Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Brak swung his legs off the cot. Dizzy for a moment, he could nonetheless sit up, like a real person.

  “Treemon,” Yani continued, “will never again be able to make as united, as self-righteous, as arrogant an assault on remaking Ignatus. Ignatus will not in consequence revolt quite so hard, and Treemon will not respond with the genocide that isn’t ever far from the puritanically self-righteous.”

  Brak said hotly, “My people would never—”

  “So you think. Are you going to tell me a boy like you never had his own doubts about this war?”

  The wamu in the mountains, the shocked look on his friends’ faces when he talked to them, his mother’s averted gaze . . . all less than a week ago. Brak said nothing.

  Yani was relentless. “What do you say to that, young Brak?”

  “I say that you Servants of Peace could become as dangerous as the violence you’re trying to prevent.”

  “Oh, gods, yes,” Yani said, suddenly looking a decade older. “Don’t you think we know that?”

  “I don’t know,” Brak said. It seemed to him, teetering on the edge of a cot in this unreal place with these unimaginable people, that he was no longer sure of much of anything.

  “I know!” Claree cried. “Yani, Benn Ko, whoever you are—I’m resigning from the Servants of Peace! Right now. This minute. You’re evil!”

  “Are you sure of that? We’re not the ones killing anybody. We never do.”

  Claree burst into tears. Yani didn’t try to help her. He gazed at her with tenderness, but it was Brak who staggered unsteadily to his feet and put his arms around the sophisticated girl from off-world, the girl who had talked to him so joyously about the Servants of Peace over the dead body of a cave hylut. She felt bony in his arms, a fledgling bird. Brak looked at Yani. “She’ll tell the galaxy what you’re really like.”

  “I hope so,” Yani said. “That too is part of the process.”

  “What ‘process’ ?” Brak spat. Holding Claree emboldened him.

  “The process of preventing ideologies from becoming too rigid, and the right from becoming too righteous. Muddling things up. Balance, some might call it.”

  “Or corruption!” Brak said, and the trembling girl went still in his arms.

  “Corruption is a less intrusive way of intervention than is violence.” Yani stretched his arms over his head. “I must go soon. Claree?”

  “Not with you! Never!”

  “Your choice, postulant. Although I’m sorry for it. Brak, your people will be here for you and the children later today. We’ll give them exact coordinates, once we’re well away. Until then, you and Claree will need to manage the little ones. And eventually, you know, your folks will accept you as if the xenotransplant had never happened. They’ll have to. Their own values of tolerance say so. And through that, they’ll end up accepting a great many other aberrations, as well.”

  Brak didn’t answer. He watched Yani stroll off, and a complex feeling stirred in him.

  “I hate them!” Claree cried, pulling away from him. “Evil, immoral . . . and I never knew how corrupt they really are! I never knew! Corrupt!”

  “Yes,” Brak agreed, and then, from some depths of drug and thought and emotion, “No. Claree—”

  But she had begun sobbing again, and she wasn’t listening to him.

  Brak, dizzy, sat again on the edge of the cot. What was he going to do with her? Take her to his mother, of course. And if she wanted to stay in Treemon—but she was an off-worlder! And yet, looking at her, he had a sudden perception that even though she ate flesh, she would fit in on a Treemon farm or in a Treemon city. It had something to do with her being so straight-forward, so single-minded, so sure of what’s always right. Claree might even be happy in Treemon, might feel at home.

  As he never had, not really. And now he would fit in even less.

  Brak gazed after Yani’s exhausted, retreating figure. The Servants of Peace owed Brak, now. They had fouled him, used him, turned him from being a person to being an asset. Oh, yes, they owed him.

  He wondered if they ever took postulants from backwater worlds like Treemon, and how old you had to be to join.

