ADAM-TROY CASTRO

THE FUNERAL MARCH OF THE MARIONETTES

1.

It was in the third year of my indentured servitude that I rescued Isadora from
the death-dance of the Marionettes.

This happened on Vlhan, a temperate world of no strategic importance to either
the Terran Confederacy or any of the great off world republics. An unremarkable
place with soft rolling hills, swampy lowlands, and seasons that came and went
too gently for anybody to notice the change, it was indistinguishable from a
million similar worlds throughout the known universe, and it would have been
charted, abandoned, and forgotten were it not for the Vlhani themselves; they
were so different from every other sentience in the universe that seven separate
republics and confederacies maintained outposts there just to study them.
Because the Vlhani had been declared sentient, we called our outposts embassies
instead of research stations, and ourselves diplomats instead of scientists, but
almost nothing we did involved matters of state; we were so removed from real
power that the idea of a genuine diplomatic incident -- let alone a war --
seemed a universe away.

My name was Alex Gordon then. On Vlhan, I was a twenty-two-year old exolinguist,
born and raised in the wheelworld known as New Kansas; the kind of bookish young
man who insists he dreams of visiting the real Kansas someday even after being
told how long it's been uninhabitable. Like the three dozen other indentures who
made up the rest of our delegation, I'd bartered five years of service in
exchange for a lifetime of free travel throughout the Confederacy; but I'd been
so captivated by the mysteries of the Vlhani people that I seriously considered
devoting my entire life to finding the choreographic Rosetta Stone that would
finally make sense of their dance. For it was the Ballet that, once every
sixteen standard lunars, made them the center of attention on a thousand worlds.
It was simultaneously tragedy, art form, suicide, orgasm, biological imperative
and mob insanity. The first time I saw it I was shattered; the second time I
wept; the third. ...

But this story's about the third.

The one that belonged to Isadora.

2.

It was a warm, sunny day, with almost no breeze. We'd erected a viewing stand
overlooking the great natural amphitheater, and installed the usual holo and
neurec remotes to record the festivities for future distribution. As was
customary, we gathered on the north rim, the assembled Vlhani spectators on the
south. I sat among the mingled human and alien diplomats, along with ambassador
Hal Dhiju, and my fellow indentures. Kathy Ng was there, making her usual
sardonic comments about everything; as was our quartermaster Rory Metcalf, who
talked gossip and politics and literature and everything but the spectacle
unfolding before us; and Dhiju's sycophantic assistant Oskar Levine, who waxed
maudlin on his own personal interpretation of the dance. We were all excited by
the magic we were about to witness, but also bored, in the way that audiences
tend to be in the last few minutes before any show; and as we murmured among
ourselves, catching up on gossip and politics and the latest news from our
respective worlds, few of us dwelled on the knowledge that all of the one
hundred thousand Vlhani in the bowl itself were here to die.

Hurrr'poth did. He was my counterpart from the Riirgaan delegation: a master
exolinguist among a reptilian race that prided itself on its exolinguists. He
usually liked to sit among the other delegations rather than sequester himself
among his own people; and this year he'd chosen to sit beside me, which had a
chilling effect on my conversations with anybody else. Like all Riirgaans, he
had a blank, inexpressive face, impossible to read (a probable reason why they'd
had to develop such uncanny verbal communication skills), and when he said, "We
are all criminals," I was uncertain just how to take it.

"Why? Because we sit back and let it happen?"

"Of course not. The Vlhani perform this ritual because they feel they have to;
it would be immensely arrogant of us to stop it. We are correct in allowing
their orgy of self-destruction. No, we are criminal because we enjoy it; because
we find beauty in it; because we openly look forward to the day when they gather
here to die. We are not innocent bystanders. We are accomplices."

I indicated the neurecs focused on the amphitheater, for the benefit of future
vicarious spectators. "And pornographers."

Hurrr'poth trilled, in his race's musical equivalent of laughter. "Exactly."

"If you disapprove of it so much, then why do you watch?"

He trilled again. "Because I am as great a criminal as any one of you. Because
the Vlhani are masterpieces of form following function, and because I find them
magnificent, and because I believe the Ballet to be one of the most beautiful
sights in a universe that is already not lacking for beauty. Indeed, I believe
that much of the Ballet's seductive power lies in how it indicts us, as
spectators...and if I must be indicted for the Ballet to be a complete work,
then I happily accept my guilt as one of the prices of admission. What about
you? Why do you watch?"

I spoke cautiously, as lower-echelon diplomats must whenever posed sufficiently
uncomfortable questions. "To understand."

"Ahhhh. And what do you want to understand? Yourself, or the Vlhani?"

"Both," I said -- glibly, but accurately -- and then hurriedly peered through my
rangeviewers as a quick way of escaping the conversation. It wasn't that I
disliked Hurrr'poth; it was that his manner of cutting to the heart had always
made me uncomfortable. Riirgaans had a way of knowing the people they spoke to
better than they knew themselves, which may have been one reason they were so
far ahead of us in decoding the danced language of the Vlhani. We could only ask
childlike questions and understand simple answers. The Riirgaans had progressed
to discussing intangibles. Even now, much of our research on the Vlhani had to
be conducted with Riirgaan aid, and usually succeeded only in uncovering details
they'd known for years.

This rankled those of us who liked to be first in everything; me, I just thought
we'd accomplish more by cooperating. Maybe the Riirgaans just enjoyed watching
others figure things out for themselves. Who knows? If the thriving market in
Vlhani Ballet recordings means anything at all, it's that sentient creatures are
subject to strange, unpredictable passions...and that the Vlhani are plugged
into all of them.

A wind whipped up the loose dirt around the periphery of the amphitheater. The
Vlhani spectators on the far rim stirred in anticipation. The one hundred
thousand Vlhani in the amphitheater mingled about, in that seemingly random
manner that we knew to be carefully choreographed. Our instruments recorded the
movements of each and every Vlhani, to determine the many subtle ways in which
tonight's performance differed from last year% I merely panned my rangeviewer
from one end of the amphitheater to the other, content to be awed by the
numbers.

Vlhani have been compared to giant spiders, mostly by people with an Earthbound
vocabulary, and I suppose that's fair enough, if you want a description that
completely robs the Vhani of everything that renders them unique. Personally, I
much prefer to think of them as Marionettes. Imagine a shiny black sphere
roughly one meter across, so smooth it looks metallic, so flawless it looks
manufactured, its only concession to the messy biological requirements of
ingestion, elimination, copulation and procreation a series of almost-invisible
slits cut along one side. That's the Vlhani head. Now imagine anywhere between
eight and twenty-four shiny black tentacles attached to various places around
that head. Those are Vlhani whips, which can grow up to thirty meters long and
which for both dexterity and versatility put humanity's poor opposable thumb to
shame. A busy Vlhani can simultaneously a) stick one whip in the dirt, and
render it rigid as a flagpole, to anchor itself while occupied with other
things; b) use another four whips to carve itself a shelter out of the local raw
materials; c) use another three whips to spear the underbrush for the rodentlike
creatures it likes to eat; d) flail the rest of its whips in the air above its
head, in the sophisticated wave-form sign language that Vlhani can use to
conduct as many as six separate conversations at once. Even a single Vlhani,
going about its everyday business, is a beautiful thing; one hundred thousand
Vlhani, gathered together to perform the carefully choreographed Ballet that is
both their holiest rite and most revered art form, are too much spectacle for
any human mind to absorb properly at one time.

And too much tragedy too. For the one hundred thousand Vlhani gathered in that
great amphitheater would soon dance without rest, without restraint, without
nourishment or sleep; they'd dance until their self-control failed, and their
whips carved slices from each other's flesh; they'd dance until their hearts
burst and the amphitheater was left filled with corpses. The ritual took place
once each revolution of their world around their sun, and no offworlder claimed
to understand it, not even the Riirgaans. But we knew it was some kind of art
form, and that it possessed a tragic beauty that transcended the bounds of
species.

Hurrr'poth said, "They are starting late, this year. I wonder if --"

I took a single, sharp, horrified intake of breath. "Oh, God. No."

"What ?"

I zoomed in, saw it again, and shouted: "AMBASSADOR!"

Hai Dhiju, who was seated two rows away, whirled in astonishment; we may have
been an informal group on Vlhan, but my shout was still an incredible breach of
protocol. He might have taken it a little better if he weren't intoxicated from
the mild hallucinogens he took every day --they left him able to function, but
always a little slow. As it was, his eyes narrowed for the second it took him to
remember my name. "Alex. What's wrong?"

"There's a woman down there! With the Vlhani!"

It wasn't a good idea to yell it in a crowd. Cries of "What?" and "Where?"
erupted all around us. The alien reactions ranged from stunned silence, on the
part of my friend Hurrr'poth, to high-pitched, ear-piercing hoots, on the part
of the high-strung Ialos and K'cenhowten. A few of the aliens actually got up
and rushed the transparent barriers, as if inspired by one insane, suicidal
Terran to join the unknown woman in that bowl where soon nothing would be left
alive.

Dhiju demanded, "Where?"

I handed him my rangeviewer. "It's marked."

He followed the blinking arrows on the interior screen to the flagged location.
All around us, spectators slaved their own rangeviewers to the same signal. When
they spotted her, their gasps were in close concert with his.

I wasn't looking through a rangeviewer at that moment; I didn't see the same
thing the others saw. My own glimpse had been of a lithe and beautiful young
woman in a black leotard, with short-cropped black hair and unfamiliar striped
markings on both cheeks. Her eyes had burned bright with some emotion that I
would have mistaken for fear, were it not for the impossibly level grace with
which she walked. She couldn't have been older than her early twenties. Just
about everybody who saw her the same moment the ambassador did now claims to
have noticed more: an odd resonance to the way she moved her arms...

Maybe. Neither the ambassador nor anybody else around us commented on it at the
time. Dhiju was just shocked enough to find the core of sobriety somewhere
inside him. "Oh, God. Who the hell -- Alex, you saw her first, you get to man
the skimmer that plucks her the hell out of there. Hurry!"

"But what if --"

"If the Ballet starts, you're to abort immediately and let the universe exact
the usual fine for idiocy. Until then -- run!"

I could have hesitated, even refused. Instead, I whirled, and began to fight my
way through the crowd, an act that was taken by most of those watching as either
a testament to my natural courage under fire, or a demonstration of Dhiju's
natural ability to command. The more I look back, and remember my first glimpse
of Isadora, the more I think that it might have been her that drew me.

Maybe part of me was in love with her even then.

3.

I was free of the crowd and halfway to the skimmer before I noticed Hurrr'poth
running alongside me, his triple-segmented legs easily keeping up with my
less-than-athletic gait. He boarded the vehicle even as I did. He anticipated
the inevitable question: "You need me. Take off."

My official answer should have been that this was a human matter and that I was
not authorized to take any liberties with his safety. But he was right. He had
years more experience with the Vlhani; he possessed more understanding of their
language. If nothing else, he was my best chance for getting out alive myself.

So I just said, "All right," and took off, circling around the rear of the
viewing platform and then coming in as low over the amphitheater as I dared.
Once I was over the Vlhani I slaved the skimmer to my rangeviewer and had it
home in on the woman. Thousands of shiny spherical black heads rotated to follow
our progress; though a few recoiled, many more merely snapped their whips our
way, as if attempting to seize us in flight. The average whip-span of a grown
Marionette being what it was, they came close.

He peered over the side as we flew. "We don't have much time, Alex; they're all
initiating their Primary Ascension."

I was clipping on a Riirgaani-patented whip harness. "I don't know what that
means, Hurrr'poth."

"It's what we call one of the earliest parts of the dance, where they gather
their energies and synchronize their movements. You would probably call it a
rehearsal, or a tune-up, but it's apparently as fraught with meaning as anything
that follows; unfortunately, it doesn't last very long, and it tends to be
marked by sudden, unpredictable activity." After a pause, he said: "Your flyby
is causing some interesting...I would say clumsy and perhaps even...desperate
variations."

"Wonderful." The last thing I needed was to be known all my life as the man who
disrupted the Vlhani Ballet. "Do you see her yet?"

"I've never lost sight of her," Hurrr'poth said calmly.

A few seconds later I spotted her myself. She was...well, the best possible word
for her walk is, undulating...down the slope on the far side of the
amphitheater, into the deepest concentrations of Vlhani. She was waving both of
her long slender arms over her head, in a gesture that initially struck me as an
attempt to catch my attention but almost immediately made itself clear as an
attempt to duplicate the movements of the Vlhani. She moved like a woman fluent
in the language, who not only knew precisely what she was saying but also had
the physical equipment she needed to say it: all four limbs were so limber that
they could have been Vlhani whips and not human arms and legs. One of the first
things I saw her do was loop each of her arms all the way around her other one,
not just once but half a dozen times, forming a double helix.

"Jesus," I said, as we descended toward her. "She's been enhanced."

"At the very least," agreed Hurrr'poth.

Her arms untangled, became jagged cartoon-lightning, then rose over her head
again, waggling almost comically as little parentheses-shapes moved from wrist
to shoulder in waves. As we came to a hovering stop three meters ahead of her,
she scowled, an expression that made the scarlet chevrons tattooed on each cheek
move closer to her dark penetrating eyes. Then she lowered her gaze and
retreated.

"Leave her be," said Hurrr'poth.

I stared at him. "She'll die."

