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The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes
by Adam-Troy Castro
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Classic Literature

Fictionwise, Inc.
www.Fictionwise.com

Copyright ©2003 by Adam-Troy Castro

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 2003

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

1.

Travel to a certain plateau in the southern hemisphere of the planet Vlhan. It's a stark windswept place, far from the hives or migration routes of the native Vlhani, and well-hidden from the many offworlders who have come to this world.

That's where you'll find the statue.

Its center is a mirrored black sphere, one meter in diameter, radiating eight long, serpentine cables in a frozen explosion of loops and spirals and helixes. Three of those cables are supports, holding the sphere two meters off the ground. The other five curl about in no obvious pattern, extending twenty meters at their greatest extension. They curl with such elegance that only a blind man would consider their positions random.

You'll no doubt recognize the statue as a realistic life-sized representation of a typical adult Vlhani, waving its prehensile whips in the sophisticated choreography of the all-dance language that distinguishes the species. They were called Vlhani by those who discovered them first, but you might prefer the many competing names other offworlders have given its kind: Spiders. Marionettes. Whipdancers. Even Buggies: Isadora, the first human being to achieve fluency in Vlhani, is said to have called them that.

You might even imagine yourself able to determine the significance of this particular tableau, but that's impossible. The species expresses meaning through movement, not static poses. An isolated instant like this, shorn of context, would be as meaningless to the Vlhani as the ultimate significance of their epic annual Ballet is to those of us who come to this world to watch their hundred thousand Chosen gather and perform and die. No Vlhani could make much of this artifact. Nor would you, unless you knew what it's doing here. You might assume it a monument, but you won't guess which kind.

My name's Paul Royko. I first travelled to Vlhan at the height of the Pre-War Era, a few short years after Isadora became the first human being to join the hundred thousand Vlhani who perform and die in their annual Great Ballet. The holos of her final moments had already been distributed throughout inhabited space, establishing her in the popular imagination as a tragic cult heroine. Thousands of similarly enhanced youths had already arrived on Vlhan, intent on following her example. But it was early yet. The humans who had not only passed through the various levels of selection, but been chosen for the fatal ceremony, still numbered only four. It was big news throughout human space whenever the Vlhani accepted another Hom.Sap applicant, bigger news when one performed. I came on assignment from a neural linkcaster no longer extant, to interview the latest: a young lady named Shalakan who was reported to be a dancer as brilliant as Isadora herself, and who was scheduled to perform and die in one week's time.

I thought she was the story.

The monument provides vivid testament that I was wrong.

2.

Ambassador Walster Croyd didn't want to see me at all; then when the proper strings got pulled he claimed an emergency and kept me waiting outside his office for ninety minutes past our original appointment time. I spent the time sitting on an uncomfortable chair in an anteroom with a temperature set to raise goosebumps on stone, recording every ache, every distant sound, and every overheard scrap of bureaucratic conversation that kept me company during the wait, letting my future audience know how I was treated, certain that my future audience would infer from all this the desperation of that sad species, the bureaucrat with no other way to demonstrate his own importance.

Then an aide waved me in and I found myself in the presence of Croyd himself. He was a white-haired, gray-eyed functionary, installed behind a desk that served no purpose grander than a place to rest his hands. That, and provide some cover: for Croyd also happened to be stark naked, with a sagging chest the texture of dry riverbeds.

There's always been a certain sad defiance that afflicts those who appreciate their own irrelevance. Even when their conduct is professional and their work is conscientious, even when they began with a passion for the job, the taste of failure remains all around them, rendering everything they do joyless and stale. I'd tasted that flavor in other Dip Corps outposts, when those were places where the natives bore special contempt for human beings. But it was pungent here. Ever since the Dance Pilgrims began to arrive on Vlhan, first in the hundreds and then in the thousands, the Confederate Embassy here had become little more than a shrill voice shouting itself hoarse as it struggled to make itself heard over the voices of thousands of amateurs whose own rapport with the natives was far more intimate than anything the diplomatic professionals could manage. For better or worse, the Dance Pilgrims had become humanity's embassy to Vlhan. The official Dip Corps facility, as represented by Croyd, was only there to maintain symbolic opposition to a thriving civilian movement they possessed no local authority to stop.

I saw at once that Croyd hated the very idea of me. He tapped a wooden implement of some kind against the desktop and said: “You're a vampire, you know that?"

“I'm a neurec slinger. Not the same thing."

“Sure as hell is. You both live off blood."

It was an ancient accusation against the reporters of news. And a facile one. I said nothing.

“People die here,” he said.

“People die everywhere,” I told him.

“Except that here, it's a good story."

Again I said nothing.

“You don't have the slightest idea,” he told me. “You don't live here. You don't work here. Do you even appreciate what it's like for us, to be damned to a place where children line up to commit suicide?"

I considered saying something glib about war. At that point in my career I'd already covered several. But it wasn't exactly appropriate to the present circumstances, so I just stood opposite the naked man, waiting.

“That's what the Ballet is,” he said. “You can defend Vlhani culture, you can praise its artistic worth, you can dress it up in any justification you want, but it's still a bloody ritual suicide—and any human beings the spiders allow into the ceremony are just misguided children, destroying themselves in the service of a ritual that for all we know might not even have a bloody point."

The Dip Corps, and the Confederacy behind it, had maintained this position since the first day human beings found a place in the Vlhani Ballet. It failed to impress me. “I can name a hundred respected authorities who feel otherwise."

“Alien authorities. Riirgaans, AIsource, Bursteeni. They have an excuse. They can afford to be generous when it comes to human lives. It gives them more to study.” His voice burned with venom now. “But you, Mr. Royko—you're actually here to encourage this madness. Spread its gospel throughout Hom.Sap space. Reward the sickness of these cultists with notoriety, make them heroes to the next misguided children looking for some stupid way to waste their lives."

I could have said that the dance pilgrims were notorious already and that I couldn't help it if people were fascinated with them. But that would have only encouraged him to continue the debate, and I had neither the time or the patience for that. So I said: “I'm here to interview a dancer."

“A misguided suicide."

“An artist,” I said. “Who wants to give her life for her art."

Croyd was almost purple with frustration. “It's still death."

“That's right,” I said.

My easy agreement infuriated Croyd more. His hands clenched and he rose from his seat, revealing more fatty sag than any human being should have to possess in the age of genomod and AIsource Medical. It might have been an affectation all its own, useful for an Ambassador desperate to establish a personal style in a service otherwise inhabited by a limited variety of functional types; in that event, the pale blue veins that lined the softer spots struck me as a particularly nice touch. Either way, he lurched across the spongy floor like a man who had never felt such a surface beneath his bare feet before. “I don't know why I even bother arguing with somebody like you. You're not here to have a conscience."

“How do you intend to stop me?"

He emitted a bitter laugh. “Stop you? I can't stop you. This is Vlhan. These aren't my laws to enforce."

“But you're not going to help me find her, either."

He said: “There are other people on-world equipped to do that. The Riirgaans, maybe. No, I just want to provide you a little warning."

A warning. Good. There was little my audience liked more than the whiff of danger. I turned up the gains and concentrated on one particularly ugly pockmark, right below his eye, as he leaned in close, attempting intimidation.

He used his index finger to jab my shoulder at every possible point of emphasis. “I say this to every human being I find trying to do business with the Pilgrim movement. I can't stop you from aiding and abetting this atrocity, but the Confederacy wants to shut down whoever's responsible for bringing these poor souls to Vlhan. We want to know who finds them. Who recruits them. Who installs their Enhancements, and who brings them here.” That last was accompanied by an especially sharp jab, intended to hurt. “I warn you. If you ever find out any of this, in the course of producing your recording, you are to bring it to me. If I ever find out that you withheld such information, the authorities will consider you aligned with these crimes against the human species and place you under arrest the second you set foot back inside our jurisdiction. Is that clear, Mr. Royko?"

I seized his finger in mid-jab and held it, motionless, in my clenched fist. “Clear, Mr. Croyd."

He yanked his finger free and blasted me with a faceful of breath so awful that it must have reflected deep inner rot. “Good. And I hope you got that on your precious recording."

3.

The Hom.Saps refused to offer any other assistance, so I followed Croyd's suggestion and went to the Riirgaans. Unlike our own officialdom, they actually believed in claims of a deep meaning behind the Vlhani Ballet, and were more than willing to help a lowly slinger intent on spreading the word. They set up the meet and loaded me aboard a remote skimmer bound for Shalakan's desert retreat.

It was dry country, colored in subtle variations of brown dirt. But the air was cool and the breeze was light and the angle of the sun cast a pleasant pink glow over the approaching night. It was the kind of place I might have chosen for a camping trip, had there ever been any chance of me ever taking a camping trip. A lone marionette grazed on scrub in the distance. Since its big round photoreceptor head was essentially one big 360 degree eye, I couldn't tell whether it took any particular notice of my arrival. I paid particularly close attention to it anyway, acquiring exotic detail, the chief skill of a good neurec slinger being constant awareness of which sensations needed to be nurtured for the playback.

The only other sign of life in the neighborhood was a sleepcube inflated beside a dry riverbed. It didn't look like a two-man model, designed for long treks into barren country, but a semi-permanent installation, big enough for entertaining visitors. I knew worlds where entire families lived in worse. If that was Shalakan's home, she was well-funded, though I'd have to ask whether that was by patrons or personal savings.

A woman emerged from the cube as my skimmer landed a short walk away. She was lithe and round-faced: the kind of combination that might have tempted me to call her pixie if I'd been willing to get slapped for it. She had the kind of eyebrows that knit together at the bridge of her nose, which might have given her a permanent frown if the metal disk affixed to the center of her forehead hadn't compensated. She wore a Riirgaan caste pendant on a chain over a green jumpsuit.

There was no chance of mistaking her for Shalakan herself, or for any of our own Dip Corps—not in that ensemble. She didn't seem to move like one of Shalkan's fellow dance pilgrims either. They had a liquid way about them. She was something else. Graceful, but something else.

Showing off for the pretty lady, I hopped from the skimmer and onto the dirt. Big mistake. My ankles felt like they'd just been riven with spikes. (Probably not a good detail to keep for the playback.) I managed to approach without limping. “Ow. Hello."

She covered her smile with one hand. “Ow yourself. Are you all right?"

“Just temporarily crippled."

“I can see that. Is this your way of establishing rapport with your subjects, Mr. Royko? Major muscle sprains?"

The language was Hom.Sap Mercantile, the accent Riirgaan, complete with their characteristic epic slurred r's. Whoever she was, she'd spent more time with the lizards than with other human beings. An exile?

I slapped the side of the kimmer, sending it back into the sky and from there back to its Riirgaan masters. “Naaah. Sometimes, with the tough ones, I go for compound fractures. And you're...?"

“Deeply amused,” she said. Then she relented: “Need any help?"

I took another step and discovered that my leg could take the weight with only a minimal degree of resentment. “No, I can make it. You can call me Paul, if you want."

“My name's Ch'tpok.” That was a good accent all right. She managed that central hiccup better than any non-Riirgaan I'd ever heard.

I wasn't nearly as good. I almost choked on it. “Chuppock?"

“Don't worry if you can't get it on the first try,” she said, providing an extra-careful pronunciation: “Ch'tpok."

I tried Chitpock, Cheatpock and Chatpock before establishing to our mutual satisfaction that Chuppock was as close as I was likely to get. She didn't take it seriously: I gathered that correct pronunciations from her fellow humans were as rare as generous compliments from the Tchi. By then we'd also established that she was an exolinguist, third grade, trained by the Riirgaans to specialize in Vlhani Dance. She said that she'd been a citizen of the Riirgaan republic since the age of four years Mercantile.

Still working out the limp, I asked: “How did that happen?"

“How else? Crazy idealist parents who thought renouncing their species made some kind of point about an issue long since forgotten.” That really was an insistent smile she had, but anybody who grew up among the stony-faced Riirgaans probably had cause to overcompensate. “I'm not bigoted against Hom.Saps, if that's what you're thinking. It was all political, and I never bought into it."

