Ekaterin turned the array back and forth, examining the portraits from all angles. Miles, looking over her shoulder, told himself firmly that it was probably just as well that his holovid of the blandly blastular Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia was still in his luggage back aboard the Kestrel . But maybe later he would have a chance to show Bel—
“Have you two finally decided what you want?” asked Garnet Five.
“A little quaddie girl, to start. Like Nicol.” Bel's face softened, then, abruptly, recovered its habitual ironic smile. “Assuming I take the plunge and apply for my Union citizenship.”
Miles imagined Garnet Five and Dmitri Corbeau with a string of handsome, athletic quaddie children. Or Bel and Nicol, with a clutch of smart, musical ones. It made his head spin. Roic, looking quietly boggled, shook his head at Ekaterin's profferment of a closer examination of the holo-array.
“Ah,” said Bel. “The show's about to start.” The herm retrieved the holocube and switched it off, and plunged it back safely deep in the pocket of its baggy blue knee breeches, carefully fastening the flap.
The auditorium had filled to capacity while they spoke, the honeycomb of cells now harboring an attentive crowd including a fair smattering of other downsiders, though whether Union citizen or galactic visitor Miles could not always tell. No green Barrayaran uniforms tonight, in any case. The lights dimmed; the hubbub quieted, and a few last quaddies sped across to their boxes and settled in. A couple of downsiders who had misjudged their momentum and were stranded in the middle were rescued by the ushers and towed to their box, earning a quiet snicker from the quaddies who noticed. An electric tension filled the air, the odd blend of hope and fear that any live performance bore, with its risk of imperfection, chance of greatness. The lights dimmed further, till only the blue-white starshine glinted off the chamber's array of now-crowded cells.
Lights flared, an exuberant fountain of red and orange and gold, and from all sides, the performers flowed in. Thundered in. Quaddie males, athletic and vastly enthusiastic, in skin-fitting ship knits made splendid with glitter. Drumming .
I wasn't expecting hand drums. Other free fall performances Miles had seen, whether dance or gymnastic, had been eerily silent except for the music and sound effects. Quaddies made their own noise, and still had hands left to play hands-across; the drummers met in the middle, clasped, gripped, exchanged momentum, turned, and doubled back in a shifting pattern. Two dozen men in free fall took up perfect station in the center of the spherical auditorium, their motion so controlled as to permit no sideways drift as the energy of their spins and duckings, twistings and turnings, flowed through their bodies one to another and on around again. The air pulsed with the rhythm of their drumming: drums of all sizes, round, oblong, two-headed; not only played by each holder, but some batted back and forth among them in an eye-and-ear-stunning cross between music and juggling, never missing a beat or a blow. The lights danced. Reflections spattered on the walls, picking out flashes from the boxes of upraised hands, arms, bright cloth, jewelry, entranced faces.
Then, from another entrance, a dozen female quaddies all in blues and greens geysered up into the growing, geodesic pattern and joined the dance. All Miles could think was, Whoever first brought castanets to Quaddiespace has much to answer for. They added a laughing descant note to the percussive braid of sound: hand drums and castanets, no other instruments. None needed. The round chamber reverberated, fairly rocked. He stole a glance sideways; Ekaterin's lips were parted, her eyes wide and shining, drinking in all this booming splendor without reserve.
Miles considered Barrayaran marching bands. It wasn't enough that humans did something so difficult as learning to play a musical instrument. Then they had to do it in groups . While walking around. In complicated patterns . And then they competed with one another to do it even better . Excellence, this kind of excellence, could never have any sane economic justification. It had to be done for the honor of one's country, or one's people, or the glory of God. For the joy of being human.
The piece ran for twenty minutes, until the players were gasping and sweat spun off them in tiny drops to speed in sparking streaks into the darkness, and still they whirled and thundered. Miles had to stop himself from hyperventilating in sympathy, heartbeat synchronized with their rhythms. Then, one last grand blast of joyous noise—and somehow the shifting net of four-armed men and women resolved itself into two chains, which flowed away into the exits from which they had emerged a revelation ago.
Darkness again. The silence was like a blow; behind him, Miles heard Roic exhale reverently, longingly, like a man home from war easing himself into his own bed for the first time.
The applause—hand-clapping, of course—rocked the room. No one in the Barrayaran party, Miles thought, had to pretend enthusiasm for quaddie culture now.
The chamber hushed again as the orchestra emerged from four points and filtered into positions all around the great window. The half-a-hundred quaddies bore a more standard array of instruments—all acoustic, Ekaterin observed to him in a fascinated whisper. They spotted Nicol, assisted by two more quaddies who helped manage and secure her harp, which was nearly the usual shape for a harp, and her double-sided hammer dulcimer, appearing to be a dull oblong box from this angle. But the piece that followed included a solo section for her with the dulcimer, her ivory face picked out in spotlights, and the music that poured forth between her four flashing hands was anything but dull. Radiantly ethereal; heartbreaking; electrifying.
Bel must have seen this dozens of times, Miles guessed, but the herm was surely as entranced as any newcomer. It wasn't just a lover's smile that illuminated Bel's eyes. Yes. You would not be loving her properly if you did not also love her improvident, lavish, spendthrift excellence. No jealous lover, greedy and selfish, could hoard it all; it had to be poured forth upon the world, or burst its wellspring. He glanced at Ekaterin and thought of her glorious gardens, much missed back on Barrayar. I shall not keep you away from them much longer, love, I promise.
There was a brief pause, while quaddie stagehands arranged a few mysterious poles and bars sticking in at odd angles around the interior of the sphere. Garnet Five, floating sideways with respect to Miles, murmured over her shoulder, “Coming up is the piece I usually dance. It's an excerpt from a larger work, Aljean's classic ballet The Crossing , which tells the story of our people's migration through the Nexus to Quaddiespace. It's the love duet between Leo and Silver. I dance Silver. I hope my understudy doesn't muck it up . . .” She trailed off as the overture swelled.
Two figures, a downsider male and a blond quaddie woman, floated in from opposite sides of the space, picked up momentum with hand-spins around a couple of the poles, and met in the middle. No drums this time, just sweet, liquid sound from the orchestra. The Leo character's legs trailed uselessly, and it took Miles a moment to realize that he was being played by a quaddie dancer with dummy legs. The woman's use of angular momentum, drawing in or extending various arms as she twirled or spun, was brilliantly controlled, her changes of trajectory around the various poles precise. Only a few indrawn breaths and critical mutters from Garnet Five suggested anything less than perfection to Miles's perceptions. The false-legged fellow was deliberately clumsy, earning a chuckle from the quaddie audience. Miles shifted uncomfortably, realizing he was watching a near-parody of how downsiders looked to quaddie eyes. But the woman's charming gestures of assistance made it seem more endearing than cruel. Bel, grinning, leaned over to murmur in Miles's ear, “It's all right. Leo Graf's supposed to dance like an engineer. He was.”