The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

by Adam-Troy Castro

  I tried to comprehend what it must have been like. “That must have been a comfort."

  He was far away, now, reliving the tortures of a time now dead. “No. I was too weak. From the first day I screamed for it to stop. She was the strong one. She only screamed some of the time. She told me she loved me before I could speak a single sane word. But by the time I was able to give her anything, I loved her too. It was the only thing that got us through the recovery. That ... and talking about the Ballet. Which we both knew would always be far more important to both of us than we could ever be to each other."

  They were words that should have been drowned in tears, but his eyes remained dry. I leaned in close: “And then?"

  “You know what then. She proved more compatible. She became a dancer. I became,” he groped for a phrase, “a marionette with tangled strings."

  “But she still stayed with you, Dalmo."

  “She had to. Because while she had the physical ability ... her understanding of the Ballet itself was only mediocre. She didn't meet Vlhani standards. She didn't have the right insights. Without me, there would have been no chance of her ever being chosen.” He closed his eyes, keeping them shut for so long that I wondered if he'd fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, his words even softer than they'd been before; “So I taught her."

  It was a good thing my neurec had already been sent to the publisher, because the weight of what I'd just been told might have burned out the playback. The blood pounding in my ears, I said: “What?"

  “The only woman I've ever loved. Probably the only woman I ever will love. And I'll never be sure she really loved me, because we spent years giving her everything she needed in order to leave me.” His eyes popped open and stared at the ceiling again. They were not quite aligned with each other, the way human eyes ought to be, with the one on the left trying hard to retreat beneath a droopy lid. Neither seemed to see me at all. He whispered: “If I didn't know what the Ballet is for, I'd hate it. If I didn't know what I still have left to do, I'd kill myself. But I don't have those options.” His words became thick, sludgy. “Art speaks to art, Mr. Royko. The Ballet will never be complete if what I know stays in my head. I have to find another way. Get Enhanced again. Changed Again. And Again after that. Make them invent the right procedures for me, if they have to. Anything that's Necessary. It's that important."

  “And Ch'tpok?"

  “It's not love. At least not for me. But she's still the one who'll get me where I need to go."

  I thought about waking her. I thought about dragging her off the ameboid mattress and hauling her away from this literally damned man before she was forced to pay a price as great as he had paid. I wrote ten separate scripts for the eloquent things I could have said to make her see reason. But she was a Riirgaan who only happened to look human; I was a neurec slinger whose feelings were his stock in trade; and we were both on Vlhan, where sacrificing yourself to the cause of the great Ballet was not a sick abnormality but a religious calling.

  Call it cowardice. Call it sympathy from a crippled artist who knew exactly how Dalmo felt. Call it even the curse of a neurec slinger, so accustomed to experiencing life as a spectator that concrete action of any kind requires more will than I had.

  But once again I turned my back without speaking. I left the room, and Vlhan, and did not see her again for ten years Hom.Sap Mercantile.

  * * *

  15.

  They were the ten busiest years of my professional life.

  I travelled from system to system, covering the empathy drought, the search for the beast Magrison, the unveiling of the Michelard Colossus, the riot at the latest Vossoff funeral, even the banquet held at a house of an unremarkable old Hom.Sap couple worshipped by a cult of interstellar cargo loaders. I saw all the things I was supposed to see and felt all the things I was supposed to feel and even made myself a little reputation for the intensity of my coverage, which didn't quite make up for the sensation of dying inside, one piece at a time, as it came to mean less and less.

  I didn't go out of my way to follow developments on Vlhan. It was, after all, a place I'd visited for less than two weeks, covering one story out of many—even if it happened to be one story that sometimes left me gasping after dreams I barely remembered.

