Starseed

Chapter Four

I could write a whole chapter about my first free fall cafeteria meal, my first free fall sleep, my first free fall pee…but you can get that sort of thing from any traveler’s account. The next event of significance, the morning after our arrival at Top Step, was my first class with Reb Hawkins-roshi.

The course was titled “Beginner’s Mind”—a clue to me that I would like it, since my mother’s battered old copy of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind had been my own introduction to Buddhism. There are as many different flavors of Buddhism—even just of Zen!—as there are flavors of Christianity, and some of them give me hives…but if this Hawkins’s path was even tangent to Suzuki’s, I felt confident I could walk it without too much discomfort.

You couldn’t really have called me a Buddhist. I had no teacher, didn’t even really sit zazen on any regular basis. I’d never so much as been on a retreat, let alone done a five-day sesshin. My mother taught me how to sit, and a little of the philosophy behind it, was all. By that point in my life I mostly used Zen as a sort of nonprescription tranquilizer.

Robert, on the other hand, approached it with skepticism. He was not, I’d learned the night before, a Buddhist—it’s silly, I know, but for some reason I kept expecting every Asian I meet to be a Buddhist—but he had mentioned in passing that if he were going to be one, he’d follow the Rinzai school of Zen. (A rather harsh and overintellectual bunch, for my taste.) Pretty personal conversation for two strangers, I know; somehow we hadn’t gotten around to less intimate things, like how we liked to have sex. Nonetheless, I was proud of myself: I hadn’t physically touched him even once.

Well, okay: once. But I hadn’t kissed him goodnight before returning to my place! (Kirra kissed Ben…)

And I didn’t look for him in the cafeteria crowd during breakfast—and didn’t kiss him good morning when we met accidentally in the corridor on the way to class. I was too irritated: I’d had to stall around for over three minutes to bring about that accidental encounter, and I was mildly annoyed that he hadn’t looked me up during breakfast. God, lust makes you infantile!

But he was adequately pleased to encounter me, so I let him take my arm and show me a couple of jaunting tricks I’d already figured out on the way to breakfast—with the net result that we were nearly late for class, and I arrived in exactly the wrong frame of mind: distracted. So a nice thing happened.

As the door of the classroom silently irised shut behind us, my pulse began to race. What could be more disorienting than being inside your headful of racing thoughts, toying with the tingles of distant horniness—and suddenly finding yourself face to face with a holy man?

He was in his fifties, shaven-headed and clean-shaven, slender and quite handsome, and utterly centered and composed. He was not dressed as a Zen abbot, he wore white shorts and singlet, but his face, body language and manner all quietly proclaimed his office. I think I experienced every nuance of embarrassment there is.

He met my eyes, and his face glowed briefly with the infectious Suzuki-roshi grin that told me he was a saint, and he murmured the single word, “Later,” in a way that told me I was forgiven for being late and I had not given offense and we were going to be good friends as soon as we both had time; meanwhile, lighten up.

All of this in an instant; then his eyes swept past me to Robert, they exchanged an equally information-packed glance which I could not read, and he returned his attention to the group as a whole.

If I hadn’t arrived for class in an inappropriate mental state, it might have taken me minutes to realize how special Reb was.

Most of the spiritual teachers I’ve known had a tendency to sit silently for a minute or two after the arrival of the last pupils, as if to convey the impression that their meditation was so profound it took them a moment to shift gears. But Reb was a genuinely mindful man: he was aware Robert and I were the last ones coming, and the moment we had ourselves securely anchored to one of the ubiquitous bungee cords, he bowed to the group—somehow without disturbing his position in space—and began to speak.

“Hello,” he said in a husky baritone. “My name is Reb Hawkins, and I’ll be your student for the next eight to twelve weeks.”

Inevitably someone spoke up, a New Yorker by her accent. “ ‘Student’? I thought you were supposed to be the teacher.”

“I am supposed, by many, to be a teacher,” he agreed pleasantly. “Sometimes they are correct. But I am always a student.”

“Aah,” said the New Yorker, in the tones of one who has spotted the hook in a commercial.

Reb didn’t seem to notice. “I am going to try to teach all of you…specifically, how to enter Titanian Symbiosis without suffering unnecessary pain. Along the way, I will teach you any other lessons I can that you request of me, and from time to time I will offer to teach you other things I think you need to know…but in this latter category you are always privileged to overrule me.”

“If that’s true,” the New Yorker said, “I’m actually impressed.”