“Parents happy about that?"

“Parents defected again a couple of years later, this time to some kind of sentient spore-colony. Last I heard they were still growing underground somewhere. They were pretty insane, really.” She noted this with a friendly wink, establishing, or at least trying to establish, that nothing about these experiences had left her bitter. “Naaah, I recognize my species. I know my biological roots. I just don't use them for legal purposes. I stay Riirgaan because that's where my credentials are."

The phenomenon wasn't unheard-of; I knew of three wealthy Hom.Saps who had aligned themselves with the software intelligences known as the AIsource just to avoid the Confederacy's ruinous taxes. And the entire Dance Pilgrim movement, here on Vlhan, was about human beings altering themselves to fit into an alien ritual. But it was still discomfiting. Despite being a fine model of her birth species, Ch'tpok's citizenship still rendered her legally not human ... a status which would have kept her from being recognized as a human being in any Hom.Sap court. Without defecting back to her birth species, she would not be able to own Hom.Sap property, enjoy the protection of Hom.Sap laws, or even enjoy a legal partnership with another human being. I wondered if she'd ever travelled in human space, and just how much inconvenience she must have suffered along the way—questions that rendered her an excellent possible future neurec subject, once I was finished with the story at hand. But right now Shalakan took precedence. I asked, “Did your Embassy send you here to meet me?"

“No. Dalmo and Shalakan have been letting me observe her last few months of training."

“Dalmo?"

“Shalakan's husband."

Nobody had mentioned a husband. It disturbed me. Who would get married when their greatest ambition in life was to die violently as soon as possible? “Where are they?"

“Shal's out communing with the Vlhani; she'll be back later. Dalmo's inside. He would greet you himself, but he's not feeling well today."

Ch'tpok lifted the flap of the sleepcube and we went in. The interior was bright, mostly from sunlight filtering through the cloth. It was sparse, too; a couple of hammocks, a food chest, a few instruments likely belonging to Ch'tpok, and one or two other boxes too small to provide much in the way of civilized amenities. The light came from a single hoverglobe. There was soft music playing: not human, as far as I could tell, but something a human being could listen to without retching. Shalakan's ailing husband was not lying in bed, as I'd expected, but standing on one leg. The other leg and everything from the waist up extended parallel to the ground, facing downward, like a body lying on an invisible mattress. Thin, sunken-cheeked, sweaty, and hollow-eyed, he bore the look of a man whose ailments had set in a lot earlier than just today, but he seemed comfortable enough, even if, like me, he belonged to that unfortunate subspecies of sleeper afflicted with terminal drool-mouth. He wore only a thin gray cloth around his waist. His arms, spread out at his sides like wings, each displayed several joints too many; they undulated gently as he slept, the contractions moving from shoulders to fingertips in waves.

My aching bod felt all the more inadequate as I sank into a seated position on the food chest. “That's him, I guess."

“That's Dalmo,” Ch'tpok said, adding an unnecessary: “He's a Dance Pilgrim too."

At least that explained how he could bear a suicidal wife; he had the same odd sense of priorities. “How come he's not out with the missus?"

Ch'tpok's smile didn't falter, even as her eyes turned grim. “The Vlhani didn't invite him."

“This party's for Selected only?"

“Uh huh. Last-minute choreography."

I tried to imagine the alien protocols that dictated how Shalakan should move one way, and not another, while dancing herself to death. It knew it made a difference to the spiders; it was the basis of their greatest cultural artifact. But did it make a difference to Shalakan? Did she feel the rightness of these last-minute instructions? Did she change a twitch and say, oh, yes, you're right, that part always bothered me, thanks for helping me finally get it right?

And what about Dalmo? “Doesn't it bother him? Even a little?"

“Not ... really,” said Dalmo. (I attributed his slow speech to his illness, but I soon learned he always spoke like a drunk, or like a man trying to sound drunk. The words left his mouth at irregular intervals, like prisoners escaping in shifts to avoid the attention of guards.) “Mister Royko,” he said, and licked his lips. There was an especially long pause as he parsed the rest of the sentence. “My wife has important work to do. Good morning, Chuppi."

It happened to be late afternoon. If Dalmo had gone to sleep the night before, he'd been unconscious for most of a day. But Ch'tpok humored him: “Good morning, Dalmo. Feeling better?"

“Yes.” He paused. “Never felt bad. Calculating. Had to work out some variables."

“I figured,” Ch'tpok said. “Any luck?"

“Some. Real progress."

“Up to talking about it?"

“Need to dance first.” He grimaced and lowered his other leg. His flexible Enhanced arms uncoiling, straightening, assuming fixed joints at elbow-height, he soon became an approximation of any other unenhanced human—albeit a painfully thin one, with a lip that drooped to the right. I'd grown up in a habitat too poor for an AIsource Medical contract, so I'd seen what unprosthetized stroke victims looked like. It's a rare sight, some other places. Dalmo walked like that, too: no obvious paralysis, but with the slow deliberation of a man for whom every step required careful planning. Ch'tpok hovered close as if she feared he'd fall. I supposed it wasn't hard to see why the Vlhani hadn't cast him in the great honking suicide-show; they needed graceful dancers, and this poor shmo could barely move.

I almost didn't want to follow them outside, for fear he'd mistake my recently-acquired limp as mockery. But I did. No point in alienating the hubby.

Out in the twilight, Dalmo unfolded again, tripling his height, becoming a torso that bobbed like a puppet at the center of four looping and twirling limbs. He showed nothing approaching the grace of a Vlhani, or even of those humans who'd made themselves enough like Vlhani to earn a place in the Ballet, but his performance was still impressive enough, especially the way he made those outstretched arms seem to bubble and twist like vapor buffeted by a strong wind.

“See?” he said, with strain. “I parsed it. I made it work. It's progress."

“I believed you,” Ch'tpok said.

“I'll have to show Shal. She should know."

Ch'tpok hesitated a few seconds before answering. “You're right."

Dalmo displayed some more moves, all slow, all impossible for normal human physiology, all well within the peculiar faux-Vlhani anatomy that the pilgrims try so hard to achieve. The performance hurt to watch, but not because of the contortions themselves; I had already seen other enhanced pilgrims twist themselves into even greater knots. Watching Dalmo hurt more because moving that way clearly cost him more. And it hurt for another reason, too: familiarity. There was something about the hold his art had on his life, that felt like an old friend I'd abandoned a long time ago.

He must have spotted my sympathetic pain. “You like to dance, Mr. Royko?"

I tried to match his flippant tone. “I know a waltz or two."

“Any good at them?"

“Well,” I smiled, “Not according to any woman who's ever endured my tries."

His limbs twirled in great jagged jerks. “Nothing Vlhani?"

It was a joke. He had to see I wasn't physically equipped for it. “Sorry."

“Pity.” His limbs retracted, drawing closer to his body. “I hope you're not one of those people who think we're crazy for doing this."

“Like Ambassador Croyd?” I said.

“You met him? I'm sorry to hear that. He's exactly the kind of closed-minded bigot I would have expected the Dip Corps to send out here. They don't post anybody who wouldn't like to shut the Ballet down. He won't even keep an open mind. Just calls us crazy cultists and turns his back whenever we try to share what we know."

“Sounds like him all right,” I said. “If you leave out his nudity."

Dalmo clucked. “He's still doing that? Ah well. And what's your opinion, Mr. Royko? Of the dance, not the Ambassador's unmentionables."

“I haven't made up my mind yet."

“Sometimes, I don't think I've made up my mind either.” He expanded his limbs again. “This isn't an easy thing to want to do with your life. It isn't a normal thing to want. It's especially hard to justify when the people questioning you don't understand the only language capable of providing answers. But the explanation's in the Ballet. The Vlhani see it. Isadora saw it. Shal and I see it. I would be overjoyed to make you see it, too, Mister Roy."

That's as far as he got. He froze in position before finishing my name, the unspoken “...ko” a breath stuck in his throat.

I waited, but the rest of the sentence did not seem imminent. After a moment, I turned to Ch'tpok and saw tear-tracks on her cheeks that shone red from the setting Vlhani sun. Her smile was still there, still as unforced as before, but now informed by a sadness as complicated as the Ballet itself.

She said: “Are you beginning to see the nature of his problem?"

4.

Back inside the sleepcube, Ch'tpok described Dalmo's ailment as a matter of incompatible software.

The dance that comprises everyday Vlhani language is easy enough for those born to it. The Ballet is no doubt more difficult, but it's just an advanced application of the same basic tools. They have the whips. They have neural pathways capable of manipulating them. They have brains evolved to parse a complex language that expresses multiple-level datastreams via the wave-form oscillations of their flexible limbs. They can understand it because it's how they're built. They evolved that way.

We, on the other hand, evolved somewhere else.

The first dance pilgrim, Isadora, demonstrated by vivid example that certain human beings were not only capable of understanding the Ballet, but somehow vital to its continuing development as the centerpiece of the Vlhani culture.

This, of course, made no sense. Why would random individuals from a totally different species that evolved three hundred light years away have such a freakish understanding of a ritual that the greatest linguists and behaviorists of a dozen other sentient species were still unable to parse?

It was impossible.

It couldn't be true.

There was no way for it to be true.

But Isadora proved that it was.

And the pilgrims who came after her showed that she wasn't a one-of-a-kind fluke. Most of them were not much more than the children Ambassador Croyd alleged them to be: adolescents, or post-adolescents. But alerted to the Ballet's existence by the holos and neurecs distributed throughout Hom.Sap space, before the Confederacy had a chance to appreciate the forces this would set in motion, all of these people saw something vital in the Ballet, something that had to be preserved—something that only their own participation could fix.

Alas, even those humans who possessed the raw talent couldn't manage the dance without compensating for the limitations of human physiology.

A Vlhani whip is many thousands of times more flexible than the most elastic cord available to humanity, with flexible segments less than a tenth of a millimeter apart, and muscle/joint combinations facilitating an almost unlimited range of movement between them. The average Vlhani possesses a dozen other whips just like it. Creating prosthetics for human use was a serious mechanical problem, but the operating software was a real bitch. Since we've never been wired to manipulate a thicket of limbs that bend in that many places, let alone to move them with such coordinated grace they can function as performance elements in a complex and demanding art form, humans driven to dance Vlhani need AI and bionics to manage it. The unknown agencies responsible for providing the Pilgrims with their Enhancements—agencies the Confederacy would have liked to identify and prosecute—dealt with the problem by installing networks of sophisticated micro-controllers, which constantly perform the millions of tiny calculations necessary to translate a human dancer's imagination into a Vlhani dancer's grace.

It's a hideously complicated process that needs direct communication with the nervous systems involved.

According to Ch'tpok, the system still had a long way to go.

“The enhancements work,” Ch'tpok said. “Just not very well. Dalmo's nervous system resists the interface."

“Tissue rejection?” AIsource Medical had licked that problem, but human surgeons still encountered it once in a while.

“No,” Ch'tpok said. “Software problems."

“Does it happen a lot?"

“Too often,” she said. “Dalmo freezes up several times a day. Sometimes for hours. Data traffic while he plots his movements. He has to make millions of calculations just to choreograph a few seconds of Vlhani dance. Even normal human movement isn't easy for him, which is why he has so much trouble walking and talking. It's a fairly common problem among the pilgrims."

“I never heard of it."

“I'm not surprised. Your government may frown on it, but most of human space still glamorizes the Ballet, sees it as something beautiful and even transcendent. Your literature tends to focus on the famous successes like Shalakan or the lost, sainted Isadora.” She rolled her eyes in case I didn't get the sarcasm. “But about thirty percent of those who arrive here with enhancements also suffer some kind of degenerative neurological impairment."

All the Pilgrims I'd seen, in the various creches and settlements I'd visited, had possessed whipdance enhancements in perfect order. “Where do they keep the disabled ones?"

