The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes Read online

  I asked. “Are you all right?"

  “She's not gone,” Dalmo said, his fingertip tracing a loop-de-loop in the desert. “She'll never be gone."

  He sounded like every other self-deluded fanatic I'd ever heard, but it was not the time to make a point of that either. “Did she say anything before she went?"

  “You mean,” he flashed a grim smile, “anything meant for you?"

  “Anything you don't mind me quoting."

  “No. At the end everything she said was between us.” He flashed a smile which betrayed no sense of loss whatsoever, then stabbed the earth with another fingertip. “What about you and Ch'tpok? We heard the two of you in there. We were surprised but happy for you. I hope you don't plan on including any of that in your playback."

  For a moment, just a moment, I felt like smacking him. Then I got his point: none of your business. It was a sentiment that never had much success among those of us employed in exporting the personal business of other people to the masses, but I'd rarely had it so skillfully thrown in my face.

  He relented before I could figure out what to say next. “You want commentary? The Ballet's her commentary. She'll speak volumes there."

  “Before she dies."

  “Yes,” he said. “Before she dies."

  “Doesn't that bother you?"

  For the first time in our association he showed a little human annoyance at being pricked about his bereavement. “Of course it does. But you people all focus on that aspect, like it's the only detail that matters. You don't see the performance that leads up to it. Or everything she'll leave behind when she's gone."

  I couldn't resist pushing him a little further. “Like yourself, for instance."

  He erased his meaningless dirt-drawing with a sweep of his hand, creating a fresh canvas, before starting again with another pattern of interlocking swirls. “You want commentary, Mr. Royko? All right. Here's your commentary. I'm going to mourn my wife. I'll miss her. But I'm just a person, you know. A little sack of bones and flesh. An organism with insight. The Ballet is something much larger."

  I had already spent three days mingling with some of the freshest arrivals, and heard a lot of what sounded like pseudomystical profundity from kids desperate to justify the obsession that had swallowed their lives whole. I wiped perspiration from my forehead and asked him the question I'd asked them: “How?"

  “Well. You know that the Ballet doesn't start fresh, every year? That each year's performance is actually a continuation of the performance from the year before? All going back thousands years?"

  That information had been provided by Isadora. “Yes."

  “Well, it goes on from here, too. The role Shal plays this year affects what the next set of dancers have to do next year. And what the next set of dancers have to do the year after that. Come back ten thousand years from now, after watching every Ballet between now and then, and you'll be able to pick out some of the themes she introduced, some of the sub-routines she helped evolve.” He drew another set of lines over the first, eradicating the pattern he'd produced with another just as meaningless to my eyes. “It's complicated, but it all follows certain rules. Seen from the right viewpoint—the viewpoint of a future Vlhani, for instance—you're able to read not only the meaning of those movements, but also how they must have been developed. With enough patience, you'll be able to piece together the specific refinements of all the generations that came before ... working your way back, one Ballet at a time ... until at long last you reconstruct how they must have started with a single dancer very much like her, playing a part very much like hers.” He drew a third pattern in the same patch of dirt, and said: “If you understood the Ballet at all, you would know just how intricate an epic it is—how every single dancer who ever played a part, in all of its thousands of years of history, was a vital participant in the choreography of all the years to come. And someday, when it reaches its conclusion, and accomplishes everything the Vlhani know it can do, everybody involved in its evolution will have been a part of something transcendent. That's not dying, Mr. Royko. That's a little bit like living forever."

  I asked the question that haunted everybody who had ever seen the Vlhani dance. “But for what purpose?"

  He turned toward me, making direct eye contact for the first time. I expected him to be devastated, possibly even torn to pieces by denial. What I saw in his eyes was far worse: a deep, abiding faith in the Ballet, and an equally overwhelming pity for me, the outsider who would always be unable to appreciate it.