I was becoming irritated with the heckling—but Reb was not. “In free fall,” he said, “raising one’s hand for attention does not work well. Would you help me select some other gesture we all can use, Jo?”

Jo, the New Yorker, was so surprised by the question that she thought about it. “How ’bout this?”

Is there a proper name for the four-fingered vee she made? My parents were Star Trek fans, so I think of it as the Spock Hello.

He smiled. “Excellent! Unambiguous…and just difficult enough to perform that one has a moment to reconsider how necessary it really is to pre-empt the group’s attention. Thank you, Jo.” He demonstrated it for those who could not see Jo. “Is there anyone who can’t make this gesture?”

Several of us found it awkward, but no one found it impossible. I was less interested in my manual dexterity than in his social dexterity. Hecklers heckle because they need everyone in the room to know how clever they are. He had given her a chance to make that point, reproved her so gently that she probably never noticed, and I knew he would have no further trouble from her that day. By persuading her not to be his enemy, he had defeated her. I smiled…and saw him notice me doing so. He did not smile back—but I seemed to see an impish twinkle for a moment in his eye.

I like spiritual teachers with an impish twinkle. In fact, I don’t think I like any other kind.

“If any of you happen to be Buddhist, I am an Abbot in the Soto sect. I trace my dharma lineage through Shunryu Suzuki, and will be happy to do dokusan with any who wish it in the evenings, after dinner.”

I don’t know how to convey the significance of Reb’s dharma lineage to a non-Soto-Buddhist. Perhaps the rough equivalent might be a Christian monk who had been ordained by one of the Twelve Apostles. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi was one of the greatest Japanese Zen masters to come to America, way back in the middle of the twentieth century—founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the famous Tassajara monastery near Carmel.

“But this is not a class in Zen,” he went on, “and you need not have any interest in Buddha or his Eightfold Path. What we’re going to attempt to do in this class is to discuss spirituality without mentioning religion. The former can often be discussed by reasonable people without anger; the latter almost never can.”

Glenn made the Spock Hello; he returned it, to mean she had the floor. “What is ‘spirituality without religion,’ sir?”

“Please call me ‘Reb,’ Glenn. It is the thing people had, before they invented religion, which caused them to gape at sunsets, to sing while alone, or to smile at other people’s babies. And other things which defy rational explanation, but are basic to humanity.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“By happy coincidence, practically the next thing in the syllabus is an example of what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to take a short field trip in just a few minutes, to see something spiritual. Can you wait, Glenn?”

“Of course, Reb.”

“Good. Now: one of the main things we need to do is to begin dismantling the patterns in which you think. Some of you may think that you’ve never given much thought to spirituality—but in fact you’ve thought too much about it, in patterns and terms that were only locally useful. Space adds dimensions unavailable to any terrestrial. It’s time you started getting used to the fact that you live in space now. So I’d like you all to unship all those bungee cords, and pass them to me.”

I began to see what he was driving at. The cords, to which we were all loosely clinging, imposed a strictly arbitrary local vertical, the same one Reb had been using since I’d entered. But as we followed his instruction, “up” and “down” went away…and he began (without any visible muscular effort) to tumble slowly and gracefully in space. His face was always toward us, but seldom “upright,” and as some of us unconsciously tried to match his spin—and failed—there was suddenly no consensus as to which way was up. We had to stop trying to decide. Soon we were all every which way, save that we all at least tried to face Reb. I found it oddly unsettling to pay attention to someone who was spinning like a Ferris wheel—which was his point.

I noticed something else. He had positioned himself roughly at the center of the wall behind him—and the majority of us, myself included, had unconsciously oriented ourselves, not only “vertical” with respect to him…but “below” him as well. He was the teacher, so most of us wanted to “look up to him.” Several of the exceptions looked like people who’d pointedly if subconsciously fought that impulse. (Robert was one of them.) Now the “upper” portion of the room was starting to fill up, as we redistributed ourselves more…well, more equally. Which again, I guess, was his point.

“That’s more like it,” he said approvingly as he stowed the bungee cords in a locker. “When you’ve been in free fall a while longer, you’ll find the sight of a roomful of people aligned like magnets amusing—because in this environment it is.”

An uneasy chuckle passed around the room.

“It’s possible,” he went on, continuing to rotate, “for a normal terrestrial to enter Symbiosis without permanent psychic damage; it has happened. But any spacer will find it enormously easier. Now for that field trip.”