“Various places around Vlhan. Inside Vlhani hives. They tend not to mix."

“And they can't be fixed? Ever?"

“Hom.Sap medicine can't. Neither can Riirgaan. Even the AIsource Medics say it's impossible. Maybe the folks who originally made the installations could—but they don't provide any of these poor people with the means to contact them for warranty work."

“Because they're afraid of being exposed and shut down,” I said.

“You got it,” said Ch'tpok.

It made grim sense. Vlhan may have been a sovereign world, unbound by human law, but the Hom.Sap Confederacy still remained dedicated to putting those responsible for facilitating the dance pilgrims out of business. Any pilgrim who left the planet could lead our agents right back to them.

Even so, keeping the surgery underground still seemed a cold precaution in the face of somebody whose Enhancements seemed easier to classify as Disabilities. I peered out the window at Dalmo. He had become unfrozen, his limbs spiraling around him in gestures that communicated both exuberance and frustration. “Thirty percent."

“Yes,” said Ch'tpok. “Most worse off than him, with nothing to show for it."

I juggled half a dozen possible followup questions before settling on the certainty I heard in Ch'tpok's voice. It was the sound of a woman who lived close to this subject, and in her own personal way, considered it Sacred: the sound that had been in her voice all day. I put a few things together and came to a realization I'd been building since my arrival. “And you're not here to study Shalakan, are you? You're not even here to study the Vlhani. You're here for Dalmo."

Her nod was placid. “That's right. I am."

“Why?"

“Because he's the visionary."

The word surprised me. “Visionary?"

“The only kind that means anything on this world. The Vlhani kind.” She held my solemn stare, then flashed her insistent smile again. “You'll see."

5.

The hours were pleasant but frustrating. Ch'tpok turned out to be the kind of charming conversationalist who specializes in making sure little of value is actually said. I liked her. I had a good time speaking to her. But she provided me with precious little data I didn't already have.

She apologized again for Shalakan's lateness. I told her again that it was okay.

She described the nature of Dalmo's impairments in more detail than my own technophobic education allowed. I pretended to understand.

She made the same grandiose claims about the Ballet's significance that the dance pilgrims and her own government's translation project had made a thousand times before. She failed to persuade me.

At one point she quizzed me about my profession. Where had I been? What had I seen? Had I downloaded anything that got distributed in Riirgaan space? I told her about my biggest coup to date, a spectacular close-up view of a bloody political assassination so carefully orchestrated by the opposition party that its scheduled time and location were actually posted in advance via hytex. Then I dove back into my own questions. What I got in return was charm, and very little that differed from the Pilgrim party line.

We heard the first Vlhani three hours after nightfall. People who don't live on planetary deserts can't really appreciate how dark it had become. With the exception of the dim circle of yellow light that surrounded the Dalmo/Shalakan residence, there was nothing, from unseen horizon to unseen horizon, that gave off or reflected any illumination at all. It imparted a terrific sense of isolation, more psychological than sensual, which made it impossible to catch on neurec even with the gains set on full: a lot like being in a locked closet without any doors.

Nor could I gauge the distances of the sounds carried by the cool evening air—the whispering thwuf-thwuf-thwuf made by the pointed ends of many Vlhani whips spearing the earth for traction could have been either meters of kilometers away. I wondered how many there were and if they approached from all directions. Aware that this particular sound hadn't always meant good news for the human beings who heard it (as in the Embassy Massacre of a few years earlier), I even felt a twinge of fear.

But Ch'tpok led me outside, to a spot only meters from the immobile Dalmo. His face, lit on one side by light from the sleepcube, was a pale yellow crescent, glistening where beads of sweat had collected during the day. His eyes had turned toward the desert to follow the thwuf-thwuf-thwuf moving closer with every breath.

“Look,” Ch'tpok murmured.

The first Vlhani became visible only as a spot of yellow light: an image of the sleepcube, reflected off the smooth chitin of its great round head. That head, almost an arm's-length across, came into focus a heartbeat later, bobbing along atop four striding whips while three others gestured wave-forms in the open air. It bypassed Dalmo, moved toward us, and undulated its whips at length.

“A greeting,” Ch'tpok said. “An acknowledgment. An offer of peace."

“What do we say back?"

“We don't have to say anything. We're not wearing whip-harnesses.” That was a Riirgaan invention which, when worn, allowed diplomats to mimic Vlhani movement enough to permit some basic communication. “Unenhanced people are more or less mute as far as they're concerned, and that it would be silly to expect a response. As long as we do nothing to the contrary, it will assume we got the message."

The Vlhani moved away from us and approached Dalmo. Extending its whips to their full length, lifting its head thirty meters into the air, it stepped over Dalmo and spiked the dirt on all sides of him, imprisoning him in a cage of its own sinuous limbs.

Another yellow reflection popped out of the darkness. Another Vlhani. This one didn't bother to pay its respects to us, probably because its cousin had already taken care of that formality. This one went straight to the living structure that now enclosed Dalmo, and extended a pair of whips inside. They touched Dalmo's cheeks, then withdrew. The newcomer moved aside, not returning to the darkness, but instead waiting as a third and a fourth and a fifth Vlhani also emerged from the desert to caress the altered man's face.

By the time the sixth Vlhani showed up, I knew I was in for a parade that might last a while. “What are they doing?"

“What do they look like they're doing?” Ch'tpok asked.

“I don't have the slightest idea. I don't know Vlhani."

“I don't know it either; this thing,” she tapped the silver memory disk on her forehead, “gives me the best working reference my people could compile, but I don't need its help to understand what I'm seeing. Come on, you have eyes. What is this?"

I didn't much like the sensation of being quizzed like a primary-schooler in the prep classes before his first upload. “Are they worshipping him?"

“Good guess. But you're not quite right."

“Where am I off?"

“They're worshipping something."

The Vlhani marching out of the desert all approached Dalmo with clear and unmistakable reverence. But what could be drawing them, if not Dalmo himself?

Ch'tpok moaned with frustration. “Think, Paul. Vlhani don't believe in gods, as far as we can tell, and they're far too smart to worship humans."

“Riirgaans, then?"

She laughed. “Nice try. No, that wasn't species chauvinism. They don't worship us either."

Us, I thought. Another indication of how deeply she identified with her adopted people."Then what?"

“Come on. It's not hard to figure out. What's their big ritual? The only thing they find sacred?"

“The Ballet?"

“See? It wasn't hard."

“But Dalmo's not in the Ballet."

“That's right. And he won't ever be. He can't process the variables that quickly."

“Then why would they give him such special attention?"

“Because he's still the dance."

I still didn't get it, and I'd run out of time to complain about it. Because the next shape to emerge from the darkness was Shalakan herself.

6.

My briefing on Shalakan had included holos taken on the day the Vlhani first selected her.

Like most of the humans chosen, she was barely out of her childhood at the time. She had been a skinny kid not far into her late teens, with eyes too close together and a chin that came to a point; the brief interviews she'd permitted at the time had painted her as a dazed laureate indeed, neither honored nor thrilled but instead overwhelmed that the future she had sought was hers. Back then, her answers to even the simplest questions had been a series of inarticulate sentence fragments isolated by oppressive silences. She'd ultimately chosen to express her feelings the Vlhani way ... and when she'd danced, following an alien choreography that shouldn't have resonated among humans, she had seemed not only Enhanced but Divine. Her arms and legs, human enough at rest, had elongated and circled her in great, swooping spirals so filled with purpose that it was next to impossible to watch them, even on holo, and not wonder if there was music the average human being was unable to hear.

That had been two years ago.

It was now several surgeries later. None had anything to do with augmenting her fitness for the Vlhani ballet; she'd possessed all that equipment at the moment of choosing. The overwhelming impression given by the newest changes, between the fresh green glow of her eyes and the amoebic tattoos in constant motion beneath the exposed skin of her arms and legs, was shallow exoticism for its own sake. There had been imaginative things done to her breasts, her nose, her hands, her hair, all of which had given her a precious, fussed-over beauty of the sort desired by anybody who courts fame above all things. But as she approached her husband, her flexible arms twisting above her head in the wave-forms of Vlhani dance, the changes seemed less vain than defiant: bids to accentuate her humanity even as she gave herself up to this most alien form of speech.

Then she spotted Ch'tpok and me, patted Dalmo's arm, and moved toward us, her enhanced legs bearing her upper body with grace so total that she didn't even seem to be walking. She was more like a princess being transported by palanquin.

She nodded Ch'tpok's way, using a Riirgaan honorific: “Hello again, Learned One.” Something had been done to her voice too; it had been doubled, trebled, giving every word she spoke the resonance of a greek chorus.

“Hello,” Ch'tpok said. She still smiled, but now there was no warmth behind it; it was just the polite rictus of a woman turning civility into a putdown.

Shalakan turned to me next. “You're the neurec man, right?"

“That's right,” I said, calculating how all this body tinkering would play for my mass audience. “Paul Royko."

She shook my hand; though I knew hers to be artificial, there was nothing about its touch that would have alerted me had I not already known. It felt real enough, perhaps even delicate: warmer than the usual touch, but that could be easily explained as leftover heat from a day spent beneath the desert sun. Even so, the moment of contact felt more like a caress: a combination of the added flexibility her enhancements provided her, and what was probably a deliberate attempt to spike her sex appeal for the neurec. I saw through it at once, and didn't care: it still worked on me. “I'm so sorry I'm late, Mr. Royko. The Ballet is fluid, you know. It always requires adjustments, up to the very moment of performance."

I almost coughed. “So I've been told."

“It will be worth it the day we dance,” she said. “You'll see."

The passion in her eyes was that of a woman eager for the moment of her own extinction; it ended my momentary attraction, but only just. She was that good.

I was certain this would be a popular neurec.

“I wasn't told how much you'd changed since your last holos."

She glanced at the recombinant tattoo extending pseudopods along one arm. “It's nonsense, I know. Vanity. The spiders have no use for such things, but I thought it might be useful."

“Why?"

“Because, as a showman like yourself should know, it's precisely the kind of flashy surface detail that fascinates human beings. However long it takes the various recordings of this performance to get past customs—and you know they will, Mr. Royko; the Confederate embargo's a joke—looking like this will ensure them the proper degree of attention in Hom.Sap circles."

“And that's important to you? The fame?"

“No,” she said. “But the next generation of human dancers has to come from somewhere."

Her gaze flickered toward Ch'tpok. I saw no warmth in either that look or the look Ch'tpok gave her in return. I got, and recorded, the clear impression that only the respect prevented the unsheathing of claws. Then she addressed me again: “Whatever happens after tonight, Mr. Royko, I hope you take the time to see Dalmo at work. I know it's easy to underestimate him because of his problems. But he's the dance."

“Chuppock said the same thing. But she wouldn't tell me what she meant."

“Maybe she couldn't, Mr. Royko. Hom.Sap Mercantile's such an imprecise language. Maybe the concept would make more sense in Vlhani. But that's still pretty much all there is to it, in words or choreography. Dalmo is the dance."

I struggled to get that. “Are you saying he personifies it?"

“No,” she said. “Only that he understands it. That he knows it all the way from the beginning, and all the way to its inevitable end. All its thousands of performances, before and after. And everything that comes after this point, won't happen without him."

I tried a retreat to the story I knew about: Shalakan herself. “Can you tell me if you'll—"

Shalakan pressed the tip of her index finger to my lips: it tasted of equal parts human skin and desert sand, not at all the synthskin compound I knew her flesh to be. “Spend some time with him later. Tell him it was his accomplishment, not mine. Tell him I danced because he can't."

Then she returned to her husband. She wrapped her arms around him: a phrase that would have been a mere hug when performed by most women but was pure literal description when attributed to her. Her arms encircled him once, twice, three times, looping under his arms and over his shoulders and back around his body again. She lashed herself to him so tightly she might have feared being torn away by hurricane winds, and she kissed his lips, his chin, and his shoulders, moving down along the frozen arch of his body with passion that made her malleable spine ripple like a banner. He responded, too: throwing off his paralysis, sinking toward the ground in a moment of absolute surrender, then bracing his limbs against the dirt and lifting both his wife and his himself a full three meters from the ground where we stood.

