The Stardance Trilogy (61 page)

“Where?”

“Twelve, actually, but they’re squeezed into six bodies at the moment. Kirra and Benjamin Buckley, allow me to present Jinsei Kagami, Yuan Zhongshan, Consuela Paixio, Sven Bjornssen, Ludmilla Vorkuta, and Walerij Pietkow.”

The red blob was much closer now. Music swelled out of nowhere, a soft warm A chord with little liquid trills chasing in and out of it. It couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was major or minor.

“They are all trained dancers themselves, but they have all agreed to lend remote-control of their bodies to six of their more distant siblings, who will now dance in your honour. These are Shara Drummond, Sascha Yakovskaya, Norrey Armstead, Charles Armstead, Linda Parsons, and Tom McGillicuddy. Choreography is by all six, around a frame by Shara. Music prerecorded by Raoul Brindle; playback, set design and holographic recording by Harry Stein. The piece is called
Kiss the Sky
.”

By now the jumbled murmuring of our group was as loud as the soft music. Shara Drummond…and
all
of the original Six…
and
Yakovskaya, the first truly great dancer to join them in space, the man who had choreographed the
Propaedeutics
in his first week as a Stardancer…all dancing together, if only by proxy, for the first time in over a decade—with Brindle on synth! “Pull the other one,” Kirra said. “I don’t see a bloody soul. Just that great hunk of—oh!”

She and everyone fell silent. The approaching blob of Symbiote had suddenly flexed, and stretched in six directions at once to become a kind of six-pointed red snowflake, swirling gently as it approached, like a pinwheel in a gentle breeze, its axis of rotation pointed right at us.

It took a moment for the eye to get it into correct perspective: it was
not
just enough Symbiote for two people, but enough and more than enough for six, therefore somewhat farther from us than it had seemed to be. Six Stardancers had mingled their Symbiotes and were joined at the feet, held together by their linked hands, a hundred meters from us. The snowflake shifted and flowed, as the six dancers who comprised it changed their position in unison from one pattern to another by flexing elbows and knees, contracting and releasing.

The music acquired a slow, steady pulse in the bass. The pattern of the spinning snowflake changed with each beat, as if it were some great red heart clenching rhythmically. Percussion instruments and a Michael Hedges-like guitar began adding counterpoint accents to the rhythm. The total mass of Symbiote began to swell away from the dancers it contained, until it was a translucent crimson disc with six people at its heart, perhaps twenty meters in diameter. The disc swelled from the center and became a convex lens, nearly transparent; pink stars swam behind it, rippling. Lights came up. The lamps themselves were invisible to us, since they were tiny and dull black and pointing away from us, but we saw their blue and yellow reflections come up as highlights on the crimson lens, highlights that bled all the other colours there are at their edges.

The six children of the lens separated like a bud opening into a flower, fanned out in six directions and wedged themselves into the narrow parts of the lens wall. One of them doubled and jaunted back to the center of the lens, came to rest there…and began to move. Even at a hundred meters, even behind that carmine film of Symbiote, even wearing a different body, there was no mistaking her. The familiar motif that emerged in brass in the underlying music only confirmed it. Jinsei’s body it may have been, but it was Shara Drummond, the greatest dancer of our time, who took the first solo.

She wore thrusters at wrists and ankles, but could not have used them inside that lens, I think. She danced only with body and muscles, moving three-dimensionally in place, with her unmistakable fluidity and precision of line. It reminded me of a piece I’d seen years ago by a colleague recovering from a leg injury called
Dancing in Place:
confining himself to one spot on stage, standing on one leg, he had explored more ways of dancing and looking at dance than most performers can do using an entire stage. Shara/Jensei did the same now, tumbling, arching, turning, while her center stayed anchored to the center of the lens. She could have been a butterfly gifted with limbs, or a leaf in flight, or a protozoan swimming in the primordial soup. The brass stopped hinting at Shara’s Theme and made a new statement, underlined by strings. Soon, inevitably, she drifted far enough from the center of the lens to touch its inner surface, and used it to jaunt back to her original place at the periphery.

