The Stardance Trilogy (89 page)

When he finally stopped, Colly’s applause startled him. He had not been aware of her watching, hadn’t thought to censor what his body was saying. But she was not disturbed by his dance, only impressed; her applause was sincere. She was oblivious to her doom.

They ended up napping in each other’s arms.

Nova Dance Theatre
The Shimizu Hotel
22 January 2065
 

E
ARLY ON IN THE DANCE
, Eva knew she was in good hands, and relaxed.

You couldn’t always tell, that early. Sometimes a serious dance was over before you had decided whether you liked it or not. Every piece must, along with what it actually conveys, explain to you the rules by which it is meant to be judged, and sometimes that subtext can take as long to grasp and evaluate as the work itself. For that very reason, Eva had avoided seeing any rehearsals, so she could assess the finished work fairly. But a minute or so into
Kinergy,
she stopped praying that her friend’s work wouldn’t bomb, and became lost in it. Jay and his brother had meshed well, for the second time: this piece, despite its origins in the turgid head of Pribhara, was even better than
Spatial Delivery
had been.

It was not as cerebral as that piece, nor as simple. For one thing, it was staged in the sphere rather than in proscenium, so it had to work in any direction. The stage was bare: apparently none of the standard vector-changing hardware of free-fall dance was going to be used tonight…which meant the dancers were going to work harder. The piece’s title was another clue.
Spatial Delivery
had been a single pun, based on a long-obsolete term—but
Kinergy
was a cascade of overlapping ones—synergy/kinetic energy/kinship energy/kin urge—all primal concepts of the human universe, as old as DNA and as unlikely to ever become dated. It had opened, in fact, with two chains of six dancers unwinding from a double helix in a sudden burst of illumination. The musical accompaniment that appeared as they separated was likewise timeless: the tones of its individual voices did not precisely match any classical instrument, but neither did they sound electronic. The music they made together was difficult to categorize; one could have imagined such music being played at just about any time in history. The dancers were costumed as neutrally as possible, in unitards that matched their complexions, with hoods that masked their diversity of hair styles and colors, and with oversized wings and disguised thrusters.

Nor did the ensuing choreography seem to contain any period or style “flags” in its movement vocabulary—not even those characteristic to its creator. Eva was familiar with most of Jay’s work, and might not have identified this as his if she hadn’t been told: he had managed to transcend his own limitations.

Ordinarily, for instance, he hated unisons, referred to them as “redundancies,” and tended to use them as little as possible—but once his two chains of dancers had separated into twelve individuals, they spent several minutes dancing in unison, changing only in their dynamic relation to one another, like birds altering their formation in flight.

Eva slowly realized that the piece
did
have an unavoidable period flag: since the dancers were weightless, the dance had to belong to the twenty-first century. Few of its sweeping movements could have been performed any earlier in history, on Terra, without the help of special effects. But as that realization came to her, Rand’s shaping began, and cut the piece adrift in time again. The audience facing her on the far side of the theater went away; the dancers were now flying in a blue Terran sky that went on forever, peppered with slow-moving clouds. The sun, its brilliance tempered to a tolerable level by an intervening cloud, was directly opposite Eva, so her subconscious decided that she was lying on her back,
mere thousands of meters above Terra,
about to fall, an effect so unsettling that she grabbed for her seatmate. (Glancing briefly around, she noticed that many others were doing the same—but not those who were spaceborn.) But the clouds and dancers did not recede, she did not “fall”; before long she relaxed and accepted the fact that she could float in a gravity field, that she was simply lying on a cloud. She resumed watching the dance.

