that told them they were coming near to the vortex, they
paused in their flight and hung in an interpatterned motion-
sequence above the dark, rolling sea, conversing only in short
flickerings of color because they had to hold the pattern
tightly in order to withstand the already-strong attraction of
the vortex.
"Somewhere near?" asked Asterrea, pulsing a quick green.
"Closer to the vortex, I think," Pur said, chancing a
sequence of reds and violets.
"Can we be sure?" asked Fless; but there was no answer
from Pur and he had expected none from Asterrea.
The ocean crashed and leaped; the air howled around them.
And the vortex pulled at them.
Suddenly they felt their motion-sequence changing, against
their wills, and for long moments all three were afraid that it
was the vortex's attraction that was doing it. They moved in
closer to each other, and whirled more quickly in a still more
intricate pattern, but it did no good. Irresistibly they were
drawn apart again, and at the same time the three of them
were moved toward the vortex.
And then they felt the Oldest among them.
He had joined the motion-sequence; this must have been
why they had felt the sequence changed and loosenedto
make room for him. Whirling and blinking, the Oldest led
them inward over the frightening sea, radiating warmth
through the storm and, as they followed, or were pulled along,
they studied him in wonder.
He was hardly recognizable as one of them, this ancient
Oldest. He was . . . not quite energy any longer. He was half
matter, carrying the strange mass with awkward, aged grace,
his outer edges almost rigid as they held the burden of his
congealed center and carried it through the air. (Looking
rather like a half-dissolved snowflake, yes, only dark and
dismal, a snowflake weighed with coal-dust.) And, for now
at least, he was completely silent.
Only when he had brought the Three safely into the calm
of his barren personality-home on a tiny rock jutting at an
angle from the wash of the sea did he speak. There, inside a
cone of quiet against which the ocean raged and fell back,
the sands faltered and even the vortex's power was nullified,
the Oldest said wearily, "So you have come." He spoke with
a slow waving back and forth, augmented by only a dull red
color.
To this the Three did not know what to say; but Pur finally
hazarded, "Have you been waiting for us?"
The Oldest pulsed a somewhat brighter red, once, twice.
He paused. Then he said, "I do not waitthere is nothing to
wait for." Again .the pulse of a brighter red. "One waits for
the future. But there is no future, you know."
"Not for him," Pur said softly to her companions, and
Fless and Asterrea sank wavering to the stone floor of the
Oldest's home, where they rocked back and forth.
The Oldest sank with them, and when he touched down he
remained motionless. Pur drifted over the others, maintaining
movement but unable to raise her color above a steady blue-
green. She said to the Oldest, "But you knew we would
come."
"Would come? Would come? Yes, and did come, and have
come, and are come. It is today only, you know, for me. I
will be the Oldest, when the others pass me by. I will never
change, nor will my world."
"But the others have already passed you by," Fless said.
"We are many life cycles after you, Oldestso many it is
beyond the count of windbirds."
The Oldest seemed to draw his material self into a more
upright posture, forming his energy-flow carefully around it.
To the red of his color he added a low hum with only the
slightest quaver as he said, "Nothing is after me, here on
Rock. When you come here, you come out of time, just as I
have. So now you have always been here and will always be
here, for as long as you are here."
Asterrea sparked yellow suddenly, and danced upward into
the becalmed air. As Fless stared and Pur moved quickly to
calm him, he drove himself again and again at the edge of the
cone of quiet that was the Oldest's refuge. Each t:me he was
thrown back and each time he returned to dash himself once
more against the edge of the storm, trying to penetrate back
into it. He flashed and burned countless colors, and strange
sound-frequencies filled the quiet, until at last, with Pur's
stern direction and Floss's blank gaze upon him, he sank back
wearily to the stone floor. "A trap, a trap," he pulsed. "This
is it, this is the vortex itself, we should have known, and
we'll never get away."
The Oldest had paid no attention to Asterrea's display. He
said slowly, "And it is because I am not in time that the
vortex cannot touch me. And it is because I 'am out of time
that I know what the vortex is, for I can remember myself
born in it."
Pur left Asterrea then, and came close to the Oldest. She
hung above him, thinking with blue vibrations, then asked,
"Can you tell us how you were born?what is creation?
how new things are made?" She paused a moment, and added,
"And what is the vortex?"