"So will all these others. It's why they're here, and why she's here. If you
save her, you'll be disturbing the Ballet for no good reason, and demonstrating
to the Vlhani that you consider her life more valuable than any of theirs. No:
leave her be. She's a pilgrim. It's her privilege to die if she wants."

Hurrr'poth was probably right; being right was his way. But he did not know
human beings, or me, anywhere near as well as he knew Vlhani, and could not
understand that what he advised was unacceptable. I set the skimmer to land, and
hopped out almost a full second before it was strictly safe to jump, hitting the
slope with an impact that sent jabs of pain through both knees.

The Vlhani loomed above me on all sides: great black spheres wobbling about on
liquid flailing whips. One stepped daintily over both me and the skimmer,
disappearing without any visible concern into the roiling mob further down the
slope; another half-dozen seemed to freeze solid at the sight of me, as if
unsure what improvisations I might require of them. None seemed angry or
aggressive, which didn't make me feel any better. Vlhani didn't have to be
aggressive to be extraordinarily dangerous. Their whips had a tensile strength
approaching steel and moved at speeds that had been known to exceed sound. And
though we'd all walked among Vlhani without being harmed -- I'd even been picked
up and examined by curious ones -- those had been calm, peaceful Vlhani, Vlhani
at rest, Vlhani who still possessed their race's equivalent of sanity. These
were driven pilgrims here to dance themselves into a frenzy until they dropped;
they could slash me, the woman, Hurrr'poth and the skimmer into slices without
even being fully aware they were doing it...

Fifteen meters away, the woman twisted and arched her back and flalied arms as
soft and supple as ribbons. "Go 'way!" she shouted, in an
unidentifiably-accented Human-Standard. "Don't dang yeselves! Le' me alone!"

I switched on my harness, activating the pair of artificial whips that
immediately rose from my shoulders and snaked above my head, undulating a
continuous clumsy approximation of the Vlhani dance for Friend. Our delegation
had borrowed the technology and much of the basic vocabulary from the Riirgaans;
with its built-in vocabulary of fifty basic memes, it was sufficient to allow us
clumsy four-limb human oids to communicate with the Vlhani at the level of baby
talk. Which by itself wouldn't be enough roger me and the girl out of the
amphitheater alive...

. . .broadcasting Friend in all directions, I ran to her side, stopping only to
evade a huge towering Marionette passing between us. When I got close enough to
grab her, she didn't run, or fight me; she didn't even stop dancing. She just
said, "Le' me go. Save yeself."

"No," I said. "I can't let you do this."

She twisted her arm in a way wholly inconsistent with human anatomy, and twisted
out of my grip without any effort at all. "Ye cannae stop me," she said,
flitting away in a pirouette graceful enough to hurt my eyes. I hadn't even
succeeded in slowing her down. I turned around, shot a quick
Why-the-Hell-Aren't-You-Helping-Me look at the impassive Hurrr'poth, then ran
after her again.

I found her dancing beneath, and in perfect sync with, a Marionette five times
her height; the eight whips it held aloft all undulating to the same unheard
music as her own arms. It had anchored four of its whips in the ground, one on
each side of her; turning itself into a enclosed set for her solo performance.
The effect was sheltering, almost maternal, which didn't make me feel any safer
scurrying past those whips to join her at the center. Again, she made no attempt
to evade me, merely faced straight ahead, looking past me, past the Vlhani, and
past the eyes of all the sentients who'd be watching the recordings of this
scene for more years than any of us would be alive...past everything but the
movements her dance required her to make next.

The harness piped a thousand contradictory translations in my ear. Danger. Life.
Night. Cold. Hungry. Storm. Dance. I had no idea whether it translated her or
the Vlhani.

"All right," I said, lamely. "You want to play it like this, go ahead. But tell
me why. Give me some idea what you think you're trying to accomplish!"

Her head rotated a perfect 360 degrees on her long and slender neck, matching a
similar revolution performed by the featureless Marionette head directly above
us. Her eyes remained focused on mine as long as her face remained in view; then
sought me out again, the instant her features came around the other side. Her
expression was serious, but unintimidated. "I tryin' to waltz Vlhani. What are
ye trying to accomplish? Kill yeself bein' a gilgamesh?"

"I'd rather not. I just want you to come with me before you get hurt."

"Ye're in a lot hotter stew than I be. Leastin' I ken the steps."

The Vlhani didn't stop dancing; they didn't slow down or speed up or in any
visible way react to anything either Isadora or I said. If anything, they took
no visible notice of us at all. But I was there, in the middle of it, and though
my understanding of Vlhani sign language was as minimal as any human's, I
did...feel...something, like a great communal gasp, coming from all sides. And I
found myself suddenly, instinctively, thoroughly certain that every Vlahni in
the entire amphitheater was following every nuance of every word that passed
between this strange young woman and me. Even if they were not close enough to
see or hear us, they were still being informed by those around them, who were in
turn breathlessly passing on the news from those farther up the line. We were
the center of their attention, the focus of their obsessions. And they wanted me
to know it.

It wasn't telepathy, which would have shown up on our instruments. Whatever it
was couldn't be measured, didn't translate to the neurecs, wasn't observed by
any of the delegations. I personally think I was only making an impossible
cognitive leap in the stress of the moment and for just one heartbeat understood
Vlhani dance the way it was meant to be understood. Whatever the reason, I knew
at once that this impasse was the single most important thing taking place in
the entire valley...

Love, my harness squeaked. Safety. Dance. Food.

Sad.

She'd gone pale. "What are ye plannin' to do?"

What I did was either the bravest or most insane or most perceptive thing I've
ever done.

Reversing our positions, placing my life in her hands, I simply turned my back
on her and walked away...not toward Hurrr'poth, the skimmer, and safety, but
farther down the slope, into the densest concentrations of Vlhani. It was
impossible to see very far into that maze of flailing black whips, but I
approached a particularly thick part of the mob, where I might be lilleted and
sectioned in the time it took to draw a breath, as quickly as I could without
actually breaking into a run. It was far easier than it should have been. All I
had to do was disengage my terror from the muscles that drove my legs ....

She cried out: "Hey! HEY!"

Four Vlhani whips stabbed the earth half a meter in front of me. I flinched, but
didn't stop walking. The Vlhani moved out of my way with another seven-league
step. I stepped over the stab wounds in the earth, continued on my way...

. . .and found her circling around in front of me. "Just what the crot do ye ken
ye're doin'?"

My first answer was obliterated by stammering: a sign of the terror I was trying
so hard not to feel. I swallowed, concentrated on forming the words and speaking
them understandably, and said: "Taking a walk. It seems like a nice day for it."

"Ye keep waltzin' this direction, ye won't last two minutes."

"Then you've got yourself a moral decision," I said, with a confidence that was
a million kilometers away. "You can bring me back to my skimmer and hold my hand
while I pilot us both back to safety. Or you can stay here and dance, and let me
die with you. But the only way to avoid putting you on my conscience is to put
myself on yours."

Danger. Dance. Danger.

Hot wind fanned my back, a razor-sharp whiff following in its wake: the kind of
near-miss so close that you feel the pain anyway. I stiffened, held on to my
last remaining shreds of serf-control, and walked past her.

She muttered a curse in some language I didn't know and wrapped her arms around
my chest. I mean that literally. Each arm went serpentine and encircled me twice
before joining in a handclasp at my collarbone. They felt like human flesh; they
were even warm and moist from exertion. But there was something other than
muscle and bone at work beneath that too-flexible skin.

Her heart beat in sync with mine.

"I ought to let ye do it," she breathed. "I ought to let ye waltz in there and
get torn to gobs."

I managed to turn my head enough to see her. "That's your decision."

"And ye really think ye ken what that's goin' to be, don't you? Ye think ye ken
me well enough to guess how much I'm willin' to toss for some mungie catard
tryin' to play martyr. Ye...think...ye...ken."

Sometimes, in crisis situations, you find yourself saying things so stupid they
come back to haunt you. "I'm a good judge of people."

"Ye're a good judge of vacuum. Ye sit on that mungie viewing stand and ye coo at
the spectacle and ye shed a brave tear for all the buggies tearin' each other to
gobs for yet ball-tinglies. And ye wear those ridiculous things," indicating my
artificial whips, "and ye write mungie treatises on how beautiful it all be and
ye pretend ye're tryin' to understand it while all the while ye see nothing, ye
ken nothing, ye understand nothing. Ye don't even appreciate that they been
goin' out of their way to avoid gobbing ye. They been concentratin' on ye
instead of the show, usin' all the leeway their script gives them, steppin' a
little faster here and a little slower there, just for ye, me mungie good judge
of people. But if ye keep waltzin' this direction, they won't be able to watch
out for ye without turning the whole show to crot, and they gob ye to spatters
before yer next gasp!"

If she paused for breath at all during her speech, I didn't notice. There were
no hesitations, no false starts, no fleeting "uh"s to indicate blind groping for
the phrase she needed; just a swift, impassioned, angry torrent of words,
exploding outward like wild animals desperate to be free. Her eyes brimmed with
an anguished, pleading desperation, begging me to leave her with the death she
had chosen: the look of a woman who knew that what she asked was bigger than any
of us; and she desperately needed me to believe that.

Danger. Dance. Birth.

I almost gave in.

Instead, I spoke softly: "I'm not interested in the moral decisions of the
Vlhani. I'm interested in yours. Are you coming with me or not?"

Her grip loosened enough for me to wonder if my bluff had been called. Then she
shuddered, and the beginnings of a sob caught in her throat. "Crod it. CROD it!
How the hell did ye ken?"

At the time, I didn't know her nearly well enough to understand what she meant.

But already, it was impossible not to hate myself, a little, for defying her.

4.

The trip back to the skimmer wasn't nearly as nerve-wracking as the trip out,
with her providing us a serpentine but safe path directly through the heart of
the Ballet. She told me when to speed up, when to slow down, when to proceed
straight ahead, and when to take the long way around a spot that inevitably,
seconds later, became a sea of furiously dancing Vlhani. I followed her
directions not because I considered her infallible, but because she seemed to
believe she knew what she was doing, and I was completely lost.

Before we even got near the spot where I'd left the skimmer, I heard the hum of
its drive burning the air directly above us: Hurrr'poth, piloting it to a
landing beside us. Which was itself not the least of the day's surprises, since
the skimmer was set for a human gene pattern, and Hurrr'poth had no business
being able to control it at all. Even as he lowered it to boarding altitude, I
called, "What the hell --"

He waved. "Hurry up and get in. I don't know how much time we have to do this."

She trembled, not with fear, but with the utter heartbreak of a woman being
forced to give up that which she wanted above all else. Getting her this far had
shattered her; forcing her onto the skimmer would carve wounds that might not
ever heal. But at least she'd have a chance to survive them...something I
couldn't say for her chances dancing among the Vlhani. I said, "You first."

She took Hurrr'poth's outstretched hand, and climbed aboard. I followed her,
taking a seat directly beside her in case she decided to try something.
Hurrr'poth took off, set the controls for the return flight, then turned around
in his seat, so he could gently trill at us. "I hope you don't consider me
impolite, Alex."

His manners were the very last thing on my mind. "For what?"

"For taking such liberties with your vehicle. But there were a number of very
large Vlhani determined to pass through the spot where we'd landed -- and I
thought it best for the purposes of our safe escape that I argue with your
genetic reader instead. It saw reason a lot faster than I thought it would."

"Think nothing of it."

He turned toward the girl. "My name is Viliissin Hurrr'poth. I am a third-level
wave-form linguist for the Riirgaan delegation, and whatever else happens now, I
must state my professional opinion that you are an astonishingly talented dancer
for one of your species; you did not appear to be at all out of place among the
Vlhani. It is a grand pleasure indeed to make your acquaintance. And you are --"

"Isadora," she said, sullenly. It was a good thing he'd asked; I'd been too
preoccupied by matters of survival to get around to it myself.

"Is-a-do-ra," he repeated, slowly, testing each syllable, committing it to
memory. "Interesting. I do not believe I've encountered that one before. Is
there an adjunct to that name? A family or clan designation?"

She looked away: the gesture of a woman who no longer had the energy or the
inclination to answer questions. "No. Just Isadora."

I saw the silence coming and ached for the wit to come up with the words that
would break it. I wanted to come up with a great, stirring speech about the
sanctity of life and the inevitability of second chances: about the foolishness
of suicide in a universe filled with millions of choices. I wanted to tell her
that I was glad that she'd chosen to come with me and live, for I'd sensed
something special about her -- a strength of will and purity of purpose that
would have rendered her special even without the enhancements that had made
flexible whips of her limbs. I wanted to tell her that there were better places
to apply those attributes than here, on this planet, in this amphitheater, among
thousands of doomed Vlhani. I wanted to say all of that, and more, for I
suddenly needed to understand her more than I'd ever needed to understand the
creatures who danced below. But Hurrr'poth was right: she'd been perfectly at
home among the Vlhani, and was just a trembling, devastated young woman beside
us.

Below us, the Vlhani writhed: a sea of gleaming black flesh and snapping black
whips, their spherical heads all turning to watch us as we passed.

"They look like they're slowing down," noted Hurrr'poth.

I couldn't tell. To me, their Ballet looked every bit as frenetic now as it had
five minutes ago. It all seemed perfectly graceful, perfectly fascinating, and
perfectly alien: an ocean of fluid, undifferentiated movement, diminished not at
all by the deletion of one strange young woman with chevrons on both cheeks. Why
not? They'd always danced without her; they could just go ahead and dance
without her again. If anything they were probably relieved not to have her
getting underfoot anymore...