  But you couldn't live in Hom.Sap civilization without hearing more about the Ballet. It remained a sensation, despite the Confederacy's efforts to paint it as a monstrosity. The source of the pilgrim Enhancements remained a mystery despite the entire system treasuries the Confederacy poured into tracking down those responsible. The neurecs went on-line, the analyses flew back and forth by hytex, the human dancers who participated became celebrities and then gods. There were novels and vids about star-crossed romances with the Ballet as a backdrop, even a few that told the tale of Shalakan in terms that substituted sensation for insight. (Two of those theorized that she had survived somehow, and set up housekeeping with Isadora and Melaniherz and all the dancers who came before and after, none of whom died as we had seen them die; the fictitious bungalow grew awfully crowded by the time the number of humans approved for the Ballet exceeded a dozen per performance.)

  I felt a chill the year the dance pilgrims training on Vlhan exceeded one million. Few of those were ever chosen for the performance, of course, but the Confederacy still cried genocide the first and only year more than a thousand humans danced and died. By then the celebrity phase of the movement was over, of course. By then the humans were almost as faceless in their numbers as the Vlhani.

  The updates on Dalmo arrived without my invitation, waiting for me at every new destination. I heard when he married again, to Moralia, a second pilgrim woman who also used his help to qualify for the Ballet. I heard when she died. I heard when he became a teacher guiding other chosen toward their own final performances. I heard when he disappeared, and when he returned to Vlhan with even more radical enhancements, intended to take him closer to the time when he'd be able to join the Ballet himself. The holo I have of him as he appeared at that time shows an emaciated male torso that sprouts half a dozen long black whips uncompromised by any resemblance to human arms and legs. The face is Dalmo's, but it's slack-jawed, heavy-lidded, idiot in its lack of emotional affect. The whips move in painful spasms, occasionally leavened by grace. The Vlhani surrounding him move with such comparative ease that they're like giants, unwittingly mocking the clumsy visitor on stilts. Ch'tpok's there, too: a shadowy observer in their midst, absorbing everything she sees with inscrutable rapture.

  I never liked the updates. As a slinger I saw more than my share of tragedy, but the Dalmo updates felt different: like dispatches in the evolution of a skimmer crash occurring before me in slow motion.

  Still, I might have spent my entire life going from disaster to disaster, feeling none of them, never stirring myself to a moment of genuine participation ... were it not for the summons that called me back.

  It didn't come from Ch'tpok. I was about forty light years away, returning from a sensational murder case involving defendants of four separate species, and a victim who remained conscious despite passing all of the clinical definitions of death, when my sponsors diverted my latest transport to Vlhan. They wanted me to cover Rafael, a young man whose charm and magnetism and passion for the Vlhani Ballet had rendered him the first Chosen dancer to capture the imagination of the Hom.Sap public in three years Mercantile. And while I did my job, and spoke to him and watched him perform and saw him die, he was not the real story any more than Shalakan had been.

  * * *

  16.

  The growing Pilgrim city known as Nureyev occupied a stark expanse of shoreline between one of Vlhan's many deserts and one of its rarer freshwater seas. Why the Pilgrims had chosen that particular spot for their promised land was anybody's guess. Maybe the Vlhani themselves dictated the site. Or maybe, like most fanatics, the Pilgrims believed they could ennoble their cause with suffering.

  Established soon after Isadora's dance as a handful of ragge
d tents, huddled defiantly against both the dry desert winds and the diplomatic firestorms that had greeted their arrival, Nureyev had grown into a boom town, with many square kilometers of cramped cubehouses arrayed in as disorganized a grid as possible. There were still a few battered tents scattered around the perimeter, a phenomenon common to many frontiers that attract new citizens faster than the old can be housed. It was in no way a self-sufficient community; the Pilgrims grew only a little food and produced even fewer goods, surviving mostly on the support of the various alien embassies who continued to supply them with staples despite the Hom.Sap Confederacy's increasingly shrill protests that this only encouraged more pilgrims to show up.

  There were about eighty thousand Hom.Saps in Nureyev, most of them Enhanced. There was also always a scattering of aliens, visiting from their respective delegations, sometimes mingling with each other, sometimes keeping to themselves, always observing the mysteries of Vlhan with a fascination that transcended species.