How old is the concept of fairies? Of winged humans who play among the clouds? These dancers played
with
the clouds, buzzing them, bursting through them, batting them to and fro like fluffy beachballs. A sextet formed, grabbed each other’s ankles and made a great circle just in time for a cloud to thread it in stately slow motion. Another group at the opposite end of the theater seemed to echo the phrase, but contracted as the cloud was passing through their circle and pinched it into two clouds; the sextet broke into two trios, and each took one of the cloudlets to play with. The remaining six formed a puffball, like fish in the pool, with a cloud at their center; it slowly expanded outward through them, moving up their torsos, and became a translucent wispy sphere around them, then a globe of water, swirling with surface tension. All six came apart from each other and burst the bubble: it popped with a comical moist sound and sent droplets cascading in all directions like a cool firework blossoming. The ones coming toward Eva vanished just before arriving.

She was delighted. The simple beauty of weightlessness, which became prosaic for every Shimizu resident through daily familiarity, was made magical again by the setting. In this context, the dancers seemed somehow
more than
(or was it less than?) weightless; they seemed to be nearly massless as well, ethereal. They could meet at high speed without apparent impact, change vector so that it seemed to be their will rather than thrusters which caused the change, bounce from a cloud as easily as penetrate it, pivot on a passing breeze.

Fetch a Sumerian shepherd with a time machine, give him an hour or two to get used to zero gee, and show him this piece: it would communicate to him instantly. The same for a Cretan stonecutter or a medieval alchemist or, Eva imagined, a hypothetical twenty-third century energy creature. There were probably
apes
who would appreciate this dance. The creative audacity of trying to rekindle the ancient wonder of flying, for people in an environment where one had to fly to get to the bathroom, people who had been striving since their arrival inboard to become blasé about that very miracle, was inspired. Eva had been in space for a long time, and this was the first time in years that she had reflected on how
lucky
she was: that mankind’s oldest dream—to fly like a bird, and never fear hitting the ground—was for her a commonplace.

During the brief interval between movements, Eva reached up and tapped the program-button in her ear; she had deliberately not audited the program notes before the piece began, but now she wanted to know what the creators had had to say about it. She heard the recorded voice of the immortal Murray Louis, reading from one of his own books:

Performance is not mired, it floats. It exists upward, it hovers. It is immediate. It happens. It has no roots, it feeds from the air. It floats above all the tangibles that create it. From its loftiness, its aura descends and permeates all, lifting everything to its height as well as its depth. Performance is the revelation that speaks for itself.

She switched off as the credits began; the second movement had begun. During the interval the dancers had all exited—seeming to shimmer out of existence, one by one—and the clouds had thickened into banks of rolling thunderheads that blotted the sun and darkened the sky. Now the darkness was nearly complete; one could just make out individual billowings in the roiling storm. The temperature seemed to drop slightly, and the air pressure to rise.

Suddenly, with an earsplitting crash, a fractal fork of lightning arced between two prominences. It came
toward
Eva, ended only meters from her; for the second time she clutched her seatmate tightly. The audience gasped, then muttered and tittered nervously. Five or ten seconds later a second bolt, shorter and with a different vector, again gave a snapshot of the interior of the storm. The music began to sound like mountain horns in the far distance, great deep bass tones punching through intervening winds. Another bolt, more crooked than the last, flared and died…then another, and another. Their randomness was convincing; they came anywhere from two to twenty seconds apart, lingering in the eye for nearly a second.

Then all at once all twelve dancers were there, caught in the sudden glare of God’s flashbulb, frozen in tableau. Again the audience murmured. The next flash found them in a different tableau, and the next. Sometimes they were arrayed as two sextets, sometimes as four trios, or three quartets, or a septet and quintet, or six pairs; sometimes they were simply twelve lost individuals. No matter how close together the flashes came, the dancers were never caught in motion. Eva wondered how they managed to navigate to each new position in the dark without colliding, but refused to let herself speculate on how the trick was being done, preferring to simply enjoy it. Soon she was noting patterns in the progression of patterns itself. The whole thing began to remind her of the ancient computer game called “Life,” in which a collection of cells changes shape and structure in successive frames, “evolving” and “growing” according to simple rules. This was like a three-dimensional Life sequence run at a very slow frame rate, had the same weird but intuitively appealing beauty, constantly changing yet remaining stable over time.