I tried very hard to believe that, and failed. Hurrr'poth knew more about their
dance than I. Not, it seemed, as much as Isadora--he wouldn't have been able to
stride into the middle of the Ballet and expect to keep his skin intact -- but
enough to read the essence of what he saw. If he said they were slowing down,
they were slowing down.

And it could only be because I'd taken away Isadora.

They were as devastated as she was.

Why?

5.

We landed the skimmer in the open field behind the viewing stand. Dhiju led a
small mob of humans and aliens from their seats to meet us. They all wanted to
know who Isadora was, where she'd come from, and why she was here; I don't
honestly think anybody actually stayed behind to watch the Ballet. They crowded
around us so densely that we didn't even attempt to leave the skimmer: an
ironic, unintended parody of the dance we'd all come here to witness.

Dhiju's face was flushed and perspiring heavily -- a condition owing as much to
his intoxication as his concern -- but he retained enough self-control to speak
with me first. "Astonishing work, Alex. I'll see to it that you get some time
taken off your contract for this."

"Thank you, sir."

He next directed his attention to Hurrr'poth. "And you too, sir -- you didn't
have to risk yourself for one of ours, but you did anyway, and I want to express
my thanks for that."

Hurrr'poth bowed slightly, a gesture that surprised me a little, since I would
have expected much more than that from a sentient who so prized the sound of his
own voice. Maybe he was too impatient for the part that we all knew would have
to come next: Dhiju as disciplinarian. And Dhiju complied, with the fiercest,
angriest, most forbidding expression he knew how to muster: "And as for you,
young lady: do you have any idea just how many laws you've broken? Just what the
hell was going through your mind, anyway? Did you really wake up this morning
and think it would be a good day for being torn to pieces? Is that what you
wanted out of your afternoon today?"

Isadora stared at him. "The buggies invited me."

"To what? Die? Are you really that blind?"

Whereupon Hurrr'poth returned to form: "Forgive me, Mr. Dhiju, but I don't
believe you've thought this out adequately."

Dhiju didn't like the interruption, but protocol forced him to be polite. "Why
not? What mistake am I making?"

"I daresay it should be obvious. What do we know about this young lady so far?
She's obviously had herself altered to approximate Vlhani movement; she's
evidently learned more about their dance than either your people or mine have
ever been able to learn; she's made her way here from wherever it was she
started, apparently without any of your people finding out about her; and she's
snuck herself into what may be the most thoroughly studied native ritual in
recorded history, without hundreds of observers from seven separate
confederacies spotting her until she was in the middle of it. No, Mr. Dhiju,
whatever else you might say about her wisdom in trying to join the Vlhani
Ballet, I don't think you can fairly accuse her of coming here on a foolish
spur-of-the-moment whim. What she's done would have required many years of
conscious preparation, a fair amount of cooperation from people with the
resources to give her these enhancements, and a degree of personal dedication
that I can only characterize as an obsession."

Dhiju digested that for so long that I thought for a moment the hallucinogens
had prevented him from understanding it at all. Then he nodded, regarded Isadora
with a new expression that was closer to pity, and met my eyes. He didn't have
to actually insult me by giving the orders.

Find out.

I nodded. He turned and strode off, not in the direction of the viewing stand,
but toward his own skimmer, which was parked with the rest of the embassy
vehicles. A half-dozen indentures, including Rory and Kathy and Oskar, scurried
along behind him, knowing that they'd be required for the investigation to
follow.

I looked at Isadora. "You can save us all a lot of trouble by just telling us
everything we need to know now."

She glared at me insolently, the dark alien fires burning behind her eyes: still
unwilling to forgive me for saving her life, or herself for saving mine. "Will
it get me back to the show?"

"No. I'm sorry. I can't imagine Dhiju ever allowing that."

Her look was as clear as Dhiju's: Then go ahead. Find out what you can. But I'm
not going to make things easier for you.

Fair enough. If she could learn to understand the Vlhani, then I could sure
learn to understand her. I turned to Hurrr'poth: "Are you coming along?"

He considered it, then bobbed his head no. "Thank you, Alex, but no. I think I
can be of better use conducting my own investigation using other avenues. I
will, however, be in touch as soon as I have anything relevant to contribute."

"See you, you old criminal," I told him.

It was a personal experiment, to see how he'd react to a joke, and he made me
proud: "See you soon...pornographer."

6.

It may have been the only time in the history of the human presence on Vlhan
that the delegation was actually expected to deal with a Major Diplomatic
Incident. Oh, we'd had minor crises over the years (uneventful rescue missions
to pick up linguists and anthropologists who'd gotten themselves stranded in the
field, tiffs and disagreements with the representatives of the other
delegations), but never anything of life-and-death import; never anything
designed to test us as representatives of the Confederacy, never a dozen
separate mysteries all wrapped up in the form of one close-mouthed, steadfastly
silent young woman.

And so we worked through the night, accomplishing absolutely nothing.

We took DNA samples, voice-prints, and retinal scans, sending them via hytex to
the databases of a thousand planets; nobody admitted to having any idea who she
was. We went through our library for record of human cultures with ritual facial
tattooing. We found several, but none still extant that would have marked a
young woman with chevrons on both cheeks. We seized on the slang phrases she'd
used, hoping they'd lead us back to a world where they happened to be in current
usage, and found nothing -- though that meant little, since language is fluid
and slang can go in and out of style at weekly intervals.

She silently cooperated with a medical examination which elaborated upon that
which we already knew: that her entire skeleton, most of her musculature, and
much of her skin had been replaced by enhanced substitutes. Her arms alone were
minor miracles of engineering, with over ten thousand flexible joints in just
the distance between shoulder and wrist. Her nervous system was also only
partially her own, which made sense, since the human brain isn't set up to work
a limb that bends in that many places. She had a complex system of
micro-controllers up and down her arms, to translate the nerve impulses on their
way to and from the brain. She just had to decide the moves she wanted to make;
the micro-controllers let her limbs know how to go about making them. There were
also special chemical filters in her lungs, to maximize the efficiency with
which she processed oxygen, several major improvements made to her internal
connective tissue, and uncounted other changes, only some of which made
immediate sense.

There weren't many human agencies capable of this kind of work, and most of them
operated at the level of governments and major corporations. We contacted just
about all of those, from Transtellar Securities to the Bettelhine Munitions
Corporation; they all denied any knowledge of her. Of course, they could have
been lying, since some of her enhancements were illegal; but then they operated
in the realm of profit, and there was no possible profit in turning a young
woman into a sort of quasi-Vlhani, geared only toward her own self-destruction.

That left nonhuman agencies, some of which could be expected to harbor motives
that made no human sense. But we couldn't contact many of them by hytex, and the
few we could were a waste of time, since they had a relaxed attitude toward the
truth anyway. Kathy Ng, who was in charge of that aspect of the investigation,
got fed up enough to grouse, "How am I supposed to know who's telling the truth?
None of them have ever been consistent liars!" Everybody sympathized; nobody had
any better suggestions.

As for me, I spent four hours at the hytex poring through the passenger
manifests of civilian vessels passing anywhere within a twenty light-year
distance of Vlhan, finding nobody fitting her general description who couldn't
be accounted for. Then I stole a few minutes to check on Isadora, who we'd
locked up in our biological containment chamber. It was the closest thing we had
to a prison facility, though we'd never expected to use it that way. Hai Dhiju
sat in the observation room, glaring at the sullen-faced Isadora through the
one-way screen. Oskar Levine sat beside him, alternately gaping at Isadora and
feeding Dhiju's ego. When Dhiju noticed me, something flared in his bloodshot,
heavy-lidded eyes: something that could have been merely the footprint of the
hallucinogens still being flushed from his system, or could have been something
worse, like despair. Either way, he didn't yell at me to go back to work, but
instead gestured for me to sit down beside him.

I did. And for a long time neither of us said anything, preferring to watch
Isadora. She was exercising (though performing was more like it; since even
though the room on her side of the shield was just four soft featureless walls,
she had to know that there would be observers lurking behind one of them). Her
form of exercise involved testing the flexibility of her limbs, turning them
into spirals, arcs, and jagged lightning-shapes; a thousand changes each
instant. It was several different species of beautiful -- from its impossible
inhuman grace, to the sheer passion that informed every move.

The translation device squeaked out a word every thirty seconds or so. Death.
Vlhani. World. Sad. Dance. Food. Life. Sad.

Human.

None of it meant anything to me. But my eyes burned, just looking at her. I
wanted to look at her forever.

Dhiju took a hit of a blue liquid in a crystalline cylinder. "Anything?"

It took me several seconds to realize he'd spoken to me. "No, sir. I don't think
she left a trail for us to find."

Cold.

"It makes no sense," he said, with a frustration that must have burned him to
the marrow. "Everything leaves a trail. In less than one day I could find out
what you had for breakfast the day you turned five, check your psych profile and
find out which year of your adolescence featured the most vivid erotic dreams;
get a full folio on the past fifteen generations of your family and still have
time to get a full list of the dangerous recessive genes carried by the second
cousins of all the children you went to school with. But everybody's drawing a
blank with her. I wouldn't be surprised to find out she was some kind of mutant
Vlhani."

"It would certainly make her a lot easier to deal with," said Oskar. "Just send
her back to the Ballet, and let nature take its course."

I would have snapped at the bastard had Dhiju not beaten me to it. "Not an
option."

"Then ship her off-planet," Oskar shrugged. "Or keep her in detention until the
Ballet's over."

"I can't. It's become bigger than her." Dhiju looked at me. "In case you haven't
heard, the Ballet's off."

I felt no surprise. "They stopped, then?"

"Cold. We weren't really sure until about an hour ago -- it took them that long
to wind down -- but then they just planted their center whips in the dirt and
began to wait. They've already sent a message through the Riirgaans that they
need her back in order to continue. I've been fending off messages from all the
other delegations saying I ought to let her, as the Vlhani have jurisdiction
here."

I thought of our superiors back home, who'd no doubt want the Vlhani appeased to
preserve future relations. "That kind of pressure's only going to get worse."

He emitted a sound midway between a sob and a laugh. "I don't care how bad it
gets. I have a serious problem with suicide. I think anybody foolish enough to
choose it as an option is by definition not competent to be trusted with the
decision."

Storm. World.

I thought of all the Vlhani who made that decision every year -- who came, as
honored pilgrims, to the place where they were destined to dance until their
hearts burst. We'd always found a terrible kind of beauty in that ritual...but
we'd never thought of them as incompetent, or mad, or too foolish to be trusted
with the choice. Was that only because we considered them nothing more than
giant spiders, not worth saving?

Fire. Love. Danger.

Disturbed, I said, "I was with her, sir. She was one of the most competent
people I've ever met."

Dance.

"Not on that issue. It's still suicide. And I don't believe in it and I'm not
going to let her do it."

I faced the shield, and watched Isadora. She was running in circles now, so
swiftly that she blurred. When she suddenly stopped, placed a palm against one
wall, and hung her head, I couldn't believe it was fatigue. She wasn't sweating
or breathing heavily; she'd just gotten to the point where it made Marionette
sense to stop. Mter a moment, I said, "Has anybody actually tried talking to her
directly?"

"That's all I've been doing. I had people in there asking questions until their
breath gave out. It's no good. She just keeps telling us to, uh, crod
ourselves."

World. Dance.

"With all due respect, sir, interrogating her is one thing. Talking to her is
another."

Dhiju came close to reprimanding me, but thought better of it. "Might as well.
You're the only one here who's ever demonstrated the slightest clue of how to
deal with her. Go ahead."

So I went in.

The containment chamber was equipped with a one-way field, permeable as air from
one side but hard as anything in existence on the other. It was invaluable for
imprisoning anything too dangerous to be allowed out, which up until now had
meant bacteria and small predators. The controls for reversing the polarity were
outside the chamber, on a platform within easy reach of Oskar and Dhiju. The
second I passed through the silvery sheen at the doorway, I was, effectively, as
much a prisoner as she was. But it didn't feel that way; at the moment, I didn't
want to be anywhere else but with her.

She had her back to me, but she knew who I was even as I entered; I could tell
that just by the special way she froze at the sound of my step. She turned, saw
me, and with a resignation that hurt more than any words could, leaned back
against the opposite wall.

I did not go to her. Instead, I found a nice neutral spot on the wall and faced
her from across the width of the chamber. "Hello."

Her expression would have been strictly neutral were it not for the anger behind
those dark, penetrating eyes. Facing those eyes was like being opened up and
examined, piece by piece. It should have been unsettling; against my will, I
found I liked it.

"I've got to hand it to you," I said, conversationally. "The Vlhani are on
strike, the other delegations are going crazy, nobody here has the slightest
clue who you are, and I'm supposed to come in here and get the information that
everybody else can't. Who you are. Where you come from, where you got those
augmentations, and how you got here."

Impatience. Establishing that she'd already been through this -- that she hadn't
answered the questions before and wouldn't be answering them now. Wondering just
what I thought I was accomplishing by throwing good effort after bad.

And then I folded my arms and said, "The thing is, I really don't care about any
of that. Wherever you come from, it's just a place. How you got here is just
transportation. And as for who put in those augmentations? That's just a brand
name. None of that makes any difference to me at all."

She rolled her eyes incredulously. "What does?"

"Why."

"In twenty-five words or less?"

"Counting those? Sure. You have nineteen left."

She blinked several times, back-counting, then flashed an appreciative smile.
"Only if ye ken twenty-five as two words instead of one. Ye shouldn't."