He reached behind himself without looking, caught the hatch handle on the first try, pivoted on it while activating it, and lobbed himself out of the room. His other hand beckoned us to follow.

We left the room smoothly and graciously, with no jostling for position or unnecessary speech. This man was having an effect on us.

We proceeded as a group down winding, roughly contoured corridors of Top Step. The image that came to my mind, unbidden, was of a horde of corpuscles swimming single file through some sinuous blood vessel. Whoever it belonged to needed to cut down on her cholesterol.

I glanced back past my feet, saw that Robert had managed to take up position immediately behind me. He smiled at me. My mental image of our group changed, from corpuscles to spermatozoa. I looked firmly forward again and tried to keep my attention on spirituality—and on not jaunting my skull into the foot of Kirra in front of me.

In a few minutes we had reached our destination. To enter, we had to go through an airlock, big enough for ten people at once—but it was open at both ends: there was pressure beyond it. I wondered what the airlock was for, then. As I passed through it I heard a succession of gasps from those exiting before me; despite this foreknowledge, as I cleared the inner hatch, I gasped too. It was not the largest cubic in Top Step—not even the largest I’d seen so far; you could have fit maybe three of it in that big cavern where I’d met Teena the talking computer—but its largest wall was transparent, and on the other side of it was infinity.

We were at Top Step’s very skin, gazing at naked space, at vacuum and stars. At the place where all of us hoped to live, one day soon…

From this close up, it did not look like terribly attractive real estate. Completely unfurnished. Drafty. No amenities. Ambiguous property lines, unclear title. Big. Scary…

How weird, that I was getting my first naked-eye view of space after more than twenty-four hours in space. Those stars were bright, sharp, merciless, horribly far away. It was hard to get my breath.

I wished Earth were in frame; it would have been less scary. This cubic seemed to be on the far side of Top Step. I wondered if there were a similar cubic on the other side, for folks who liked to look at the Old Home. Or did all of Top Step turn its collective back to Terra?

The last of us entered the room behind me and found a space to float in. We all gaped out the huge window together in silence.

Something drifted slowly into view, about ten meters beyond the window. A sculpture of a man, made of cherry Jell-O, waving a baton…

A Stardancer!

A real, live, breathing Stardancer. (No, unbreathing, of course…Stardancers must have some internal process analogous to breathing, but they do not need to work their lungs.) A Homo caelestis, a former human being in Titanian Symbiosis: covered, within and without, by the Symbiote, the crimson life-form that grows in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and is the perfect complement to the human metabolism. A native inhabitant of interplanetary space.

Except for the four-centimeter-thick coating of red Symbiote, he was naked. He would never need clothes again. Or, for that matter, air or food or water or a bathroom or shelter. Just sunshine and occasional trace elements. He was at home in space.

Of course we’d seen Stardancers before; we’d all come here to become Stardancers. We’d seen them hundreds of times…on film, on video, on holo. But none of us had ever actually been this close to one before. Stardancer and Symbiote mate for life, and the Symbiote cannot survive normal terrestrial atmosphere, pressure, moisture or gravity. Stardancers sometimes lived on Luna for short periods, and it was said that one had once survived on Mars for a matter of days…but no Stardancer would ever walk the Earth.

The Symbiote obscured details like eyes and expression, but it was clear that, back when he’d been a human being, he’d been a big, powerful man, heavily muscled…and very well hung, I couldn’t help but notice. He was cartwheeling in slow motion as he came into view, but when he reached the center of the vast window, he made a brief, complex gesture with his magic wand and came to a halt relative to us. From my perspective he was upside down; I tried to ignore it.

With a small thrill, I recognized him, even under all that red Jell-O. I’d seen his picture often enough, his and all the other members of The Six. He was Harry Stein!

The Harry Stein—designer/engineer of the first free fall dance studio—less than five meters away from me. Others began to recognize him too: a susurrant murmur of, “SteinHarrySteinthat’sHarryStein,” went round the room.

Reb spoke at normal volume, startling us all. “Hello, Harry.”

What happened then startled me even more. I suppose I should have been expecting it: I knew that Teena could project audio directly to my ear, like an invisible earphone—and a voice on two earphones sounds like it’s coming from inside your head. Nonetheless I twitched involuntarily when Harry Stein’s voice said, “Hi, Reb. Hi, everybody. My name is Harry,” right in my skull.

