“So what do you think?” I asked Sally over breakfast.
“All right, I guess,” she answered indifferently, but then perked up. “Can I do the lights?”
“Lights?” The studio had never been anything but fully lit. I didn’t even know if we had a light board. But for Faun, the stage should be in darkness at first and then gradually brighten. “Uh, I’ll see.”
“Don’t exhaust yourself,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll be in the video room.” She pushed herself away from the table and sauntered out.
Until Sally arrived, I hadn’t even known the ship had a video room, intercepting broadcasts from Earth. Well, why not. It kept her away from class. The alienettes, I sensed, didn’t like her there, although it would be difficult to say how I knew this, since they understood most of what I said now, but I understood nothing of their squeaks and whistles and chirps. In fact, they were hardly individuals to me. I didn’t worry about this. Ellen had a strong extension, Terry a smooth flowing développé, Denise a graceful port de bras. That was enough to know.
I asked Randall for Afternoon of a Faun, the Royal Ballet production of 2011 which, gods forgive me, I thought superior to the New York City Ballet’s. He looked at me blankly.
“It’s a ballet, Randall. I need a performance recording of it to show my dancers.”
“With people.”
“Of course with people!”
“I’m sorry, Celia, I’m a little slow this morning. The computers have been acting up, and there’s a trade problem with the Visitors and the EEC… but you’re not interested in that.”
“Not in the slightest. Can you have a cube transmitted up?”
“Of course.”
It was there by the time we’d finished barre warm-ups and took our break, before moving to center work. Half my mind was on Jim’s fouette of adage, which was terrible. He could pilé on one leg all right, could slowly lift the other and extend it to the side in one smooth movement, and his overhead arms stayed steady. But he couldn’t seem to coordinate the side arms with the extension, no matter how hard he tried. The result was too many appendages out of sync with each other, so he looked more like an opening umbrella with broken spokes than like a ballet dancer. I was not in a good mood.
“Okay, troops, this is the dance we’ll do for the recital. I’ve adapted it for you, of course. But we’ll look at this version first. Look! Look!”
I started the cube. It projected onto the wall. Darkness, and then dimly, at first barely seen through the gloom, a dancer. She stood in a gap in the back curtain. A deep plié, two steps forward, and then, just as you became sure what you were seeing in the shadow, she began to warm up with deep stretches and bends. It was Royal Ballet principal Rebecca Clarke, in all her long-legged, perfectly poised loveliness, her luminous calm. The stage gradually brightened around her.
Ellen fell to the floor, screaming.
“It’s apparently biological,” Randall said, running his hand over his perfect cropped hair. He looked as close to upset as I imagined he got. His sash might even have been a quarter inch crooked. “We only know what we’ve been told about their home planet and evolution, of course. The Visitors aren’t sea dwelling, despite their superficial, to us, resemblance to cephalopods. The home system lies in a populated part of the galaxy with many bright stars and three large moons. More important, there may be a constant atmospheric form of gaseous photoelectric energy, something like marsh gas, and perhaps also an enhanced visual spectrum compared to ours, extending possibly to wavelengths that—”
“Randall, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“They hate the dark.”
I gaped at him. He leaned closer and spoke softly. “Oh, the adults tolerate it, of course. But they prefer to carry on all activities, including sleep, in full light. They can’t smell at all, you know, and there is probably an evolutionary history of locating prey by motion. Most Terran cephalopods— not that there’s a one-on-one analogue, of course, but still—most advanced Terran cephalopods are pretty ferocious carnivores, with fairly common cannibalism. Those powerful arms and suckers… If the Visitors’ evolution was highly competitive, it might include a strong bias for light. In the young, some might even have a vestigial neural response to darkness, pain or otherwise, until they learn to compensate. I’m afraid the ambassador’s daughter may be one such youngster.”
Ellen was the ambassador’s daughter. I’d forgotten that; I thought of her as the squid with a good strong extension. But… “Powerful arms and suckers“… “cannibalism“… I shuddered. All at once my charges seemed genuinely alien, much more so than when we concentrated together on dance.
“It’s not a major problem,” Randall said, misinterpreting. “You simply have to start your recital with the lights full on and keep them on, not starting in the dark as on the cube performance. The ambassador’s daughter is being told that’s what will happen. She’ll be fine.”
The ambassador’s daughter. Ellen. Powerful arms and suckers to destroy prey, and cannibalism. Extension and développé and ports de bras.
“Fine,” I said.
But after that, I couldn’t look at them the same way. I don’t know if they could tell. What we were doing wasn’t ballet; it was a grotesque travesty with six arms and no necks and a pathetic parody of beauty. The recital was in five days. I hated every minute of rehearsal.
The morning of the performance, the computer glitches were traced to Sally, and Randall told me, tight-lipped, that she was going back down to Earth.
“How could you?” I raged at her. “We’re guests here! You promised to behave! You promised! Then you go messing up UN computers!”
“So what did I do that’s so major?” She was back to her worst self, sneering and indifferent. “I futzed a few programs. Big show. They caught me easy enough. It isn’t like I’m all that good at smashing firewalls to have any big impact on the great First Contact thing.”
“Only because you’re so stupid! If you could have screwed the system majorly, you would have!”
She didn’t answer, only shrugged. I was so mad I had to get away from her, and I slammed doors all the way to the studio.
It was set up for the recital. The membrane had been moved somehow so that now nine-tenths of the room had Mollie air, leaving me only a strip along the wall with my door. The adjacent wall had been rigged with a curtain that defined backstage; the octopi could stand there in their air and I, in one corner from which I could view the audience, could breathe mine. My corner held the stand for the music cube. In the curtain were cut two rectangular holes like doors, which led to a stage raised a foot or so above the floor. Barres ran along three sides of the stage. On the floor sat chairs for the parents. Or chairlike things, anyway. Everything was as brightly lit as an operating room.
In two more hours the proud parents would troop in, eager to see their offspring desecrate Robbins and Debussy. It would be obscene, a mockery, and they would love it. I slid down the wall until I slumped on the floor, and waited.
My only consolation was that if recordings were made—and of course they would be—I would never have to see them.