The Stardance Trilogy by Spider & Jeanne Robinson Page A

fiasco that will begin the loss of his only essential commodity: face.
    Seeing his kind of triumph next to hers spoiled the moment for me, and instead of thrilling for Shara I found myself almost hating her. She spotted me, and waved me to join her before the cheering crowd, but I turned and literally flung myself from the room. I borrowed a bottle from Harry Stein and got stinking.
    The next morning my head felt like a fifteen-amp fuse on a forty- amp circuit, and I seemed to be held together only by surface tension. Sudden movements frightened me. It’s a long fall off that wagon, even at one-sixth gee.
    The phone chimed—I hadn’t had time to rewire it—and a young man I didn’t know politely announced that Mr. Carrington wished to see me in his office. At once. I spoke of a barbed-wire suppository, and what Mr. Carrington might do with it, at once. Without changing expression he repeated his message and disconnected.
    So I crawled into my clothes, decided to grow a beard, and left. Along the way I wondered what I had traded my independence for, and why?
    Carrington’s office was oppressively tasteful, but at least the lighting was subdued. Best of all, its filter system would handle smoke—the sweet musk of pot lay on the air. I accepted a macrojoint of “Maoi-Zowie” from Carrington with something approaching gratitude, and began melting my hangover.
    Shara sat next to his desk, wearing a leotard and a layer of sweat. She had obviously spent the morning rehearsing for the next dance. I felt ashamed, and consequently snappish, avoiding her eyes and her hello. Panzella and McGillicuddy came in on my heels, chattering about the latest sighting of the mysterious object from deep space, which had appeared this time in the Asteroid Belt. They were arguing over whether or not it displayed signs of sentience, and I wished they’d shut up.
    Carrington waited until we had all seated ourselves and lit up, then rested a hip on his desk and smiled. “Well, Tom?”
    McGillicuddy beamed. “Better than we expected, sir. All the ratings agree we had about 74 percent of the world audience…”
    “The hell with the nielsens,” I snapped. “What did the critics say?”
    McGillicuddy blinked. “Well, the general reaction so far is that Shara was a smash. The Times…”
    I cut him off again. “What was the less-than-general reaction?”
    “Well, nothing is ever unanimous.”
    “Specifics. The dance press? Liz Zimmer? Migdalski?”
    “Uh. Not as good. Praise yes—only a blind man could’ve panned that show. But guarded praise. Uh, Zimmer called it a magnificent dance spoiled by a gimmicky ending.”
    “And Migdalski?” I insisted.
    “He headed his review, ‘But What Do You Do for An Encore?’” McGillicuddy admitted. “His basic thesis was that it was a charming one-shot. But the Times…”
    “Thank you, Tom.” Carrington said quietly. “About what we expected, isn’t it, my dear? A big splash, but no one’s willing to call it a tidal wave yet.”
    She nodded. “But they will, Bryce. The next two dances will sew it up.”
    Panzella spoke up. “Ms. Drummond, may I ask you why you played it the way you did? Using the null-gee interlude only as a brief adjunct to conventional dance—surely you must have expected the critics to call it gimmickry.”
    Shara smiled and answered. “To be honest, Doctor, I had no choice. I’m learning to use my body in free fall, but it’s still a conscious effort, almost a pantomime. I need another few weeks to make it second nature, and it has to be if I’m to sustain a whole piece in it. So I dug a conventional dance out of the trunk, tacked on a five-minute ending that used every zero-gee move I knew, and found to my extreme relief that they made thematic sense together. I told Charlie my notion, and he made it work visually and dramatically—the whole business of the candles was his, and it underlined what I was trying to say better than any set we could have