Tick tock tick, it seemed to be saying, non-judgmentally. Tick tick tock.
Tom suspected that William Asherson might not be hearing it in exactly the same way, but that didn't trouble him. After all, this wasn't about William Asherson, and never had been. This was about the trial—the petty trial that was already halfway through, and the greater trial that was about to begin.
Copyright (c) 2007 Brian Stableford
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* * *
BULLET DANCE
BY John Schoffstall
John Schoffstall's stories have appeared in Writers of the Future Volume 21, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. His current work in progress is a young adult novel about blasphemy, witch engineers, and goblins. In John's first tale for Asimov's SF, a young girl learns the brutal truth about why she must master the...
At night Shi and Morir came to Clio's room and taught her to bullet dance. Morir held a silvery Desert Eagle and sighted along its barrel at Clio. He wore a white linen suit and his black hair fell to his waist. Clio thought Morir had the most beautiful hair she had ever seen. It looked like her mother's hair in old photographs. Her mother was dead. For that matter, so was Morir, or at least, he was not alive in the usual sense. This didn't bother Clio, who, at seven years old, was untroubled by the rigid categories of the adult world.
“Watch Morir's face,” Shi said. She bent so close to Clio that her robes half-enfolded the girl and her lavender scent enveloped them both. Shi pointed with a slender porcelain finger. “Just before he pulls the trigger, watch for the tiniest movement in his cheeks, and around his mouth. His eyes will narrow. His breathing will change. Observe closely. At the perfect moment you must begin to move, because the bullet is about to come."
The Desert Eagle roared and Clio leaped, but not fast enough. The bullet tore through her arm without hurting or leaving a mark because Morir used only ghost bullets. Someday, though, Shi said, Clio would have to dance with real bullets. For that day she must prepare.
Shi and Morir had come to her at night for as long as she could remember, back into that dim time in earliest childhood before memories form. In the beginning Morir's bullets came slowly, so slowly that she could see them flying toward her, glittering gold or silver in the light of her bedside lamp. As her bullet dance improved, the bullets became faster, like real bullets. “No human being, no matter how skilled, can outdance a bullet,” Shi told her. “Instead, you must outdance the shooter."
Shi taught Clio a song to chant in her head when she did the bullet dance, a song in a minor key with a strong beat. “It is the song of muscle and nerve,” Shi told her. “Human flesh can only move as fast as nerve and mind can command. When you sing this song, you align your own body to that rhythm. Your movements mirror your enemy's. You become his reflection, moving as he does. He cannot escape you, or trick you, any more than he could trick a mirror."
When Clio talked to her father about the bullet dance he listened respectfully, as he did to everything she said. Her nanny, Najwa, was less indulgent. “You have a wonderful imagination,” she said, “but it is time to grow up. You will be in third grade next year, and it is time to put away childish things.” She and Clio sat at the breakfast table. Through the window Clio saw the morning sun glittering gold and silver off the Nile, the crawl of cars on the Al-Tahrir bridge, and the admonishing finger of Cairo Tower on Gezira Island.
“So soon?” Clio's father said. “Can't she be a child a little longer?"
Najwa clinked her tea cup on the saucer more loudly than necessary. “Perhaps you do things differently in America,” she said. Najwa had dark eyes, skin the color of a walnut shell, and dark hair that she kept bobbed. Najwa never wore a head covering, even on the street. That was because she was a Copt.
Clio's father always ate early and alone, sipping Nescafe while reading a fax version of the Washington Post and overnight dispatches from the State Department. He had stopped to spend a few minutes with Clio before going downstairs to his office on the fifth floor of the Embassy building.
“I think this may be her way of growing up,” Clio's father said. “Guns, bullets, death—she sees these things on television. She overhears adults talking. Goodness, she can't even leave the compound without passing by the Marines and their rifles. This fantasy is her way of coping with the madness of the adult world, and imagining she can control it. She'll grow out of it."
“She would grow out of it faster,” Najwa said, “if she were properly encouraged to act and think like a young lady."