For me, it was like seeing Sleeping Beauty, revived by the touch of her own true love ... except with the genders reversed and the participants altered into something more Vlhani than human.

It was simultaneously the most repugnant and the most erotic thing I'd ever seen.

“They'll make love now,” Ch'tpok said.

And that was the most unneeded explanation. “Looks like it."

I made no other move.

She placed a hand on my shoulder. “They're still human, Paul. They don't particularly mind if the Vlhani watch; they know the Vlhani don't care much one way or the other. But we should show them some privacy."

I'll confess to a moment's hesitation. The temptation to record this particular coitus for neural playback was so overwhelming it burned. But even a neurec slinger is subject to appeals for decency. The words were resentful, but they did come. “All right."

“They'll probably talk to you tomorrow morning."

Dalmo and Shalakan were all over each other now, thirty meters up: bobbing up and down atop legs like stilts. It looked perverse and grotesque and epic and oddly beautiful. Despite all I would learn and all I would come to understand, it would be the only time in my life I'd ever wish to be Enhanced their way.

After we re-entered the sleepcube, and Ch'tpok activated a white sound generator to block out the noises from outside, I had the thought which banished my envy forever. “That's goodbye for them, isn't it?"

Ch'tpok, who had been getting us some buzzpops from her supplies, nodded. “Yes. She'll be going off with these Vlhani shortly after dawn. They're all headed for ... you know."

“Damn.” I accepted the narcotic but didn't patch any to my flesh. “Won't Dalmo be able to keep her company along the way?"

“In theory, he's allowed to follow along at a respectful distance. Knowing him, he'll freeze up every few kilometers and get left behind. My government will offer him a skimmer ride to the Ballet as a courtesy (that is, if he even wants to watch), but it doesn't really matter either way as far as his relationship with his wife is concerned; once she leaves here, he won't be permitted any communication with her ever again.” She flipped the buzzpop and slapped more against her bare skin; certainly more than I'd ever taken myself, even in the long hard times after a download. Her eyes glazed. “I really thought I'd be all right with this; it's all I've been thinking of since I came to live with them..."

I patched a buzz just to be companionable, and bit back a grimace at the feedback. Partaking isn't really recommended for a neurec slinger in record mode. “They're your friends."

Another daunting sniff by Ch'tpok. “Dalmo is."

“I noticed you didn't like Shalakan."

Now, a moment's distance. “I don't dislike her. But we're not friends."

“Why not?"

“She's a little too swallowed up by what she intends to do. Everything's about getting ready for her dance. Even her relationship with Dalmo is less about two people supporting each other than it is about providing support for her legend. Until now, I wasn't sure she would have anything left for him even at the end. I was hoping she would, but I didn't think—” She spread her hands, and sat down a little too heavily. “I don't know. Maybe that little display outside is for your benefit, too."

“What do you believe?"

She considered that. “I believe they're geniuses who also happen to be flawed human beings. But it's so hard to watch what it's costing them that I sometimes find myself wishing my people could come up with their own phrase for God Damn It. I get so tired of repeating the Hom.Sap version."

To hell with the feedback. I turned off the recording and patched as much buzzpop as I could stomach. “Yeah. So do I."

She showed enough class to not look surprised. But her eyes were questioning.

I heaved a deep breath. “You know the dumbest cliche about slingers? That we're unfeeling sensation mongers. That we're just sterile conduits, piping sights and sounds to the masses.” I took another buzz, shivered, and went on: “The truth is, most of us stumble into the biz running away from feelings we no longer want."

“Does it work?"

“Not really. We're not just paid to see it; we're paid to feel it. We have to be sensitive to make it real. We sometimes have to feel it so hard it hurts to go on. Otherwise, it's just pointless, sterile crap."

She saw from my eyes that there had to be more. “And?"

“And eventually we see so much we get jaded. We wear grooves in our empathy. And our networks start sending us to bigger and nastier places—catastrophes, civil wars, even assassinations like the one I told you about—just to break through to that part of us which is still capable of being moved.” I cast a thumb in the direction of the sleepcube flap. “Like the Ballet. Like watching two people like that destroy themselves in the service of a cause I can't even understand. So yeah. I know what it's like to get tired of saying, ‘Oh My God.’”

Ch'tpok chewed on that, then blinked through her tears and switched off the white sound, allowing an occasional gasp or whisper to make its way through the few short meters and thin layer of fabric that separated the two people inside the sleepcube from the two bidding farewell outside.

A moment more and she plunged us both into matching darkness.

And, settling by my side, said: “I think I'll go insane if all I'm allowed to do is listen."

After a moment, I said, “Me, too."

She nestled a little closer. “You won't take it too personally, will you? If we do something to pass the time?"

“Not if you won't."

I was a slinger, after all. And slingers were all about enjoying sensations without allowing themselves to be touched by them.

7.

What was it like with her? Considering that it was our first time, and the second was a decade away?

I'd like to say that we took it as more than a moment's distraction from the magnitude of the parting taking place a few short meters away. But I'd be lying. The truth was that neither of us was really there. I was accustomed to considering every sensation, every moment of experience, as an element in a larger story, that needed proper manipulation in order for all the proper notes to be played. I may have thought I liked her, but like all slingers I lived in the service of novelty, considered it my stock in trade, and was too detached, too jaded, to see my few moments with Ch'tpok as much more than that.

As for Ch'tpok, I don't think she really cared about me being there at all: I was just a useful emotional anaesthetic that didn't work as well as expectations. I tasted the anger in the form of the tears on her cheeks, and though I could not understand the Riirgaan phrases she whispered both during and afterward, I could still tell they were not directed toward me. I would later wonder if they were words she wished Dalmo could hear, but I don't think that's what they were. They were curses, muttered by the lost.

Much later on, when we were both floating on the edges of sleep, the sounds from outside the sleepcube had faded, Ch'tpok placed a hand on my chest and murmured another Riirgaan word: “Darrr'pakh."

I didn't open my eyes. “What?"

“Riirgaan word. Means teacher. A very special kind of teacher.” Her index finger found a hair on my chest, played curling games with it. “He teaches a lesson that all Riirgaan children need to learn, and learn well, in order to earn the rights of a free adult in their society. It's a difficult lesson, I understand; it takes a full year, by their calendar, and some children fail. I won't say what happens to them, except to say that their productive lives are, essentially, over; they don't get educations, they don't get jobs, they don't mix with the general population, they don't have futures. They don't get a second chance."

A breeze from somewhere cooled sweat on my forehead. “Did you take the course, Chuppock?"

“Of course. I was legally Riirgaan, and bound by Riirgaan tradition."

“And?"

She tapped my chest again. “I was also a human being, and I failed."

The regret in her voice was so palpable I searched for her other hand, found it, gave her a reassuring squeeze. “But you're here. They didn't do ... whatever they do to the others."

“That's because I'm human. They knew that I couldn't. They couldn't penalize me for that. But they also knew that I could never be Riirgaan too unless I was at least given the chance to try. The end result is that I'm one of them all right ... but I'm also the only one who never had to meet the one sacred standard that otherwise allowed no exceptions. So I'm also always apart."

I groped for something to say about that. “Maybe it's not the right place for you."

“Maybe.” She let that hang for a while, perhaps challenging me to come up with something more relevant to say ... then accepted my silence and sat up, facing the sleepcube wall as if hoping to see what was happening on the other side. I reached for her but she was just out of reach; and when I didn't try to pull her back, she moved still farther away, receding into shadow. Her profile became a distant crescent floating in darkness, like the narrowest phase of a moon searching for the place it was meant to orbit.

8.

I never got my interview. I never learned Shalakan's real name, or where she came from, or how she'd reached the decision that this one ritual was more important than any human endeavor. I probably shouldn't have expected to do so; in those early years of the Human-Vlhani connection, the dancers made a point of rejecting their pasts. Like her predecessors Isadora and Gabriel and Xavis, who had taken this journey before her, or Melaniherz, whose own infamous performance would follow, Shalakan admitted to nothing but humanity ... and she entered the dance knowing that ten thousand worlds would pretend to be her birthplace.

By the time I woke up the next morning, staring through a thin layer of sleepcube canvas at a sun still bright enough to glare, she and the Vlhani had already fled for the Ballet now only four days away. I lifted the still-sleeping Ch'tpok's arm off my chest, fell back into the same clothes from the night before, and emerged from the sleepcube to find the desert bright, stiflingly hot, and empty but for one. That one, Dalmo, sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at a horizon that had probably swallowed his departing wife hours before. Though his eyes were dry, his hands still drew obsessive patterns in the dirt.

I might have thrown a fit about broken promises, but there wasn't any point. This man, misguided or not, had just lost a lot more. So I sat down beside him, and for a minute or so shared a companionable silence. In this light, it was easy to see that he was just a kid, not much older than Shalakan, but his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and the sense of unavoidable loss made him look ancient, as well: like a man who had progressed from childhood to dotage without a stop in between.

I asked. “Are you all right?"

“She's not gone,” Dalmo said, his fingertip tracing a loop-de-loop in the desert. “She'll never be gone."

He sounded like every other self-deluded fanatic I'd ever heard, but it was not the time to make a point of that either. “Did she say anything before she went?"

“You mean,” he flashed a grim smile, “anything meant for you?"

“Anything you don't mind me quoting."

“No. At the end everything she said was between us.” He flashed a smile which betrayed no sense of loss whatsoever, then stabbed the earth with another fingertip. “What about you and Ch'tpok? We heard the two of you in there. We were surprised but happy for you. I hope you don't plan on including any of that in your playback."

For a moment, just a moment, I felt like smacking him. Then I got his point: none of your business. It was a sentiment that never had much success among those of us employed in exporting the personal business of other people to the masses, but I'd rarely had it so skillfully thrown in my face.

He relented before I could figure out what to say next. “You want commentary? The Ballet's her commentary. She'll speak volumes there."

“Before she dies."

“Yes,” he said. “Before she dies."

“Doesn't that bother you?"

For the first time in our association he showed a little human annoyance at being pricked about his bereavement. “Of course it does. But you people all focus on that aspect, like it's the only detail that matters. You don't see the performance that leads up to it. Or everything she'll leave behind when she's gone."

I couldn't resist pushing him a little further. “Like yourself, for instance."

He erased his meaningless dirt-drawing with a sweep of his hand, creating a fresh canvas, before starting again with another pattern of interlocking swirls. “You want commentary, Mr. Royko? All right. Here's your commentary. I'm going to mourn my wife. I'll miss her. But I'm just a person, you know. A little sack of bones and flesh. An organism with insight. The Ballet is something much larger."

I had already spent three days mingling with some of the freshest arrivals, and heard a lot of what sounded like pseudomystical profundity from kids desperate to justify the obsession that had swallowed their lives whole. I wiped perspiration from my forehead and asked him the question I'd asked them: “How?"

“Well. You know that the Ballet doesn't start fresh, every year? That each year's performance is actually a continuation of the performance from the year before? All going back thousands years?"

That information had been provided by Isadora. “Yes."

“Well, it goes on from here, too. The role Shal plays this year affects what the next set of dancers have to do next year. And what the next set of dancers have to do the year after that. Come back ten thousand years from now, after watching every Ballet between now and then, and you'll be able to pick out some of the themes she introduced, some of the sub-routines she helped evolve.” He drew another set of lines over the first, eradicating the pattern he'd produced with another just as meaningless to my eyes. “It's complicated, but it all follows certain rules. Seen from the right viewpoint—the viewpoint of a future Vlhani, for instance—you're able to read not only the meaning of those movements, but also how they must have been developed. With enough patience, you'll be able to piece together the specific refinements of all the generations that came before ... working your way back, one Ballet at a time ... until at long last you reconstruct how they must have started with a single dancer very much like her, playing a part very much like hers.” He drew a third pattern in the same patch of dirt, and said: “If you understood the Ballet at all, you would know just how intricate an epic it is—how every single dancer who ever played a part, in all of its thousands of years of history, was a vital participant in the choreography of all the years to come. And someday, when it reaches its conclusion, and accomplishes everything the Vlhani know it can do, everybody involved in its evolution will have been a part of something transcendent. That's not dying, Mr. Royko. That's a little bit like living forever."