What made it even stranger was that I happened to have been looking at his face when he spoke, and even under that faintly shimmering symbiote I was sure his lips had not moved. His suit radio was linked directly to the speech-center of his brain: the speech impulses were intercepted on their way to his useless vocal cords and sent directly. I’d studied all this in Space Camp, but it was something else again to experience it directly.

“Hi, Harry,” several voices chorused raggedly.

“Can’t stay long,” he said. “Got a big job in progress over to spinward. Just wanted to say hi. And so did I.” With that last sentence, there was an odd, inexpressible change in his voice. Not in pitch or tone or timbre—it was still Harry Stein’s voice—but it was not him speaking it. “Hello, everybody, this is Charlie Armstead speaking now.” Armstead himself! “I’m sorry I can’t be there to meet you all personally—as a matter of fact, I’m a few light-hours away as you hear this—but Harry’s letting me use his brain to greet you. I will be meeting you all when you graduate, of course—but so will the rest of the gang, all of us at once, and I couldn’t resist jumping the gun. Neither could I—Hi, everyone, Norrey Armstead, here.” Jesus! “I’m out here with Charlie, I guess you’re all a little confused right about now…but don’t let it worry you, okay? Just take your time and listen to what Reb tells you, and everything will be fine. Now I’ll hand you over to Raoul Brindle for a minute. Oh, before I go, I want to say a quick hello to Morgan McLeod—”

I gulped and must have turned almost as red as Harry Stein.

“—I’ve been a fan of yours for years. I loved your work with Monnaie Dance Group in Brussels, especially your solo in the premiere of Morris’s Dance for Changing Parts. I hope we can work together some day.”

“Thank you,” I said automatically—but my voice came out a squeak. People were staring. Robert, Kirra and Ben were smiling.

“Here’s Raoul, now. Howdy, gang! I’m on my way home from Titan with the Harvest Crew, riding herd on about a zillion tons of fresh Symbiote—but I wanted to pass on a personal greeting of my own, to Jacques LeClaire and to Kirra from Queensland; hi, guys! I hope you’ll both make some music for me one day; I’ve heard tapes of your work, and I’d love to jam with both of you when I get back. Or maybe you’ll graduate before then and come meet me halfway. I’ll hand you back to Harry now. So long…”

I don’t think an Aboriginal can blush; Kirra must have been expressing her own embarrassment with body language. Fluently. And it was easy to pick out Jacques LeClaire in the crowd, too.

“Well, like I said,” Harry went on, sounding like himself now—and don’t ask me to explain that. “Work to do. Deadline’s coming. I hope you’ll all be in my family soon. See you later.” He waved his thruster-baton negligently, and began drifting out of our field of view.

Not a word was spoken until he was gone. Then someone tried for irony. “What, Shara Drummond was too busy to say hello?” Some of us giggled.

“Yes,” Harry’s voice said, and the giggle trailed off. “Oh,” the joker said, chastened.

There was another long silence. Then Kirra said softly, “Spirituality without religion—”

There was a subdued murmur of agreement.

“Lemme see if I’ve got this straight, Reb,” she said. “If I needed to talk to one of that mob—”

“Just call them on the phone, like you would anyone else in space,” Reb agreed. “If you really need an instantaneous response, you can ask for a telepathic relay through some other Stardancer whose brain happens to be near Top Step—but bear in mind that you will almost certainly be distracting their attention from something else. Don’t do so frivolously. But if you don’t mind waiting for both ends of the conversation to crawl at lightspeed, by radio, you can chat any time with any Stardancer who’ll answer, anytime. Yes, Kirra.”

“What was that Raoul said about a harvest crew?”

“When Armstead and The Six originally came back from Titan after entering Symbiosis, they brought an enormous quantity of the Symbiote back with them, using the Siegfried to tow it. But that was about thirty years ago, and Top Step has graduated a lot of Stardancers since then. It’s becoming necessary to restock…so an expedition was sent out three or four years ago to mine more from Titan’s upper atmosphere. They’re on their way back right now, with gigatonnes of fresh Symbiote. Some of you in this class will be partaking of it. Yes, Jo?”

Jo was using her Teacher-May-I gesture, I noticed. “Is there, like, a directory of their phone numbers, or what?”

“You just say, ‘Teena, phone…’ and the name of the Stardancer you want, just like calling anyone else in Top Step. If there are no Stardancers nearby with attention to spare to relay for you, she’ll tell you, and ask if you want her to contact your party directly, by radio. Glenn, what’s bothering you?”

Glenn did have a frown. “This business of telepathy being instantaneous. It just doesn’t seem natural.”