* * * *
Two months later the embassy hosted a reception and dinner for a delegation of city officials and businessmen from New York City. New York was a sister city of Cairo, her father said. This time her father took Najwa's side: like it or not, Clio was going to attend. Najwa took her to buy a dress. Despite Clio's protests, it seemed her usual jeans or shorts would not do.
Clio and Najwa waited at the Embassy entrance in the noonday heat for a limo to be brought up from its underground garage. Debris and piles of construction material hid the small lawn in front of the embassy. A wrought iron fence covered with bougainvillea and red-orange trumpet vine had stood between the embassy grounds and the street. Now Egyptian workmen in coveralls were tearing it down and raising a ten-foot barrier of concrete slabs in its place. Crushed flowers were everywhere underfoot.
The air was acrid with dust from the construction, and Clio sneezed. “I liked it the old way,” she said.
When the limo arrived, Najwa directed the driver to a shop that sold European and American brands, in one of the Baehler buildings on 26th July Street. Clio chose a long dress with a peach organza skirt and a black velvet bodice. “But I don't know if I can dance in this,” Clio said. “It'll catch my legs."
“It's perfect for dancing,” Najwa said.
She told the limo driver to return by way of Antikhana El Masriya Street, where there was a brasswork gallery. “The ambassador wanted you to give a little present to the Deputy Mayor of New York,” she said. She always referred to Clio's father very respectfully, except in his presence, when often she seemed almost rude to him.
Little Fiats, big Mercedes buses, horse and donkey carts with rubber tires like automobiles, and the occasional camel thronged the jigsaw streets of the Sheikh al-Maarouf district. At the gallery, Najwa opened the front door. Chilly air from inside swept over Clio. “Hurry up,” Najwa said. “What are you looking at?"
Cattycorner across the street, a ruined building filled most of the block. It was a three-story mansion in the old style, its façade decorated with fluted pilasters, corniced windows with tiny balustrades, and other fussy architectural bric-a-brac. The building might have been limestone or marble, but the stone was so covered with grime it was impossible to tell. Most of its windows were broken. Some had been replaced with plywood. A group of idle men in soiled dishdasha robes lounged on the steps.
Clio heard the beat of the bullet dance song in her head.
Najwa tugged at her hand, but Clio refused to move. “Who lives there?” she asked.
“It's a pity they've let it go to ruin,” Najwa said. “That was the palace of Prince Said Halim Pasha, back in the days when the Turks ruled Egypt."
“Does the prince live in it now?"
“Prince Said Halim has been dead for many years, child. The Armenians shot him. He was Grand Vizier to the Young Turks. They were all shot by Armenians."
The bullet song played in her head so loudly that Clio could barely hear the street noise. “Why didn't they dance?” she asked.
* * * *
That night Clio danced better than she ever had before, leaping and twirling around Morir's ghost bullets, dodging, twisting, doing somersaults and jetés. Not one bullet touched her. Shi clapped for her, a high, musical sound like china bells. “You dance with all your heart,” she said.
Clio kept thinking of the prince who had been shot by Armenians. If Clio were shot by Armenian
s, would the Embassy building fall into ruin? What would happen to her father? That was why she danced so hard, so mindfully.
Adults taught Clio to do all sorts of things, to wear socks that matched, to pronounce “spaghetti” correctly, to use a fork instead of a spoon to eat peas. She was a dutiful child, but had begun to suspect that if she used a spoon instead of a fork to eat peas, the world would not fall down.
The bullet dance was different, or so it seemed. The bullet dance was important. Said Halim's ruined palace told her: this was what happened when people were shot.
The weight of a terrible responsibility descended on Clio.
