Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Do they understand English?”

  “Only a few words. You’ll teach them dance vocabulary as you go.”

  He made it sound so simple. I gazed at the line of youngsters, wondered how the hell I was going to teach partnering and lifts, and made a deep reverence toward my class.

  “And one and two and three and four . . .”

  Sixteen octopi stood at the barre, doing warm-ups. Dressed in leotard and practice skirt, I walked up and down on my side of the membrane, watching for flaws in position.

  The Mollies had no hip sockets. They were vertebrates, not really mollusks, but each of their six limbs emerged from a sort of padded hole in the sort of flexible shell that cased their organs and head. The shell, which had a soft underside for various anatomical openings, was vaguely oval, with the limbs attached halfway up. The result was sort of like Humpty Dumpty with six long, powerful arms. Not an ideal shape for ballet.

  Still, it had some advantages. Without hip sockets, turnout was no problem; these kids already had their limbs rotated 180 degrees to their body. The long arms-or-legs were unsegmented and had no bones, just tough cartilage-analogue skeletal tissue, and so a fluid line was much easier to obtain than with all those stiff human bones. The back two limbs were the most powerful; along with the next two, they usually bore the weight in walking. Suckers three quarters of the way down each limb provided sturdy balance. I designated these back two limbs “legs.”

  The front two limbs were “arms.” The middle two, the alienettes (I couldn’t refer to them as “dance students,” not even in my own mind) kept folded close to their body except at the height of posed steps, when they would slowly unfold for great dramatic effect. That was the plan, anyway. Right now, we were working on warm-up stretches and simple extensions. Warm-ups got a lubricating fluid flowing in each limb socket, so no one got injured when we started throwing limbs as high in the air as possible in grands battements.

  “Ellen, keep your suckers on the floor as long as possible in the plié . . . damn.” I kept forgetting they couldn’t speak English. “Ellen, look! Look!”

  I demonstrated a grand plié, heels down, and then demonstrated what she was doing, shaking my head. Ellen made me a deep reverence—they all loved doing that—and performed the movement correctly.

  “Good, good . . . Terence, don’t wobble . . . look! Look!”

  I’d been aboard ship for four months. My Mollies worked fanatically hard, practicing for hours every day. Randall Mombatu conveyed lavish compliments from all the parents, none of whom would have recognized a correct arabesque if Pavlova herself were doing it. The small squid couldn’t talk to me, although they chattered readily among themselves in chirps and whistles. There was some incompatibility of human words with their tongues. I think. But they understood me well, picking up a huge dance vocabulary quickly. I had the suspicion they were smarter than I was. The adults, I gathered, communicated with our diplomats through keyboards.

  Today I had a surprise for the octopi; the toe shoes had arrived. They were specially designed, blocky pink coverings for the back two legs that would support the fragile tentacle ends and add another few inches to their extensions.

  But first we had to get from pliés to grands battements. “One and two and—”

  “Celia,” Randall said abruptly, spoiling my count. “You have a phone call.”

  “Can’t it wait? Jim, no, no, not like that . . . look! Look!”

  “She says not. It’s your niece.”

  Sally? I turned to look at Randall. His tone had been disapproving, but now his entire attention absorbed by the alienettes. “You know,” he murmured to me, “we have almost no knowledge about the Visitor young. Their parents are very protective. You’re the only human who’s spent any time with them at all.”

  I realized then why I’d been forbidden to record classes for later analysis. I said incredulously, “You mean, this is the only contact between a human and Mollie kids?”

  “Between a human and Alien Visitor children,” he corrected, with an emphasis that told me we were being overheard. Probably the aliens taped my classes—something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Well, why not? Except that it would have been useful to see those tapes for dance analysis.

  I followed Randall to the comlink phone, which the Mollies had allowed us to install in the human part of the ship. We passed people engaged in urgent, obscure tasks. It occurred to me that very few people aboard this ship ever smiled.

  “Sally?”

  “Oh,” my niece said, sounding bored, or trying to sound bored. I waited, until she was forced to say, “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Fine. Except, of course . . . oh, Aunt Celia, I’m not fine at all!”

  It was the last thing I’d expected: the return of the open, honest eight-year-old she’d once been. It got under my barriers as nothing else could have.

  “What’s wrong, Sally?”

  “Dad’s going to send me away to school again and it’s awful, you can’t know and I can’t bear it! I won’t!” Her voice rose to a shriek.

  “Sally, dear—”

  “Unless I can come up there and stay with you. Oh, can I, please? I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I promise!”

  I closed my eyes and ground my forehead against the wall. “Sally, honey, this is an embassy or something, I can’t give permission to—”

  “Yes, you can. The news said the Mollies would do anything for you because they’re so happy about their kids’ dancing!”

  That was more than I knew. The pleading in her voice broke my heart. I didn’t want her here. She’d be a bored nuisance. Guilt washed over me like surf.

  “Please! Please!”

  I said to the presence behind me, who was probably always behind me electronically or otherwise if I only had the interest to look for him, “Randall?”

  “The Alien Visitors would allow it.”

  “They would? Why?”