I asked the question that haunted everybody who had ever seen the Vlhani dance. “But for what purpose?"

He turned toward me, making direct eye contact for the first time. I expected him to be devastated, possibly even torn to pieces by denial. What I saw in his eyes was far worse: a deep, abiding faith in the Ballet, and an equally overwhelming pity for me, the outsider who would always be unable to appreciate it.

He said, “I wish you had enough of a vocabulary to understand. I wish human speech provided me with enough of a vocabulary to explain it. I wish I could dance it, even once, just to show you. I wish I could work out all the problems and let everybody know what I see, just once. It's just ... too goddamned important. Not just for them. But for everybody. Everywhere."

He spoke as a man who knew the world was burning and couldn't find anybody willing to listen to the warnings..

Maybe it was the moment. But I noticed something then that I hadn't noticed before: that we weren't alone after all. There were a pair of Vlhani a few hundred meters away, each standing still as distant from each other as they were from us. I didn't have to turn around to know that if I scanned the other direction I would probably find more. Sentries? Lookouts?

An Honor Guard?

My heart thumped. “Dalmo ... why is Ch'tpok studying you? Why did she and Shalakan call you the dance? Why were those spiders making such a fuss over you, last night? Why do they think you're so special?"

He closed his eyes tight enough to make my own burn.

“Because I see it, Mr. Royko. Not just the little bits and pieces most of my fellow Pilgrims see ... but all of it. Everything the dance means. Everything it's ever going to mean. Everything that has to be done to bring out its real potential. I just can't do enough to make it happen."

I struggled for words. “Shalakan said ... something about her dance being your accomplishment, not hers. I almost thought that was just love talking..."

He shook his head. “Shal loved me for what I could give her."

“And you?"

“I loved her so much I let her have it."

He rose and walked into the desert, his right leg dragging. Partial paralysis, even now. Whatever he'd gained from the enhancements cost him the pleasure of walking with confidence. I considered going after him, lest he freeze up again, somewhere out of sight, and end up baking his brainpan beneath the heat of the broiling midday sun. Somehow, it seemed like a bad idea. He may have been a damaged thing who would never accomplish that which he'd changed himself to do—but for this moment, he had earned a few minutes away from my eyes.

It also occurred to me, too late, that my link was still off.

I hadn't archived a single damn word he'd said.

It was the first commandment drummed into the head of every neurec slinger: Don't Miss Anything. The turnoff option was a courtesy provided those occasional slingers who liked to have personal lives in between bouts of professional sensation, who may have wanted to eat meals or take shits or make love without the queasiness that comes from sharing the most intimate moments with millions of future voyeurs. Not all slingers used it; I knew a couple so burned out that they remained linked all their waking hours. I wasn't that far gone, fortunately—I liked being able to relate to people—but I was still pretty good about catching everything important. Missing the first conversation with the grieving, disabled husband was a professional gaffe of the highest order.

At the moment, I couldn't have cared less.

I returned to Ch'tpok, who had curled into a fetal position. (That was human, at least; I recalled reading somewhere that her adopted folks the Riirgaans grew their fetuses in straight lines.) The frown built into her face was even more pronounced now, but she looked peaceful anyway. I knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

She came awake with a nova-intensity smile. “Slinger Man."

“Riirgaan Lady,” I said, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “Good morning."

“Is it morning?"

“Don't kill me for this, dear Chuppock, but it's more than morning. We overslept."

Her eyebrows knit tighter. “She's gone?"

“They both are."

A moment of discontinuity, as she processed that. “Dalmo too?"

“Yes."

She sat up in a hurry, clutching at the discarded clothing of the night before. “Goddammit, why didn't you tell me? You saw the way he is, you know he can't take care of himself! If he wanders too far, and freezes up again..."

I took her by the shoulders. “Not a chance. The Vlhani posted nursemaids. They know what he's worth."

She almost fought me, but then the message sank in, and she relaxed all at once, the panic giving way to a sadness so deep it almost qualified as mourning. I knew something else, then: something I'd already suspected but had not confirmed until now—that she loved him.

I hadn't invested any emotional permanence to our one night, but it still stung.

The angle of the sun seemed to change several degrees in the time it took her to face me. When she did, her eyes were defiant. “Do you understand how important he is?"

“Yes,” I said. “I've seen it before."

9.

Even neurec slingers have childhoods. Mine had been seventy-five light years away, on a wheelworld called Eden.

You don't need to know the nasty details, but the place name was false advertising of the cruellest kind. The owners didn't want it to be pleasant, or even livable—just survivable. The indentures who sold off the months and years in their lives in exchange for one-way passage there discovered that the promises of a better life were just empty propaganda, produced by backers less interested in the creation of a self-sustained community than they were in exploiting the trapped tenants of a one-factory town. Intended as a slum from the moment it was commissioned, it wasn't called Eden by the people who had to live and work there. I won't repeat the name they did use. I follow the promise I made to myself, on getting out, to never utter the epithet again.

But while I was still imprisoned there, believing I'd die a wasted old man at forty years Mercantile standard, chol was one of the few forms of recreation we had. It was an indigenous song style, performed a capella and produced so deep in the throat that one visitor who heard it for the first time characterized it as a unique form of musical wheeze. Chol compositions were short, but soulful; joyous, but filled with the desperation of the trapped; tonal, but as expressive as any combination of words. More conventional singing styles were sometimes used to add clarifying lyrics. It didn't happen often. Chol didn't really need it, and it wasn't a great idea, in any environment patrolled by company police, to let those in power know what the songs were actually about. It was enough that we knew, and that we were able to take comfort in giving our pain a voice.

Everybody I grew up with performed chol, if they were any good. Most weren't. But there was one kid who happened to be better than good. Better than genius. Better, even, than magical. The sounds that came out of him had no business coming out of a human being; they stretched not only what was physically possible to sing, but also what was emotionally possible to say. He used to climb up to the rafters in the dormitories where everybody our age was housed, position himself at the junction of two cross-beams, and improvise music that immediately called Time-Out on all the casual brutalities we inflicted upon each other the rest of the time. Sometimes he sang, too. He was not bad at that. But he was unparalleled at chol; it was an art form that existed nowhere else, and he had a gift for it. Even now, a lifetime away, I think about the sounds he made and I remain convinced that, had he escaped with his instrument intact, he would have been known forever.

Alas, one major risk of the industry we trained for was degenerative lung damage, and this kid got it early. It didn't kill him outright. But his windpipe coarsened, his air capacity shrivelled, and he lost the sounds he was able to make earlier in youth. I stayed too long to prevent it from happening to him, and I died inside the night he tried to perform anyway, producing a series of gasps and squeaks all the more pathetic for its recognizable connection to the music he was determined to make. The music itself wasn't gone. He knew which notes he wanted to phrase. By any standard of raw talent, he was exactly as great as he had ever been. He was even greater, thanks to the pain that had tempered him and given him so much more to say. But he was not able to call any of it forth. The music was now forever trapped inside him, like any other clawed thing that could scar the walls of its cage but would never be able to rip its way free.

I wasn't that boy any more. I was just the boy who had escaped not to achieve freedom, but to avoid the pity of those who had known him.

And who knew enough to recognize Dalmo as part of the same sad fraternity.

Dalmo wasn't merely a vital participant, like Shalakan or Gabriel or even Isadora had been. He had come up with insights even the Vlhani themselves had never been able to produce. He understood the ultimate point of the Ballet, appreciated what it meant, and saw the purpose of this thing the Vlhani and now their human acolytes had spilled so much of their own blood trying to construct. He even knew the special contribution only he was gifted enough to make, the contribution that, to hear him say it, might bring this single evolving work of art to fruition ... and it was all a waste; his limitless talent just refused to connect with the limited tools he'd been given to express it.

Da Vinci with his hands cut off is still Da Vinci. Just Da Vinci in hell.

And Dalmo possessed just enough ability to let the Vlhani and his fellow pilgrims know it.

10.

Even with what I'd been through in my own life, I still didn't appreciate just how much the obsession cost him. But I got an idea two hours later, when he returned pale, drawn, and shaking. Three Vlhani came with him, hovering like nurses worried about the well-being of a patient who shouldn't have been out of bed. He didn't look at them, but then he didn't really look at Ch'tpok and me, either. He faced us, even saw us, but gazed only at something behind us, greater than us, that loomed untold lifetimes away.

“That was a bad one,” he murmured.

Ch'tpok moved right past the Vlhani bodyguards and braced him. “It's all right, Dal. I'm here."

“Are you? Are any of us? Do you have any idea what the Ballet has to say about what it means to be anywhere?” His knees buckled and the Vlhani surged forward to help Ch'tpok support his weight. They moved so quickly that my own impulse to catch him came after the others were well on their way to carrying him back inside. “I ... oh, hell ... oh, damn..."

I followed, feeling useless. The interior was now pretty crowded, with three Hom.Sap and three Vlhani; the spiders, who needed ample space for gesturing and were effectively gagged by the low ceiling, held their whips close, their heads bobbing about with the restlessness of hyperactive human children struggling to obey a parental Shut Up. Dalmo lay on the ground, his pain-wracked form speckled with desert sand. His legs writhed like angry snakes. He must have clawed Ch'tpok, who knelt beside him fumbling with sedatives from her kit, I don't know how she could even see with that angry gash in her forehead oozing scarlet into her eyes. As for me, I did the only thing neurec slingers have ever been equipped to do: I stood there and watched.

He spotted me, though. “Mr. Royko! Are you there?"

I didn't move. “Yes, Dalmo. I'm here."

“I loved her! Do you see that, Mr. Royko? Do you believe me?"

I might have hesitated if not for Ch'tpok's eyes, beseeching me as Vlhani arms held Dalmo down. “Yes. I believe you."

“Then come to the Ballet! Make sure you watch!"

It was an unnecessary promise; Shalakan's dance was after all a major part of the spectacle I'd travelled so far to capture. But even if Dalmo hadn't been convulsing with the need to hear the actual words, Ch'tpok's eyes raged just as hot. I gave the answer they wanted. “I'll watch, Dalmo. I promise."

She put him down. He sank to the cube floor, his arms and legs unfurling like banners robbed of all motivating wind. The Vlhani bobbed over him, tapped their big black heads together in a gesture that might have been their equivalent of a distraught group hug, then moved past me to the exit.

Ch'tpok held Dalmo's head in her lap and sang. I can only suppose that's what she was doing, since the sound itself was more Riirgaan than human. It bubbled with glottal stops and atonal whistles, and was beautiful enough, though few human audiences would have been able to discern a lullaby.

It had the desired effect, because once his eyes closed he seemed to have found some kind of peace. It was a temporary peace, and the last I would ever see him have, but it was there nevertheless.

It was not at all reflected by the loss I saw in Ch'tpok's eyes.

She murmured, “God Damn It."

Thinking of chol, I said: “Yeah. God Damn It."

We may have been tired of using it, but sometimes no other phrase will do.

I watched her tend to him for maybe twenty minutes. Then I went outside and used my pocket hytex to signal the Riirgaan Embassy for a ride back. The skimmer arrived while Ch'tpok was still inside with Dalmo. I hopped aboard and left without saying goodbye, already thinking of the show to come.

11.