"All right. But that still brings you down to...uh..."

"Seven," she said, simply. And then: "I'm madly in love with their show."

Damned if she hadn't done it, on the dot. We grinned at each other--both of us
understanding that she hadn't told me anything I couldn't have guessed already,
but enjoying the little game anyway. I said: "So am I. So's everybody on Vlhan,
and half the known universe. That doesn't explain how you came to understand it
so well...and why you're so determined to risk your life dancing among them."

She waggled a finger at me. "Uh-uh, boyo. It's yet turn. Twenty-five words or
less, how can ye say ye love the Show when ye don't ken it one bit?"

It didn't come off as rude, the way she asked it -- it was a sincere question,
expressing sincere bafflement. I measured my response very carefully, needing to
both be truthful and match the precision of her answer. "I suppose...that if I
only loved things I understood perfectly, I'd be living a pretty loveless
existence. Sometimes, love is just...needing to understand."

"That's not love, boyo. That's just curiosity. Give yerself an extension and
riddle me this: What do ye feel when ye watch their show? Do you ken their
heart? Their creativity? Their need to do this, even at the edge of dyin'?"

"Maybe," I said. "Some of it."

"And how do ye ken ye're not croddin' the whole thing to bloody gobs? How do ye
ken ye're not seeing tears when the buggies mean laughs? Or that it's really a
big show and not a mungie prayer?"

It was hard to keep my voice level. "Is that what you're saying, Isadora? That
it's not an art form?"

She shook her head sadly, and dared me with eyes like miniature starscapes.
There was pain, there: entire lifetimes of pain. But there was arrogance, too:
the kind that comes from being able to understand what so many others cannot.
And both were tempered by the distant, but genuine hope that maybe I'd get it
after all.

After a moment, I said, "All right. How about I tell you what we think we know,
and you tell me how and where we're sadly mistaken?"

She shrugged. "Ye're free to toss."

"All right. The Marionette dance isn't a conventional symbolic language, like
speech, but a holographic imaging system, like whalesong. The waveforms rippling
up those whips aren't transmitting words or concepts, but detailed
three-dimensional images. They must be tremendously sophisticated pictures, too,
since the amount of information being passed back and forth is huge. And if a
Marionette can paint a detailed map of the immediate environment in about ten
seconds of strenuous dance, then the Ballet may have enough detail for a
complete scale model of this solar system. The problem is, we haven't been able
to translate more than a few simple movements -- and even then we think they're
talking down to us."

Isadora nodded. "Ye're right. That they be."

I had made that part up. Excited now, certain she had the key that the rest of
us had missed, I leaned forward and said, "But they weren't talking down to you,
were you? They respected you. They made a place for you. How is that? Who are
you to them?"

"Someone who kens them."

"And how is it you understand the dance when we can't?"

"Because I ken it's a show, not a mungie code." When I reacted to that with a
mere uncomprehending blink, she just shook her head tiredly, appeared to
reconsider silence as an option, and said: "Peer this. There's a species out in
space, known by a name I can't make me lips say. They're pitifully boring
folks...born filing-systems, really...but they're totally tingled to crot by the
idea of the human pun. The idea of ringin' two chimes with one phrase seems as
sparkledusty to them as the buggie dance be to us. And their greatest brains
been wastin' years of sweat just tryin' to ken. Ye can buy the whole libraries
they've penned about it."

I seemed to recall reading or hearing about the race in question, at some point
in the distant past. "So?"

"So they crod up the whole sorry mess. They don't ken humor and they don't ken
that a pun's supposed to be funny. They think it's zen-time instead...a,
how-ye-put-it, ironic human commentary on the interconnectedness of all things.
Once upon a time, I peered a pair of the dingheads pickin' apart a old terran
comedy about professional athletes with wack names -- names that were questions
like Who and What and Why. It didn't seem all that laugh-time, to me, but I
could ken it was supposed to be silly -- and they didn't. I vow to ye, Alex, it
was like peering a couple of mathematicians dustin' up over an equation. Like ye
folks, they peered the mechanism, and missed the context."

Dammit, she did know something. I pushed myself off the wall, and went to her.
"So tell me the context. You don't have to give me all of it, if you don't want
to, but something. A clue."

And she smiled at me. Smiled, with eyes that knew far more than I ever would.
"Will it get me back in the show?"

Against my will, I glanced at the featureless wall that concealed the outer lab;
I didn't need to be able to see through it to know what Ambassador Dhiju was
doing on the other side. He was leaning forward in his seat, resting his chin on
a cradle of locked hands, his eyes narrowing as he waited to see if I'd make any
promises he couldn't allow me to keep. He was probably silently urging me to go
ahead; like all career diplomats, he'd spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into
the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong
with doing the same now. But he hadn't been with her in the amphitheater, as I'd
been; he hadn't bartered his life for hers, and been the beneficiary of the
sacrifice she made in return; he couldn't know that it would have been
unthinkable for me to even attempt to lie to her. So I came as close to being
honest with her as I dared. I said nothing.

She understood, of course. It was inevitable that she would. And though she must
have known the answer even before asking the question, it still hit her just as
hard; she lowered her face, and looked away, unwilling to let me see what was in
her eyes. "Then the deal's bloody gobbed. I don't speak one crot more 'less I
get back to the show."

"But --"

"That's final."

After a moment, I understood that it was. It was all she cared about, all she
had to negotiate with. Any attempt to pretend otherwise would be an insult. And
so I nodded, and went to the door, waiting for Oskar to reverse the field so I
could leave.

Except that I was wrong. It wasn't final, after all; there was still business
between us, still something she couldn't say goodbye to me without saying.

She said: "Alex?"

I looked at her. "What?"

She didn't meet my eyes: just stared at her feet, as if peering past the floor
and past the ground to face a scene now half a day in our past. "Were ye just
blowin' dust, back at the show? Were ye...really goin' to waltz with the buggies
and me...if I'd not ridden that skimmer out with ye?"

"Absolutely. I wasn't about to leave there without you."

She nodded to herself, as if confirming the answer to a question that nobody had
bothered to ask out loud...then shook her head, flashed a dazzling smile, and,
in perfectly proper Human-standard, said: "Then you deserve this much. The
Ballet doesn't end, each year, just because the last dancer dies. Think...the
persistence of vision."

7.

We didn't find out about it until the postmortems, but first blood was shed on a
swampy peninsula over a thousand kilometers from our embassy: a place equally
inhospitable to both Vlhani and Men, with terrain soft enough to swallow
wanderers of either race.

Dr. Kevin McDaniel wasn't officially attached to the embassy. In truth, he was
an exobotanist, on Vlhan as part of an unrelated commercial project having
something to do with a certain smelly reed native to the swamps. It may have
been important work, but to the rest of us it was nowhere near as compelling as
the mysteries of the Vlhani, which interested him not at all. Usually, we only
remembered he was on-planet at all because he was a clumsy oaf, and one of us
always had to keep him company lest some absentminded misstep leave him drowning
in the ooze with nobody to pull him out. It was an annoying detail that
everybody lower than Dhiiu had pulled at least once. We made jokes about it.

Today, McDaniel's babysitter was a plump young kinetic pattern analyst by the
name of Li-Hsin Chang, who had entered her servitude one year behind me. Li-Hsin
had bitterly complained about the duty rotation that had obliged her, and not
anybody else, to miss the spectacle of the Ballet in favor of a week spent
trudging through muck in the company of the single most boring sentient on the
planet. And the strange developments at the amphitheater only made matters
worse: even as she sat in the skimmer hovering five meters up and watched
McDaniel perform his usual arcane measurements among the reeds, she was deeply
plugged into the hytex, absorbing all the latest bulletins about me and Isadora
and the Vlhani crisis.

Under the circumstances, Li-Hsin can be forgiven for failing to spot the Vlhani
until it was almost upon him.

Vlhani can weigh up to a thousand kilos, but they have a controlled way of
running that amounts to keeping most of that weight in the air, and even at full
speed they can make significantly less sound than a running man. It's not
deliberate stealth, but tremendous inherent grace. And while even they're not
quite as quiet splashing through muddy swampland as they are galloping over dry,
densely packed earth, they still never stumble, never make a misstep, never
release one decibel of sound that they don't absolutely have to. This one's
approach was drowned out until the very last minute by the hum of the skimmer's
drive and the clumsy splashing-about of Dr. McDaniel. When Li-Hsin heard a
particularly violent splash, she peered over the railing, saw that McDaniel had
wandered only a few meters from where he was supposed to be, then heard another,
louder, splash from the north.

It was a ten-whip mature Vlhani approaching at top speed. It ran the way Vlhani
always run when they push themselves to their limits -- spinning its whips like
the spokes of a wheel, with the shiny black head at the center. It ran so fast
that the whips blurred together in great gray streaks. It ran so fast that it
seemed to be flying. And it was coming their way.

Li-Hsin can also be forgiven for not immediately realizing that it was hostile.
For one thing, it wasn't wholly unheard-of for a huge adult Vlhani to be running
around in the middle of the swamp. It was unusual, but they did sometimes wander
far from their usual habitat. She'd seen a mating pair just the other day. For
another thing, Vlhani simply weren't hostile. They may have been too dangerous
to approach during their Ballet, but that was a function of the Ballet, not of
the Vlhani. In their everyday existence, they were extraordinarily gentle;
Li-Hsin had walked among them without protection for two years, and had
developed an easy familiarity with those she saw most frequently. She even
considered one or two of them friends -- at least, as much as she could when the
best our harnesses could do was pipe the meme Friend back and forth. That was
enough for her. As it was for me. And the rest of us.

So even when she saw that Dr. McDaniel was directly in its path, it still didn't
occur to her that it might be deliberately attacking him. She did nothing more
drastic than just flip on the amps and cry out: "Mac! Get out of the way!"

McDaniel, who'd been too absorbed in his measurements to see or hear the big
Vlhani's approach, glanced up at the skimmer, annoyance creasing his pale,
sweaty features. He spotted the Vlhani a second later, stood there dumbfounded,
wholly unwilling to believe that this was actually happening to him, then saw
that he was about to be run over and leaped to one side, belly-flopping in the
middle of a pool of stagnant water. He sank beneath the surface and did not come
up for air. Vlhani whips sank deep into the ooze where he had been, with a force
that would have pulped him. The Vlham didn't even slow down. It was ten meters
past him before Li-Hsin even had time to yell, "MAC!"

She grabbed the controls and swooped low over the water where McDaniel had
disappeared. He came to the surface choking and spitting, but waving that he was
all right. She was about to descend further to pick him up when he spotted the
Vlhani, fifty meters away and circling around for another go. Unlike Li-Hsin, he
was totally ignorant about the Vlhani, and therefore had no preconceptions to
shed; he knew immediately that the attack was real, and that the Vlhan would be
on him again long before Li-Hsin managed to pick him up. He frantically waved
her off: "Go away! It's circling back!"

Li-Hsin looked up, and saw that McDaniel was right. If she still had any doubts
about its intentions, the speed of its approach would have banished them: were
this an accident, it would have slowed down and returned with exaggerated
caution, hanging its head at the angle that we'd all come to recognize as mimed
remorse. She glanced at McDaniel and shouted: "STAY DOWN!"

McDaniel yelled back: "DON'T--" But it was too late for Li-Hsin to hear him. In
one smooth movement, she'd turned the skimmer around, aimed it toward the
approaching Vlhani, and instructed it to accelerate. She did this without
thinking, and without hesitation, seized by the kind of desperate inventiveness
that takes over only when there are no other options available. A direct
collision with a skimmer, moving at those speeds, would splatter even the
largest Marionettej Li-Hsin had to know that such a crash would certainly kill
her too. She probably hoped it would be intimidated enough to duck and run.

Except that it didn't happen. Just before the moment of collision, the
Marionette leaped, and came down on top of the skimmer. Two of its whips were
broken at the moment of impact: another one was cleanly amputated by the lift
coils. The rest cushioned its landing. The neurec connections, which had so
clearly captured all of Li-Hsin's actions and sensations up until now, now
documented her helpless astonishment as she suddenly found herself surrounded by
a cage of undulating whips. The Marionette's head loomed close behind her for an
instant, then disappeared out of frame. A whip slashed across the frame,
blurred, and then disappeared, leaving her without a right arm.

The horizon behind them spun like a dial.

Then the skimmer crash-landed into the swamp, and both Li-Hsin and the
Marionette were decapitated instantly.

It took McDaniel four hours to dig out the hytex and call for help. By then,
those of us still left alive were way too busy to hear him...

8.

The only question anybody really managed to answer before everything fell to
pieces was the precise manner of Isadora's secret arrival on Vlhan. It was Rory
Metcalf who made the connection with a supply transport that, about eight months
ago, had entered Vlhan's atmosphere half a world away from its assigned landing
position, come within a hair's breadth of a landing before seeming to realize
that it was in the wrong place, then risen back to 50,000 meters to travel the
rest of the way. This might have seemed suspicious at the time, but the
bickering pilots had struck everybody as just a couple of incompetents with no
real talent for the work. When Rory looked up their courier license, she found
that they'd subsequently been arrested on several charges of carrying
unregistered passengers. It was a mildly impressive piece of deduction, which
probably solved one minor part of the mystery, but still explained absolutely
nothing.

And even if we could put together the parts that mattered, we were running out
of time.