  And Vlhani, of course. Whether alone or in groups, they moved among their followers with the self-assurance of Gods on daily errands. Or if not gods, then something else: for as my skimmer banked over the central marketplace, the thousands of undulating whips on display resembled nothing so much as an inferno of writhing snakes.

  Ch'tpok was, as promised, waiting at a table outside one of Nureyev's slapdash bars. Years of desert conditions, without compensatory rejuvenation by AIsource Medical, had aged her more than time could have. She was grayer, browner, more leathery about the eyes. She wore battered old Hom.Sap gear instead of the Riirgaan uniform she'd affected years ago. The frown built into her features now looked more like a scowl. But the weariness lightened when she saw me, and she flashed the same dazzling smile I remembered from so long ago. She didn't stand to greet me, but instead just raised her beer in a salute. “Mr. Royko. Been a lot of years."

  “Not so many you can't still call me Paul,” I said, as I took the seat opposite hers.

  “Um,” she said. “I did call you Paul, didn't I?"

  “For a while,” I said.

  “I remember,” she said, and for a moment we both smiled. “You know, you made the best recording that day. Some of the young ones, pilgrims I mean, tell me how inspiring they found it."

  My expression must have been complicated. “Thank you."

  “I'll call you Paul."

  “And I'm still willing to try to pronounce Chuppock."

  Her eyes darkened, lowered, and found something intensely interesting to study on the surface of her beer. The moment was fleeting, though; before the clouds had a chance to gather the sunlight broke through, revealing a determined cheer that must have taken her some effort to maintain. “My,” she said. “We really have been out of touch for a while, haven't we?—That's not my name anymore. A while back I had a misunderstanding with my adopted species and was forced to renounce my affiliation."

  That was a stunner. “You're not Riirgaan anymore?"

  “Never was,” she said, taking dark enjoyment in my reaction.

  “I mean, legally. What are you, Hom.Sap now?"

  “Wish I could say I was; it would be awfully convenient sometimes.” There was another flash of darkness, dispelled just as quickly. “No. The Confederacy said it wouldn't let me reclaim Hom.Sap citizenship without first making a public statement renouncing my support for the Ballet. So I'm legally nothing."

  I thought of what it must have been like to have no home, not even in theory; to have fewer rights than a representative of a species not yet judged Sentient or Animal, to have the closest thing to a consensus government in a thousand human worlds decide that the entire race would turn its back on her.

  My reaction must have shown on my face, because she laughed out loud. “Don't look so damn stricken. People have been without countries before. And while I may not have rights anywhere else, the Vlhani don't care about stupid concepts like citizenship and species loyalty."

  It was still exile, and it had taken more out of her than she evidently liked to pretend, but I declined to say so. “What can I call you?"

  She made a Vlhani gesture, her right arm looping around itself in an uneven spiral. The move was lyrical, beautiful, and so fleeting that until she repeated it twice I wasn't sure I'd seen it at all. “That's what they call me."

  Damn. She'd obtained Enhancements of her own. I wondered if she harbored any dreams of giving her life for the Ballet, and felt a pang at the idea: as brief as our past encounter had been, I still remembered her with too much fondness to wish such an end for her. Wanting to protest, I tried to imitate her new name with a flappy arm movement and failed.

  Another grin. “Call me Chuppock, if you must. This time it can even be the correct pronunciation."

  “All right,” I said. “Chuppock."

  The pause between us lasted as long as some entire Vlhani Ballets, with nothing filling it except for mutual anticipation. A number of marionettes and pilgrims passed by, limbs flailing in communication many times more frenzied but not any more articulate than our silence. There were any number of things I could have said to break the moment, but I just asked, “Where is he, Chuppock?"

  She looked away, studied the rough wood surface of the table, and drummed her fingertips against the grain. “Is it just for a story, or do you really want to know?"

  My answer was no answer at all. “What do you think?"