One night Morir said, “The time has come for you to dance with real bullets. We will go to the Alyscamps.” Shi took Clio's right hand in her own. Shi's hand was white, slick and chilly as a porcelain doll's. Morir took Clio's left hand. His hand was like dry twigs strung with cord. Across the nighttime world they ran, northward through the noisy streets of Cairo, through the bulrush bayous of the Nile delta, over the Mediterranean's black waves that tickled the bottoms of Clio's bare feet, across the rocky hills of Sardinia, still warm from the sun, and high above the lights of Toulon and Marseilles. In a wood outside Arles the looted sarcophagi of fifteen centuries lay in stacks beside a broad gravel road: this was the Alyscamps. Tumble-down limestone sepulchers hid like the truant children of giants among the poplars and cypress. The night was moonlit, the moist air smelled of fallen cypress needles.
Clio danced among the tombs and the poplars, flinging her body high into the air above Morir's bullets as they ricocheted off the stacked marble sarcophagi. Once a bullet grazed her thigh. It tore a hole in her nightgown and left a red mark on her skin.
Morir's bullets had cut fresh chips out of the sides of the sarcophagi. Clio ran her fingers across them. She had loved the bullet dance, the beauty and rhythm of its movements, but tonight had been different. Her thigh stung where the bullet had grazed her. It was less beautiful when you might really be shot.
“Were all these people shot?” she asked, pointing to the sarcophagi and vaults about them.
Shi shook her head. “There have been no new burials here for five hundred years."
“Oh.” Clio had wondered whether that might be why the place was such a ruin. “If I'm shot, will the Embassy fall down?"
“Sometimes,” Shi said, “bad things happen when people die. Sometimes bad things happen when they don't die. Everyone must die at his proper time."
* * * *
At the reception for the New York City delegation, the embassy ballroom sparkled with light. A band played Egyptian folk tunes and current American pop hits. Clio danced with everyone, including her father, the Deputy Mayor of New York, the Egyptian Minister of Culture, and the son of the CEO of Citibank, who was named James. James was in fourth grade already. He wore a suit, but kept shrugging at the shoulders and pulling at his collar with one finger.
“You look very nice,” Clio said. Najwa had told her to say that.
James said: “I didn't want to wear this. Dad made me. How can grown-ups wear suits all the time?"
“You're supposed to say, ‘Thank you',” Clio said. “When someone says you look nice."
“You sound like a grown-up."
“Do not!"
“If I ever have kids,” James said, “I won't forget what it was like to be a kid and have to do what people tell you."
“Me, too,” Clio said quickly. But it crossed her mind that grown-ups, too, must have said the same to themselves when they were young. So why did they forget it when they grew up? Distracted by this thought, she almost missed what James said next.
“Aren't you scared with all the guns around here?” he asked.
“What guns?"
He pointed around the room. “There."
Marines in dress blues stood at parade rest in the corners of the room. Each wore a sidearm. James pointed to another man. “That man has a gun in a shoulder holster.” It was one of the Secret Service agents who usually accompanied Clio's father.
Clio knew the Marines and Secret Service men had guns, but had never thought about what that might mean. Were the Marines the ones who were supposed to shoot at her, against whom she would have to bullet dance? “I'm not scared,” she said. “I'm a good dancer."
“Huh? So what?"
“You dance around the bullets, that's all."
James stopped. “No one can do that,” he said.
Clio hesitated. She was filled with a sudden stubbornness, and unwilling to retreat. She looked James in the eye. “I can dodge bullets,” she said.
She recognized the look on James's face. She had jumped on his bed with muddy boots. “No, you can't!” he said.
“I can."
The twitch of his mouth. The tautness in his cheek. She knew these things. The bullet was coming.
“Then dodge this!” James said. He drew back his fist and struck at her face.
His eyes were uncertain, as if he wasn't in earnest, but intended to pull his punch. Clio didn't flinch. A spasm of annoyance crossed James's face. Now it's for real, Clio thought.
James launched himself toward her, both fists going. Clio leaped, her body flowing over him, somersaulting, landing on her feet as James sprawled onto the dance floor.