This year's Vlhani Ballet came together in the same natural amphitheater that had hosted millennia of ballets before it. The hundred thousand chosen Vlhani swarmed out of the hills. The entire landscape turned black from them, the world dappling from the sunlight that reflected off their great mirrored heads. Avoiding only the northern rim, where the diplomats and observers from seven separate offworld species traditionally gathered to watch, they approached from every other compass point at once, moving in clean orderly sweeps over the edge and toward the killing ground where so many before them had died. Some stayed behind on the southern rim, as eager to watch as we were. Between them, millions of serpentine whips twirled above their heads in the kind of gestures that might have been prayers and might have been their equivalent of the excruciatingly banal small talk that has always dominated the last conversations before long-anticipated ceremonies.

They took their positions, milled about in the seeming chaos that Riirgaan exolinguists called the Primary Ascension, then began to move faster. Black heads bobbed up and down like bubbles floating on a sea of writhing snakes, only to descend again, beneath carpets of intertwined black whips caressing each other in ebony knots. The dancers came together, separated, leaped into the sky in waves, slowed down just long enough to provide contrast, then sped up, becoming blurs, turning the performance into a blur of undifferentiated motion. There were times when all of them were synchronized, times when they seemed about as well-organized as a riot, and times when all of the dancers made enough room for a single Vlhani to step forward and punctuate the performance with a solo that elaborated on themes visible in the Ballet as a whole.

It turned out to be one of the longest Ballets the Vlhani had given in recorded history. Some had lasted only a few hours, others a couple of days. This one was epic. It went on longer than any normal human spectator could have been expected to follow it. Even those offworlders known for their endurance had trouble staying for the whole thing. My fellow Hom.Saps, the naked Ambassador Croyd included, all attended in dour shifts. The Riirgaans came and went with enthusiasm, seeing nothing but beauty even as the first few deaths bloodied the floor of the valley below. Among the organics, the Tchi probably stayed awake longest, but they were so busy complaining about the lack of discernment on the part of the other delegations that they probably saw nothing at all. Only the hovering AIsource flatscreens stayed for the whole thing, recording billions of nano-movements in precisely detailed increments.

The limitations of human observation being what they are, most of the neural records provided at the time were fragmentary. They had to be pieced together, and well supplemented with AIsource data and the far more inclusive holos taken by the instruments the various offworlders traditionally set up around the site. Nobody saw it all, even if they were destined to spend years picking it apart.

I stayed for the whole thing.

It was an Enhancement I'd been provided by the linkcaster. Strictly temporary, good for one-time only: an implant that cleansed blood toxins and divorced me from any need for sleep for the entirety of the seven days it took this year's dance to progress from first step to last death. I couldn't see everything, of course; no human mind, enhanced or not, could follow everything that happened on that one teeming stage. But I took in as much of it as any one person could, following not only the show before me but also the reactions of the various diplomats behind me.

I followed Shalakan's performance with special interest; she threaded in and out of everything that happened around her with an elegance that tried but failed to transcend the terrible, scarlet moment when the whips of her dance partners sectioned her into pieces. Too much has been written about how beautiful she was during that performance: the same things that were written the first year when Isadora fell, and would be written the next year when Melaniherz fell. If you want to know what it felt like to watch her die, you don't have to ask me. My neurec's still available for those who need to isolate the moment when one more piece of my soul chipped off and died. The bit analysis is available for those who want the moment-by-moment coverage.

No, I want to talk about the part that came after that, which few people noticed. The part that you don't know about because it got edited out; the part that should have been the real story.

12.

It happened on the southern rim, opposite the vantage point traditionally taken by offworld spectators, among the sizeable gathering of Vlhani who had come to this place to watch their brethren struggle and dance and die. There were usually a large number of dance pilgrims among them as well, but they had moved away over the past few hours, either retreating into the desert or drifting to other outlooks along the rim. Their exodus had been so gradual that, in the face of the far more spectacular show taking place down below, nobody had noticed the stage being set for a sideshow. Few saw it even when one row of Vlhani all lined up side by side, each extending a pair of long black whips in a gesture that reminded me of a formal salute. The whips all came down and stabbed the dirt together, forming a barrier which almost immediately rose to reveal a single human form, emerging from their midst.

I had been alone for the majority of the Ballet. That was good. Paying attention was my job. Distractions would have marred the playback. But Ch'tpok, who I hadn't seen since the failed interview in the desert, now sought me out, snuck up behind me, and whispered in my ear: “Now."

I heard her voice but couldn't afford to turn around to see her. The recording would have been damaged.

I understood why she said it. She wanted to make sure I knew he was starting. But the reminder was unnecessary. I'd been waiting for this. I took the rangeviewers from my jacket pocket and watched the scene at full magnification.

It was a man, pale, naked, trembling, and not extraordinary in any way. He limped, dragging one leg, hardly seeming to notice as the Vlhani parted before him. He had eyes for nothing but the dirt.

When he reached the circle of open ground they had reserved for him, he just stood there, blinking, as if lost in their adulation.

His arms extended. He spread them wide, as if claiming the whole universe above him. He arched back, doubling over, making a knot of himself. He drew himself in, wrapping himself tight, forming a little personal universe with himself as its own citizen. He seemed capable of shrinking still further, retreating so far that he became a singularity, about to disappear in a single dot of compressed misery.

Then he uncurled, opening himself up, turning his back on wherever he had been a few short seconds before. He kept this up a long time, longer than just the increased flexibility of a dance pilgrim should have permitted. He made it seem that, however much he uncurled, however tall he managed to stand, there was still a part of himself huddled in the dirt. He bloomed and he continued to bloom and he made it a drive that would never be able to satisfy, and he did this in the midst of hundreds of Vlhani who for that moment all seemed willing to defer to him. And then he raised his pale ribbonlike arms and allowed the opening movements of his great unperformed dance to ripple down those arms in the sine waves that have always been the densest form of Vlhani communication.

It would be nice to report that his dance was brilliant, that in these hours after the death of his wife, his heartbreak allowed him to overcome all of his physical limitations and give a performance that dwarfed anything taking place in the amphitheater below.

I would like to report that because for those few minutes at least, it actually seemed about to happen.

I would like to report it happened because it's what I was hoping would happen.

But the grace he showed was fleeting, the brilliance he demonstrated was pretty much all untapped potential, and the masterpiece he seemed about to perform never took place.

Instead, his limitations came back into play. He froze in mid-gesture. Paralyzed, imprisoned by the moment, probably screaming silent frustration at the mutiny of his nervous system, he stood in place, his body contorted, his eulogy undelivered.

The tableau lasted for an endless few seconds before the Vlhani nearest him surged forward, shielding him from view, mercifully drawing the curtain with their own bodies.

I don't think any of the other observers paid the incident any special notice.

The rest of the Ballet lasted forever. One hundred thousand marionettes and one altered human woman died for no cause I could fathom. Conscious of my responsibilities toward my audience, I willed myself to feel the glory. I'm told I was persuasive. Nobody enjoying the playback ever complained about my lack of sincerity.

When the Ballet was over, Ch'tpok was gone.

13.

The aftermath, on the offworlder side, was always the same in those days. The Riirgaans and the Bursteeni and the Tchi all scurried off to their embassies, to pore over the playback, in the vain hope that their translation programs had succeeded in furthering their understanding another percentile point or two. The Hom.Sap analysts did much the same, though not without muttering about the loss of another human life. The AIsource flitted about making no pronouncements at all, releasing no information beyond a strict accounting of the volume of data retrieved. Many representatives of many races expressed awe at the beauty they had seen. Some pretended understanding. Nobody produced an actual explanation.

I forwarded my file to the network via hytex, hitched a ride back to the human compound, found an unclaimed bunk in the common room and slept for fourteen hours.

Giving Ambassador Croyd all due credit, he waited until I woke naturally before having his two largest and most intimidating aides drag me to his office. They weren't very large and were way too soft at the edges to be intimidating: call them faux-thugs. There wasn't room for three on the tiny couch, but they still sat down on either side of me, their elbows resting against invisible notches in my ribs in a laughable effort to rattle my personal space. Croyd sat on the opposite side of his desk, his eyes red and shadowed, his shock of white hair now a wild starburst. Not only was he still naked, but he'd had something bready to eat recently: I could tell from the crumbs scattered in his thatches of chest hair. He tapped a drumbeat against the top of the desk, waiting for me to break the silence first.

When I didn't, he said: “I had an friend in the our first Embassy to Vlhan. The one the spiders attacked when my predecessor tried to keep Isadora out of the Ballet. He said that the dirt was muddy with blood, that there were some people torn into so many pieces that the cleanup detail had to freeze the parts in cryofoam cubes. After that, he gave up thinking that the Ballet was art. He called it a mass suicide and wished only that there was something he could do to get every single Vlhani to participate at once."

I said nothing.

“She died horribly. She was torn to pieces. And all over Confederate Space, morons with nothing better to do are patching into your neurec, thinking they can see something beautiful and profound in that. Some will want to follow where she led. No doubt one or two will even die the way she died. Does that bother you at all, Royko? Even a little?"

I tried to speak, found my throat too dry to make a sound. After a moment I managed it. “A little."

“Too bad,” he said. “That's not nearly enough to qualify as human. You're still a vampire. Did you find out anything about the Enhancements?"

“No."

“Nothing at all?"

“Nothing,” I said.

He might have pressed it, but then he lowered his weary eyes and made a dismissive gesture at the two faux-thugs, too fed up the night after such a bloodletting to continue with the empty charade of personal fearsomeness. They rose on either side of me with such smooth simultaneity that there might have been an invisible string connecting them, and strolled out the door together. Croyd watched their backs recede with all the sadness of a man watching the departure of the only two friends he had in this world. When the door closed behind them, he shook his head. “You have colluded with a great evil, but there's no law against that on this world, so here's the best I can do. You'll be transporting out of here in seven days. Between now and then I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear you, and I sure as hell don't want to smell you. You will not receive any amenities from my staff beyond the bare minimum necessary to support your worthless life, and then you will get the hell out of here and never come back. Does that leave you with any questions?"

All my instincts warned to say nothing.

There was no reason to say anything, anyway. I'd sent my recording off. I had finished the assignment. I had no official remaining interest in the madness of everyday life on Vlhan.

So I rose from the couch and headed toward the door. But something stopped me just before I left—a sense of questions unanswered, business unfinished—and I found myself turning to face the Ambassador's glare once again. “Sir ... what do you know about a woman named Ch'tpok?"

He looked surprised. “That Riirgaan girl who was doing the study on Shalakan?"

“Yes. Except she's human, not Riirgaan."

His surprise turned to annoyance. “You know who I mean. What about her?"

“Tell me what you know."

He next tried dubiousness on for size. “Are you attracted to her, Royko? Is this supposed to be a dating service I'm running here?"

I waited.

Ultimately, he sighed. “If you've met her, you know almost everything we do. Her family defected a long time ago, over some piddling political reason or another. Then they defected from Riirgaan too, leaving her there to grow up with the lizards. From what I understand, she went through their education system, their coming-of-age rituals, their religious instruction, even this sort of sexless ritual marriage thing they do, and is quite open about believing in none of it. Their Ambassador, Hurrr'poth, considers her the Riirgaan equivalent of an adopted daughter. We've offered to repatriate, but she says she's not interested. Told me, the time we met, that she prefers her biological species from the outside; says we're more entertaining that way. Even chittered that annoying laugh the Riirgaans have. And why did I waste even that much time out of my day telling you this?"

“Because I need to talk to her again,” I said.

He stared at me, not knowing how to read what he saw.

Then he scowled. “I don't like you, Royko. I'm not interested in your infatuations. I just want you off this world as soon as possible."

He was right, of course. I had nothing more to say to her, or to Dalmo.

But finding them still required less than a day.

14.

The Riirgaans had established their embassy by a lake in one of the wispy, ethereal forests that dotted Vlhan's temperate zone, a place as quiet as an unspoken thought that nevertheless constantly teased the eye with tiny flying things that darted from one hiding place to the next whenever they imagined themselves unobserved. The air was cool and misty, the cabins of the Riirgaan rustic in style but far too sturdy to have anything to do with the region's fragile wood. The embassy personnel drifted from cabin to cabin in twos and threes, chittering away in a variety of languages ranging from their own to Hom.Sap Mercantile; they noticed my arrival, in a skimmer I'd borrowed from a contact among the Bursteeni, but only one changed his routines to investigate me.