  “I suspect they’re as interested in our young as we are in theirs.”

  But not this particular girl, I didn’t say. Not Sally, not to form impressions of human offspring by.

  “If Dad makes me go away again, I’ll . . . he just wants me somewhere where he doesn’t have to think about me and be distracted from his work!”

  And there was enough truth in that despairing pain that I said, “All right, Sally. Come up here.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Celia! I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”

  But I didn’t know her now. Worse, I didn’t really want to. Guilt held me in its undertow, and I just hoped we didn’t both drown.

  At first she tried, I’ll give her that. She learned the Mollies’ names. She made no audible jokes about crustaceans. She played the music cubes I asked for in class. She chatted with me over dinner, and she didn’t (as far as I could tell) take any drugs. But she neither understood nor liked ballet, and day by day I could feel her boredom and irritation grow, and my resentment grow along with it.

  But that was all background noise. My little cavorting squid had been working for six months, and I’d been informed that a recital for the parents would be a good idea. After a long sleepless night, I’d decided to adapt—radically adapt!—Jerome Robbins’ choreography for Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

  In this short ballet, a boy and girl in practice clothes warm up at the barre, facing the audience as if it were a mirror. So great is their concentration on dance that only gradually do they become aware of each other. The first steps they do are easy, basic warm-ups, and I could keep subsequent combinations from getting too difficult. Moreover, I could gradually add more couples onstage until they were all there, with the most accomplished of my young dancers performing solos and the least accomplished forming a corps after their later entrances. The music was lovely; also, it was slow enough that I would not tax my young Mollies’ speed or balance. Finally, I wouldn’t need elaborate sets or costumes, yet I would still
be presenting a (sort of) real ballet.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Sally over breakfast.

  “All right, I guess,” she answered indifferently, but then perked up. “Can I do the lights?”

  “Lights?” The studio had never been anything but fully lit. I didn’t even know if we had a light board. But for Faun, the stage should be in darkness at first and then gradually brighten. “Uh, I’ll see.”

  “Don’t exhaust yourself,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll be in the video room.” She pushed herself away from the table and sauntered out.

  Until Sally arrived, I hadn’t even known the ship had a video room, intercepting broadcasts from Earth. Well, why not. It kept her away from class. The alienettes, I sensed, didn’t like her there, although it would be difficult to say how I knew this, since they understood most of what I said now, but I understood nothing of their squeaks and whistles and chirps. In fact, they were hardly individuals to me. I didn’t worry about this. Ellen had a strong extension, Terry a smooth flowing développé, Denise a graceful port de bras. That was enough to know.

  I asked Randall for Afternoon of a Faun, the Royal Ballet production of 2011 which, gods forgive me, I thought superior to the New York City Ballet’s. He looked at me blankly.

  “It’s a ballet, Randall. I need a performance recording of it to show my dancers.”

  “With people.”

  “Of course with people!”

  “I’m sorry, Celia, I’m a little slow this morning. The computers have been acting up, and there’s a trade problem with the Visitors and the EEC . . . but you’re not interested in that.”

  “Not in the slightest. Can you have a cube transmitted up?”

  “Of course.”

  It was there by the time we’d finished barre warm-ups and took our break, before moving to center work. Half my mind was on Jim’s fouette of adage, which was terrible. He could pilé on one leg all right, could slowly lift the other and extend it to the side in one smooth movement, and his overhead arms stayed steady. But he couldn’t seem to coordinate the side arms with the extension, no matter how hard he tried. The result was too many appendages out of sync with each other, so he looked more like an opening umbrella with broken spokes than like a ballet dancer. I was not in a good mood.

  “Okay, troops, this is the dance we’ll do for the recital. I’ve adapted it for you, of course. But we’ll look at this version first. Look! Look!”

  I started the cube. It projected onto the wall. Darkness, and then dimly, at first barely seen through the gloom, a dancer. She stood in a gap in the back curtain. A deep plié, two steps forward, and then, just as you became sure what you were seeing in the shadow, she began to warm up with deep stretches and bends. It was Royal Ballet principal Rebecca Clarke, in all her long-legged, perfectly poised loveliness, her luminous calm. The stage gradually brightened around her.

  Ellen fell to the floor, screaming.

  “It’s apparently biological,” Randall said, running his hand over his perfect cropped hair. He looked as close to upset as I imagined he got. His sash might even have been a quarter inch crooked. “We only know what we’ve been told about their home planet and evolution, of course. The Visitors aren’t sea dwelling, despite their superficial, to us, resemblance to cephalopods. The home system lies in a populated part of the galaxy with many bright stars and three large moons. More important, there may be a constant atmospheric form of gaseous photoelectric energy, something like marsh gas, and perhaps also an enhanced visual spectrum compared to ours, extending possibly to wavelengths that—”

  “Randall, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “They hate the dark.”

