I was silent. We both knew he was right. I could open a dance studio for little girls—little human girls—somewhere in a garage in Iowa, but that was about all. And I didn’t have the money for a garage in Iowa. Corps members live on air, hope, and a pittance that barely covers Manhattan rent.
“I have, Celia,” Diego said with unusual gentleness, “seen you try to help the young girls who have just joined the corps. I think you will be good at your new job.”
I told Cal at dinner. No one else knew yet. The Mollies wanted to keep it out of the press until I had safely left Earth for their huge orbiting ship.
“For their what?” Cal said. He looked stunned, which was understandable. I felt pretty unstable myself.
“Their ship.”
“To teach ballet to young squid,” he repeated, squinting at me.
“We’re not supposed to call them that.”
“But why do they want—”
“God knows!”
“And so you’re going to teach them to turn out their toes and… and…”
“Point and flex. Arabesques.”
“Those little running steps across stage—”
“Bourées. And ports des bras. That means ‘arm movements.’”
“With four arms.”
We both collapsed into hysterical laughter. It was hilarious, it was terrible, it was going to be my life. As soon as one of us started to recover, the other would curve an arm overhead or point and flex an ankle, and we’d be off again. It went on and on. Finally I staggered upright, wiping my eyes. “Ah, Cal…”
The door opened and Sally strolled in. Everything changed.
My niece had been beautiful, before she scarred the left side of her face while on a deadly combination of snap and rapture. She refused surgery to fix it. One look at her eyes, vacant and filmy, and I knew she was on something again. Oh, Cal…
He sat stiffly, impaled on an instrument of torture I couldn’t know, even though the rack was partly of his own making. Cal has never been the best of fathers. Sally’s mother, a spoiled rich beauty whom I’d never liked, died when Sally was three, and Cal was always too caught up in his work to really attend to her. She had everything material and very little that wasn’t. I saw that now, although I, too, hadn’t been paying much attention as she grew up. Still, plenty of children grow up with emotionally absent fathers without becoming addicts who steal or disappear for days at a time. Cal had got her into treatment programs and boot-camp schools, but nothing had worked. I think he’d been relieved just to have her out of the apartment for those weeks or months. “Sally…”
“Hi, Aunt Celia. Still lifting your legs for money?”
I restrained myself from answering. I’d tried with Sally, too. Now I only wanted to not make it worse for Cal.
“Sally—”
“Don’t return, Daddy mine, to the Sally’s health-and-well-being platform.”
“I never left it”
She laughed, a high giggle, so unbearable—I remembered her at three, at seven—that I excused myself and caught a cab home. They didn’t want me there for the looming fight, and I didn’t want to be there either.
Call me a coward.
They took me up in a Mollie shuttle along with a load of diplomat types. We left a government building somewhere on Long Island through an underground tunnel, then emerged beside an egg-shaped craft that I suddenly thought would make an interesting backdrop for one of DePietro’s geometric ballets. No one spoke to me. These men and women, all dressed in business suits with the latest pleated sashes, looked grim. Was there trouble between humans and Mollies? Not that I knew of, but then I didn’t know much. Cal teased me about never watching a newsvid. Everything on them seemed so fleeting compared to the eternities danced every night on stage.
But for the last week I’d watched vids, and I’d studied about Mollie anatomy, and I’d carefully selected my music cubes, and I was scared to death.
“Miss Carver,” said a human voice, “I’m Randall Mombatu. I’ll be your liaison officer aboard ship.”
I was so glad to see an actual person I nearly cried. The diplomats had all stridden purposefully down a corridor and shut the door after them, leaving me standing in the big empty place where the shuttle had flown in.
“You probably have questions,” Mombatu said. He was a tall, handsome man the color of milk chocolate, dressed in the ubiquitous sashed suit. His face looked like all of the others: sanded, with all emotional irregularities planed out. I nodded, clutching my dance bag.
“Well, this part of the ship is filled with Terran atmosphere, obviously, as your quarters and half the dance studio will be. The gravity is that of the alien planet, a little over two-thirds Earth, as of course you’ve noticed. This troubles some humans—”
I sprang into a pas de chat. Such height for a simple jump! I never got that height at NYCB. Nijinsky-like, I seemed to hang for a moment before landing in a perfect fifth position. I laughed in delight.
“—although others adjust to the gravity quite easily,” Mombatu said, smiling. “This way, please.”
They’d given me a small bedroom, sparse as a monk’s cell. “All this part of the ship is human. Dining room, commons, conference rooms… think of it as an international hotel. Your studio, of course, is new.” He opened a door at the end of a short hall. I followed him and froze.
They were already there, the little aliens. The room was like any other dance studio, lined with mirrors and barres on two sides, a stand at one end for music cubes—except that across from me stood sixteen small Mollies, all staring at me from flat black eyes. I clutched Mombatu’s arm.
“How… how are they breathing…?”
“There’s a membrane down the middle of the room. Invisible, some technology we don’t have, impermeable to gases but not to light and sound. Terran air on this side, theirs on the other.”
“But… how will I touch them?” A teacher needed to straighten a leg, push down a shoulder… except the aliens had no shoulders anyway. Hysteria bubbled inside me; I forced it down.
“You can’t touch them, I’m afraid. You’ll have to demonstrate what you want. We also didn’t know what to do about toe shoes, so we left that until you arrive.”
Toe shoes. Dancers didn’t go on toe until a few years of training had strengthened their muscles… and these aliens had no toes. I turned my back to them and spoke to Mombatu softly, urgently.
“I can’t do this. I’m sorry, I know you probably spent a lot of money or whatever bringing me here but I can’t do it, I really can’t—”
“Yes, you can, Celia,” he said, with complete confidence. It was a professional facade but, gods, was it effective. “And your students believe you can, too. They’re waiting to be introduced.”
He turned me firmly to face the octopi. “This is Ellen—they’ve chosen Terran names, of course, for your convenience—the ambassador’s daughter.”
The Mollie on the right end of the waiting line extended one tentacle full length on the floor in front of her, bent the other five, and bowed forward. It was a ballerina’s reverence: clumsy, hopeful, infinitely touching.
“This is Jim… and Justine…” He knew them all. They all looked alike to me, and when I caught myself thinking that I was suddenly ashamed. These were kids, as eager to learn as I had been at Miss DuBois’ School of the Dance in Parcells, Iowa, thirty years ago.
“Do they understand English?”
“Only a few words. You’ll teach them dance vocabulary as you go.”
He made it sound so simple. I gazed at the line of youngsters, wondered how the hell I was going to teach partnering and lifts, and made a deep reverence toward my class.