“Where you come from, it is not especially natural, occurs rarely and often requires decades of training and practice. Where you are going, it is far more natural than that discarded old habit, breathing.”

“But everything else in the universe is limited to lightspeed. Why should telepathy be different?”

“Why should you ask that question?” Reb asked.

Glenn fell silent…but her frown deepened.

A thin professorial-looking man gestured for attention. “Yes, Vijay?” Reb said.

“I think I understand Glenn’s dilemma. To be confronted with empirical proof that there is more to reality than the physical universe…how is one supposed to deal with that? It’s—”

“—terrifying, yes. There might be a God lurking around out there, armed with thunderbolts, demanding insane proofs of love, inventing Purgatories and Hells. There are techniques for helping with that fear. You were taught some back at Suit Camp. Sitting correctly. Breathing correctly. I’ll teach others to you, and they’ll help a lot. But the only way to really beat that fear—or the other, perfectly reasonable fear many of you have, that you’ll lose your ego when you join the Starmind—is to keep on confronting it. If you retreat from it, suppress it, try to put it out of your mind, you make it harder for yourself.” He was looking at Glenn as he said that sentence, and she slowly nodded. Reb smiled. “All right, now we’re going to learn the first technique of Kûkan Zen. Namely, how to sit zazen…in zero gee.”

“I thought you said, ‘without religion,’ ” Glenn complained.

He looked surprised. “But Zen isn’t a religion—not in the usual sense, at least.”

“It isn’t? I thought it was a sect of Buddhism. Buddhism’s a religion. It’s got monks and temples and doctrines and all of that.”

Reb nodded. “But it has no dogmas, no articles of faith, no God. It has nothing to do with telling other people how they ought to behave. There has never been a Buddhist holy war…except intellectual war between differing schools of thought. You can be a Catholic Buddhist, a Muslim Buddhist, an atheist Buddhist. So although it may be religious, in the sense that it’s about what’s deepest in us, it’s not a religion.”

“What is it, then?”

“It is simply an agreement to sit, and look into our actual nature.”

The very first chapter of Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind concerns correct sitting posture: that should be a clue to how important he considered it.

On Earth the classic full lotus position is something a Soto Zen Buddhist may take or leave alone, as his joints and ligaments allow. But in Kûkan Zen (I learned later that Reb coined the term: kûkan is Japanese for “space”), the lotus posture becomes both more important and less difficult. It is fundamental in “sitting” kûkanzen, the space equivalent of sitting zazen.

In the absence of weight, if you don’t tuck your feet securely under the opposite knees, any “sitting” posture you assume will require considerable muscular effort, impossible to maintain for any length of time. When you relax, you end up in the Free Fall Crouch, the body’s natural rest position, halfway between sitting and standing.

What’s wrong with that? you may ask. Well, the idea is that Sitting, in the Zen sense, is something you do with full and powerful awareness. It requires some effort to do properly. Sitting zazen on Earth is not like sitting in a chair or standing or lying down or squatting or anything else humans do as a matter of course. It is a special posture you assume for the purpose of meditation, and after enough self-conditioning, just assuming that posture will make you begin to enter a meditative state.

And terrestrial zazen posture involves total relaxation in the midst of total attention. If relaxation alone were the goal, you would meditate lying down. The attempt to maintain a specific, defined posture (spine straight, chin down, hands just so) involves just enough effort and attention to make you see that you are, in a way, accomplishing something although you’re merely sitting. It’s one of those paradoxes—like using your mind to become so mindful you can achieve no-mind—that lie at the heart of Zen.

Reb felt it necessary to maintain that paradox, even in an environment where it’s more difficult to maintain anything but Free Fall Crouch. Full lotus position is stressful for most beginners, in gravity—but it becomes quite tolerable in zero gee. Even for someone a lot less limber than I am: over the next few days I saw senior citizens who hadn’t touched their toes in decades spend time in lotus. The worst part is getting unfolded again.

Similarly, Reb was forced to modify hand arrangement. Suzuki’s “cosmic mudra”—left hand on top of right, middle joints of middle fingers aligned, thumb tips touching—tends to come apart without gravity’s help. Reb interlaced the fingers to compensate.

And of course the zafu (round pillow), and the slanted wooden meditation bench used by other Eastern religions, are useless in space. In their place Kûkan Zen uses one of the most ubiquitous items of space hardware, as humble and commonplace as a pillow on Earth: the Velcro belt.