The band had stopped playing. Adults were moving toward them. It would be over in a moment, but James, his cheeks scarlet, ran at her one last time. This is easy, Clio thought. She tried to leap again, but this time her legs caught in the fabric of her long dress. James grabbed her around the waist, and dragged her down to the floor with him. Pain seared her right shoulder and tears burned in her eyes. Warm and fleshy adult hands gently pulled them apart, and reproachful adult voices tut-tutted.
* * * *
In a tomb beneath Xi'an, Clio watched the Qin Emperor's terracotta army drilling in ranks and files, ten thousand ceramic horsemen and foot soldiers marching. Drummers beat time and flautists played the bullet dance song for her on seven-holed flutes carved from the ulnae of the red-crowned crane. “My shoulder still hurts,” Clio said.
“It is dangerous to use a tool in a task for which it is not designed,” Shi said. “Hand-to-hand fighting is different than bullet dancing."
“I want to learn to fight, then."
“There is no need,” Shi said.
“Why do I have to learn to bullet dance?” Perhaps the pain in Clio's shoulder made her braver than usual: she was slightly shocked to find herself questioning an adult.
The ceramic feet of the Qin Emperor's army rattled on the limestone floor of the tomb like teeth chattering. “In school you learn arithmetic and reading,” Shi said, “because your father and teachers think those subjects will prove of value some day. Exactly when, under what circumstances, they don't know. But they think that someday, that knowledge will be important.
“Like you in your bullet dance, we read the expressions which cross the face of history—Morir and I, and Tumba, and Sepulcrum, and Mauti, and others of our order. We know there is a bullet coming for you. Many bullets, perhaps. We do not know where, or when, but we know they must not hit you. We prepare you for that unknown moment."
Because Clio's shoulder still ached, there was no bullet dancing that night. Instead, hours of instruction on firearms engineering. Sear and tumbler, breach and chamber, cook-off and hangfire, the language of the clockwork of destruction.
“When do I learn to shoot a gun?” Clio asked.
* * * *
Shi and Morir exchanged glances.
“I want to learn,” Clio said.
Shi and Morir didn't come again for several nights. Restless, Clio practiced alone in her room, humming the bullet dance song to herself while she leaped into the air and ducked imaginary bullets.
Someone loudly clapped their hands behind her, and she spun around, shocked.
“You're very athletic,” said her father. She had left the door of her room cracked open, and he was looking around it. He said, “I had no idea
. You leaped clean over that boy, the other night. Is that a dance they're teaching you at school?"
“Uh-uh,” Clio said.
“Is it gymnastics?"
“...I guess."
“Did you make it up?"
“No."
He laughed, his brassy male laugh that both reassured her and made her feel shy at the same time. “All right, I'm embarrassing you. It's a secret, then. But I'll bet you'd be good at gymnastics. We should look into it. Maybe you can find a way to release all that energy without beating up your peers."
The American school in Cairo was small and its P.E. teacher knew only rudimentary gymnastics, but her father's secretary found an expatriate German who had once helped coach the East German Olympic team. Clio went to his gymnasium three times a week after school, in the embassy limousine. The first time she went, the driver refused to go without a Secret Service agent.
“Why?” Clio complained to her father. “Najwa and I go to the museums and the souks all the time. Last week we had tea at the Fishawi—"
“Not any more. New policy from CENTCOM. A Secret Service man has to go with you whenever you go into Cairo. It's the same for all embassy families."
“Whyyyyy?"
“Right now, there's a lot of tension in the region.” He put an arm around her shoulder. “These situations come and go."
“When will it go?"
“I don't know, punkin. Maybe not in our lifetimes."
The walls were closing in.
Although the movements of classical gymnastics were not those of the bullet dance, Clio's body was well toned, and she learned quickly. Karl Dresdner was a man miserly with praise, but Clio recognized approval in his eyes and his pursed lips. Within six months she was being packed off on a British Air flight to Milan for a gymnastics meet against other overseas American schoolchildren. Six months later, at a pan-European/ Americas meet in Marseilles, she took the bronze in her age class.
Asimov's SF, July 2007 Page 6