That one led me to their Ambassador Hurrr'poth, who gave me certain things I needed and had me escorted to their on-site hospital facility, and a certain bright green room where I found two figures lying in utter silence.

Ch'tpok lay curled on a mattress that had curled into a crescent to mimic the position of her body. Her eyebrows were knit with that special species of worry that occurs only in troubled sleep.

The object of her dreams drifted on his back on the surface of a flotation pool, staring open-eyed at the ceiling. The proportions of his arms and legs were uneven, but close to mainline human; a sign of his enhanced anatomy, contracting to the positions it assumed at rest.

I wanted to wake Ch'tpok, but Dalmo sensed my presence first. His eyes twitched. “Don't disturb her. She needs her rest; she's been fussing over me all day."

The Riirgaans had provided me with a stool capable of housing the Hom.Sap posterior. Carrying it in, I parked myself beside the pool and looked down at Dalmo. “She cares about you."

Dalmo's body twitched and bobbed, forming ripples in the amber liquid. “No. She's like Shalakan. She cares about the Dance."

Was that bitterness? “You're also a man."

Were he not paralyzed, he might have shrugged; he managed to express the gesture with an eye-twitch. “I sometimes think so. I sometimes wish not."

There was nothing I could say to that.

We remained silent for a while, listening to the ripples in the flotation tank and the whispering rasp of Ch'tpok's breath. Then he said: “I wanted to dance for Shalakan. I wanted to pay tribute to her. I froze up. I fell mute."

“The message got through,” I assured him.

“Don't humor me!” he said.

“I'm not. It looked good."

“You're blind,” he said.

More silence.

And then: “You know, Shalakan and I met in surgery. Not before or after our surgery. Not in recovery from our surgery. During our surgery."

“You mean, while getting your Enhancements?"

A wry, if lopsided grin. “I'm not about to tell you who did it, or where it was done. I can't, you know. Silence on the subject is one of the changes they built in."

“Tell me what you can."

He coughed, without really needing to; enhanced lungs knew no congestion. It was just the delaying tactic of a man trying to put off what needed to be said. “You have to imagine what it was like. I was just a strange, lonely kid who thought he saw something in a pirated neurec of the Ballet, and was so driven by that understanding that I was willing to re-invent myself to become part of it. Contacting the Engineers was easy. They found me. But nobody told me how much the change would cost."

“What did it cost, Dalmo?"

“The body has to be rebuilt, practically cell by cell. The nervous system has to be rewired, given a new race memory. I won't insult you or the Ballet by saying how much pain is involved. But it takes two full Mercantile years, with the machines working on you every moment. You're only pieces for most of it. And you're awake throughout; you need a normal sleep cycle for the neural restructuring to take. The Engineers understand that human beings need company to endure it. Shalakan and I were given each other."

I tried to comprehend what it must have been like. “That must have been a comfort."

He was far away, now, reliving the tortures of a time now dead. “No. I was too weak. From the first day I screamed for it to stop. She was the strong one. She only screamed some of the time. She told me she loved me before I could speak a single sane word. But by the time I was able to give her anything, I loved her too. It was the only thing that got us through the recovery. That ... and talking about the Ballet. Which we both knew would always be far more important to both of us than we could ever be to each other."

They were words that should have been drowned in tears, but his eyes remained dry. I leaned in close: “And then?"

“You know what then. She proved more compatible. She became a dancer. I became,” he groped for a phrase, “a marionette with tangled strings."

“But she still stayed with you, Dalmo."

“She had to. Because while she had the physical ability ... her understanding of the Ballet itself was only mediocre. She didn't meet Vlhani standards. She didn't have the right insights. Without me, there would have been no chance of her ever being chosen.” He closed his eyes, keeping them shut for so long that I wondered if he'd fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, his words even softer than they'd been before; “So I taught her."

It was a good thing my neurec had already been sent to the publisher, because the weight of what I'd just been told might have burned out the playback. The blood pounding in my ears, I said: “What?"

“The only woman I've ever loved. Probably the only woman I ever will love. And I'll never be sure she really loved me, because we spent years giving her everything she needed in order to leave me.” His eyes popped open and stared at the ceiling again. They were not quite aligned with each other, the way human eyes ought to be, with the one on the left trying hard to retreat beneath a droopy lid. Neither seemed to see me at all. He whispered: “If I didn't know what the Ballet is for, I'd hate it. If I didn't know what I still have left to do, I'd kill myself. But I don't have those options.” His words became thick, sludgy. “Art speaks to art, Mr. Royko. The Ballet will never be complete if what I know stays in my head. I have to find another way. Get Enhanced again. Changed Again. And Again after that. Make them invent the right procedures for me, if they have to. Anything that's Necessary. It's that important."

“And Ch'tpok?"

“It's not love. At least not for me. But she's still the one who'll get me where I need to go."

I thought about waking her. I thought about dragging her off the ameboid mattress and hauling her away from this literally damned man before she was forced to pay a price as great as he had paid. I wrote ten separate scripts for the eloquent things I could have said to make her see reason. But she was a Riirgaan who only happened to look human; I was a neurec slinger whose feelings were his stock in trade; and we were both on Vlhan, where sacrificing yourself to the cause of the great Ballet was not a sick abnormality but a religious calling.

Call it cowardice. Call it sympathy from a crippled artist who knew exactly how Dalmo felt. Call it even the curse of a neurec slinger, so accustomed to experiencing life as a spectator that concrete action of any kind requires more will than I had.

But once again I turned my back without speaking. I left the room, and Vlhan, and did not see her again for ten years Hom.Sap Mercantile.

15.

They were the ten busiest years of my professional life.

I travelled from system to system, covering the empathy drought, the search for the beast Magrison, the unveiling of the Michelard Colossus, the riot at the latest Vossoff funeral, even the banquet held at a house of an unremarkable old Hom.Sap couple worshipped by a cult of interstellar cargo loaders. I saw all the things I was supposed to see and felt all the things I was supposed to feel and even made myself a little reputation for the intensity of my coverage, which didn't quite make up for the sensation of dying inside, one piece at a time, as it came to mean less and less.

I didn't go out of my way to follow developments on Vlhan. It was, after all, a place I'd visited for less than two weeks, covering one story out of many—even if it happened to be one story that sometimes left me gasping after dreams I barely remembered.

But you couldn't live in Hom.Sap civilization without hearing more about the Ballet. It remained a sensation, despite the Confederacy's efforts to paint it as a monstrosity. The source of the pilgrim Enhancements remained a mystery despite the entire system treasuries the Confederacy poured into tracking down those responsible. The neurecs went on-line, the analyses flew back and forth by hytex, the human dancers who participated became celebrities and then gods. There were novels and vids about star-crossed romances with the Ballet as a backdrop, even a few that told the tale of Shalakan in terms that substituted sensation for insight. (Two of those theorized that she had survived somehow, and set up housekeeping with Isadora and Melaniherz and all the dancers who came before and after, none of whom died as we had seen them die; the fictitious bungalow grew awfully crowded by the time the number of humans approved for the Ballet exceeded a dozen per performance.)

I felt a chill the year the dance pilgrims training on Vlhan exceeded one million. Few of those were ever chosen for the performance, of course, but the Confederacy still cried genocide the first and only year more than a thousand humans danced and died. By then the celebrity phase of the movement was over, of course. By then the humans were almost as faceless in their numbers as the Vlhani.

The updates on Dalmo arrived without my invitation, waiting for me at every new destination. I heard when he married again, to Moralia, a second pilgrim woman who also used his help to qualify for the Ballet. I heard when she died. I heard when he became a teacher guiding other chosen toward their own final performances. I heard when he disappeared, and when he returned to Vlhan with even more radical enhancements, intended to take him closer to the time when he'd be able to join the Ballet himself. The holo I have of him as he appeared at that time shows an emaciated male torso that sprouts half a dozen long black whips uncompromised by any resemblance to human arms and legs. The face is Dalmo's, but it's slack-jawed, heavy-lidded, idiot in its lack of emotional affect. The whips move in painful spasms, occasionally leavened by grace. The Vlhani surrounding him move with such comparative ease that they're like giants, unwittingly mocking the clumsy visitor on stilts. Ch'tpok's there, too: a shadowy observer in their midst, absorbing everything she sees with inscrutable rapture.

I never liked the updates. As a slinger I saw more than my share of tragedy, but the Dalmo updates felt different: like dispatches in the evolution of a skimmer crash occurring before me in slow motion.

Still, I might have spent my entire life going from disaster to disaster, feeling none of them, never stirring myself to a moment of genuine participation ... were it not for the summons that called me back.

It didn't come from Ch'tpok. I was about forty light years away, returning from a sensational murder case involving defendants of four separate species, and a victim who remained conscious despite passing all of the clinical definitions of death, when my sponsors diverted my latest transport to Vlhan. They wanted me to cover Rafael, a young man whose charm and magnetism and passion for the Vlhani Ballet had rendered him the first Chosen dancer to capture the imagination of the Hom.Sap public in three years Mercantile. And while I did my job, and spoke to him and watched him perform and saw him die, he was not the real story any more than Shalakan had been.

16.

The growing Pilgrim city known as Nureyev occupied a stark expanse of shoreline between one of Vlhan's many deserts and one of its rarer freshwater seas. Why the Pilgrims had chosen that particular spot for their promised land was anybody's guess. Maybe the Vlhani themselves dictated the site. Or maybe, like most fanatics, the Pilgrims believed they could ennoble their cause with suffering.

Established soon after Isadora's dance as a handful of ragged tents, huddled defiantly against both the dry desert winds and the diplomatic firestorms that had greeted their arrival, Nureyev had grown into a boom town, with many square kilometers of cramped cubehouses arrayed in as disorganized a grid as possible. There were still a few battered tents scattered around the perimeter, a phenomenon common to many frontiers that attract new citizens faster than the old can be housed. It was in no way a self-sufficient community; the Pilgrims grew only a little food and produced even fewer goods, surviving mostly on the support of the various alien embassies who continued to supply them with staples despite the Hom.Sap Confederacy's increasingly shrill protests that this only encouraged more pilgrims to show up.

There were about eighty thousand Hom.Saps in Nureyev, most of them Enhanced. There was also always a scattering of aliens, visiting from their respective delegations, sometimes mingling with each other, sometimes keeping to themselves, always observing the mysteries of Vlhan with a fascination that transcended species.

And Vlhani, of course. Whether alone or in groups, they moved among their followers with the self-assurance of Gods on daily errands. Or if not gods, then something else: for as my skimmer banked over the central marketplace, the thousands of undulating whips on display resembled nothing so much as an inferno of writhing snakes.

Ch'tpok was, as promised, waiting at a table outside one of Nureyev's slapdash bars. Years of desert conditions, without compensatory rejuvenation by AIsource Medical, had aged her more than time could have. She was grayer, browner, more leathery about the eyes. She wore battered old Hom.Sap gear instead of the Riirgaan uniform she'd affected years ago. The frown built into her features now looked more like a scowl. But the weariness lightened when she saw me, and she flashed the same dazzling smile I remembered from so long ago. She didn't stand to greet me, but instead just raised her beer in a salute. “Mr. Royko. Been a lot of years."

“Not so many you can't still call me Paul,” I said, as I took the seat opposite hers.

“Um,” she said. “I did call you Paul, didn't I?"

“For a while,” I said.

“I remember,” she said, and for a moment we both smiled. “You know, you made the best recording that day. Some of the young ones, pilgrims I mean, tell me how inspiring they found it."

My expression must have been complicated. “Thank you."

“I'll call you Paul."

“And I'm still willing to try to pronounce Chuppock."