  He said, “I wish you had enough of a vocabulary to understand. I wish human speech provided me with enough of a vocabulary to explain it. I wish I could dance it, even once, just to show you. I wish I could work out all the problems and let everybody know what I see, just once. It's just ... too goddamned important. Not just for them. But for everybody. Everywhere."

  He spoke as a man who knew the world was burning and couldn't find anybody willing to listen to the warnings..

  Maybe it was the moment. But I noticed something then that I hadn't noticed before: that we weren't alone after all. There were a pair of Vlhani a few hundred meters away, each standing still as distant from each other as they were from us. I didn't have to turn around to know that if I scanned the other direction I would probably find more. Sentries? Lookouts?

  An Honor Guard?

  My heart thumped. “Dalmo ... why is Ch'tpok studying you? Why did she and Shalakan call you the dance? Why were those spiders making such a fuss over you, last night? Why do they think you're so special?"

  He closed his eyes tight enough to make my own burn.

  “Because I see it, Mr. Royko. Not just the little bits and pieces most of my fellow Pilgrims see ... but all of it. Everything the dance means. Everything it's ever going to mean. Everything that has to be done to bring out its real potential. I just can't do enough to make it happen."

  I struggled for words. “Shalakan said ... something about her dance being your accomplishment, not hers. I almost thought that was just love talking..."

  He shook his head. “Shal loved me for what I could give her."

  “And you?"

  “I loved her so much I let her have it."

  He rose and walked into the desert, his right leg dragging. Partial paralysis, even now. Whatever he'd gained from the enhancements cost him the pleasure of walking with confidence. I considered going after him, lest he freeze up again, somewhere out of sight, and end up baking his brainpan beneath the heat of the broiling midday sun. Somehow, it seemed like a bad idea. He may have been a damaged thing who would never accomplish that which he'd changed himself to do—but for this moment, he had earned a few minutes away from my eyes.

  It also occurred to me, too late, that my link was still off.

  I hadn't archived a single damn word he'd said.

  It was the first commandment drummed into the head of every neurec slinger: Don't Miss Anything. The turnoff option was a courtesy provided those occasional slingers who liked to have personal lives in between bouts of professional sensation, who may have wanted to eat meals or take shits or make love without the queasiness that comes from sharing the most intimate moments with millions of future voyeurs. Not all slingers used it; I knew a couple so burned out that they remained linked all their waking hours. I wasn't that far gone, fortunately—I liked being able to relate to people—but I was still pretty good about catching everything important. Missing the first conversation with the grieving, disabled husband was a professional gaffe of the highest order.

  At the moment, I couldn't have cared less.

  I returned to Ch'tpok, who had curled into a fetal position. (That was human, at least; I recalled reading somewhere that her adopted folks the Riirgaans grew their fetuses in straight lines.) The frown built into her face was even more pronounced now, but she looked peaceful anyway. I knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She came awake with a nova-intensity smile. “Slinger Man."

  �
�Riirgaan Lady,” I said, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “Good morning."

  “Is it morning?"

  “Don't kill me for this, dear Chuppock, but it's more than morning. We overslept."

  Her eyebrows knit tighter. “She's gone?"

  “They both are."

  A moment of discontinuity, as she processed that. “Dalmo too?"

  “Yes."

  She sat up in a hurry, clutching at the discarded clothing of the night before. “Goddammit, why didn't you tell me? You saw the way he is, you know he can't take care of himself! If he wanders too far, and freezes up again..."

  I took her by the shoulders. “Not a chance. The Vlhani posted nursemaids. They know what he's worth."

  She almost fought me, but then the message sank in, and she relaxed all at once, the panic giving way to a sadness so deep it almost qualified as mourning. I knew something else, then: something I'd already suspected but had not confirmed until now—that she loved him.

  I hadn't invested any emotional permanence to our one night, but it still stung.

  The angle of the sun seemed to change several degrees in the time it took her to face me. When she did, her eyes were defiant. “Do you understand how important he is?"

  “Yes,” I said. “I've seen it before."

  * * *

  9.