  DANCING IN THE DARK

  BALLET INSTRUCTOR

  Preprofessional ballet program requires a fully-accredited dance teacher. RAD syllabus or equivalent classes. Pas de deux & repertoire. Beginner to professional students. Applicant should be a member of the Dance Educators of America (DEA), and have trained in a national-caliber school such as the School of American Ballet, the National Ballet School, or the Royal Academy of Dancing. Preference given to teachers who have demonstrated success working with younger students of unusual ability. Submit applications, with letters of reference, to R. Mombatu, Liaison Office, United Nations Interplanetary Division.

  WHEN my brother dropped me off at Lincoln Center on his way down to Wall Street, the alien landing craft again blocked the plaza and Security swarmed everywhere. “The Mollies are back to see the ballet again,” Cal said.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to call them that,” I said, making a face at him.

  “Octopi, then.”

  “Squidi.”

  “Calamari.” We giggled at each other like ten-year-olds. I suspect that morning both of us wished we were ten again. Then Cal wouldn’t have to deal with Sally and I wouldn’t have to make my meeting with Alvarez.

  “Well,” Cal said, “at least the aliens’ being so fond of ballet is good for you,” and I didn’t tell him different. Nothing was good for me just then. I knew what Alvarez wanted to see me about.

  “See you and Sally tonight,” I promised as I closed the car door, and his face clouded. I shouldn’t have mentioned Sally. His sixteen-year-old daughter was tearing Cal’s heart apart, even though he hadn’t been—wasn’t—exactly the ideal father himself. “Bye, twin-boy.”

  “Be good, twin-girl.” But his heart wasn’t in it. I wished we’d ended on that other note, making fun of the aliens.

  I threaded my way though their weird craft and our security barriers, concrete and electronic and human. From not too close, I glimpsed one of the aliens being escorted into the New York State Theater. God, probably it was going to be permitted to watch class again. It was creepy, taking class with a Mollie watching. It sits in that plastic cage with its own air, looking for all the world like a six-armed octopus (“mollusk,” “squid”) with a soft, salmon-colored shell, and it balances on two tentacles and waves the other four in time to the music. “Can it keep good time?” Cal asked, and I had to admit that, yes, it could. But its presence didn’t help the timing of the rest of us.

  No. It wasn’t a Mollie that had been hurting my timing.

  No one knew why the aliens had fallen so in love with ballet. They’d landed on Earth eighteen months ago and had been in communication and translation and negotiation and transubstantiation, or whatever the UN did with them, for all that time. They’d been polite and cooperative and non-threatening and appreciative and benevolent. But nothing had lit their fire until they were taken, as part of an endless round of cultural outings, to see the New York City Ballet dance Coppelia. Then something had unaccountably ignited and they were back, in singles or small groups, every night they could be there. Why ballet? No one knew. “It is beautiful,” was all they’d say.

  It was the only thing they’d said that I found interesting. Most of their mission, which apparently involved trading things and ideas I couldn’t pronounce, was as impenetrable to me as whatever Cal did with such passion down on Wall Street.

  “Go on in, Celia, Mr. Alvarez is waiting for you,” his secretary said. No reprieve.

  “Celia,” Alvarez said from behind his big, cluttered desk, not smiling. My stomach tightened.

  “Hello, Diego.”

  “Sit down,” he said in his soft Spanish accent. So of course I did.

  Twenty years ago Diego Alvarez was perhaps the best male dancer in the world He partnered Greta Klein, and Ann Wilcox, and Xenia Aranova
. He never partnered me, of course; I hadn’t risen above the corps de ballet, that unheralded background to stars. Only once in my life had I even danced a solo performance, Io in Jupitor Suite, and then only because both principal and understudy had the flu.

  When Alvarez retired from dancing, he took over as Artistic Director of NYCB, a position for which he’d been openly groomed for years. He was a decent, not great, director, and the company struggled along under him as ballet always had, supported by a small percentage of the population, paid cultural lip service by a larger percentage, and ridiculed by the rest. An intense, exquisite, marginal art—until me Mollies changed everything.

  “Celia,” Diego said, “I think you know why I called you in.”

  I did, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I stayed mute.