We'd placed our embassy on an isolated plateau that was both higher and colder
than the Vlhani found comfortable -- a location we'd chosen not out of fear for
our own safety, but common courtesy and respect for their privacy. After all, we
could reach any place on their planet within three hours; we could walk among
the Vlhani as frequently as they cared to let us, without obtrusively cluttering
up any land they were already using. So, like the Riirgaans and the K'cenhowten
and the Cid and all the other embassies, we'd placed our cluster of buildings
far otside their normal migration patterns, and normally didn't entertain Vlhani
guests more than once or twice a year. Usually, we could stand outside the
collection of prefabricated buildings that made up our compound, look down upon
the rolling gray hills that surrounded us, and feel completely alone, as if we
were the only sentients on the entire planet.

But not today. Today, when a few of us took a break to face the Vlhani sunset,
we found a landscape dotted with thousands of spiders. The ones we could see
were all approaching from the west; the other embassies reported many more
approaching us from every direction, but the herds in the west had been closer,
and were first to show up. They didn't approach in formation, like an army, but
in randomly spaced groups of one or two or three, like strangers all heading the
same way by coincidence. They moved so quickly that every time they crested the
top of a hill their momentum sent them flying in great coltish leaps. The sun
behind them turned their elongated shadows into surrealistic tangles. The few
that had reached the base of the plateau seemed content to mill about there,
looking up at us, their trademark flailing whips now reminding me of nothing so
much as fists shaken in anger.

Kathy Ng intoned, "The natives are restless."

She gave it the special emphasis she used whenever she lifted a quote from the
archaic adventure fiction she enjoyed so much; I'd never heard it before. "Do
you think we're going to have to fight them?"

"They certainly look like they're trying to give us the impression, don't they?"
She bit her lower lip hard enough to turn it white. "I just hope it's just their
ancestral scare-the shit-out-of the-bipeds dance, or something."

"Ancestral or not, it's working."

Our chief exopsychologist, Dr. Simmons, tasked paternally. "You're being
ethnocentric, people. We can't say they're acting hostile just because, to our
eyes, it happens to look that way. Especially since, in all the years we've been
here, nobody's ever seen the Vlhani react to any conflict in an aggressive or
violent fashion."

"What about the Ballet?"

"That's violent, all right...but it's not conflict. It's a highly stylized,
intricately planned annual ritual, choreographed down to the very last step.
Which means that it's about as relevant to typical Vlhani behavior as your
birthday party is to the remaining four-hundred-and-ninety-nine days of the
year."

"Which would make me feel a lot better," said Rory Metcalf, "if not for one
thing."

"What's that?"

"This Ballet hasn't been typical at all."

That started everybody arguing at once. I missed most of what got said because
Oskar Levine chose that moment to scurry out of the main building and summon me
to Dhiju's quarters. I hesitated just long enough to spare one more look at the
army of Marionettes gathering down below, contemplate how long we'd be able to
hold them off if we had to, and realize that if it came to that, we wouldn't
even be able to slow them down. We were a peaceful embassy on a peaceful world;
we had nothing to fight them with beyond a few inadequate hand-weapons. We might
as well start stockpiling sticks and stones...and if it came to that, we were
all dead.

I shuddered and went to see Dhiju.

A funny thing. Desks, as practical pieces of office furniture, have been
obsolete for over one thousand years. They were helpful enough when most work
was done on paper, or on computer screens that needed to be supported at
approximately eye-level...but since none of that's true anymore, desks no longer
serve functions important enough to merit all the space they take up. They're
still used only because they're such effective psychological tools. There's
something about the distancing effect of that great smooth expanse that
inherently magnifies the authority figure seated on the other side. And men like
Dhiju know it. When I ran into his office, he was in position behind his,
glowering as if from Olympus.

He gestured at the hytex projection floating in the air beside his desk. There
were four main images fighting for supremacy there: a panoramic view of the
amphitheater, where the participants in the Vlhani Ballet still stood
motionless, patiently waiting for the show to go on; another view of the Vlhani
gathering at the base of our plateau; the surveillance image of Isadora,
serenely doing multijointed leg lifts in the Isolation Lab; and finally, a head
shot of Hurrr'poth, looking as grave as his inexpressive Riirgaani face ever
allowed him. I was unsure which image I was supposed to look at until Hurrr'poth
swelled to fill my entire field of vision. The giant head turned to face me.
"Alex," he said. "The pornographer."

"Hurrr'poth," I said. "The criminal."

He trilled, but it struck me as the Riirgaani equivalent of forced laughter: it
went on a little too long and failed to convey any amusement at all. "I thank
you for coming Alex. This is a very important communication, and since you were
with Isadora in the Ballet, I felt that you might possess the keen perspective
that your Ambassador Dhiju seems to lack. -- Have I disturbed you in any way?"

I glanced at Dhiju, saw only anger, and remained mystified. "Uh...no. How can I
help your"

"You can listen," said Hurrr'poth. "I was telling your Ambassador, here, that I
speak not only as the chosen interpreter of the Vlhani people, but as the
elected representatives of all the other embassies stationed on Vlhan. The
Vlhani have spent the past several hours communicating their wishes on this
matter, and we are at their request lodging an official protest against your
embassy's continuing interference with the indigenous culture of this planet."

Dhiju made an appalled noise. "This is like something out of Kafka."

"I am unfamiliar with that term, ambassador, but the Vlhani are trying to be
fair about this. They understand that, armed with insufficient information, you
and Alex acted to preserve the life of a fellow member of your species. They
know that this was only natural, under the circumstances, and they bear you no
ill will for doing what seemed to make sense at the time. Indeed, they respect
you for it. But they also believe that they've shown you they consider the woman
Isadora an integral part of this year's Ballet...and that, by irresponsibly
prohibiting her return to the amphitheater, you are inflicting irrevocable
damage upon the most sacred ritual of their entire culture. They demand that you
surrender her at once, so the Ballet can continue."

"Will she die in the Ballet, like they do?"

"Of course," said Hurrr'poth.

"Then the answer's No," said Dhiju.

"You are interfering with a tradition that has lasted hundreds of generations."

"I am deeply sorry about that, Mr. Hurrr'poth. But Isadora's not a member of
Vlhani tradition. She's a human being, and as such part of a tradition that
abhors suicide. Nobody authorized her presence here, and I'm not about to
authorize her participation in any ceremony that ends with her death. The Vlhani
will just have to understand that."

Then Hurrr'poth did trill: but it was a grim, bitter form of amusement...one I
never would have expected from a sentient I'd imagined a harmless eccentric.
"Sir: you are an idiot."

Dhiju's natural impulse to show anger crashed head-on with his professional duty
to be totally courteous to all the other members of every alien delegation at
all times. "Pray tell. Why?"

"Her presence here is not up to you to authorize. It is up to the Vlhani. It is
their law and their judgment that applies on this world, and they have clearly
recognized her and welcomed her and honored her with an integral position in
their Ballet. When you behave as if you are the sole arbiter of who is and who
is not supposed to be here, you demonstrate that you understand even less about
this species than you understand about your own -- which, if you still think the
young lady doesn't know what she's doing, is saying a lot. If you persist in
this course of action, you will only get the Vlhani more angry at you than they
already are. And everything that happens from this moment on will be on your
head."

I broke protocol by interrupting: "Are you saying they'll attack?"

Hurrr'poth faced me directly. "Yes."

We had no way of knowing that the first skirmish had already taken place;
neither Dhiju or I even happened to think of Kevin McDaniel or Li-Hsin Chang who
were half a world away, and well outside the usual Vlhani habitat. After a
moment, Dhiju just said, "Understood. I'll be back in touch with you as soon as
I confer with my people."

"You are making a terrible mistake! The Vlhani --"

Dhiju thumbed a pad beside him. The hytex projection folded up, shrank into a
mote of blackness the size of a pea, then faded. Dhiju stuck out his lower lip,
made a "t-t-t-t-t" sound from somewhere deep in his throat, and aside from that,
remained in place, apparently finding volumes of meaning in the way his hands
sat on the smooth desk before him. Eventually, he just said, "Susan." And a new
hytex projection took the place of the one he'd taken away: this one the static
image of a girl in her early teens. She was fresh-faced, but wan, and she smiled
in the patently artificial way that's been common to all portraits, captured by
any recording media, since the beginning of time.

"My daughter," he said.

I had no idea what to say. So I lied. "She's pretty."

"You think so? -- The truth is, I barely even saw her after she turned nine. Her
mother and I became just too much of a bad mistake together, and I found it
easier to stay away, on one off-world assignment after another. I got letters
and recordings, but saw her in person maybe for a couple of months out of every
year. And then, one day, when she was fifteen, a friend at a party introduced
her to the latest fashionable import from off-world: a sort of...vibrating
jewel...capable of directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain. ...
"He shuddered. "It took six months, Alex. Six months of killing herself a little
bit more every day. Six months I didn't even get to hear about until I was
rotated home and found her gone."

He sat there, thinking about that a while, letting Susan's enlarged, joylessly
smiling face accuse him at length.

And then he said: "Every once in a while, some poor bastard gets saddled with
the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a
curse for the next hundred years. -- Go tell the others we're evacuating.
Deadline one hour. After that we're taking the little gatecrasher with us and
leaving everything we haven't packed behind. Then we'll take the transports into
orbit and wait there until we can summon a ride home."

My heart pounding past the threshold of pain, I stepped toward him, faced his
gray, deceptively watery eyes, and choked out what he already knew: "They'll
never let us back. You'll be throwing away all our relations with the Vlhani,
and everybody at home will blame you. You know that."

"Yes. I do." He looked past me, past the hytex projection, past the wall, and
past the entire worsening crisis, and said: "But at least this time I'll be here
to save her."

9.

The Vlhani were a black horde, covering the hills like flies; and though there
were far, far more of them than anybody had ever documented in one place before,
it was still impossible to look at them without sensing deliberate choreography
at work. Even when threatening war, everything they did was still a dance,
albeit a different kind of dance, with nothing graceful or balletic about it.
This time, it was more like a march of death, their normally fluid gait reduced
to something joyless and rigid that seemed as forced and unnatural coming from
them as a goose-step coming from Man. They were packed most densely in the rocky
terrain at the foot of our plateau, more crowded by far than anything I'd seen
in the amphitheater, but never advancing beyond the rocks, even when the
competition for space flattened them like creatures being crushed against an
invisible wall. If that wall crumbled, the wave of Vlhani swarming up the slope
would be upon us in seconds.

There weren't many people visible; everybody was too busy performing the frantic
business of a last-minute evacuation. That mostly meant clearing out the food
stores, the infirmary, the records, and the tool lab; but everybody was human
enough to spend a few precious seconds in their own quarters sweeping them clear
of anything so personal we couldn't bear to leave it behind. There wasn't much
of that, though; indentured diplomats don't get much space for clutter. All I
had was a pocket hytex and a length of severed Vlhani whip I'd salvaged from the
amphitheater after last year's Ballet; I irradiated it regularly to discourage
decomposition, but time had taken its toll anyway and the chitin that had once
been harder than steel was now soft and spongy and cracked at the edges. Only a
few days ago, an unworthy part of me had looked forward to the mass carnage at
the Ballet so I could later search the amphitheater for a new coil to seal in
permaglass. I remembered that, shuddered, and left the old one untouched on the
shelf beside my bed. It was Vlhani, and if we were truly leaving, it belonged to
Vlhan.

With twenty minutes to go, it fell to me, as the closest thing we had to an
expert on the Isadora problem, to figure out a way to get her onto a transport
safely. After all, her enhancements made her physically more than a match for
any of us; if she decided to resist, she could easily be as formidable as a
Vlhani. Drugs were out, since so much of her was artificial that nobody had any
idea how to even begin to figure out what dosages would be safe or even
effective on those portions of her anatomy that remained, and the embassy didn't
stock anything that could restrain her or be legitimately used as a weapon.

In the end, I snagged Oskar Levine--who, as I've said, I'd never liked much, but
who happened to be the only person not doing anything -- and armed him with two
tanks of compressed cryofoam from the infirmary, one hose strapped to each arm.
We kept the stuff on our skimmers in case of injuries in the field; we hadn't
used any at the embassy itself since last year, when Cecilia Lansky came down
with a rare form of cancer we couldn't cure on-site and had to be stored on ice
until we could send her home for treatment. There was enough in those two tanks
to wrap up a single full-grown Vlhani. If Isadora tried to break, Oskar would
foam her.

He tried to talk me out of going in. "Use the intercom. Turn off the field, tell
her to come out, I'll get her in the doorway. It'll be fast and easy."

"I know. But I still think I can turn this thing around. I want to talk to her
first."

He gave me the kind of look most people reserve for irredeemable idiots. "If you
walk out together, and I see no reason to trust her, I'll foam both of you."

"That's reasonable enough. Long as you get me on a transport."

"Fine," he said. "Give me more work to do."

"Oskar... !"

"It's a joke, jerkoff. Don't worry about it, I'll take care of you either way."

She'd pulled out the folding cot built into the rear wall of the chamber, and
curled up to sleep there; a reasonable enough thing to do, given the
circumstances, but still one that surprised me, as it was the first genuinely
human gesture I'd ever seen from her. Somehow, without my ever realizing it, I
had come to think of her as far beyond such considerations as any other
perfectly designed machine. But she didn't look like a machine now: she didn't
even look adult. With her eyes closed, and her knees hugging her belly, and her
hands tightly clasped beside her chin, she resembled nothing so much as a little
girl dreaming of the magic kingdoms that existed only inside her head. The
tattoos on her cheeks could have been make-believe war paint, from a game played
by a child...