The Oldest seemed to lean forward, seemed tired. His color
had deepened again to the darkest red, and the Three could
clearly see every atom of matter within his energy-field, stark
and hard. He said, "So many questions to ask one question."
And he told them the answer to that question.
And I can't tell you that answer, because I don't know it.
No one knows it now, not even the present-day Loarra who
are the Three after a thousand million billion life cycles.
Because the Loarra really do become different . . . different
"persons," when they pass from one cycle to another, and
after that many changes, memory becomes meaningless.
("Try it sometime," one of the Loarra once wave-danced to
me, and there was no indication that he thought this was
a joke.)
Today, for instance, the Three themselves, a thousand
million billion times removed from themselves but still, they
maintain, themselves, often come to watch the Dance of the
Changer and the Three, and even though it is about them
they are still excited and moved by it as though it were a tale
never even heard before, let alone lived through. Yet let a
dancer miss a movement or color or sound by even the
slightest nuance, and the Three will correct him. (And yes,
many times the legended Changer himself, Minnearo, he who
started the story, has attended these dancesthough often he
leaves after the re-creation of his suicide dance.)
It's sometimes difficult to tell one given Loarra from all the
others, by the way, despite the complex and subtle technolo-
gies of Unicentral, which have provided me with sense filters
of all sorts, plus frequency simulators, pattern scopes, special
gravity inducers, and a minicomp that takes up more than
half of my very t
ight little island of Earth pasted onto the
surface of Loarr and which can do more thinking and analyz-
ing in two seconds than I can do in fifty years. During my
four years on Loarr, I got to "know" several of the Loarra,
yet even at the end of my stay I was still never sure just who
I was "talking" with at any time. I could run through about
seventeen or eighteen tests, linking the sense-filters with the
minicomp, and get a definite answer that way. But the Loarra
are a bit short on patience and by the time I'd get done with
all that whoever it was would usually be off bouncing and
sparking into the hellish vapors they call air. So usually I just
conducted my researches or negotiations or idle queries,
whichever they were that day, with whoever would pay
attention to my antigrav "eyes," and I discovered that it didn't
matter much just who I was talking with: none of them made
any more sense than the others. They were all, as far as I was
concerned, totally crazy, incomprehensible, stupid, silly, and
plain damn no good.
If that sounds like I'm bitter, it's because I am. I've got
forty-two murdered men to be bitter about. But back to the
unfolding of the greatest legend of an ancient and venerable
alien race:
When the Oldest had told them what they wanted to know,
the Three came alive with popping and flashing and dancing
in the air, Pur just as much as the others. It was all that they
had hoped for and more; it was the entire answer to their
quest and their problem. It would enable them to create, to
transcend any negative cycle-climax they could have devised.
After a time the Three came to themselves and remembered
the rituals.
"We offer thanks in the name of Minnearo, whose suicide
we are avenging," Fless said gravely, waving his message in
respectful deep-blue spirals.
"We thank you in our own names as well," said Asterrea.
"And we thank you in the name of no one and nothing,"
said Pur, "for that is the greatest thanks conceivable."
But the Oldest merely sat there, pulsing his dull red, and
the Three wondered among themselves. At last the Oldest
said, "To accept thanks is to accept responsibility, and in
only-today, as I am, there can be none of that because there
can be no new act. I am outside time, you know, which is
almost outside life. All this I have told you is something told
to you before, many times, and it will be again."
Nonetheless, the Three went through all the rituals of
thanksgiving, performing them with flawless grace and care
color-and-sound demonstrations, dances, offerings of their
own energy, and all the rest. And Pur said, "It is possible to
give thanks for a long-past act or even a mindless reflex, and
we do so in 'the highest."
The Oldest pulsed dull red and did not answer, and after
a time the Three took leave of him.
Armed with the knowledge he had given them, they had no
trouble penetrating the barrier protecting Rock, the Oldest's
personality-home, and in moments were once again alone with
themselves in the raging storm that encircled the vortex. For
long minutes they hung in midair, whirling and darting in
their most tightly linked patterns while the storm whipped
them and the vortex pulled them. Then abruptly they broke
their patterns and hurled themselves deliberately into the
heart of the vortex itself. In a moment they had disappeared.
