The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “Unfortunately,” she said, her smile becoming downright broad, “we can't all meet here in a few thousand years, take a look around us, and know who was right."

  “No,” I said. “We can't."

  She took me by the wrist and led me down the stinking corridor, past an array of other failed pilgrims in other states of degeneration. I allowed myself to be pulled along less out of faith that she'd take me someplace meaningful, than hope she'd take me away from so much wasted pain. She brought me outside and she led me across a bright sunlit plain to a sleepcube much like the one where I'd found her so long ago.

  This one was empty but for a neural playback unit. She sat me down beside it, plugged me in, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Paul? Do you remember, a long time ago, I told you about the Riirgaan darrr'pakh?"

  There were many things she'd spoken to me about, that were now lost; but that particular detail had stuck. “Yes."

  “Well, mine said something to me, once, not long after I accepted that I'd never learn what he had to teach. He said that no piece of paper can bear words unless it's the right color to provide contrast with the ink. He said that just because the human mind was incompatible with his particular curriculum, didn't keep it from being receptive to other things. Even harder things.” She took a deep breath, and gave the machine a glance that suggested she resented it. “Dalmo said that you'd understand. He said that if you ever came back I would have to show this to you."

  I stared at the playback leads. “What?"

  “Art,” she said. “Speaking to art. A little gift from him to you."

  I might have hesitated.

  But then I plugged in—

  * * *

  18.

  It was a recording of chol.

  The neurec had been made by a genius at the peak of his abilities, capturing another whose sounds should have been entirely alien to any concerns involving the Vlhani Ballet. I had no idea how Dalmo knew that they would speak to me, or how he commissioned the performance. I can only say that the voice I heard was infinitely greater than I had been even on the best day of my life, that the tears sprung from my eyes within the first few notes, and that by the time I calmed down enough to listen I had discovered it was possible to miss hell if hell was the place where you were at your best.

  And one other thing.

  For the duration of that song, at least, I understood everything the Vlhani had been trying to express. I saw what Isadora and Shalakan and Dalmo had seen, what the pilgrims were desperate to create, what lesser visionaries like Ch'tpok and myself could appreciate only in fragments. I saw the millennia of Ballet performances as a single unified whole, creating a single, complex, exhaustively-annotated image. I saw what the image conveyed and I knew why the message had to be delivered and I understood why the Vlhani and all the humans who had begun to join them felt their own lives of minor consequence in the face of the ways everything would change upon the day of the final performance. I saw who in power harbored the secrets of the Enhancement engineers and I saw how those secrets were being kept and I understood the great colossal joke that was being played on the Confederate Dip Corps and its futile ambition to shut the Ballet down.

  I saw all this and for a few moments I persuaded myself that I could use this knowledge to blackmail the engineers into inflicting their Enhancements upon me, so I could dance where all those others had danced before me. But that urge lasted less than a second. Almost as soon as it struck I knew that it was impossible. Even if I endured the surgeries, I didn't have what Dalmo had, or what Shalakan had. I didn't even have what Ch'tpok had. I could hear the music, for now—even if, like most complex melodies, its precise structure would no doubt fade from memory the second I stopped listening—but I would never be able to play the song.

  It was a feeling I had felt before, upon losing chol.

  The performance built to a crescendo. I saw the final Ballet, being performed on a Vlhani plain more than ten thousand years from now. It involved every single Vlhani alive at that time, gathered together from horizon to horizon, giving their all for the climax of the performance that had consumed their racial history. I saw, not thousands, but millions of altered humans among them. I sensed others, too far away for me to see: entire civilized worlds which had dedicated their entire populations to dancing these last few moments. I saw no indication that anybody would die in this last performance. I sensed only what all those sentients sensed as they raised their limbs for the last flourish.

  And one other thing:

  I saw that the Vlhani conception was flawed. That they were flailing about in a vacuum. That they'd never accomplish what they wanted to accomplish unless Dalmo pointed the way for them.

  Why a human? Since it made no sense for a human to be able to accomplish what creatures evolved for this dance could not?

  I saw the reason for that, too.

  And it was the only part that frightened me.

  As the song ended, I found myself on my hands and knees, shaking. Ch'tpok had her enhanced arms curled around me in a sort of harness, holding me tightly and murmuring soft reassurances as I passed through the various stages of hysteria.

  I said, “Thousands of years.” Destroyed that I'd never see it. “Thousands."

  Ch'tpok held me, and kissed me on the back on the neck. “But we'll get him there."

  We, I thought. And knew it was true.

  I would never dance.

  But the rest of my life would be about making that final dance happen.

  * * *

  19.

  Travel to a certain isolated plateau, in the southern hemisphere of the planet Vlhan, and you'll find the statue: a representation of a lone Vlhani, its whips contorted in expansive, frozen curls.

  You'll wonder what it signifies, and you'll decide that at it means nothing. After all, Vlhani Dance requires movement. A static moment like this means nothing to them, without the choreography that carries one position to the next. It's realistic enough, even lifelike, but utterly without meaning, to anybody interested in decoding the great Vlhani Ballet.

  Chances are that you'll describe it a curiosity and walk away.

  Chances are that you won't return at some later date.

  Chances are that if you do you won't notice the subtle differences between its position now and its position then. Those changes involve millimeters over a series of years—each micro-movement carefully planned, and laboriously plotted by the one part of this enhanced creature that still belongs to a lonely and tormented human being. You wouldn't see anything if you came back a year from now. Or even a century from now. But give it time. Sooner or later, with all its movements plotted and memorized, all its calculations finished and all its plans made, the thing will come to life and perform its dance at the proper speed. Sooner or later, it will tell the Vlhani what they need to know.

  That, Ch'tpok tells me, is when everything will change.

  Until then, it's just a statue.

  You might consider it a monument.

  But you won't guess which kind.

  —END—

  * * *

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