If you simply drift freely while meditating, you will naturally drift in the direction of airflow, and sooner or later end up bumping against the air-outgo grille. Distracting. But if you temporarily shut down the room’s airflow to maintain your position, in a short time your exhalations will generate a sphere of carbon dioxide around your head and suppress your breathing reflex. Even more distracting.

So you leave the airflow running…and stick the back of your Velcro belt to the nearest convenient wall. People can tell you’re meditating, rather than just hanging around, because your legs are tucked up in lotus and your hands are clasped.

When two or more people are sitting kûkanzen together, it’s customary to all use the same wall, all face the same way, for the same reason that on Earth Suzuki’s disciples sit facing the wall rather than the group. Humans are so gregarious it’s hard for them to be in each other’s visual field without paying attention to each other.

That’s Kûkan Zen. Simple elegance, elegant simplicity.

The second chapter of Suzuki’s book deals with breathing. We didn’t get to that until the following day. Hawkins-roshi would put special emphasis on breathing (even for a Zen teacher), since once we graduated, we wouldn’t be doing it anymore…

At the close of our first lesson in Kûkan Zen 101, Reb said, “One thing before I let you all go. Does everyone understand why I brought you here to meet Harry Stein?”

Perhaps we did, but no one spoke.

“One of the reasons I brought you to this Solarium, when I could just as easily have had video piped into the classroom, is that here in this room you were as close to Harry as you could possibly get—you’d be little closer EVA, since a p-suit is a layer too—and it made a difference. You’ve all seen high-quality video and holo of Stardancers, dozens of hours of it in Suit Camp alone…but God, that was the Harry Stein himself, one of the original Six, right there, inches away, and it made a difference, didn’t it?” There were nods and murmurs of agreement. Everyone in the room knew it made a difference. “Just what that difference was is one of those things—like the phenomenon of ‘contact high’—that defy explanation unless you admit the existence of the thing I’ve labeled ‘spirituality.’ And your personal religion, whatever it may be, had nothing to do with it, did it?”

We left in a very quiet, thoughtful mood.

There was a food fight at lunch. A zero-gee food fight is amazing. Almost everybody misses, because they can’t help aiming too high. Robert, having “space legs,” did well—but his roommate Ben did almost as well, despite his klutziness. You couldn’t sneak up on him…

Glenn, I noticed, was infuriated at both the food fight, and how badly she lost. I could tell, just from her expression, that she believed handling oneself in free fall was something best conquered by intellect—and therefore, she ought to be one of the best at it. I’d seen the expression before, on the faces of beginner dance students who were also intellectuals. They see people they consider their inferiors picking up the essentials of movement quicker than they can, and it forces them to admit there are kinds of intelligence that do not live in the forebrain.

I didn’t do very well in the food fight myself. I found that just as infuriating as Glenn did. But I covered it better.

Glenn’s and my problem was addressed almost immediately. The schedule called for spending our afternoons in Jaunting class, learning how to move in zero gee.

Our instructor was Sulke Drager, a powerfully built woman whose primary job, I later learned, was rock-rat: one of the hardboiled types who blasted new tunnels and cubics into Top Step when needed. In between, she worked in the Garden and taught Jaunting, and worked two more jobs in other space habitats. She was not here for Symbiosis, like us; she was a spacer. A permanent transient, citizen of the biggest small town in human history. I think she privately thought we were all crazy.

I thought she was crazy. She had chosen a life with all the disadvantages of a Stardancer, and none of the advantages, it seemed to me. She could never go back to Earth; her body was long since permanently adapted to free fall. But she was not a telepathic immortal as we hoped to be. Just a human a long way from home, hustling for air money, hoping to bank enough to buy her retirement air. Talk about wage slaves! Sulke was as dependent as a goldfish.

Most of us were disappointed when she confirmed that it would be a good month before we got any EVA time. For about the first fifteen minutes, we were disappointed. That’s how long it took us to convince ourselves that we weren’t ready to go outdoors yet, Suit Camp or no Suit Camp. Theory is not practice.

(One thing I had never anticipated, for instance, in all the hours I’d spent trying to imagine movement in this environment: sweat that trickled up. Or refused to trickle at all, and just sort of pooled up in the small of your back until you flung or toweled it off. What a weird sensation!)

We were given wrist and ankle thruster-bracelets, but Sulke only allowed us to use them to correct mistakes: the first step was to learn to be as proficient as possible without external aids.

