“And one and two and three and four…”
Sixteen octopi stood at the barre, doing warm-ups. Dressed in leotard and practice skirt, I walked up and down on my side of the membrane, watching for flaws in position.
The Mollies had no hip sockets. They were vertebrates, not really mollusks, but each of their six limbs emerged from a sort of padded hole in the sort of flexible shell that cased their organs and head. The shell, which had a soft underside for various anatomical openings, was vaguely oval, with the limbs attached halfway up. The result was sort of like Humpty Dumpty with six long, powerful arms. Not an ideal shape for ballet.
Still, it had some advantages. Without hip sockets, turnout was no problem; these kids already had their limbs rotated 180 degrees to their body. The long arms-or-legs were unsegmented and had no bones, just tough cartilage-analogue skeletal tissue, and so a fluid line was much easier to obtain than with all those stiff human bones. The back two limbs were the most powerful; along with the next two, they usually bore the weight in walking. Suckers three quarters of the way down each limb provided sturdy balance. I designated these back two limbs “legs.”
The front two limbs were “arms.” The middle two, the alienettes (I couldn’t refer to them as “dance students,” not even in my own mind) kept folded close to their body except at the height of posed steps, when they would slowly unfold for great dramatic effect. That was the plan, anyway. Right now, we were working on warm-up stretches and simple extensions. Warm-ups got a lubricating fluid flowing in each limb socket, so no one got injured when we started throwing limbs as high in the air as possible in grands battements.
“Ellen, keep your suckers on the floor as long as possible in the plié… damn.” I kept forgetting they couldn’t speak English. “Ellen, look! Look!”
I demonstrated a grand plié, heels down, and then demonstrated what she was doing, shaking my head. Ellen made me a deep reverence—they all loved doing that—and performed the movement correctly.
“Good, good… Terence, don’t wobble… look! Look!”
I’d been aboard ship for four months. My Mollies worked fanatically hard, practicing for hours every day. Randall Mombatu conveyed lavish compliments from all the parents, none of whom would have recognized a correct arabesque if Pavlova herself were doing it. The small squid couldn’t talk to me, although they chattered readily among themselves in chirps and whistles. There was some incompatibility of human words with their tongues. I think. But they understood me well, picking up a huge dance vocabulary quickly. I had the suspicion they were smarter than I was. The adults, I gathered, communicated with our diplomats through keyboards.
Today I had a surprise for the octopi; the toe shoes had arrived. They were specially designed, blocky pink coverings for the back two legs that would support the fragile tentacle ends and add another few inches to their extensions.
But first we had to get from pliés to grands battements. “One and two and—”
“Celia,” Randall said abruptly, spoiling my count. “You have a phone call.”
“Can’t it wait? Jim, no, no, not like that… look! Look!”
“She says not. It’s your niece.”
Sally? I turned to look at Randall. His tone had been disapproving, but now his entire attention absorbed by the alienettes. “You know,” he murmured to me, “we have almost no knowledge about the Visitor young. Their parents are very protective. You’re the only human who’s spent any time with them at all.”
I realized then why I’d been forbidden to record classes for later analysis. I said incredulously, “You mean, this is the only contact between a human and Mollie kids?”
“Between a human and Alien Visitor children,” he corrected, with an emphasis that told me we were being overheard. Probably the aliens taped my classes—something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Well, why not? Except that it would have been useful to see those tapes for dance analysis.
I followed Randall to the comlink phone, which the Mollies had allowed us to install in the human part of the ship. We passed people engaged in urgent, obscure tasks. It occurred to me that very few people aboard this ship ever smiled.
“Sally?”
“Oh,” my niece said, sounding bored, or trying to sound bored. I waited, until she was forced to say, “How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“Fine. Except, of course… oh, Aunt Celia, I’m not fine at all!”
It was the last thing I’d expected: the return of the open, honest eight-year-old she’d once been. It got under my barriers as nothing else could have.
“What’s wrong, Sally?”
“Dad’s going to send me away to school again and it’s awful, you can’t know and I can’t bear it! I won’t!” Her voice rose to a shriek.
“Sally, dear—”
“Unless I can come up there and stay with you. Oh, can I, please? I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I promise!”
I closed my eyes and ground my forehead against the wall. “Sally, honey, this is an embassy or something, I can’t give permission to—”
“Yes, you can. The news said the Mollies would do anything for you because they’re so happy about their kids’ dancing!”
That was more than I knew. The pleading in her voice broke my heart. I didn’t want her here. She’d be a bored nuisance. Guilt washed over me like surf.
“Please! Please!”
I said to the presence behind me, who was probably always behind me electronically or otherwise if I only had the interest to look for him, “Randall?”
“The Alien Visitors would allow it.”
“They would? Why?”
“I suspect they’re as interested in our young as we are in theirs.”
But not this particular girl, I didn’t say. Not Sally, not to form impressions of human offspring by.
“If Dad makes me go away again, I’ll… he just wants me somewhere where he doesn’t have to think about me and be distracted from his work!”
And there was enough truth in that despairing pain that I said, “All right, Sally. Come up here.”
“Thank you, Aunt Celia! I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”
But I didn’t know her now. Worse, I didn’t really want to. Guilt held me in its undertow, and I just hoped we didn’t both drown.
At first she tried, I’ll give her that. She learned the Mollies’ names. She made no audible jokes about crustaceans. She played the music cubes I asked for in class. She chatted with me over dinner, and she didn’t (as far as I could tell) take any drugs. But she neither understood nor liked ballet, and day by day I could feel her boredom and irritation grow, and my resentment grow along with it.
But that was all background noise. My little cavorting squid had been working for six months, and I’d been informed that a recital for the parents would be a good idea. After a long sleepless night, I’d decided to adapt—radically adapt!—Jerome Robbins’ choreography for Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.
In this short ballet, a boy and girl in practice clothes warm up at the barre, facing the audience as if it were a mirror. So great is their concentration on dance that only gradually do they become aware of each other. The first steps they do are easy, basic warm-ups, and I could keep subsequent combinations from getting too difficult. Moreover, I could gradually add more couples onstage until they were all there, with the most accomplished of my young dancers performing solos and the least accomplished forming a corps after their later entrances. The music was lovely; also, it was slow enough that I would not tax my young Mollies’ speed or balance. Finally, I wouldn’t need elaborate sets or costumes, yet I would still be presenting a (sort of) real ballet.