  “There comes a time in every dancer’s life—”

  “Diego, I can take being fired for being too old, but I can’t take pomposity.”

  Oh, fuck, now I’d done it. But after a moment of blinking astonishment—I doubt any corps member had ever spoken to him like that before—Alvarez leaned back in his chair and spoke levelly.

  “I’m not firing you, Celia. I’m offering you an alternate position. As a teacher.”

  Now it was my turn to blink. Second-rate corps members did not become teachers or coaches at NYCB.

  “They asked for you, specifically, after watching several performances and studying with me the structure of the company and the usual promotion paths. They understand that there is a ceiling, and you—”

  “Who?” I blurted out, but I already knew. Incredibly, I knew.

  “The aliens. They want someone to teach their offspring classical ballet, or at least a modified version of it that—”

  “Noooooo,” I moaned. “Not . . . possible.”

  “I wouldn’t have said so,” Alvarez said, and for a second I saw his distaste for this whole enterprise, turning his beloved art over to a bunch of slack-tentacled monsters, and I knew that Diego had steered their choice toward me. Second-rate, overage, never be missed even from the corps, at least don’t legitimize the travesty by assigning a good dancer to it. Diego had never liked me.

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “They’re offering a salary larger than mine. And, Celia, it is the only way you can continue dancing.”

  “But—”

  “The only way. Here or, I’m afraid, in any professional capacity at all.”

  I was silent. We both knew he was right. I could open a dance studio for little girls—little human girls—somewhere in a garage in Iowa, but that was about all. And I didn’t have the money for a garage in Iowa. Corps members live on air, hope, and a pittance that barely covers Manhattan rent.

  “I have, Celia,” Diego said with unusual gentleness, “seen you try to help the young girls who have just joined the corps. I think you will be good at your new job.”

  I told Cal at dinner. No one else knew yet. The Mollies wanted to keep it out of the press until I had safely left Earth for their huge orbiting ship.

  “For their what?” Cal said. He looked stunned, which was understandable. I felt pretty unstable myself.

  “Their ship.”

  “To teach ballet to young squid,” he repeated, squinting at me.

  “We’re not supposed to call them that.”

  “But why do they want—”

  “God knows!”

  “And so you’re going to teach them to turn out their toes and . . . and . . .”

  “Point and flex. Arabesques.”

  “Those little running steps across stage—”

  “Bourées. And ports des bras. That means ‘arm movements.’ ”

  “With four arms.”

  We both collapsed into hysterical laughter. It was hilarious, it was terrible, it was going to be my life. As soon as one of us started to recover, the other would curve an arm overhead or point and flex an ankle, and we’d be off again. It went on and on. Finally I staggered upright, wiping my eyes. “Ah, Cal . . .”

  The door opened and Sally strolled in. Everything changed.

  My niece had been beautiful, before she scarred the left side of her face while on a deadly combination of snap and rapture. She refused surgery to fix it. One look at her eyes, vacant and filmy, and I knew she was on something again. Oh, Cal . . .

  He sat stiffly, impaled on an instrument of torture I couldn’t know, even though the rack was partly of his own making. Cal has never been the best of fathers. Sally’s mother, a spoiled rich beauty whom I’d never liked, died when Sally was three, and Cal was always too caught up in his work to really attend to her. She had everything material and very little that wasn’t. I saw that now, although I, too, hadn’t been paying much attention as she grew up. Still, plenty of children grow up with emotionally absent fathers without becoming addicts who steal or disappear for days at a time. Cal had got her into treatment programs and boot-camp schools, but nothing had worked. I think he’d been relieved just to have her out of the apartment for those weeks or months. “Sally . . .”

  “Hi, Aunt Celia. Still lifting your legs for money?”

  I restrained myself from answering. I’d tried with Sally, too. Now I only wanted to not make it worse for Cal.

  “Sally—”

  “Don’t return, Daddy mine, to the Sally’s health-and-well-being platform.”

  “I never left it.”