Her eyes darkened, lowered, and found something intensely interesting to study on the surface of her beer. The moment was fleeting, though; before the clouds had a chance to gather the sunlight broke through, revealing a determined cheer that must have taken her some effort to maintain. “My,” she said. “We really have been out of touch for a while, haven't we?—That's not my name anymore. A while back I had a misunderstanding with my adopted species and was forced to renounce my affiliation."

That was a stunner. “You're not Riirgaan anymore?"

“Never was,” she said, taking dark enjoyment in my reaction.

“I mean, legally. What are you, Hom.Sap now?"

“Wish I could say I was; it would be awfully convenient sometimes.” There was another flash of darkness, dispelled just as quickly. “No. The Confederacy said it wouldn't let me reclaim Hom.Sap citizenship without first making a public statement renouncing my support for the Ballet. So I'm legally nothing."

I thought of what it must have been like to have no home, not even in theory; to have fewer rights than a representative of a species not yet judged Sentient or Animal, to have the closest thing to a consensus government in a thousand human worlds decide that the entire race would turn its back on her.

My reaction must have shown on my face, because she laughed out loud. “Don't look so damn stricken. People have been without countries before. And while I may not have rights anywhere else, the Vlhani don't care about stupid concepts like citizenship and species loyalty."

It was still exile, and it had taken more out of her than she evidently liked to pretend, but I declined to say so. “What can I call you?"

She made a Vlhani gesture, her right arm looping around itself in an uneven spiral. The move was lyrical, beautiful, and so fleeting that until she repeated it twice I wasn't sure I'd seen it at all. “That's what they call me."

Damn. She'd obtained Enhancements of her own. I wondered if she harbored any dreams of giving her life for the Ballet, and felt a pang at the idea: as brief as our past encounter had been, I still remembered her with too much fondness to wish such an end for her. Wanting to protest, I tried to imitate her new name with a flappy arm movement and failed.

Another grin. “Call me Chuppock, if you must. This time it can even be the correct pronunciation."

“All right,” I said. “Chuppock."

The pause between us lasted as long as some entire Vlhani Ballets, with nothing filling it except for mutual anticipation. A number of marionettes and pilgrims passed by, limbs flailing in communication many times more frenzied but not any more articulate than our silence. There were any number of things I could have said to break the moment, but I just asked, “Where is he, Chuppock?"

She looked away, studied the rough wood surface of the table, and drummed her fingertips against the grain. “Is it just for a story, or do you really want to know?"

My answer was no answer at all. “What do you think?"

I wouldn't have blamed her for refusing to tell me. We really didn't know each other well, and the media have been disregarding pledges of secrecy since before the bygone era of paper.

But if there was one thing that personified all questions about the Vlhani Ballet, it was the genuine need to know ... and if there was one thing that characterized humanity it was the equal, and compensatory, need to tell.

After a long time, she said: “Dalmo always said he'd see you again."

17.

The clinic was dim and humid and filled with a smoky something that wasn't exactly breathable but didn't have the courtesy to suffocate you either. The walls echoed with the cries of other patients, some of which sounded human enough but made no coherent sense. All of those interred here had been damaged beyond repair by the Enhancement technology; none had any hope of getting better.

The figure in the hammock was the worst. Neither Vlhani or human or the hybrid pilgrim enhancements were meant to achieve, he was just a failure, twitching and writhing from his inability to achieve any of those lost but exalted states.

The torso I'd seen in the holo was gone. It had been simplified, streamlined, reduced to a knotty cable that might have begun existence as a human spinal column. Bags of moist something clung to the cable by straps. So did a human head, still recognizable as the man I'd met, but robbed of his passion and intelligence. Even the eyes were blind, clouded. I would have thought him brain-dead were it not for the hovering AIsource monitor busily translating every neural jolt into screens of data.

Behind me, Ch'tpok said:. “They kept trying. They never did it for anybody else, but they kept taking him back to try again. Six, seven stages already: all making him a little less human, all in search of a system capable of expressing the choreography locked inside his head."

It was monstrous. It made me want to vomit. I choked: “And he wants it this way?"

“He isn't driven by what he wants,” she said. “He's driven by what he needs to do."

I moved closer to the damaged creature in the hammock, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to think. I felt horror, awe, repugnance, amazement, and for a moment, the ghost of another feeling I couldn't identify. Retrospect, much later on, allowed me to identify that feeling as understanding. Maybe my own exposure to the Ballet had given me some awareness of the Vlhani plan; maybe I couldn't tell what that plan was all about but still understood that it was about something. Maybe my first glimpse of what Dalmo had become gave me some sense of progress toward the realization of what they wanted.

Or maybe it was just plain pity for the idiot who had damned himself to hell for a belief. “Can I talk to him?"

“He doesn't make much sense these days. But the monitor will translate.” She spoke up: “Amplify, please."

The flatscreen obliged, flashing the words in Hom.Sap Mercantile while simultaneously speaking the words in a simulation of Dalmo's voice: “Dance. Future. Dance. Time. Heat. Vlhani. Dance. Spin. Leap. Dance. Death. Life. Dance. Hate. Danger. Death. Time. Dance. Love. Dance. Ch'tpok. Dance. Fear. Fear. Pain. Dance. More. Dance.” It went on like that, the only pattern frequent repetition of the word “Dance.” The tone was insistent, even desperate, underlaid with the kind of irritation that comes with explaining something to somebody too stupid to get it.

Ch'tpok said, “That's in Mercantile, of course. It doesn't have enough of a common vocabulary to express what Dalmo's getting at. Unfortunately, there's not much more for those of us who understand the dance. We play the neurecs and get something useful to the Vlhani once every three or four days."

“Is that enough?"

“No,” she said. “He needs to move. He won't be able to do much the way he is now."

“Meaning more Enhancements,” I said.

“Another generation. Maybe two. Yes."

I could see it, then: more years in torment, more disfigurement, more pain and exile. Was it even something he was still capable of wanting? Or were Ch'tpok, and whoever else she included in the mysterious “We,” just torturing a lost soul whose potential, if any, had been lost several operations back? I opened my mouth to ask, realized while still forming the question that there was no way to phrase it without striking the barrier called faith, and shut my mouth, feeling trapped.

She seemed unsurprised. “You don't believe I love him?"

I turned, to confront eyes glowing with conviction. “I believe you love what you think he is. I don't know if that means doing what's best for him."

“Unfortunately,” she said, her smile becoming downright broad, “we can't all meet here in a few thousand years, take a look around us, and know who was right."

“No,” I said. “We can't."

She took me by the wrist and led me down the stinking corridor, past an array of other failed pilgrims in other states of degeneration. I allowed myself to be pulled along less out of faith that she'd take me someplace meaningful, than hope she'd take me away from so much wasted pain. She brought me outside and she led me across a bright sunlit plain to a sleepcube much like the one where I'd found her so long ago.

This one was empty but for a neural playback unit. She sat me down beside it, plugged me in, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Paul? Do you remember, a long time ago, I told you about the Riirgaan darrr'pakh?"

There were many things she'd spoken to me about, that were now lost; but that particular detail had stuck. “Yes."

“Well, mine said something to me, once, not long after I accepted that I'd never learn what he had to teach. He said that no piece of paper can bear words unless it's the right color to provide contrast with the ink. He said that just because the human mind was incompatible with his particular curriculum, didn't keep it from being receptive to other things. Even harder things.” She took a deep breath, and gave the machine a glance that suggested she resented it. “Dalmo said that you'd understand. He said that if you ever came back I would have to show this to you."

I stared at the playback leads. “What?"

“Art,” she said. “Speaking to art. A little gift from him to you."

I might have hesitated.

But then I plugged in—

18.

It was a recording of chol.

The neurec had been made by a genius at the peak of his abilities, capturing another whose sounds should have been entirely alien to any concerns involving the Vlhani Ballet. I had no idea how Dalmo knew that they would speak to me, or how he commissioned the performance. I can only say that the voice I heard was infinitely greater than I had been even on the best day of my life, that the tears sprung from my eyes within the first few notes, and that by the time I calmed down enough to listen I had discovered it was possible to miss hell if hell was the place where you were at your best.

And one other thing.

For the duration of that song, at least, I understood everything the Vlhani had been trying to express. I saw what Isadora and Shalakan and Dalmo had seen, what the pilgrims were desperate to create, what lesser visionaries like Ch'tpok and myself could appreciate only in fragments. I saw the millennia of Ballet performances as a single unified whole, creating a single, complex, exhaustively-annotated image. I saw what the image conveyed and I knew why the message had to be delivered and I understood why the Vlhani and all the humans who had begun to join them felt their own lives of minor consequence in the face of the ways everything would change upon the day of the final performance. I saw who in power harbored the secrets of the Enhancement engineers and I saw how those secrets were being kept and I understood the great colossal joke that was being played on the Confederate Dip Corps and its futile ambition to shut the Ballet down.

I saw all this and for a few moments I persuaded myself that I could use this knowledge to blackmail the engineers into inflicting their Enhancements upon me, so I could dance where all those others had danced before me. But that urge lasted less than a second. Almost as soon as it struck I knew that it was impossible. Even if I endured the surgeries, I didn't have what Dalmo had, or what Shalakan had. I didn't even have what Ch'tpok had. I could hear the music, for now—even if, like most complex melodies, its precise structure would no doubt fade from memory the second I stopped listening—but I would never be able to play the song.

It was a feeling I had felt before, upon losing chol.

The performance built to a crescendo. I saw the final Ballet, being performed on a Vlhani plain more than ten thousand years from now. It involved every single Vlhani alive at that time, gathered together from horizon to horizon, giving their all for the climax of the performance that had consumed their racial history. I saw, not thousands, but millions of altered humans among them. I sensed others, too far away for me to see: entire civilized worlds which had dedicated their entire populations to dancing these last few moments. I saw no indication that anybody would die in this last performance. I sensed only what all those sentients sensed as they raised their limbs for the last flourish.

And one other thing:

I saw that the Vlhani conception was flawed. That they were flailing about in a vacuum. That they'd never accomplish what they wanted to accomplish unless Dalmo pointed the way for them.

Why a human? Since it made no sense for a human to be able to accomplish what creatures evolved for this dance could not?

I saw the reason for that, too.

And it was the only part that frightened me.

As the song ended, I found myself on my hands and knees, shaking. Ch'tpok had her enhanced arms curled around me in a sort of harness, holding me tightly and murmuring soft reassurances as I passed through the various stages of hysteria.

I said, “Thousands of years.” Destroyed that I'd never see it. “Thousands."

Ch'tpok held me, and kissed me on the back on the neck. “But we'll get him there."

We, I thought. And knew it was true.

I would never dance.

But the rest of my life would be about making that final dance happen.

19.

Travel to a certain isolated plateau, in the southern hemisphere of the planet Vlhan, and you'll find the statue: a representation of a lone Vlhani, its whips contorted in expansive, frozen curls.

You'll wonder what it signifies, and you'll decide that at it means nothing. After all, Vlhani Dance requires movement. A static moment like this means nothing to them, without the choreography that carries one position to the next. It's realistic enough, even lifelike, but utterly without meaning, to anybody interested in decoding the great Vlhani Ballet.

Chances are that you'll describe it a curiosity and walk away.

Chances are that you won't return at some later date.

Chances are that if you do you won't notice the subtle differences between its position now and its position then. Those changes involve millimeters over a series of years—each micro-movement carefully planned, and laboriously plotted by the one part of this enhanced creature that still belongs to a lonely and tormented human being. You wouldn't see anything if you came back a year from now. Or even a century from now. But give it time. Sooner or later, with all its movements plotted and memorized, all its calculations finished and all its plans made, the thing will come to life and perform its dance at the proper speed. Sooner or later, it will tell the Vlhani what they need to know.

That, Ch'tpok tells me, is when everything will change.

Until then, it's just a statue.

You might consider it a monument.

But you won't guess which kind.

—END—

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