Something stirred in me. A connection, with something. But whatever it was, was
too unformed for me to make any sense of it yet.

I knelt down beside her and said: "Isadora."

The illusion of normalcy was broken as both her arms and legs uncoiled, like
liquid things that had never been restricted by bones. When her eyes opened they
were already focused on me: wholly unsurprised by my presence, wholly
unintimidated by anything I might have to say. The shadow of a smile played
about her lips, revealing a warmth that surprised me. She did not get up: merely
faced me from that position, and said. "Alex."

"I thought you'd like a progress report."

She refused to blink. "That's fuzzy-pink of ye."

"The Vlhani have surrounded us. Dhiju's practically thrown away his career by
giving the order to evacuate. We're packing up, getting out, and taking you with
us."

She hugged her coiled arms a little closer to her chest. "I don't want to go."

"Like hell," I said softly. "Whatever else you are, Isadora, you're far from
stupid. You knew we were watching the Ballet, you knew we would spot you, you
knew we'd be honor-bound to try to stop you, and you knew how the Vlhani would
react if we succeeded. You could have avoided this whole crisis by explaining
everything in advance, or by enhancing yourself so much we couldn't distinguish
you from a Vlhani. Instead, you just made a surprise appearance -- and got
exactly the response you expected."

Her eyes closed. "I didn't ken what ye could do to get me out. Had no idea I'd
waltz into a boyo gallant enough to hold himself hostage for me."

Her tone put the word gallant in little quotes, deranging it, making it a
joke...but not a bitter one. Encouraged, I pushed on: "And that's the real
reason you're withholding the explanations, isn't it? Even why you're using that
ridiculous dialect of yours, when you've already proven you can abandon it when
you want to. Not because you're trying to negotiate your way back to the dance.
But because you're trying to put off going back. You don't really want to die.
You're looking for a way out. Any way out."

"There is no way out."

"Just refuse to participate!"

"I can't do that. It will ruin the show."

"So one year's Ballet gets ruined, and the Vlhani are traumatized. But there's
another Ballet next year. So what? What's really at stake here, Isadora? Why are
they so determined to get you back."

"Ye wouldn't ken."

"I...ken...enough to know when they're angry, and when they're afraid, and when
they're so desperate they don't know what to do...but most importantly, enough
to know when they're holding back. They could have overrun us a couple of hours
ago, and they haven't. Because they don't want to hurt us. They don't want to
hurt anybody...but they're still ready to march all over us to get you back. Why
is that, Isadora? What's so special about you that they can't just replace you
with one of their own? And what's so special about them that you can't say no?"

In the silence that followed, I could almost hear Oskar fidgeting, outside the
door...maybe even Dhiju himself checking his timetables and demanding to know
just where the hell I was...but it was worth it. Her eyes glistened, and she
faced her delicately tooled fingers. "Alex...have you ever dreamed of something
so much, for so long, that you had to have it...even though you still weren't
certain it was what you wanted."

I just waited.

She still didn't look at me. "If I tell you, will it get me back to the Ballet
?"

"Maybe yes and maybe no...but either way it might stop a whole lot of good
people from getting hurt."

She sat up then -- a wholly unremarkable act rendered remarkable by the graceful
precision with which she performed it. When a normal person rises from a prone
position, their center of gravity shifts. Their muscles come into play, and
there's a subliminal moment of danger when they're momentarily off-balance. It's
not something you notice in the way normal people move...unless you've seen
Isadora, simply gliding. from one position to the other. She rubbed the bridge
of her nose, smiled ruefully, and once again spoke in a voice free of the thick
accent she'd used to define herself for me. "Have to hand it to you, Alex...you
know what strings to pull."

I rose from my kneeling position and sat down beside her. "I better. We're on a
planet of Marionettes."

She snorted. "Should I go for twenty-five words or less?"

"Let's not limit ourselves."

"When I was eight years old, I was living in my Uncle's house, as his
provisional ward pending...well, where I came from, there was a whole legal
lexicon for such things, and I don't really have to go into it. The Steinhoff
recordings of the '57 Ballet had just come out; I had myself plugged into the
neurec, with the feed down low so I could still pay attention to everybody else
in the house...not full gain, because I always had this need to know everything
that's going on around me. And my Uncle and his husband were plugged in too,
also low because they were the kind of people who couldn't ever stop talking
about everything they saw, and my Uncle recited something straight off the hytex
about how dark and mysterious the Vlhani were, and how their minds were so dark
and alien that no human would ever understand them.

"It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so
they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original
thought themselves. And I was eight years old...mesmerized by what I was
watching...and I knew that what my uncle was saying was gibberish. Because it
was the third recording I'd seen, over the past few months...and I was beginning
to have some idea what the Vlhani were getting at."

I swallowed. "How?"

"Crod it, I don't know. Maybe it's just some quirk in me that visualizes things
differently, something in my perceptions that's a little more Vlhani than human
being...and maybe I was just young and impressionable enough to let the message
seep through. Maybe it's even a question of talent...something that transcended
species and gave me the ability to understand when you and Dhiju and my Uncle
just saw dancing buggies. But put that aside. What matters is that I saw one
tiny aspect of the Ballet clearer than the Vlhani. I saw a critical flaw in
their performance, something they didn't even see themselves...something that
made their Ballet a lie, and that only I knew how to correct." She groped for my
hand, found it, and gave me a tight squeeze. "I can't describe what it was like,
Alex. It was like...hearing a single discordant note in the greatest symphony
ever written...and knowing that only I knew how to correct it. And that night I
slipped out the window and ran away from home, determined to make it to Vlhan."

I squeezed her hand right back. It felt human enough: nothing at all like the
intricate arrangement of circuitry and plastics I knew it to be. "You were eight
years old. How far could you get?"

"As far as I had to. You don't understand: I wasn't really eight years old
anymore. The part of me that had been a child was dead. In its place was just
this hungry, needful thing, with...with a responsibility .... "She sighed. "I
don't want to tell you all the risks I took, all the laws I broke, all the ways
I...indentured myself...to get where I needed to go...but I had a primitive
version of these enhancements within two years...and I was on Vlhan,
communicating with the spiders, within four. They saw I was right, and let me
know that when the time came for them to incorporate my ideas, I would have to
be the one to dance them. As I always knew."

"But you're not a Vlhani. You can't move like a Vlhani, no matter what crazy
modifications you've made to yourself."

Her nose wrinkled. "Maybe so. But don't you see? That doesn't matter. Art isn't
just technique, in any culture...it's also Content. It's understanding not just
How, but also What, to express. And while I may not know everything the Vlhani
do...the Vlhani still saw that I had something to offer them. Something they
hadn't even known they needed. And I've spent all the years since then preparing
for that."

"For Death."

"You think I don't have doubts? That I genuinely, honestly want to die? I want
to have a life. I want to have all the things other people have. But I have no
choice. It's my responsibility. I have to do this."

"No you don't! What if I said that the Vlhani have no right to ask this of you?
What if I said that you matter more than the Ballet? What if I said that the
Vlhani will just have to muddle along without you, and try again next time?"

"You'd be demonstrating that you understand nothing," she said. "Remember the
Persistence of Vision --"

And maybe it was the sheer madness of everything that had happened between us,
and maybe it was the memory of that one moment in the amphitheater when I sensed
some small part of how much the Marionettes counted on her, and maybe it was a
single moment of perfect telepathy...but all of a sudden the bottom dropped out
of the universe, and I understood exactly what she'd been getting at. She saw
the light dawn, and the most tragic thing happened to her eyes: they filled up
with fresh hope she did not necessarily want.

Her hand squeezed mine again, this time with enough pressure to cross the
threshold of pain. I didn't particularly mind.

I said, "Maybe --"

And that was really all I had a chance to say.

10.

She could have told us we were running out of time. She could have let us know
that the Vlhani have a calendar, of sorts -- not a written one, since they have
no writing but one they continually calculate themselves, using the passing of
the seasons and the movement of the stars across the sky. She could have let us
know that they placed an almost astrological importance on such things,
especially where the Ballet is concerned; and that while, by their lights, it's
all right to put off the Ballet for maybe one or two of their days, everything
was lost if they permitted us to delay the festivities much more than that. I'm
certain she knew all that: she understood more about the Vlhani than any other
human being who had ever lived.

Some of the people who later arrived to pick up the pieces said that Isadora as
good as murdered everybody who died. They're wrong. Because Isadora also
understood about us, and she knew that we wouldn't have listened, any more than
we'd listened to Hurrr'poth, who'd advised me to leave her alone in the first
place. And I think that even she never expected the attack to come as soon as it
did. If she had, she might have tried to warn us harder...

In any event, we didn't need to see outside to know that something very bad was
happening. The walls and floor shook hard enough to make me think of charging
cavalry, trying but failing to keep out the sounds of the invasion in progress
outside: shouting, skimmers flying low overhead, wounds being ripped in
buildings, and the thunderous drambeat of thousands upon thousands of heavy
metallic whips pounding holes in the ground. I shouted out the stupidest
question imaginable: "Oskar! What's going on out there?"

The voice that emerged from the intercom was sweaty and driven by panic. "I
don't know -- I'm hearing --"

I found the wherewithal to ask the question properly. "Oskar! Are the spiders
attacking?"

A siren wailed. Our emergency warning system. Installed as a matter of policy,
not because anybody had ever expected it to be used. Against that, Oskar's voice
was tinny and distant: "Yeah. Yeah, Alex, I think they are,"

"Shit," I said, with feeling.

Isadora said, "We have to let them know I'm going back to the Ballet."

"To hell with that," I said. I patched in to Oskar again: "All right, stay
close. Let us out in two minutes. And keep your hose ready; you might have to
use the foam."

Somewhere not very far away, something metallic -- a skimmer, probably --
smashed into pieces with enough force to drown out every other sound in the
universe. The silence that followed was one of those completely soundless
intervals that happen randomly even in the midst of totally uncontrolled
destruction -- that don't signal the end of the destruction, but merely serve to
punctuate it, putting everything that follows in parentheses. By the time Oskar
spoke again, the pounding had resumed, and I had to strain to make out his
voice. He said: "Take your time. I'm sure as hell not going out there alone."

I turned to Isadora. "You guided us past the Vlhani before. You're going to have
to do it again."

She was stunned. "It's two completely different situations, Alex. The Ballet was
choreographed. I knew every move, I could predict where the Vlhani were going to
be. This is chaos: a thousand individuals rioting in panic. I'm not going to
have much more of a clue out there than you do. If I don't let them know you're
taking me back to the Ballet --"

"Lie to them."

"Their language can't be lied in. It's...like you said, a holographic imaging
system, painting a perception of the world. To lie, I'd have to --"

"Then at least get them to back off while we make our way past them."

"I don't know they'll all listen. Some of them have got to be half-insane with
grief. Some of them are going to want to drag me back to the Ballet by force,
others are going to hate me so much that they'll fall all over themselves trying
to kill me. I don't know if --"

I grabbed her by the upper arm. "Isadora. Enough of Cant's. Can you at least get
us to a skimmer and into the air?"

She stared at me, stunned. "Just us?"

"And Oskar. And anybody else we can save. Can you do that?"

For one horrible second there, I thought she was going to offer the condition
that I allow her to return to the Ballet. I thought that she truly wouldn't care
about all our lives, or for anything beyond going back to this destiny she'd
selected for herself; that she would seize upon the opportunity to blackmail us
into giving her what she wanted. I expected it. I waited for it.

Her eyes narrowed. And she said: "Yeah. I can try."

I had Oskar reverse the field, and we ran for it.

11.

Neither Oskar nor I had the time to find and don a whip harness, but by the time
we got outside, we saw that they would have been superfluous anyway.

The compound had been overrun by Vlhani.

A dozen had attacked the dormitory building. Four were on the roof, punching
holes in the building with repeated blows from their long flailing whips. The
rest had staked out the windows, and were busily using their whips to probe
inside. One gave a sharp tug, and pulled something scarlet and ragged and human
out the window.

One of the spiders towered over Foster Simmons and Kathy Ng, rotating in place
so quickly that its whips strobed, becoming a transparent gray blur, behind
which Foster and Kathy knelt bloody and imprisoned and screaming. The spider
didn't seem particularly inclined to tighten its grip and slice them to ribbons
-- but they must have tried to get past it, because Foster's severed hand lay by
itself only a few feet away. His whip harness whined Hurt Help Hurt Help, to no
avail. I couldn't see enough to tell if Kathy was hurt too.

Rory Metcalf and a bunch of others had gotten to one of the skimmers. They'd
managed to take off, but a group of three Vlhani anchored to the ground had
reached up and wrapped their whips around the housing. The skimmer strained in
mid-air, veering from one side to the other in a vain attempt to break free.
Rory pounded at one of the whips with her bare hands. As I watched, the skimmer
lurched in a random direction and was promptly reined back in, but not before a
burly figure I recognized as Wesley Harris flipped over the side and hit the
ground hard.

Ambassador Dhiju staggered through the midst of the carnage, clearly moved by it
without ever being touched by it; beyond the fresh bruise on his forehead and a
shallow cut on his upper arm, he wasn't hurt at all. He walked blindly, without
making any special attempt to avoid the Marionettes striding back and forth
across the compound; and though they made no special attempt to avoid him
either, their long sinuous whips stabbed the ground to the right and the left
and the rear of him without once hitting him. When I got close enough to grab
him by the hand I took a close look at his eyes and recognized his secret as the
luck of the intoxicated: in trying to dull the pain of what had to be the
greatest defeat of his life, he'd pumped himself up with so many recreationals
that he simply didn't see anything unusual about the chaos around him. I had to
shout his name three times before he recognized it and followed us.