As I had been during the food fight—hell, since I’d arrived in space—I was dismayed to learn how clumsy I was in this environment. Like Glenn, I had assumed I had a secret weapon that would allow me to outstrip all the others. Instead, it seemed I had more to unlearn than most: inappropriate habits of movement were more deeply ingrained in me.

This infuriated me. So much that I probably worked twice as hard as anyone else in the class, using all the discipline and concentration I’d learned in thirty years of professional dance.

“No, no McLeod,” Sulke said. “Stop trying to swim in air, you look like a drunken octopus.” She jaunted to me and stopped my tumble, without putting herself into one. “Use your spine, not your limbs!”

It was a particularly galling admonition: in transitioning from ballet to modern dance, I had spent countless hours learning to use my spine. In one gee. “I thought I was.” Someone giggled.

“Watch Chen, there, see how he does it? Chen, pitch forward half a rev, and yaw half.” Robert performed the maneuver requested: in effect he stood on his head, spinning on his long axis so he was still facing her when he was done. His legs barely flexed, and his arms left his sides only at the end of the maneuver. “See what he did with his spine?”

“Yes, but I didn’t understand it,” I admitted.

“Put your hands on him, here, and here.” She indicated her abdomen and the small of her back.

I refused myself permission to blush. I used my thrusters to jaunt to him, and was relieved to do a near-perfect job, canceling all my velocity just as I reached him, without tumbling myself again. He was upside down with reference to me; I couldn’t read his expression. I put my hands where I’d been told.

“Keep a light contact as he begins, then pull your hands away,” Sulke directed. “Reverse the maneuver, Chen.”

So I didn’t get my hands quite far enough out of the way, quite fast enough. As he spun backwards, his groin brushed down across the palm I’d had on his belly. Now I was blushing. When he finished—a little awkwardly this time—he wore that inscrutable-Asian face of his. But he was blushing a little too. The giggles from the rest of the class didn’t help. “You’re jumping ahead,” Sulke called. “We don’t get to mating for days, yet.”

In free fall maneuvering, mating simply means interacting with another body. We’d all heard dozens of puns on the terms before we’d left Suit Camp, but this feeble one put the class in stitches. I thought wistfully about putting a few of them in traction. Then I did a quarter-yaw, to face Sulke, and copied Robert’s maneuver, very nearly perfectly. The giggling became applause.

“Much better,” Sulke said. “It must be a question of motivation. Buckley, you try it.”

Robert and I exchanged a meaningful glance…and as I was trying to decide just what meaning to put into my half, something cracked me across the skull. It was one of Ben’s elbows. Without cafeteria tables to hold on to and brace himself against, his enhanced visual perception was little help to him: he would be one of the klutziest in our class—that day, anyway. “Sorry, Morgan!”

I welcomed the distraction. “Forget it.”

“Uh…could I…I mean, would you mind…?”

For the next five or ten minutes, an orgy of belly-and-back-touching spread outwards from Robert and me, until everyone had mastered the forward half-pitch. (At least one other male was as careless with his hands as I had been with Robert. I pretended not to notice.) Then Sulke turned our collective attention to the roll and yaw techniques, which took up the rest of the class period.

After class there were a couple of free hours before dinner. I had Teena guide me back to Solarium One, where we’d seen Harry Stein—where Norrey Armstead had addressed me by my name!—and sat kûkanzen for a timeless time, seeking some clarity, some balance. There were about a half dozen of us there, all doing the same thing. I don’t know about the others; I left as confused and scattered as I’d arrived.

I sat by myself at dinner. A lot of us did, I think.

When I got back to my room Kirra was not there. I spent an hour or so at my desk, browsing through data banks, learning basic things about Top Step’s layout. It is a huge, complex place, but interactive holographic maps help a lot in understanding it. I only had to bother Teena once. The important thing to remember from a navigational standpoint is that the arrow will always be painted on the wall farthest from Earth, and will point “outboard,” toward the main docking area through which everyone enters Top Step. Eventually I sighed and collapsed the display back to the simple overview map I’d started with.

There was no sense putting it off any longer. I’d already stalled for almost a full day. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

I described my requirements to Teena, and she found me a gym not presently in use, where I could try to dance.

The space Teena directed me to was terrific—spacious, well padded, fully equipped, complete with top of the line sound and video gear. I could lock it from inside for up to an hour at a time. I locked it, selected music that did not dictate tempo, and—at last!—began trying my first dance “steps” in space.

The session was a disaster.