Just as seeming chance brought the dancers fairly close together in a cluster, an especially bright bolt of lightning lingered longer than usual, split again and again, fractured into a hundred snake-tongues of fire that raced around the entire storm—and in their flickering light, the cluster of dancers began to move in space, turning end over end like a Catherine wheel. As the actinic sparkles faded slowly away, the dancers themselves began to glow softly, somehow emitting their own light, shining from within like fireflies. They began to move bodily too, without losing their place in formation, first in unison and then individually, and before long the tension of their solos tore the cluster apart into smaller groups.

Two of the groups, asymmetrically opposed, began to leave trails of light behind them as they moved. Short at first, mere afterimages, the trails slowly lengthened until they were winding tails, as though the invisible eraser that chased them was falling farther and farther behind—then they vanished, and three other groups began to leave trails of their own. Soon dancers were making light sculptures all over the sky, like particle tracks in a cyclotron, occasionally mirroring one another for a time and then diverging. Again Eva was reminded of something from the dawn of the Age of Silicon: a screen-saver program called Electric Fire. The effect was hypnotic—but a kind of hypnosis that made the pulse race and the breath come faster, a
heightening
of alertness. Forks of lightning still flared here and there among the clouds, imbuing the whole scene with a sense of energy, largeness, danger. Perhaps there were subsonics buried in the score as well. One sensed that something awful, cataclysmic, might happen if one of the dancers missed a movement, distorted the weave of the incomprehensible pattern they were shaping together. Something on the scale of Ragnarok. The speed and intensity of the dance increased, until all twelve were racing to and fro at the highest speeds they could reach without crashing into the unseen audience, threatening to lose control and do so. The very clouds seemed to back away from them. In their boiling frenzy, they came to resemble the classic historical footage of the Fireflies confronting Shara Drummond…save that they were not red. Each glowed a
different
color now, twelve distinct shades; together they seemed the shards of a proto-rainbow struggling to form.

As the music swelled and steadied, they succeeded: seemingly by chance, they settled one after another into the same stable orbit, a great ring whose axis kept changing, like the “orange-slice” orbit of Peace Monitor satellites around Terra, like a primitive model of an atom with twelve electrons. Their trails became one orbit in length: a coruscating rainbow chased itself around the globe.

A short blast of trumpets, and the rainbow flared, doubling in brightness. Each and every cloud dissolved into a trillion spherically expanding droplets of water, a trillion seeds, each carrying with it a tiny reflection of the rainbow. As they dispersed and vanished, the stormclouds lightened in color and mass, thinned out, became wispy, melted away save for a handful of benign white clouds. The storm was broken; the sun returned, and the achingly familiar blue of the Terran sky. (Even spaceborns, studies had long shown, resonated emotionally to that color; it seemed to be in the
DNA
somewhere, though none could say how.) The music moved gradually up the scale, from deep baritone horn sounds to medium frequencies that sounded eerily like human voices, yet moved in ways no human culture sang. The dancers glowed so fiercely now that they seemed to have enlarged, and their features were indistinct.

Then the rainbow-ring came apart, and they were again the playful, independent sprites they had been in the first movement—but shining, gleaming. The voices became a vast choir, hundreds of voices singing their hearts out in a language Eva had never heard before. The net effect was dysharmonic, but occasionally little resolutions came and went, as if the choir were singing a dozen songs in a dozen keys simultaneously.

The blue sky turned suddenly to gold. Groups of dancers formed, interacted and broke up with dizzying speed. A quartet would come together, agree on a movement phrase, split apart and bring the phrase to other groups, which made up new phrases to combine with them, then split apart in their turn. Choreographic ideas appeared spontaneously and spread around the stage like heat lightning or rumor. A unison formed by apparent accident among the twelve dissolved, then returned—while in the score, more and more singers reached agreement on a key and rules of harmony, until they too were working together to build something. Dance and music together established a stable base and began to climb higher.