A ten-whip Marionette slashed at me. A cold wave knocked me back; I hit the
ground with patches of cryofoam stealing pieces of sensation from my upper arms.
The Marionette lay on the ground, four of its whips paralyzed, the others still
flailing. Oskar stared, unwilling to believe that he was the one who'd brought
it down. I caught a momentary glimpse of the dormitory building collapsing in on
itself, saw Isadora frantically signing something in the air above her head,
then spotted the silver glint of parked skimmers behind the commissary. There
were several Vlhani blocking the way between us and that holy grail, but it was
as good a direction as any. I yanked the mumbling Dhiju out of the nearest
Marionette's reach, and yelled "There!" We ran for it.

On our way there, the Marionette tethering Rory's skimmer succeeded in upending
it and tossing her out. Half a dozen indentures, some already wounded, fell too
far to the ground. I turned, and caught a glimpse of Rory getting batted to one
side by a flailing whip. She got up limping and with one hand clutched to her
side. The three Vlhani released the now unoccupied skimmer (which rocketed over
the edge of the plateau and plowed at full speed into a fresh assault wave of
Vlhani), then converged upon her. I heard her shout as three of the newer
indentures, who'd somehow avoided getting hurt or killed or trapped so far,
overcame their panic enough to dart in her direction. One went down. I didn't
get to see what happened to Rory or the others, because that's when the big bull
Vlhani got me.

It wasn't the first time I'd been lifted into the air by a Marionette. They were
peaceful, playful people most of the time, and some of them liked to hoist
humans in their whips as a way of saying hello. They'd always indicated their
intentions before doing so, and always shown a keen and gentle understanding of
the fragility of human flesh. Not so now. This one looped its whip around me
from behind and yanked me into the air with a force that realigned my vertebrae.
I didn't know I'd been grabbed until I was already off the ground, being spun
around and around so fast that the compound and the people and the rampaging
Marionettes were reduced to undifferentiated streaks of color. As its whip
tightened around my belly, the air whuffed from my open mouth, and I realized
that this was the moment I was going to die.

And then the world stopped spinning and about thirty seconds later my head
stopped spinning with it and I stared dazed and confused at a sky dominated by
the sun, which abruptly up-ended and was replaced by the ground as the whip
holding me circled around and showed me the reason I wasn't dead.

Isadora.

Face flushed, eyes desperate.

Forehead covered with a sheen of fear.

Arms in the air, twisting into impossible wrought-iron loops and curves,
circling around each other in ways that hurt the mind to imagine.

The Marionette lowered me gently to the ground, placing me in a standing
position, though I was so dizzy that I almost immediately tumbled to my knees.
Then it not only stood guard over us, as Oskar and Isadora helped me to my feet;
but also silently escorted us, as they helped Dhiju and me stumble drunkenly
toward the skimmers.

There were five of the vehicles parked behind the commissary. None were intact.
The Vlhani had pounded three into unrecognizable masses of twisted metal and
plastic; torn out the hytex and propulsion systems of the fourth; turned the
fifth into a collection of dents and broken instrumentation that may have looked
like hell, but seemed capable of wobbly flight. The seats had been ripped out,
leaving only the metal housings. We got in anyway. The Vlhani protecting us
merely looked down at us impassively, flailing its whips in a manner that could
have meant anything at all.

I managed to ask Isadora one question as Oskar lifted off: "Did you tell it you
were going back to the Ballet?"

She refused to look at me. "I told you: it's next to impossible to lie to them.
I don't know enough of the future to promise that." "Then...what did you tell
it?"

"That you were my friend. And that, whatever happened, I wouldn't dance if you
died."

Oskar flew low over the embattled compound, looking for other people to save.
Everybody we saw was either dead or too tightly surrounded by Vlhani to go
after. I saw several indentures running zigzags through the wreckage, clumsily
dodging the whips that herded them from one near miss to the next. I saw a few
others who through exhaustion or despair had simply given up running; they knelt
in the middle of the carnage, hostages to the mercy of the spiders. About half
the people I saw were wearing whip harnesses, their little windup cables seeming
a pathetic joke in light of all the real whips raining destruction all around
them.

The one time Oskar saw an opportunity to save somebody, and tried to go in,
about twenty Marionettes went after us, with great springing leaps that drove
them thirty meters straight up. We hadn't expected that at all; none of us, with
the possible exception of Isadora, even had any idea they could jump. One
collided with the skimmer so hard we almost flipped, then grabbed at us in a
clumsy attempt to grab hold before falling back down to earth. Oskar took us a
hundred meters higher up, circled away from the plateau to put us even further
out of their reach, then wiped fresh blood from a gash in his forehead and said:
"So! Is there even anyplace to go?"

Dhiju murmured something incomprehensible. Isadora and I glanced at each other.
We held the look a little longer than we had to, exchanging recriminations,
apologies, thanks, regrets...and more. Neither one of us wanted to break the
silence.

In the end, I spared her that much, at least.

I said, "The amphitheater."

12.

We were damaged too badly to make top speed, but the wind-bubble did curl over
us when we asked it to, so we were able to go supersonic. At that, it would take
us three hours instead of the usual forty minutes to reach the
amphitheater...which simultaneously seemed too long and not long enough.

I called the Riirgaans. They patched me through to Hurrr'poth, who was --
unsurprisingly -- already in the air taking a rescue squad to our plateau. He'd
started prepping the mission when I pulled Isadora from the Ballet. He'd
suspected what was coming, too; had even tried to warn me, more than once. Even
so, I had trouble seeing his help as magnanimous. When he jokingly called me
pornographer, I disconnected him.

Less than two hours passed before Oskar and I used up our store of conversation,
and Isadora crawled off into the rear screen to stare wordlessly at the
landscape racing by down below. Under the circumstances, I was almost grateful
when awareness limped back into Dhiju's eyes. He croaked: "Y-you're not taking
her back..."

I spoke in a tightly controlled whisper, because I didn't want Isadora to hear.
"I'm sorry, sir. But yes, we are."

He tried to muster up enough strength to be indignant. "I...specifically
ordered..."

"I know. And I'm still hoping to work out a way where it doesn't have to happen.
But we have to do this. We have no choice." "They're killers," he said, almost
petulantly. "We owe them nothing.

Now that they've murdered everybody, they don't even have anything left to
threaten us with. We don't have to throw good blood after bad. We can still get
her off-world. We can still save her. We can still..."

"The persistence of vision," I murmured, hearing not my own voice, but hers.

"What?"

"The persistence of vision." When Dhiju showed no signs of comprehension, I
shook my head, as if sheer denial could erase everything I knew. Oskar must have
sensed something wrong, just about then, because he left the controls and took a
seat between us, looking haggard and grim and desperate to understand. I didn't
acknowledge him, or even Dhiju; at the moment, I was too lost in the size of it,
too unable to fit other people into a universe which had suddenly changed all
shape and form. "You can't even blame them," I said, distantly. "They thought
they were going to lose everything. They had to go mad."

"You're not making any sense," crabbed Dhiju.

Isadora didn't turn around even then; but then she didn't have to. I knew she
was listening. I shook my head to fight off the shock, and spoke as earnestly as
I could, in words meant for all of us. "It's not something I'm comfortable
knowing, sir. But with all the things she's said, and all the things that have
happened, I've begun to understand, a little. And I've learned...that we never
had the slightest idea how big this was, for them. We knew their language was
holographic. We knew they were drawing pictures for each other. We knew that
whatever they were making with the Ballet was more important to them than their
lives. And we were right about all that. But we also thought that a new Ballet
began and ended every year...and in that we were wrong. The picture they paint,
sir...it's just a single frame. And it blends together, in their minds, with the
picture they painted last year...and the one they're going to paint one year
from now. All arranged in sequence, and merged by the persistence of vision..."

"A motion picture," Oskar said hoarsely.

Dhiju's eyes flickered in his direction, then bored in on mine. "S o ?"

"So that's why she can't quit. For the same reason she surrendered when I
threatened my own life. Because she's driven by responsibility. And she knows
that if she quit it wouldn't just ruin one Ballet m which would traumatize the
whole species but still leave them room to rebuild. No. It would shatter a
single evolving work of art that they've been creating for the better part of
their history. It would destroy everything they've ever been, everything they've
ever dreamed about, and everything they've ever tried to accomplish. It would
leave them with nothing to live for. And that's why she can't quit. Because it's
either her life...or the lives of every Vlhani that ever lived."

Oskar breathed, "Holy," utterly forgetting to specify a Holy What.

Dhiju remained silent. He just looked at me, and then at Oskar, and then at
Isadora, who still sat staring out the screen, giving no indication that she
heard any one of us. And then he turned back to me, and said, "I'm sorry, Alex.
But even if this theory bears any relation to reality, which I doubt, it changes
nothing. I'm still ordering you to stop her."

Dammit, he had to understand. "Like I said, sir...I intend to try. I don't want
her to die any more than you do. But the Vlhani --"

He drowned me out. "The Vlhani are not my problem! It's not my fault they've
dedicated themselves to this thing! Their insanity is not my responsibility --
and hers is! I won't let her kill herself! And I'm ordering you to turn this
crate around and demand asylum at one of the other embassies!"

"I can't. I have to leave our options open...in case there's no other

Dhiju stared, unwilling to believe that a third-year indenture would risk
everything by daring to defy him. He wrested control of his voice, and spoke
with the kind of controlled quiet that can be heard in the middle of an
explosion. "Alex. If you don't do what I say within the next five seconds, I'll
consider it a gross act of insubordination and extend your contract fifty
years."

Oskar said: "Then you'll have to extend mine too."

I glanced at Oskar, astonished. I hadn't expected him to join in my mutiny; I'd
been counting on Isadora to help me overcome the two of them. But he faced Dhiju
with the stoic intractability of a brick wall, and he gathered up the cryofoam
harness, and he held it in his hand, to demonstrate what awaited if Dhiju tried
to interfere in any way. It was funny. I'd never liked him, not even the
slightest bit; he'd never been anything more to me than just somebody I had to
deal with in order to do my job, I found myself hard-pressed to remember exactly
what that was.

As for Dhiju, he nodded, unsurprised, all the strength going out of him all at
once. And he reached into the pocket of his tunnic and look out of his vials of
blue liquid and swallowed it down in a gulp. He closed his eyes before we got to
see them to go fuzzy and delated again, and murmured, "You're both throwing away
the rest of your lives."

I began to protest, but Oskar rode me out. "No, Alex ... that's fair. Get out of
the way and I'll foam him, so he doesn't have to watch."

After a moment, I complied. Why not? Had I been in Dhiju's position, I wouldn't
have to be conscious either. And the ambient temperature in the skimmer dropped
thirty degrees as the liquid bubbling sound filled the air around us.

13.

I sat beside Isadora for much of the hour remained of our flight, not speaking,
just making my presence known. Not that she spent all of that remaining hour or
just looking out the screen. All it showed was a non-discript series of hills
and valleys and plains and lakes, none of which were particularly different from
the those hat puckered the landscape of ten million other worlds. Sometimes we
passed over small herds of Vlhani, who were visible only as block dots against
brown fields; if they heard the hum of our drive and looked up, to gatch a
glimpse of the vehicle's this years most honored dancer, it wasn't was she
needed to see. And so she spent most of the last hour just quietly sitting with
me, not speaking much, but not remaining entirely quiet either: just sharing the
space, and the wait, for that place which we both knew we'd reach all too soon.

Near the end of that hour, I asked her about the markings on her cheeks, already
suspected what she'd tell me. And I was right: they merely desperate
affectations left over from her first few days on her own --the legacy of an
eight-year-old girl strugling to re-invent herself as she finangled her way from
one world to another. Both they, and her made up slang, were remnants of a past
she'd created for herself -- the kind of past that only could have been created
by a freightened child forsed to become adult before her time. I thought about
the long hours Rory had spent searching her databases for a society that used
those ritual markings, and those idioms...and wondered whether she'd still be
alive to laugh about it when I told her.

Not long after that, I began to spot landmarks -- the otherwise nondescript rock
formations and dried riverbeds that my previous journeys to this place had
taught me to recognize as the vicinity of the amphitheater. When Oskar pointed
out a cratered plain pockmarked by the tracks of the one hundred thousand Vlhani
dancers who had passed this way on their journey to the place where they were
scheduled to die, my stomach seized up. And when we saw the Ballet...

. . .it had always been a magnificent sight. It still was. But today was the
first time it filled me with dread.

Seen from a distance, with or without rangeviewers: a sliver cut into the face
of the planet, filled with a gleaming black sea that swelled and surged like an
intelligent amoeba. With the reflective Vlhani skin glowing red in the light of
the rising sun, it looked like a lake of fire. An unworthy part of me wished for
plasma cannons so I could make it one.

As we drew closer, we saw that not all of the Vlhani were in the amphitheater
itself -- there were several hundred gathered above the northern rim, arranged
in two semicircular mobs with a single wide pathway between them. The pathway
led straight to the heart of the Ballet. An invitation, set out for Isadora.