  Even neurec slingers have childhoods. Mine had been seventy-five light years away, on a wheelworld called Eden.

  You don't need to know the nasty details, but the place name was false advertising of the cruellest kind. The owners didn't want it to be pleasant, or even livable—just survivable. The indentures who sold off the months and years in their lives in exchange for one-way passage there discovered that the promises of a better life were just empty propaganda, produced by backers less interested in the creation of a self-sustained community than they were in exploiting the trapped tenants of a one-factory town. Intended as a slum from the moment it was commissioned, it wasn't called Eden by the people who had to live and work there. I won't repeat the name they did use. I follow the promise I made to myself, on getting out, to never utter the epithet again.

  But while I was still imprisoned there, believing I'd die a wasted old man at forty years Mercantile standard, chol was one of the few forms of recreation we had. It was an indigenous song style, performed a capella and produced so deep in the throat that one visitor who heard it for the first time characterized it as a unique form of musical wheeze. Chol compositions were short, but soulful; joyous, but filled with the desperation of the trapped; tonal, but as expressive as any combination of words. More conventional singing styles were sometimes used to add clarifying lyrics. It didn't happen often. Chol didn't really need it, and it wasn't a great idea, in any environment patrolled by company police, to let those in power know what the songs were actually about. It was enough that we knew, and that we were able to take comfort in giving our pain a voice.

  Everybody I grew up with performed chol, if they were any good. Most weren't. But there was one kid who happened to be better than good. Better than genius. Better, even, than magical. The sounds that came out of him had no business coming out of a human being; they stretched not only what was physically possible to sing, but also what was emotionally possible to say. He used to climb up to the rafters in the dormitories where everybody our age was housed, position himself at the junction of two cross-beams, and improvise music that immediately called Time-Out on all the casual brutalities we inflicted upon each other the rest of the time. Sometimes he sang, too. He was not bad at that. But he was unparalleled at chol; it was an art form that existed nowhere else, and he had a gift for it. Even now, a lifetime away, I think about the sounds he made and I remain convinced that, had he escaped with his instrument intact, he would have been known forever.

  Alas, one major risk of the industry we trained for was degenerative lung damage, and this kid got it early. It didn't kill him outright. But his windpipe coarsened, his air capacity shrivelled, and he lost the sounds he was able to make earlier in youth. I stayed too long to prevent it from happening to him, and I died inside the night he tried to perform anyway, producing a series of gasps and squeaks all the more pathetic for its recognizable connection to the music he was determined to make. The music itself wasn't gone. He knew which notes he wanted to phrase. By any standard of raw talent, he was exactly as great as he had ever been. He was even greater, thanks to the pain that had tempered him and given him so much more to say. But he was not able to call any of it forth. The music was now forever trapped inside him, like any other clawed thing that could scar the walls of its cage but would never be able to rip its way free.

  I wasn't that boy any more. I was just the boy who had escaped not to achieve freedom, but to avoid the pity of those who had known him.

  And who knew enough to recognize Dalmo as part of the same sad fraternity.

  Dalmo wasn't merely a vital participant, like Shalakan or Gabriel or even Isadora had been. He had come up with insights even the Vlhani themselves had never been able to produce. He understood the ultimate point of the Ballet, appreciated what it meant, and saw the purpose of this thing the Vlhani and now their human acolytes had spilled so much of their own blood trying to construct. He even knew the special contribution only he was gifted enough to make, the contribution that, to hear him say it, might bring this single evolving work of art to fruition ... and it was all a waste; his limitless talent just refused to connect with the limited tools he'd been given to express it.

  Da Vinci with his hands cut off is still Da Vinci. Just Da Vinci in hell.

  And Dalmo possessed just enough ability to let the Vlhani and his fellow pilgrims know it.

  * * *

  10.

  Even with what I'd been through in my own life, I still didn't appreciate just how much the obsession cost him. But I got an idea two hours later, when he returned pale, drawn, and shaking. Three Vlhani came with him, hovering like nurses worried about the well-being of a patient who shouldn't have been out of bed. He didn't look at them, but then he didn't really look at Ch'tpok and me, either. He faced us, even saw us, but gazed only at something behind us, greater than us, that loomed untold lifetimes away.