  I wouldn't have blamed her for refusing to tell me. We really didn't know each other well, and the media have been disregarding pledges of secrecy since before the bygone era of paper.

  But if there was one thing that personified all questions about the Vlhani Ballet, it was the genuine need to know ... and if there was one thing that characterized humanity it was the equal, and compensatory, need to tell.

  After a long time, she said: “Dalmo always said he'd see you again."

  * * *

  17.

  The clinic was dim and humid and filled with a smoky something that wasn't exactly breathable but didn't have the courtesy to suffocate you either. The walls echoed with the cries of other patients, some of which sounded human enough but made no coherent sense. All of those interred here had been damaged beyond repair by the Enhancement technology; none had any hope of getting better.

  The figure in the hammock was the worst. Neither Vlhani or human or the hybrid pilgrim enhancements were meant to achieve, he was just a failure, twitching and writhing from his inability to achieve any of those lost but exalted states.

  The torso I'd seen in the holo was gone. It had been simplified, streamlined, reduced to a knotty cable that might have begun existence as a human spinal column. Bags of moist something clung to the cable by straps. So did a human head, still recognizable as the man I'd met, but robbed of his passion and intelligence. Even the eyes were blind, clouded. I would have thought him brain-dead were it not for the hovering AIsource monitor busily translating every neural jolt into screens of data.

  Behind me, Ch'tpok said:. “They kept trying. They never did it for anybody else, but they kept taking him back to try again. Six, seven stages already: all making him a little less human, all in search of a system capable of expressing the choreography locked inside his head."

  It was monstrous. It made me want to vomit. I choked: “And he wants it this way?"

  “He isn't driven by what he wants,” she said. “He's driven by what he needs to do."

  I moved closer to the damaged creature in the hammock, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to think. I felt horror, awe, repugnance, amazement, and for a moment, the ghost of another feeling I couldn't identify. Retrospect, much later on, allowed me to identify that feeling as understanding. Maybe my own exposure to the Ballet had given me some awareness of the Vlhani plan; maybe I couldn't tell what that plan was all about but still understood that it was about something. Maybe my first glimpse of what Dalmo had become gave me some sense of progress toward the realization of what they wanted.

  Or ma
ybe it was just plain pity for the idiot who had damned himself to hell for a belief. “Can I talk to him?"

  “He doesn't make much sense these days. But the monitor will translate.” She spoke up: “Amplify, please."

  The flatscreen obliged, flashing the words in Hom.Sap Mercantile while simultaneously speaking the words in a simulation of Dalmo's voice: “Dance. Future. Dance. Time. Heat. Vlhani. Dance. Spin. Leap. Dance. Death. Life. Dance. Hate. Danger. Death. Time. Dance. Love. Dance. Ch'tpok. Dance. Fear. Fear. Pain. Dance. More. Dance.” It went on like that, the only pattern frequent repetition of the word “Dance.” The tone was insistent, even desperate, underlaid with the kind of irritation that comes with explaining something to somebody too stupid to get it.

  Ch'tpok said, “That's in Mercantile, of course. It doesn't have enough of a common vocabulary to express what Dalmo's getting at. Unfortunately, there's not much more for those of us who understand the dance. We play the neurecs and get something useful to the Vlhani once every three or four days."

  “Is that enough?"

  “No,” she said. “He needs to move. He won't be able to do much the way he is now."

  “Meaning more Enhancements,” I said.

  “Another generation. Maybe two. Yes."

  I could see it, then: more years in torment, more disfigurement, more pain and exile. Was it even something he was still capable of wanting? Or were Ch'tpok, and whoever else she included in the mysterious “We,” just torturing a lost soul whose potential, if any, had been lost several operations back? I opened my mouth to ask, realized while still forming the question that there was no way to phrase it without striking the barrier called faith, and shut my mouth, feeling trapped.

  She seemed unsurprised. “You don't believe I love him?"

  I turned, to confront eyes glowing with conviction. “I believe you love what you think he is. I don't know if that means doing what's best for him."