As for the viewing stand on the opposite rim: it was packed again. Not quite to
capacity -- since this time, there were no humans and only a few Riirgaans in
the seats -- but close enough to let me know that all of the alien delegations
had returned to their places, eager to see the Ballet resume as scheduled. From
this side of the amphitheater, it was easy to hate them, for their eagerness to
see that which I would have given anything to stop. Would any of them mourn the
Vlhani who died? Would any mourn Isadora?

Oskar told the skimmer to hover, then came over and knelt beside us. His eyes
were tearing. "I was...going over this in my head. About what we're doing...what
we're about to let her do. I kept...thinking...that there had to be some other
way. And I think I have one."

Isadora's smile was grateful, but without much hope. "Oh?"

"Participate via hytex."

It hit me like an electric current wired right into the spine. "What?"

"You heard me," said Oskar. He turned to her. "You can dance your part somewhere
safe; we'll rig up a micro-remote to hover over the amphitheater and broadcast
your image wherever you have to be. You can do everything you have to do without
being anywhere near the Vlhani when they start losing muscle control."

My heart pounded in my chest. "Isadora! Would that work?"

She shook her head sadly. "If the Vlhani were human, maybe. But they don't see
on the same wavelengths."

"We can recalibrate! Project something they can see! Even sound, if we need to!
Dammit, Isadora, we know so much more than you think! Give us a couple of hours
to arrange it, and you'll live!"

"But don't you see what an insult that would be? All those Vlhani dying, and
their most honored guest staying alive by remote control? Showing herself above
them, by continuing to walk and breathe while everybody who waited for her dies?
I can't mock them that way. I won't."

"The spiders killed a lot of good people today," Oskar pleaded. "They can use a
little mockery."

"I'm sorry," she said, and leaned forward to kiss him. "But, please. I have to
do this. If that means anything to you, please land so I can get it over with."

He lowered his head, shuddered, and went off to the controls.

For me, it was not like we were sinking. It was like the ground was rising to
meet us like the entire planet was a single predator, and the horizons were
razor-studded jaws inexorably closing shut. It was hard to remember that neither
Oscar nor Dhiju nor ! were in the same danger Isadora was: if we just stayed in
the skimmer, let her disembark and then took off, the only person being
swallowed whole today was the strange, beautiful, terrified but unwavering woman
who knelt beside me. It didn't make me feel any safer. If she died, it would
still be too much like dying myself.

We were still some distance from the ground when I said: "Isadora."

She abandoned the view and looked at me. "Alex."

"Was everything you told the Vlhani true? Back at the compound?"

She smiled sadly. "I told you. It's impossible to lie to them."

"Then please. Listen. You don't have to do this. There are alternatives. You can
make them understand --"

She hugged me. "Thank you. But no. I have to do this."

. . .and then she tightened her arms on the edge of the Skimmer and lightly
jumped to the ground.

We were still about twenty meters up, so both Oskar and I yelped, instinctively
certain that she'd just leaped to her death. But no: when I leaned over the edge
I saw her lightly touch ground, wave at me, and run toward the amphitheater. She
was as fast as one of them; before I even had time to react she had disappeared
among the Vlhani.

I wasn't enhanced. There was no way I'd ever be able to catch her. But catching
her was not part of the plan. I'd always known that she had to do what she had
to do.

Now it was my turn.

I shouted at Oskar. "For Christ's sake! Land this thing! I have to go out there
and talk to them!"

"Talk to --" Oskar started. "Are you out of your mind?"

"Just do it! Now!"

He aimed for a spot fifty meters from the Vlhani spectators. As we landed, I
said, "Don't wait for me, I'll be okay! Just get back to the embassy and see if
you can help any of the others!"

"B-but...what are you talking about, you can't--"

I leaped over the side and hit the ground running.

All my instincts rebelled against the idea of charging creatures whom I'd so
recently seen on the rampage. But the part of my mind still capable of remaining
rational knew that I'd be in no danger from them at all; they no longer had any
need to hurt me. They already had Isadora. If I had any fear at all it was that
they would be able to recognize me as the one who'd rescued her once before;
that for fear of me doing it again they'd bar my way and refuse to allow me into
the amphitheater.

They didn't. The ones on the rim just stood passively by as I ran among them,
using the same path they'd cleared for Isadora. Their heads did swivel to watch
me as I passed; expressionless globes that could have been registering
annoyance, or disgust, or pity, or nothing at all. I like to think that they
recognized compulsion when they saw it: that they didn't stop me because they
knew stopping me would do no good.

Maybe, in that, I reminded them of Isadora.

I made it over the edge of the bowl and began to half-run, half-fall, down the
slope. It was not a gentle grade, like the place where I'd found her the first
time, but a dirt slide that with a few more degrees of pitch would have begun to
qualify as a cliff. I couldn't remain upright and stay out of the way of the
dancing Vlhani at the same time; I allowed myself to fall on my rear end and
slide. I caught a glimpse of the viewing stand On the southern rim and wondered
if anybody there could see me; if any of them were feeling little twinges of
horror at the thought of the great spectacle being delayed yet again. Not that I
cared; all I cared about, all I worried about, was Isadora. And she was nowhere
in sight.

I came to rest in a sea of slashing whips. There was blood in my mouth and on
the backs of my hands. The Vlhani around me were so densely packed that I
couldn't see more than twenty yards in any direction. Their whips, waving in the
air above their heads, spun so passionately that the whirrs of their passage
drowned out everything, even the ragged rasp of my breath.

Isadora wasn't around to lead me out, this time.

That didn't matter. What mattered was being here.

Because though I didn't understand Vlhani dance land didn't even have the
harness that would have physically equipped me to dance it), the language
barrier has always been a poor excuse for not making the attempt to communicate.

And as Isadora herself had said: Art isn't just technique, in any culture...it's
also Content. It's understanding not just How, but also What to express.

So I stood up, and took a deep breath, and appealed to them in the only way I
knew how. With words. I spoke to them in sounds they couldn't possibly
understand, hoping that the feelings would come through. I painted a
word-picture that not only apologized for never truly understanding them before,
but also mourned and celebrated the differences between us. It was a picture
that flashed upon my friends lying dead or wounded at the embassy, and of just
how many light-years they'd traveled to meet such an end; it was a picture that
talked about how they'd deserved more, then came back to Isadora and how she
deserved more too. It was a picture of a young woman who'd already given up
everything -- her home, her childhood, her normality, and now, probably, her
life-- for the Vlhani. I let them know that, however they measured such things,
it was a sacrifice: and that it was a sacrifice only they were empowered to
stop. And finally, I let them know how beautiful she was: as beautiful, in her
own way, as their Ballet, and how much it mattered to me that she still be alive
when the last dancing Vlhani fell to the trampled earth.

I never spoke at such length, or with such eloquence, in my entire life.

Had they understood the language, I would have broken their hearts.

But even as I poured everything I had into my words, I knew that I was nothing
to them but a yapping little creature making noise. They surrounded me without
reacting to me, their great spherical heads bobbing like toys.

And when I finally ran down, exhausted, unable to plead any more, unable to
think of anything else that I hadn't already said a dozen times, a Vlhani moved
toward me, so gracefully that its whips barely seemed to brush the ground. One
of its whips came down, gently curled around my waist, and lifted me up to the
head. I had the distinct impression of eyes studying me, even though Vlhani
don't have eyes; the head merely rotated first one way, then the other, in no
way conveying any expression at all. Out of reflex I reached out and placed a
palm against its cool, polished surface, thinking of the alien brain that sat
pulsing beneath. What did it think of me? Did it think me strange? Ungraceful?
Ugly or beautiful?

It passed me to another Vlhani further up the slope. Which passed me to another
one, and then to another one after that; until I was handed over to the ones
standing up on the northern rim, who gently put me down and encircled me to
ensure I wouldn't dash into the amphitheater again.

They needn't have bothered. I was done.

There was nothing left.

14.

Many hours later, the Riirgaan aircruiser flew in from the south, circled above
me, and came to a rest on packed dirt a short distance away. The Vlhani who'd
come to watch the Ballet milled around us, taking special care not to step on me
or inconvenience the aircraft in any way. Rory and Oskar were both aboard,
looking tearful and exhausted. They gave me weak little waves as Hurrr'poth
hopped over the side, approached me, and then, folding his limbs in a manner
that must have been painfully uncomfortable for a Riirgaan, knelt by my side.
His face was as expressionless as always, but there was a tentative, concerned,
uncharacteristically deferential manner to the way he regarded me. I mistook it
for simple respect for my grief, and said nothing.

At length he said, "Alex."

I asked him: "How many dead?"

"Vlhani or humans?"

I was in no mood to care about Vlhani. "You know I meant humans!"

"Seventeen. About half your delegation. Foster Simmons, Li-Hsin Chang, Kathy
Ng..." When he saw how every name made me wince, he trailed off. "It could have
been much worse. Almost half your number survived."

"And Isadora? Did she?"

He placed a reptilian hand on my shoulder. "No."

So I hadn't pulled off the impossible miracle after all. For all these hours,
I'd dared to persuade myself that I might have. I thought of her eyes, and the
way she moved, and how I'd been the one to deliver her to the moment of her
death, and I just knelt there, my shoulders shaking and my mind spinning between
the rustle of the wind and the beating of my triphammer heart.

And then, once again, Hurrr'poth said, "Alex."

I refused to look at him. "What."

"I do not know if this will make a difference to you...but everybody among the
spectators saw what you tried to do for her. What you did do for her. Everybody
witnessed it: all the delegations and, soon, thanks to the holos and neurecs,
all their worlds."

I closed my eyes more tightly. Yes, that was all I needed. To have the single
greatest failure of my life played endlessly throughout the universe. "And?"

"And," he said, "it was not just Isadora and the Vlhani who danced magnificently
today."

Whereupon he stood, and returned to the aircruiser, leaving me alone with that.

Neither Hurrr'poth nor Rory nor Oskar came out to hurry me.

Eventually, I got off my knees, and went to them. Not because I'd accepted what
he'd had to say. But because the show was done, and it was time for all the
performers to go home.

15.

The Riirgaans offered Oskar and me citizenship and diplomatic immunity. Oskar
took the deal, I didn't. Oskar went home, legally nonhuman; I was
court-martialed, got twenty years added to my contract, and went to the rancid,
half-molten hellhole known as New Pylthothus, where I would be rotting still had
I not smuggled myself AWOL two years later. Since then, I've been officially a
fugitive. I have no intention of telling you where I am, how. ! changed my
appearance, or what name I use now. I found a world acceptable for spending the
rest of my life in hiding; I changed my face and my name and found a life for
myself. I have friends, family. It's happiness, of a sort. I'm not complaining.

The Confederacy attempted to suppress the holos and neurecs of that year's
Ballet, but when the anger over the violence against our people faded, the
recordings still became the biggest thing to hit popular entertainment in
centuries. They succeeded in making the long-time interest in the Vlhani an
obsession for trillions; even the vast majority who still didn't understand just
what the Marionettes were getting at had to agree that, in some indefinable way
easier felt than understood, Isadora had just brought their Ballet to an
entirely new level. There was some half-hearted talk of reprisals and the
"permanent" withdrawal of the installation -- but within five standard years the
triple-threat combination of a new administration, humanity's notoriously short
memory, and the ravenous demand for the new recordings still being made by the
other embassies and distributed to human space on the black market, got a new
embassy established on the ruins of the old. This one, I understand, is
considerably better armed than ours was, though the indentures there haven't yet
been forced to prove it.

People love to speculate on who Isadora was, and where she came from a hundred
separate worlds have laid claim to being the place where she was born. Most of
them don't put forth very persuasive cases for themselves. All I know for sure
is that if I ever did find out the name of the place she came from, I wouldn't
feel any pressing need to go there. It has nothing to do with her.

Close to three thousand young people have tried to do what Isadora did. The vast
majority of those never made it off their own home-worlds they were dreamers,
yearning to be special and willing to do anything to emulate somebody who was.
They either destroyed themselves or found somebody else to imitate. Of those who
remained, a few actually succeeded in picking up enhancements somewhere:
usually, pale imitations of Isadora's that took away their humanity without
giving nearly enough in return. A very small number -- four women and two men --
made it to Vlhan and into the Ballet, where they died. They'd understood little
pieces of the show, too. But their names faded. Nobody remembers them the way
people remember her.

I don't know. Whatever the Vlhani are relating with this great fatal Ballet of
theirs, I'm told it's beautiful and profound and meaningful and worth dying for.
But the other side of the story is that it's not worth seeing the people you
care about die...and I've personally lost all desire to decode that message for
myself.

As a result, I have never seen Isadora's Ballet. I refused to watch it on Vlhan,
and I've refused to view the holos or neurecs. I would not be able to stand
obsessively watching and re-watching either my own famously doomed appeal or the
equally famous, inspirational moment when she fell.

Instead, I live with my memory of that moment at the compound, when she danced
to save my life. Unlike the Ballet, which has been picked to pieces by experts
all over the known universe, that performance was not recorded. There are no
holos, no neurecs, no hytex analysis breaking it down into the tiniest
millisecond fragments. Oskar was half-blind from the blood in his eyes; Dhiju,
who lay on his back dazzled and open-jawed, was so much under the influence that
no amount of artificial memory enhancement would ever succeed in separating the
real from that which his mind created. As for me, I caught only the last ten
seconds.

But I understood it all. Every single nuance.

When she later spoke to me in human words, she did not tell me the full truth
about everything that dance had meant.

And what she really told the Vlhani keeps me warm, in a universe that would
otherwise now seem dark and empty and cold.