The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

by Adam-Troy Castro

  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 translat
ion 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."