I spent a longer, slower time than usual warming up, and was careful not to overextend myself. But it was a fiasco. After an hour and a half of hard sweaty effort I had not put together five consecutive seconds I would want to show anyone. Not one single sequence I’d invented in my mind worked the way it was supposed to; not one combination I’d memorized from videos of Stardancers worked the way I’d thought it would. I was less graceful than a novice skater. Part of the problem was that the moves I’d envisioned always stopped when I was done with them…whereas every motion in free fall keeps going until something stops it. Every once in a while I accidentally created a moment of beauty…then could not reproduce it a second later. It was as though someone had randomly rewired a computer keyboard so there was no way to predict the effect of hitting any given key. And I kept poking my face through drifting mists of sweat globules that I’d spun off earlier, a truly disgusting experience.

I had not expected this to be easy. Well, okay, maybe I had. As I watched the video replay of my flounderings on the monitor, I was not sure it was possible.

It had to be possible. There was nothing back on Earth for me to return to. Shara Drummond had done this. Her sister Norrey had done it. Crippled defeated old Charlie Armstead had managed it. I had seen countless tapes of Stardancers who had had no dance training before coming to space, making shapes of almost unbearable beauty. Dammit, I was a good dancer, a great dancer.

Back on Earth, yeah, said the video monitor, when you were younger…

Finally I’d had all I could take for now. “That’s it. Teena, wipe all tapes of this session.”

“Yes, Morgan. There is a message for you, left after you told me to see that you were not disturbed. Will you accept it now?”

I sighed. “Why not?” Nothing happened, of course. I sighed again. “I mean, ‘Yes, Teena, I’ll take it now.’ ”

The monitor filled with Robert’s face, wearing the vague smile everyone wears when leaving a phone message. “Hello, Morgan. You asked me if I’d tutor you in jaunting. I have time free this evening. Call me if you’re still interested.”

I thought about it while I got my breathing under control and toweled up sweat. I’d begun this evening confused and scattered. With diligent effort I had brought myself to miserable and depressed. It was time to cut my losses. “Record this message, Teena—” The screen turned into a mirror. “—Jesus, audio only!” It opaqued again. “Take one: ‘Hello, Robert, this is Morgan. Thank you for your offer. Perhaps another time.’ Cut. Too stiff. Take two: ‘Hi, Robert, Morgan here. Maybe another night, okay? I just washed my spine and I can’t do a thing with it.’ Oh my God…take three: ‘Robert, this is Morgan. Look, I don’t know if it’s a good idea if we—I don’t think I—’ ” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Teena, just send take one, to ‘cut’, okay? Then refuse all calls until I tell you otherwise.”

“Yes, Morgan.”

I used the gym’s shower bag—God, I’ll never get used to water that slithers, it’s even weirder than sweat that won’t trickle—and went back to my room. Halfway back, as an experiment, I had Teena stop guiding me, and tried to find my own way. I barked my shins a couple of times misjudging turns, I had to double back once, and my Contact-Per-Hectometer rate was humiliating…but I found my own damn home without help.

As the door irised open, song spilled out. Kirra was home. She was halfway into her sleepsack, her “swag,” as she called it, and the lights were out in her hemisphere. My own lights were on low standby. She stopped singing to greet me. “Oh, don’t stop,” I protested, closing the door behind me.

“I haven’t,” she said. “You just can’t hear it anymore. What you been up to, lovey?”

“Wasting time,” I answered evasively. “Sing so I can hear, Kirra, really. If I fall asleep listening to music, I dream dances. At least I used to. I could use the inspiration.”

So she went back to it. In this song her voice had about the range, pitch and tone of an alto recorder, if you know that sound. (I don’t know why they were called that: they had no recording capacity at all.) It was soothing, hypnotic, resonated in my belly somewhere like a cat’s purr.

I stripped and stuffed myself into my own sleepsack, told my room lights to slow-fade. Today I talked with Charlie Armstead and Norrey Armstead, I told myself. Kirra’s warm sweet voice rose and fell in ways as unfamiliar to me as the words themselves. Just as I was drifting off to sleep I understood that they were unfamiliar to her too. She was singing about space, about zero gee. If there is no up or down, what’s a melody to do? Her soothing voice washed away all turbulent emotion, set me adrift from my drifting body.

In my dreams there were sea lions. Highlit crimson by sunset, the colour of Stardancers. Floating all around me, all oriented to my personal vertical, treading air. Waiting patiently. For the first time, I wished I spoke Sea Lion.