And all around me my teammates were floating, staring, hypnotized.
Only Tom was showing signs of self-possession. Like me, he was renewing an old acquaintance; reaffirming strong memories takes less time than making new ones.
We knew them better, this time, even those who were facing them for the first time. At that last confrontation, only Shara had seemed able to understand them to any degree--no matter how hard I had watched them, then, understanding had eluded me. Now my mind was free of terror, my eyes unblinded by need, my heart at peace. I felt as Sham had felt, saw what she had seen, and agreed with her tentative evaluations.
“There’s a flavor of arrogance to them—conviction of superiority. Their dance is a challenging, a dare.”
“… biologists studying the antics of a strange, new species....”
“They want Earth.”
“… in orbits as carefully choreographed as those of electrons....”
“Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”
Cox’s voice broke through our reverie. “Siegfried to Stardancers. They’re the same ones, all right: the signatures match to 3 nines.”
We had planned for the possibility that these might have been a different group of aliens—say, policemen looking for the others, or possibly even the second batch of suckers to buy a Sol-System Tour on the strength of the brochure. Even low probabilities had been prepared for. As Bill spoke, he, the diplomats and the computer flushed several sheafs of contingency scenarios from their memory banks and confirmed Plan A in their minds.
But all of us Stardancers had known already, on sight.
“Roger, Siegfried,” I acknowledged. “I’m terrible on names, but I never forget a face. ‘That’s the man, officer.’ ”
“Initiate your program.”
“All right, let’s get set up. Harry, Raoul, deploy the set and monitor. Tom and Linda, deploy the Die—about twenty klicks thataway, okay? Norrey, give me a hand with camera placement, we’ll all meet at the Die in twenty minutes. Go.”
The set was minimal, mostly positional grid markers. Raoul had not taken long to decide that attempting flashy effects in the close vicinity of the Ring would be vain folly. His bank of tracking lasers was low-power, meant only as gobos to color-light us dancers vividly for the camera—and to see how the aliens would react to the presence of lasers, which was their real purpose. I thought it was a damned-fool stupid idea—like Pope Leo picking his teeth with a stiletto as he comes to dicker with Attila—and the whole company, Raoul included, agreed wholeheartedly. We all wanted to stick to conventional lights.
But if you’re going to win arguments with diplomats of that stature you’ve got to make some concessions.
The grid markers were color organs slaved to Raoul’s Musicmaster through a system Harry designed. If the aliens responded noticeably to color cues, Raoul would attempt to use his instrument to make visual music, augmenting our communication by making the spectrum dance with us. Just as the sonic range of the Musicmaster exceeded the audible on both ends, the spectral range of the color organs exceeded the visible. If the aliens’ language included these subtleties, we would have rich converse indeed. Even the ship’s computer might have to stretch itself.
The Musicmaster’s audio output would be in circuit with our radios, well below conversational level. We wanted to enhance the possibility of a kind of mutual telepathic resonance, and we were conditioned to Raoul’s music that way.
Norrey and I set up five cameras in an open cone facing the aliens, for a proscenium-stage effect, as opposed to the six-camera globe we customarily used at home for 360° coverage. Neither of us felt like traveling around “behind” the aliens to plant the last camera there. This would be the only dance we had ever done that would be shot from every angle except the one toward which it was aimed, recorded only “from backstage,” as it were.
To tell you the truth, it didn’t make that much difference. Artistically it wasn’t much of a dance. I wouldn’t have released it commercially. The reason’s obvious, really: it was never intended for humans.
That had been the real root of our struggle with the diplomats over the last year. They were committed to the belief that what would be understood best by the aliens was precise adherence to a series of computer-generated movements. We Stardancers unanimously believed that what the aliens had responded to in Shara had been not aseries of movements but art. The artistic mind behind the movements, the amount of heart and soul that went into them—the very thing an over-rigid choreography destroys in space. If we accepted the diplomats’ belief-structure, we were only computer display models. If they had accepted our belief-structure, Dmirov and Silvennan at least would have been forced to admit themselves forever deaf to alien speech—and Chen would never have been able to justify siding with us to his superiors.
The result was, of course, compromise that satisfied no one, with provisions to dump whichever scheme didn’t seem to be working, if consensus could be reached. That was another reason I had had to gamble our lives and our race’s fortune on the damned lasers in order to win control of the first movement. The balance would be biased slightly our way: Our very first “utterances” would be—something more than could be expressed mathematically and ballistically.
But even if we had had a totally free hand, our dance would surely have puzzled hell out of anyone but another Homo caelestis. Or a computer.
I think Shara would have loved it.
At last all the pieces were in place, the stage was set, and we formed a snowflake around the Die.
“Watch your breathing, Charlie,” Norrey warned.
“Right you are, my love,” My lungs were taking orders from my hindbrain; it seemed to want me agitated. But I didn’t. I began forcing measure on my breaths, and soon we were all breathing in unison, in, hold, out, hold, striving to push the interval past five seconds. My agitation began to melt like summer wages, my peripheral vision expanded spherically, and I felt my family as though a literal charge of electricity passed from hand to p-suited hand, completing a circuit that tuned usto one another. We became like magnets joined around a monopole, aligned to an imaginary point at the center of our circle. It was an encouraging analogy—however you disperse such magnets in free fall, eventually they will come together again at the pole. We were family; we were one. Not just our shared membership in a hypothetical new genus: we knew each other backstage, a relationship like no other on Earth or off it.
“Mr. Armstead,” Silverman growled, “I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that for once the world actually is waiting for you. Can we get on with the show?”
I just smiled. We all smiled. Bill started to say something, so I cut him off. “Certainly, Mr. Ambassador. At once.” We dissolved the snowflake, and I jetted to the Die’s external Master Board. “Program locked and… running, lights up, cameras hot, hold four three two curtain!”
Like a single being, we took our stage.
Feet first, hands high and blasting, we plunged down on the firefly swarm.