“That Tom and Charlie were right. They are warlike. At least, there’s a flavor of arrogance to them—a conviction of superiority. Their dance is a challenging, a dare. Tell Tom I think they do use planets.”
“What?”
“I think at one stage of their development they’re corporeal, planet-bound. Then when they have matured sufficiently, they… become these fireflies, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, and head out into space.”
“Why?” from Cox.
“To find spawning grounds. They want Earth.”
There was a silence lasting perhaps ten seconds. Then Cox spoke up quietly. “Back away, Shara. I’m going to see what lasers will do to them.”
“No!” she cried, loud enough to make a really first-rate speaker distort.
“Shara, as Charlie pointed out to me, you are not only expendable, you are for all practical purposes expended.”
“No!” This time it was me shouting.
“Major,” Shara said urgently, “that’s not the way. Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”
“Hell and damnation, woman,” Cox said. “What do you want me to do? Let them have the first shot? There are vessels from four countries on their way right now, but they won’t—”
“Major, wait. Give me time.”
He began to swear, then cut off. “How much time?”
She made no direct reply. “If only this telepathy thing works in reverse… it must. I’m no more strange to them than they are to me. Probably less so; I get the idea they’ve been around. Charlie?”
“Yeah.”
“This is a take.”
I knew. I had known since I first saw her in open space on my monitor. And I knew what she needed now, from the faint trembling of her voice. It took everything I had, and I was only glad I had it to give. With extremely realistic good cheer, I said, “Break a leg, kid,” and killed my mike before she could hear the sob that followed.
And she danced.
It began slowly, the equivalent of one-finger exercises, as she sought to establish a vocabulary of motion that the creatures could comprehend. Can you see, she seemed to say, that this movement is a reaching, a yearning? Do you see that this is a spurning, this an unfolding, that a graduated elision of energy? Do you feel the ambiguity in the way I distort this arabesque, or that the tension can be resolved so?
And it seemed that Shara was right, that they had infinitely more experience with disparate cultures than we, for they were superb linguists of motion. It occurred to me later that perhaps they had selected motion for communication because of its very universality. Man danced before he spoke. At any rate, as Shara’s dance began to build, their own began to slow down perceptibly in speed and intensity, until at last they hung motionless in space, watching her.
Soon after that, Shara must have decided that she had sufficiently defined her terms, at least well enough for pidgin communication—for now she began to dance in earnest. Before she had used only her own muscles and the shifting masses of her limbs. Now she added thrusters, singly and in combination, moving within as well as in space. Her dance became a true dance: more than a collection of motions, a thing of substance and meaning. It was unquestionably the Stardance, just as she had prechoreographed it, as she had always intended to dance it. That it had something to say to utterly alien creatures, of man and his nature, was not at all a coincidence: it was the essential and ultimate statement of the greatest artist of her age, and it had something to say to God Himself.
The camera lights struck silver from her p-suit, gold from the twin air tanks on her shoulders. To and fro against the black backdrop of space, she wove the intricacies of her dance, a leisurely movement that seemed somehow to leave echoes behind it. And the meaning of those great loops and whirls became clear, drying my throat and clamping my teeth.
For her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try to create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile embodiment of entropy into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is capable simultaneously of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself.
It spoke of Shara and her life.
Again and again cyclical statements of hope began, only to collapse into confusion and ruin. Again and again cascades of energy strove for resolution, and found only frustration. All at once she launched into a pattern that seemed familiar, and in moments I recognized it: the closing movement of Mass Is A Verb recapitulated—not repeated but reprised, echoed, the Three Questions given a more terrible urgency by this new context. And as before, it segued into that final relentless contraction, that ultimate drawing inward of all energies. Her body became derelict, abandoned, drifting in space, the essence of her being withdrawn to her center and invisible.
The quiescent aliens stirred for the first time.
And suddenly she exploded, blossoming from her contraction not as a spring uncoils, but as a flower bursts from a seed. The force of her release flung her through the void as though she were tossed, like a gull in a hurricane, by galactic winds. Her center appeared to hurl itself through space and time, yanking her body into a new dance.
And the new dance said, This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving—and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.
This is what it is to be human: to persist.
It said all this with a soaring series of cyclical movements that held all the rolling majesty of grand symphony, as uniquely different from each other as snowflakes, and as similar. And the new dance laughed, as much at tomorrow as at yesterday, and most of all at today.
For this is what it means to be human: to laugh at what another would call tragedy.
The aliens seemed to recoil from the ferocious energy, startled, awed, and perhaps a little frightened by Shara’s indomitable spirit. They seemed to wait for her dance to wane, for her to exhaust herself, and her laughter sounded on my speaker as she redoubled her efforts, became a pinwheel, a catherine wheel. She changed the focus of her dance, began to dance around them, in pyrotechnic spatters of motion that came ever closer to the intangible spheroid which contained them. They cringed inward from her, huddling together in the center of the envelope, not so much physically threatened as cowed.
This, said her body, is what it means to be human: to commit hara-kiri, with a smile, if it becomes needful.
And before that terrible assurance, the aliens broke. Without warning fireflies and balloon vanished, gone, elsewhere.