This time two figures moved to the center and met there. Linda Parsons and Tom McGillicuddy, the hippie and the businessman who had met in space, fallen in love, and become the fourth and fifth founding members of Stardancers Incorporated (after Charlie, Norrey and Raoul). McGillicuddy at least was easy for me to identify: he had always been the least trained of the original company; even after decades of practice, and even wearing a better-trained body than his own, there were minor limitations to his technique. But Linda compensated for them so perfectly after thirty-four years of dancing with him that I don’t think anyone else noticed. They did a
pas de deux
at the heart of the lens, like mating hummingbirds, and now the brass and strings made different but complementary statements to accompany them.

When they returned to their places at the rim, three figures replaced them. Charlie and Norrey and Sascha, legendary partners and friends, did a trio piece loosely derived from their famous
Why Can’t We?,
as woodwinds brought in a third theme that fit the brass and string motifs like an interlocking puzzle; all three resolved into a major chord as the trio broke up and returned to the rim again.

Next a quartet of both Drummond sisters and Armstead and Yakovskaya, faster and more vigorous, interacting with the kind of precision and intuition that nontelepaths would have needed weeks of rehearsal to achieve; a great pipe organ added its voice to the music, which rose in tempo and resolved into a four-note diminished chord at the quartet’s end.

Then everyone but Shara met at the center for a flashing quicksilver quintet, tumbling over one another like kittens in a basket; the music was all tumbling five-note ninth chords.

Finally all six danced together as a single organism, making strange, indescribable geometrical figures in three dimensions. As they danced, the lens filled out, became a sphere, which slowly contracted in on them, thickening and darkening as it came. Before long there was only a nearly opaque glowing red ball of Symbiote, flexing and shifting in time to the racing music. It quivered, trembled—

—then burst apart, becoming six separate Stardancers flying in different directions like a firework detonation. Their thrusters protruded through their individual coatings of Symbiote now, and they used them to put themselves into graceful wide loops, so that they returned to their starting point, missed colliding by inches, and then arced out again. Each had a different-coloured thruster exhaust; comet-tails of red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple attended them as they flew, leaving the afterimage of a multicoloured Christmas ribbon against the star-spangled blackness. The music swelled and soared with them as they danced, spilling trills in all directions to match their thruster spray. Eventually they all came together again in a tight formation like exhibition aircraft, and took turns passing each other back and forth from hand to hand.

There was joy in their dance, and hope, and endless energy, and manifest love for one another; from time to time one or another of them would laugh for sheer pleasure. I found that I was smiling unconsciously as I watched their dance unfold. I sneaked a look at Kirra and Ben; they were smiling too.

There was a short movement in which they were performing a kind of kinesthetic pun, moving mentally as well as physically, passing their
selves
from one host body to another. I don’t know how many others caught it, but I clearly saw Shara Drummond’s essence change bodies several times. Once or twice I spotted Yakovskaya or McGillicuddy transmigrating too. I think that for a time, the bodies’ original owners were present and dancing as well.

Then Shara was stationary, spinning slowly around her vertical axis, apart from the other five as they continued to interact, watching how their dance changed in her absence; then in a reversed reprise of their solo-to-group progression. Tom dropped out, then Linda, then Charlie, then Norrey. Quintet, quartet, trio, pair, finally Yakovskaya was soloing within a pentagon of stationary spinning companions, and then he too stopped dancing and went into a spin. The music had decayed too, to a single voice, a cello, and the theme it was quoting was not Shara’s signature motif this time, but Kirra’s Song of Polar Orbit.

By some means I didn’t and don’t understand, all six of them began to move relative to one another, around their common center, as though they were jointly orbiting some invisible mini black hole. The orbits tightened inexorably, until they darted like the Firefly aliens themselves, like electrons dancing in mad attendance on some invisible nucleus. Hands met and joined just as the Song of Polar Orbit reached its coda; again they were a six-personed snowflake. Thrusters sprayed coloured fire and smoke, and they became a living, madly spinning Catherine Wheel.

The thrusters went dark, and they were a scarlet pinwheel.

Their Symbiotes merged, and they were a disc again.

