Six Moon Dance (21 page)

But then, once every few centuries all the moons gathered at once and the substance of the world was shaken, and Niasa-in-the-egg was almost jolted from sleep to call wakefully to Her, The hatcher!

Then came time for the great dance. Only the great dance would serve. Timmys had done the dance time after time. All life upon Dosha had done the dance time after time, a hundred, two hundred times.

But then mankind had come and had done the evil thing. Over and over, done the evil, destroying the dance. And when Timmys had tried to get it back, the mankinds had done worse things. Now the time for the great dance was coming fast upon the world, and no one was left, no one at all who remembered how the dance was done.

I
n the small hours of night, Mouche dreamed he stood in the mists of an unlit chasm while a cataract fell before him out of darkness into darkness. The source was so far above him, the catch basin so far below that no sound of water reached him. The curved emerald surface of the water and the glassy shadows moving within it were lit by a single ray that pierced the darkness from behind him. In his sleep he could not name this falling water, yet he knew it poured forever through that solitary beam, a perfect and eternal miracle made manifest by this single and incomplete enlightenment.

So, Mouche remembered in his dream, had the emerald hair of the dancer poured forever across the dark and empty chasms of his heart, with only his flawed perception disclosing its mystery. The dance, the scent of the food and the smoke, the sound of the drums and the voices, the flutes and the bells, all became an experience that lifted him as on an unending tide, out of nowhere into everywhere, while mystenous mists rose around him, spreading the possibility of marvel through the moist and fecund darkness.

Certainly the dream mists permeated his sleep, soaking into certain opinions that had been already petrified when he had received them and which nothing in his life until now had served to soften. Each time he woke, he was different, as though his very bones had become pliable, bending to become the framework for some other, as yet unparticularized person. Hidden in the deep embrasure beneath the patinaed dome, he suffered the nightly torments of the unknown and itched with a fascination that drove him closer to madness every time he scratched it.

The change was a fearful thing. As it progressed he found he could take nothing as a matter of course. He could no longer submit to the ministrations of the invisible masseuses without wondering what color hair they had, and whether they sang in the evening, or whether they danced, and what their true purpose was and why they had come. He did not see their eyes upon him, equally wondering and weighing. He could no longer look aside from the brown-clad forms who swept the street without wondering where their homeland had been and whether they hated their present confinement or whether even that was part of the flow he could sense happening.

He did not see their glance follow him as he went, the gestures their hands made, signifying to any tim-tim watching that this was Mouchidi, the one Flowing Green had come for, the one Flowing Green said Bofusdiaga wanted.

The change overflowed the night hours and ran into everything he tried to do. Mouche could no longer pace the dignified measures his dancing master required without flowing far too gracefully, as though to emulate the dances of those he imagined were watching from behind the walls. He could not leap without being lifted, like a balloon. He could not twirl without spinning. He was become a dervish, all too full of inordinate intention.

“What’s come over you Mouche? You dance like a windlily!”

Mouche apologized, and went on apologizing, to the fencing master, to the conversation director, both of whom found him odd, eccentric, no longer focused, but oh, interesting, very interesting. He, meantime, was too busy to find himself interesting, for he was desperately attempting to interpret what was happening to him, and he was without tutelage, completely on his own. He was possessed without knowing how to be a possession. Even if he had sought help, he could have found no adviser among the mankind inhabitants of Newholme.

Suspecting as much, he confided in no one. He borrowed the oil can from Simon’s workroom and oiled the latch and hinges of the window where he sat night after night; he borrowed a brace and bit and drilled a narrow hole into the woodwork of his bookcase, into which a short length of metal rod could be inserted from the front, thus preventing anyone else from repeating the movements that had led to his current predicament. That had been purely accidental, he told himself, unaware of the hands that had manipulated the door from behind the walls to be sure he had found the way they had opened for him.

It seemed that everything he did was accompanied by feelings of exhilarating joy or of overwhelming melancholy, that deep, unfocused grief he had felt before, in which Duster, and Papa, and his own dreams of the sea were merely drops in an unending tide. With every passing day he became more convinced that both joy and pain were signals, meant for him alone, requiring him to find the sufferer and offer … something.

It would have been more comfortable to return to his former state of ignorance and contentment, but he could not. The longer it went on, the more secret and precious his delight in the watching became, the more painful that other emotion, that one from outside, as though the delight continued sensitizing him to the agony. They were inextricable. He could not have the one without the other. When he shuddered himself awake in the night, overwhelmed by an agony of loss and horror, he knew that they, too, wakened, hearing that pain as he heard it, like the tolling of a great alarm bell deep in the world. Somewhere on this planet, something suffered and grieved. It wasn’t himself. It wasn’t the dancers. Not his family, or House Genevois or anyone he knew. But something!

T
hough Mouche had no inkling of it, another player in the Newholmian drama also itched with fascination, though of a more introspective kind. Whereas Mouche slept and changed in his sleep, Ellin, toward the end of the first stage of the trip toward Newholme, often found herself unable to sleep at all. The ship did its part, lowering the lights and the temperature and sending sleepy sounds through the ducts, like drowsy birds. The windowwall suddenly became a landscape, trees seen against a moonlit sky and a glittering body of water with a background of low mountains. It was the kind of scene that she had avoided on Earth, but here on the ship she had let it be. Who could feel claustrophobic in space? One either was well off inside or one was outside and dead.

None of her old sleepy-time rituals did any good. Her eyes stayed stubbornly open while she fretted. Since awaking from electronically induced deep sleep, which, though it had not seemed to last any time at all, had really lasted quite a long while, she and Bao had spent many waking hours reading, or having the monitors read to them, everything the Council of Worlds knew about Newholme plus a good bit the COW had no inkling of.