  She laughed, a high giggle, so unbearable—I remembered her at three, at seven—that I excused myself and caught a cab home. They didn’t want me there for the looming fight, and I didn’t want to be there either.

  Call me a coward.

  They took me up in a Mollie shuttle along with a load of diplomat types. We left a government building somewhere on Long Island through an underground tunnel, then emerged beside an egg-shaped craft that I suddenly thought would make an interesting backdrop for one of DePietro’s geometric ballets. No one spoke to me. These men and women, all dressed in business suits with the latest pleated sashes, looked grim. Was there trouble between humans and Mollies? Not that I knew of, but then I didn’t know much. Cal teased me about never watching a newsvid. Everything on them seemed so fleeting compared to the eternities danced every night on stage.

  But for the last week I’d watched vids, and I’d studied about Mollie anatomy, and I’d carefully selected my music cubes, and I was scared to death.

  “Miss Carver,” said a human voice, “I’m Randall Mombatu. I’ll be your liaison officer aboard ship.”

  I was so glad to see an actual person I nearly cried. The diplomats had all stridden purposefully down a corridor and shut the door after them, leaving me standing in the big empty place where the shuttle had flown in.

  “You probably have questions,” Mombatu said. He was a tall, handsome man the color of milk chocolate, dressed in the ubiquitous sashed suit. His face looked like all of the others: sanded, with all emotional irregularities planed out. I nodded, clutching my dance bag.

  “Well, this part of the ship is filled with Terran atmosphere, obviously, as your quarters and half the dance studio will be. The gravity is that of the alien planet, a little over two-thirds Earth, as of course you’ve noticed. This troubles some humans—”

  I sprang into a pas de chat. Such height for a simple jump! I never got that height at NYCB. Nijinsky-like, I seemed to hang for a moment before landing in a perfect fifth position. I laughed in delight.

  “—although others adjust to the gravity quite easily,” Mombatu said, smiling. “This way, please.”

  They’d given me a small bedroom, sparse as a monk’s cell. “All this part of the ship is human. Dining room, commons, conference rooms . . . think of it as an international hotel. Your studio, of course, is new.” He opened a door at the end of a short hall. I followed him and froze.

  They were already there, the little aliens. The room was like any other dance studio, lined with mirrors and barres on two sides, a stand at one end for music cubes—e
xcept that across from me stood sixteen small Mollies, all staring at me from flat black eyes. I clutched Mombatu’s arm.

  “How . . . how are they breathing. . .?”

  “There’s a membrane down the middle of the room. Invisible, some technology we don’t have, impermeable to gases but not to light and sound. Terran air on this side, theirs on the other.”

  “But . . . how will I touch them?” A teacher needed to straighten a leg, push down a shoulder . . . except the aliens had no shoulders anyway. Hysteria bubbled inside me; I forced it down.

  “You can’t touch them, I’m afraid. You’ll have to demonstrate what you want. We also didn’t know what to do about toe shoes, so we left that until you arrive.”

  Toe shoes. Dancers didn’t go on toe until a few years of training had strengthened their muscles . . . and these aliens had no toes. I turned my back to them and spoke to Mombatu softly, urgently.

  “I can’t do this. I’m sorry, I know you probably spent a lot of money or whatever bringing me here but I can’t do it, I really can’t—”

  “Yes, you can, Celia,” he said, with complete confidence. It was a professional facade but, gods, was it effective. “And your students believe you can, too. They’re waiting to be introduced.”

  He turned me firmly to face the octopi. “This is Ellen—they’ve chosen Terran names, of course, for your convenience—the ambassador’s daughter.”

  The Mollie on the right end of the waiting line extended one tentacle full length on the floor in front of her, bent the other five, and bowed forward. It was a ballerina’s reverence: clumsy, hopeful, infinitely touching.

  “This is Jim . . . and Justine . . .” He knew them all. They all looked alike to me, and when I caught myself thinking that I was suddenly ashamed. These were kids, as eager to learn as I had been at Miss DuBois’ School of the Dance in Parcells, Iowa, thirty years ago.