They seemed to feel neither motion nor lapse of time as
they fell into the vortex. It was a change that came without
perception or thoughta change from self to unself, from
existence to void. They knew only that they had given them-
selves up to the vortex, that they were suddenly lost in dark-
ness and a sense of surrounding emptiness which had no
dimension. They knew without thinking that if they could
have sent forth sound there would have been no echo, that
a spark or even a bright flame would have brought no reflec-
tion from anywhere. For this was the place of the origin of
life, and it was empty. It was up to them to fill it, if it was
to be filled.
So they used the secret the Oldest had given them, the
secret those at the Beginning had discovered by accident and
which only one of the Oldest could have remembered. Having
set themselves for this before entering the vortex, they played
their individual parts automaticallyselfless, unconscious,
almost random acts such as even non-living energy can.
perform. And when all parts had been completed precisely,
correctly, and at just the right time and in just the right
sequence, the creating took place.
It was a foodbeast. It formed and took shape before them
in the void, and grew and glowed its dull, drab glow until it
was whole. For a moment it drifted there, then suddenly
it was expelled from the vortex, thrown out violently as
though from an explosionaway from the nothingness
within, away from darkness and silence into the crashing,
whipping violence of the storm outside. And with it went the
Three, vomited forth with the primitive bit of life they had
made.
Outside, in the storm, the Three went automatically into
their tightest motion sequence, whirling and blinking around
each other in desperate striving to maintain themselves amid
the savagery that roiled around them. And once again they
felt the powerful pull of the vortex behind them, gripping
them anew now that they were outside, and they knew that
the vortex would draw them in again, this time forever, unless
they were able to resist it. But they found that they were
nearly spent; they had lost more of themselves in the vortex
than they had ever imagined possible. They hardly felt alive
now, and somehow they had to withstand the crushing powers
of both the storm and the vortex, and had to forge such a
strongly interlinked motion-pattern that they would be able
to make their way out of this place, back to calm and safety.
And there was only one way they could restore themselves
enough for that.
Moving almost as one, they converged upon the mindless
foodbeast they had just created, and they ate it.
That's not precisely the end of the Dance of the Changer
and the Threeit does go on for a while, telling of the honors
given the Three when they returned, and of Minnearo's reac-
tion when he completed his change by reappearing around the
life-mote left by a dying windbird, and of how all of the
Three turned away from their honors and made their next
changes almost immediatelybut my own attention never
quite follows the rest of it. I always get stuck at that one
point in the story, that supremely contradictory moment when
the Three destroyed what they had made, when they came
away with no more than they had brought with them. It
doesn't even achieve irony, and yet it is the emotional high-
point of the Dance as far as the L
oarra are concerned. In
fact, it's the whole point of the Dance, as they've told me with
brighter sparkings and flashes than they ever use when talking
about anything else, and if the Three had been able to come
away from there without eating their foodbeast, then their
achievement would have been duly noted, applauded, giggled
at by the newly-changed, and forgotten within two life cycles.
And these are the creatures with whom I had to deal and
whose rights I was charged to protect. I was ambassador to a
planetful of things that would tell me with a straight face that
two and two are orange. And yes, that's why I'm back on
Earth nowand why the rest of the expedition, those who
are left alive from it, are back here too.
If you could read the fifteen-microtape report I filed with
Unicentral (which you can't, by the way: Unicentral always
Classifies its failures), it wouldn't tell you anything more
about the Loarra than I've just told you in the story of the
Dance. In fact, it might tell you less, because although the
report contained masses of hard data on the Loarra, plus
every theory I could come up with or coax out of the mini-
comp, it didn't have much about the Dance. And it's only in
things like that, attitude-data rather than I.Q. indices, psych
reports and so on, that you can really get the full impact of
what we were dealing with on Loarr.
After we'd been on the planet for four Standard Years,
after we'd established contact and exchanged gifts and favors
and information with the Loarra, after we'd set up our entire
mining operation and had had it running without hindrance
for over three yearsafter all that, the raid came. One day
a sheet of dull purple light swept in from the horizon, and as
it got closer I could see that it was a whole colony of the
Loarra, their individual colors and fluctuations blending into
that single purple mass. I was in the mountain, not outside
with the mining extensors, so I saw all of it, and I lived
through it.
They flashed in over us like locusts descending, and they
hit the crawlers and dredges first. The metal glowed red, then
white, then it melted. Then it was just gas that formed billow-
ing clouds rising to the sky. Somewhere inside those clouds
was what was left of the elements which had comprised
seventeen human beings, who were also vapor now.
I hit the alarm and called everyone in, but only a few
Carr, Terry - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.txt Page 2