Though Ellin had always been a reader, she had not been much of a student, except of the dance. Ballet was taught by example and repetition, and Ellin learned best in that way. The official reports were couched in wordy bureaucratese that hid information rather than disclosing it. Trying to find meaning amid the polysyllabic jargon made her cross and irritable and wakefiil, like an itch that wouldn’t go away.

The view panel was there, of course. It didn’t have to depict trees and moonlight. She could ask for virtually anything ever written to be printed or dramatized, and she’d tried that a few times, but the panel remained obdurately
there
, between her and whatever story it was trying to convey. A book would be better. With books, she wasn’t conscious of anything except living the narrative.

Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being somebody else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement. In the books she was greeted by others who said, in effect, “You are so and so, and I know who you are!”

Often, when she finished a book, she came to herself with a sense of loss at what she’d surrendered in reading that last page. Closing the book was a finality that stripped her of identity, severed her life, left her squatting in the shallows of her mind, surrounded by polliwogs and ooze, with all the depths drained away. How often in her life had she longed for the story to become real! And yet now, here she was, far, far out in space, getting closer and closer to a dramatic doing, a wonderful adventure, a terrible excitement beyond all her expectations, and all she could do was worry that when the time came she’d be so self-conscious or frightened that she couldn’t engage the event!

Her basic worry, excavated from the depths of her being through many fretful midnight sessions, was this clone business. Could a clone accomplish something it wasn’t designed for? Dancer clones were supposed to be dancers. Musician clones were supposed to be musicians, entertainers entertainers, supervisors, scientists, genius generalists, all to be what they were! Just as many were cloned as were needed, with none left over—except for the occasional nus.

Nuses were mistakes. They were errors of system or development, and in moments of despair, Ellin comforted herself that she was definitely not a nus. She was exactly as per order, good legs, dancer’s build, and with a mind that was … oh, filth, filth, filth, step one foot outside the stage and it was an absolute blank! Hadn’t her clone parent had a brain? Hadn’t the brain been passed on? If Ellin wasn’t a nus, why did she feel like one? She clenched her pillow and groaned.

A moment later there was a rap at the door before it opened a crack to reveal a sleepy-eyed Gandro Bao peering in at her. “I am hearing moans? Are you being sick?”

Had she moaned? Perhaps it had sounded like that. “Maybe I let out a sigh or something,” she confessed. “I was thinking about something.”

“About all the volcanoes on Newholme blowing up?” he asked, insinuating himself into the tiny stateroom and perching on the foot of the bunk. “About the strange indigenous peoples existing there?” Some of this information had reached COW through official channels. Other facts, if indeed they were facts, had been picked up from the gossip of BIT or freighter crews who had landed briefly on Newholme to deliver or pick up materiel.

“Those are the only two things I could get out of all those filthy reports,” she snapped. “Did you find anything else?”

“No. Indigenous race is being there, even though indigenes were not being there before settlement. Volcanoes are threatening to blow up world, even though they were never doing so before settlement. This is making me think settlement is, perhaps, unsettling.”

He mugged a comic face, making her laugh, then cry, petulantly: “Why did it take them a thousand pages to say that?”

“Aha,” he said with a serious face. “You were moaning over number of pages. That is being very understandable. Number of pages is often causing moaning, groaning, temper tantrums.”

She flushed, embarrassed, confessing, “Nothing so relevant, Gandro Bao. I was thinking it would be easier if this was a book.”

“Why is it being easier in book?”

“If the book came to a troublesome part, I’d just lay it down for a while. Or I’d jump ahead a page or two, to see if it came out all right. That way my stomach wouldn’t hurt, and I wouldn’t get pains in my head. And in a book, you get told who you are. You get the right words and the right clothes and the dialogue, everything, props and all. You don’t have to work it out for yourself.”

“This is being true in dance, too, but dance is not excluding extemporaneous art. So, be extemporizing.”

“It’s easier if you have a personality, that’s all,” she said in a defeated tone. “You know. Roots.”

“You are fine nordic dancer. There are being many roots to go with nordic dancer.”

“I know that.” She sat up, annoyed. “I looked it up. There’s a lot of warlike hordes moving around, and lots of stomping and kicking dances and several complicated religions, and a lot of violent wars. I don’t feel connected to any of it. It’s not like a family.”

He leaned against the wall, taking one of her feet in his hands and digging his thumbs into her sole. “Why are you wanting a family?”

She felt her leg relax in a spasm of pleasure. “I meant it would be … nice to know who my parent was and what she did and where she lived, because she was a whole person and sometimes I feel like I’m just one sixth of one.”

He mused, “I am reading a little bit about chaos theory: many things explained by chaos theory, many new discoveries about it even after centuries! This teaching is that tiny differences in original event can cause great difference in result. So, you and sister clones are each having many little differences, beginning in laboratory, going on into rearing. End result is six differing persons with similar appearance and skills. You are not being them, they are not being you. People have always been having twins, triplets, also clones. They are not being identical people.”

He moved his fingers up to the arch of her foot. “If you really are wanting to know parent, records are letting you find out. All that is being included in records.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she whined. “It’s … I was born to be a dancer, and that’s all I’ve ever known about. I didn’t grow up
wanting
to be a dancer, I was born one. I didn’t
choose
to be a dancer, that was already decided. I didn’t even have to worry about whether I’d succeed, everyone knew I would. If I’d had to … explore, to try other things, I’d have had some … I don’t know, some variety.” She heard the snivel in her own voice and silently cringed. Shameful, carrying on this way!

“Female,” he said, almost affectionately, putting down the foot and picking up the other. “You are being female all over. Now to me, who is only being female impersonator, it is not making difference how I get to be a clown so long as I am really wanting to be clown. But you are wanting to try something else so you can have doubts about talents you have?” He shook his head at her.