  I gaped at him. He leaned closer and spoke softly. “Oh, the adults tolerate it, of course. But they prefer to carry on all activities, including sleep, in full light. They can’t smell at all, you know, and there is probably an evolutionary history of locating prey by motion. Most Terran cephalopods—not that there’s a one-on-one analogue, of course, but still—most advanced Terran cephalopods are pretty ferocious carnivores, with fairly common cannibalism. Those powerful arms and suckers . . . If the Visitors’ evolution was highly competitive, it might include a strong bias for light. In the young, some might even have a vestigial neural response to darkness, pain or otherwise, until they learn to compensate. I’m afraid the ambassador’s daughter may be one such youngster.”

  Ellen was the ambassador’s daughter. I’d forgotten that; I thought of her as the squid with a good strong extension. But . . . “Powerful arms and suckers”. . . “cannibalism” . . . I shuddered. All at once my charges seemed genuinely alien, much more so than when we concentrated together on dance.

  “It’s not a major problem,” Randall said, misinterpreting. “You simply have to start your recital with the lights full on and keep them on, not starting in the dark as on the cube performance. The ambassador’s daughter is being told that’s what will happen. She’ll be fine.”

  The ambassador’s daughter. Ellen. Powerful arms and suckers to destroy prey, and cannibalism. Extension and développé and ports de bras.

  “Fine,” I said.

  But after that, I couldn’t look at them the same way. I don’t know if they could tell. What we were doing wasn’t ballet; it was a grotesque travesty with six arms and no necks and a pathetic parody of beauty. The recital was in five days. I hated every minute of rehearsal.

  The morning of the performance, the computer glitches were traced to Sally, and Randall told me, tight-lipped, that she was going back down to Earth.

  “How could you?” I raged at her. “We’re guests here! You promised to behave! You promised! Then you go messing up UN computers!”

  “So what did I do that’s so major?” She was back to her worst self, sneering and indifferent. “I futzed a few programs. Big show. They caught me easy enough. It isn’t like I’m all that good at smashing firewalls to have any big impact on the great First Contact thing.”

  “Only because you’re so stupid! If you could have screwed the system majorly, you would have!”

  She didn’t answer, only shrugged. I was so mad I had to get away from her, and I slammed doors all the way to the studio.

  It was set up for the recital. The membrane had been moved somehow so that now nine-tenths of the room had Mollie air, leaving me only a strip along the wall with my door. The adjacent wall had been rigged with a curtain that defined backstage; the octopi could stand there in their air and I, in one corner from which I could view the audience, could breathe mine. My corner held the stand for the music cube. In the curtain were cut two rectangular holes like doors, which led to a stage raised a foot or so above the floor. Barres ran along three sides of the stage. On the floor sat chairs for the parents. Or chairlike things, anyway. Everything was as brightly lit as an operating room.

  In two more hours the proud parents would troop in, eager to see their offspring desecrate Robbins and Debussy. It would be obscene, a mockery, and they would love it. I slid down the wall until I slumped on the floor, and waited.

  My only consolation was that if recordings were made—and of course they would be—I would never have to see them.

  The first pure, slow notes of the Debussy. One, two, three, four . . . I nodded at Denise, the first on stage. She stepped into position in the open rectangle, slowly pliéd, and began to dance. A few bars later Terry appeared in the second opening in the curtains.

  No Mollie in the audience so much as breathed.

  It was then I knew how wrong I’d been.

  I could feel it, their reaction. I knew it, had known it my whole life: that rapt attention of an audience responding to the beauty of dance. It was more than parental love; this was the real thing. The extra arms, the childish adaptations I’d made to the Robbins choreography—none of it mattered, and not only because these were their children, or because they didn’t know any better. This audience was, on their own weird terms, experiencin
g beauty.

  Terry and Denise stood side to side, still unaware of each other, each with one tentacle on the barre. In the rectangular openings appeared the second couple, Ellen and Tom. No one was yet on toe; I had choreographed only a few minutes of toe work for these inexperienced dancers, at the end of the piece. But Ellen’s lovely long extension, made longer by her toe shoe, paralleled Denise’s port de bras.

  Some adult Mollie, somewhere in the back, made the first audience noise, a long sort of dying chirp. Even I could tell it was admiration.

  All the lights went out, and the room was plunged into blackness.

  Cacophony, crashing, screaming. I blundered into the music stand and knocked it over; the blackout was total, shocking. It only lasted a moment and then someone flung open a door somewhere and some light, not enough, flowed in from a hallway. Parents clambered forward, tripping over chairs and each other. The dancers stood paralyzed, or huddled on the floor, or writhing in the middle of the stage. No, only one writhed, crying and screaming piteously: Ellen.

  I didn’t even think. I plunged toward the anguished dancer—my dancer—who had been injured, interrupted, kept from dancing. I didn’t remember the membrane until I’d plunged through it.

  The lights went on.

  I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get air into my lungs, couldn’t breathe . . . then I could, in a great gasp, and my lungs were on fire, burning like the hell I didn’t believe in . . . help me, Col. . .

  Darkness.

  Randall swam into view above my bed. It hurt to look at him. It hurt to breathe him in, to breathe anything in.

  “Don’t talk, Celia. You’re going to be all right. It will take a while for the burns on the esophagus to heal, but they will heal, I promise you.”

  “I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”

  I croaked, “Sally?”