting security. And so, wanting to stay in space without having to scramble every moment to buy air, Robert found himself here on Top Step.

It seemed a rather shallow reason to come all this way. To abandon a whole planet and the whole human race, just to save on overhead while he pursued his art…

On the other hand, who was I to judge? He wasn’t fleeing defeat, like me. Maybe architecture was as exciting an art as dance; maybe for him it was making elements dance. Maybe space was just an environment he liked.

Maybe there were no shallow reasons to become a Stardancer.

Maybe it didn’t matter what your reasons were.

As all this was going through my mind, Robert went on: “But there’s a little more to it than that. Another part of it is that when I started spending time in space, I found myself watching Earth a lot, thinking about what a mess it’s in, how close it is to blowing itself up. I read somewhere once, Earth is just too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. We’ve got to get more established in space, soon.

“I know you can say Stardancers aren’t part of the human race anymore, but I don’t buy that. They all came from human eggs and sperm, and they’ve done more for Earth than the rest of the race put together. They fixed the hole in the ozone layer, they put the brakes on the greenhouse effect, they built the mirror farms and set up the Asteroid Pipeline, they mad the Safe Lab so we can experiment with nanotechnology without being afraid the wrong little replicator will get loose and turn the world into grey goo—they can afford to be altruistic, because they don’t need anything but each other. I think without the Starseed Foundation, there’d have been an all-out nuclear war years ago.

“So I guess I decided it was time I put some back in. From all I can learn, there aren’t many architects in the Starmind, so I think I can be of help. I want to design and build things a little more useful to mankind than another damn factory or dormitory or luxury hotel.”

“And the eternal life without want part doesn’t hurt, does it?” Ben said, grinning, and Robert smiled back. It was the first real smile of his I’d seen. I tend to trust people or not trust them on the basis of their smiles; I decided I trusted Robert.

But I wished he’d smile more often.