"Spider Robinson and Jeanne - Stardance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

STARDANCE
Spider and Jeanne Robinson
I can’t really say that I knew her, certainly not the way Seroff knew
Isadora. All I know of her childhood and adolescence are the anecdotes she
chanced to relate in my hearing—just enough to make me certain that all
three of the contradictory biographies on the current best-seller list are
fictional. All I know of her adult life are the hours she spent in my
presence and on my monitors—more than enough to tell me that every
newspaper account I’ve seen is fictional. Carrington probably believed he
knew her better than I, and in a limited sense he was correct— but he
would never have written of it, and now he is dead.
But I was her video man, since the days when you touched the camera
with your hands, and I knew her backstage: a type of relationship like no
other on Earth or off it. I don’t believe it can be described to anyone not of
the profession—you might think of it as somewhere between co-workers
and combat buddies. I was with her the day she came to Skyfac, terrified
and determined, to stake her life upon a dream. I watched her work and
worked with her for that whole two months, through endless rehearsals,
and I have saved every tape and they are not for sale.
And, of course, I saw the Stardance. I was there; I taped it.
I guess I can tell you some things about her.


To begin with, it was not, as Cahill’s Sham and Von Derski’s Dance
Unbound: The Creation of New Modern suggest, a lifelong fascination
with space and space travel that led her to become the race’s first
zero-gravity dancer. Space was a means to her, not an end, and its vast
empty immensity scared her at first. Nor was it, as Melberg’s hardcover
tabloid The Real Shara Drummond claims, because she lacked the talent
to make it as a dancer on Earth. If you think free-fall dancing is easier
than conventional dance, you try it. Don’t forget your dropsickness bag.
But there is a grain of truth in Melberg’s slander, as there is in all the
best slanders. She could not make it on Earth—but not through lack of
talent.
I first saw her in Toronto in July of 1984. I headed Toronto Dance
Theater’s video department at that time, and I hated every minute of it. I
hated everything in those days. The schedule that day called for spending
the entire afternoon taping students, a waste of time and tape which I
hated more than anything except the phone company. I hadn’t seen the
year’s new crop yet, and was not eager to. I love to watch dance done
well—the efforts of a tyro are usually as pleasing to me as a first-year violin
student in the next apartment is to you.
My leg was bothering me even more than usual as I walked into the
studio. Norrey saw my face and left a group of young hopefuls to come
over. “Charlie… ?”
“I know, I know. They’re tender fledglings, Charlie, with egos as fragile
as an Easter egg in December. Don’t bite them, Charlie. Don’t even bark at
them if you can help it, Charlie.”
She smiled. “Something like that. Leg?”
“Leg.”