A hole appeared in the center, making the disc look for all the world like an old-fashioned phonograph record (all right, I’m dating myself) spinning on a turntable, seen from above. My parents used to own an album like that, red and translucent, a novelty gimmick. The hole enlarged, so that the disc looked like a 45 RPM single; paradoxically its spin slowed rather than speeded up.

Suddenly the disc exuded some of its mass into the hole in the center, where a globe of red Symbiote grew like a pearl forming within an oyster. It moved away from the disc, coming toward us with infinite slowness. Toward Kirra and Ben. As it did so, the disc broke up into six Stardancers again, and they all braked violently to an instant stop, sudden total motionlessness. The music broke like a wave on a shore and faded to silence, the lights went out.

After several seconds of silence, there was wild applause.

Oh, I know I haven’t conveyed it; dance can’t be described. Look it up for yourself, it’s on the Net. Not a major work by any means, but a moving and lyrical piece, just right for a wedding feast and Graduation. I was terribly pleased on Kirra and Ben’s account.

They thanked me lavishly for the gift, and thanked all twelve of the dancers individually. “That was bloody marvelous,” Kirra said. “Morgan, really, it was special!” She was grinning, but her p-suit hood was full of tear-tendrils.

“Just my version of chocolate chip ice cream from Chile,” I said, grinning back at her.
Though it marks a much happier occasion than your gift did.
Dammit, I was leaking saline worms too.

“We’re deeply honoured,” Ben said. “Our GraduWedding has become part of dance history. Or almost. Get ready, spice, here it comes!”

Their blob of Symbiote was nearly upon them, a bead of God’s blood.

“I’ll sing at your Graduation, Morgan,” Kirra promised me hastily. “Wait an’ see if I don’t! Goodbye—see you soon—cheerio, all! Let’s go meet it, Benjy: one, two, three…”

They jaunted forward together, hit the Symbiote dead center, passed inside it. They stripped quickly, took the communications gear from their p-suits and hung it around their necks, pushed the suits clear of the Symbiote and joined hands. It contracted in upon them and around and through them, and they were two Stardancers, convulsing with their first shock of telepathic onslaught but still holding hands. Their combined shout of exaltation was picked up by their throat mikes and hurled to the stars.

Then they were silent and adrift, marinating in Symbiosis.

The dancers had already begun tiptoeing away on scarlet butterfly wings of lightsail. The show was over.

Reb took my arm, and we all headed back to Top Step.

They phoned me up five or six days later. They were well on their way out to meet the Harvest Crew returning with new Symbiote from Titan, about a day from rendezvous. It was an odd conversation. They both sounded as though they were very drunk or very stoned. Ben commented giddily that space now looked to him just like a newspaper. Black and white and red all over. They both assured me that Symbiosis was glorious, wonderful, not to be missed, but were quite unable to describe it in any more detail than that, at least in words. They did say they had two new senses, as expected, but could not describe or explain them any better than the instructors back at Suit Camp had. Kirra sang me part of a work in progress.
The Song of Symbiosis,
and made me promise to send a copy of it to Yarra and the Yirlandji people for her. It was terribly beautiful but very strange, haunting and confounding, hinting at things that even music can’t carry. She said she was collaborating on a Song with Raoul (whom she would be physically meeting in only a few more hours), but did not sing any of it for me. I told them my dance was about two-thirds finished, and they both exhorted me to hurry up and complete it so I could come join them. I assured them I was going as fast as I could, especially since I no longer had any close friends inboard to take up my free time. Kirra, pausing to consult some mathematician I didn’t know, worked out that they would in all likelihood be back with the fresh Symbiote just in time for my Graduation. We agreed to meet then, and I was very pleased to know they would be present for my own last breath.

I was hard at work on the piece the next day, had just solved a tricky and hard-to-describe esthetic problem in the third movement, when Teena said, “Morgan, Reb Hawkins needs to speak to you as soon as possible.”

“Put him on,” I said, brushing sweat from my back, and she did. I can’t reproduce the dialogue and won’t try. He told me the news, and I’m sure he did it as compassionately as it could have been done.