  “That was a bad one,” he murmured.

  Ch'tpok moved right past the Vlhani bodyguards and braced him. “It's all right, Dal. I'm here."

  “Are you? Are any of us? Do you have any idea what the Ballet has to say about what it means to be anywhere?” His knees buckled and the Vlhani surged forward to help Ch'tpok support his weight. They moved so quickly that my own impulse to catch him came after the others were well on their way to carrying him back inside. “I ... oh, hell ... oh, damn..."

  I followed, feeling useless. The interior was now pretty crowded, with three Hom.Sap and three Vlhani; the spiders, who needed ample space for gesturing and were effectively gagged by the low ceiling, held their whips close, their heads bobbing about with the restlessness of hyperactive human children struggling to obey a parental Shut Up. Dalmo lay on the ground, his pain-wracked form speckled with desert sand. His legs writhed like angry snakes. He must have clawed Ch'tpok, who knelt beside him fumbling with sedatives from her kit, I don't know how she could even see with that angry gash in her forehead oozing scarlet into her eyes. As for me, I did the only thing neurec slingers have ever been equipped to do: I stood there and watched.

  He spotted me, though. “Mr. Royko! Are you there?"

  I didn't move. “Yes, Dalmo. I'm here."

  “I loved her! Do you see that, Mr. Royko? Do you believe me?"

  I might have hesitated if not for Ch'tpok's eyes, beseeching me as Vlhani arms held Dalmo down. “Yes. I believe you."

  “Then come to the Ballet! Make sure you watch!"

  It was an unnecessary promise; Shalakan's dance was after all a major part of the spectacle I'd travelled so far to capture. But even if Dalmo hadn't been convulsing with the need to hear the actual words, Ch'tpok's eyes raged just as
hot. I gave the answer they wanted. “I'll watch, Dalmo. I promise."

  She put him down. He sank to the cube floor, his arms and legs unfurling like banners robbed of all motivating wind. The Vlhani bobbed over him, tapped their big black heads together in a gesture that might have been their equivalent of a distraught group hug, then moved past me to the exit.

  Ch'tpok held Dalmo's head in her lap and sang. I can only suppose that's what she was doing, since the sound itself was more Riirgaan than human. It bubbled with glottal stops and atonal whistles, and was beautiful enough, though few human audiences would have been able to discern a lullaby.

  It had the desired effect, because once his eyes closed he seemed to have found some kind of peace. It was a temporary peace, and the last I would ever see him have, but it was there nevertheless.

  It was not at all reflected by the loss I saw in Ch'tpok's eyes.

  She murmured, “God Damn It."

  Thinking of chol, I said: “Yeah. God Damn It."

  We may have been tired of using it, but sometimes no other phrase will do.

  I watched her tend to him for maybe twenty minutes. Then I went outside and used my pocket hytex to signal the Riirgaan Embassy for a ride back. The skimmer arrived while Ch'tpok was still inside with Dalmo. I hopped aboard and left without saying goodbye, already thinking of the show to come.

  * * *

  11.

  This year's Vlhani Ballet came together in the same natural amphitheater that had hosted millennia of ballets before it. The hundred thousand chosen Vlhani swarmed out of the hills. The entire landscape turned black from them, the world dappling from the sunlight that reflected off their great mirrored heads. Avoiding only the northern rim, where the diplomats and observers from seven separate offworld species traditionally gathered to watch, they approached from every other compass point at once, moving in clean orderly sweeps over the edge and toward the killing ground where so many before them had died. Some stayed behind on the southern rim, as eager to watch as we were. Between them, millions of serpentine whips twirled above their heads in the kind of gestures that might have been prayers and might have been their equivalent of the excruciatingly banal small talk that has always dominated the last conversations before long-anticipated ceremonies.