Fetch a Sumerian shepherd with a time machine, give him an hour or two to get used to zero gee, and show him this piece: it would communicate to him instantly. The same for a Cretan stonecutter or a medieval alchemist or, Eva imagined, a hypothetical twenty-third century energy creature. There were probably apes who would appreciate this dance. The creative audacity of trying to rekindle the ancient wonder of flying, for people in an environment where one had to fly to get to the bathroom, people who had been striving since their arrival inboard to become blasé about that very miracle, was inspired. Eva had been in space for a long time, and this was the first time in years that she had reflected on how lucky she was: that mankind’s oldest dream—to fly like a bird, and never fear hitting the ground—was for her a commonplace.
During the brief interval between movements, Eva reached up and tapped the program-button in her ear; she had deliberately not audited the program notes before the piece began, but now she wanted to know what the creators had had to say about it. She heard the recorded voice of the immortal Murray Louis, reading from one of his own books:
Performance is not mired, it floats. It exists upward, it hovers. It is immediate. It happens. It has no roots, it feeds from the air. It floats above all the tangibles that create it. From its loftiness, its aura descends and permeates all, lifting everything to its height as well as its depth. Performance is the revelation that speaks for itself.
She switched off as the credits began; the second movement had begun. During the interval the dancers had all exited—seeming to shimmer out of existence, one by one—and the clouds had thickened into banks of rolling thunderheads that blotted the sun and darkened the sky. Now the darkness was nearly complete; one could just make out individual billowings in the roiling storm. The temperature seemed to drop slightly, and the air pressure to rise.
Suddenly, with an earsplitting crash, a fractal fork of lightning arced between two prominences. It came toward Eva, ended only meters from her; for the second time she clutched her seatmate tightly. The audience gasped, then muttered and tittered nervously. Five or ten seconds later a second bolt, shorter and with a different vector, again gave a snapshot of the interior of the storm. The music began to sound like mountain horns in the far distance, great deep bass tones punching through intervening winds. Another bolt, more crooked than the last, flared and died… then another, and another. Their randomness was convincing; they came anywhere from two to twenty seconds apart, lingering in the eye for nearly a second.
Then all at once all twelve dancers were there, caught in the sudden glare of God’s flashbulb, frozen in tableau. Again the audience murmured. The next flash found them in a different tableau, and the next. Sometimes they were arrayed as two sextets, sometimes as four trios, or three quartets, or a septet and quintet, or six pairs; sometimes they were simply twelve lost individuals. No matter how close together the flashes came, the dancers were never caught in motion. Eva wondered how they managed to navigate to each new position in the dark without colliding, but refused to let herself speculate on how the trick was being done, preferring to simply enjoy it. Soon she was noting patterns in the progression of patterns itself. The whole thing began to remind her of the ancient computer game called “Life,” in which a collection of cells changes shape and structure in successive frames, “evolving” and “growing” according to simple rules. This was like a three-dimensional Life sequence run at a very slow frame rate, had the same weird but intuitively appealing beauty, constantly changing yet remaining stable over time.
Just as seeming chance brought the dancers fairly close together in a cluster, an especially bright bolt of lightning lingered longer than usual, split again and again, fractured into a hundred snake-tongues of fire that raced around the entire storm—and in their flickering light, the cluster of dancers began to move in space, turning end over end like a Catherine wheel. As the actinic sparkles faded slowly away, the dancers themselves began to glow softly, somehow emitting their own light, shining from within like fireflies. They began to move bodily too, without losing their place in formation, first in unison and then individually, and before long the tension of their solos tore the cluster apart into smaller groups.
Two of the groups, asymmetrically opposed, began to leave trails of light behind them as they moved. Short at first, mere afterimages, the trails slowly lengthened until they were winding tails, as though the invisible eraser that chased them was falling farther and farther behind—then they vanished, and three other groups began to leave trails of their own. Soon dancers were making light sculptures all over the sky, like particle tracks in a cyclotron, occasionally mirroring one another for a time and then diverging. Again Eva was reminded of something from the dawn of the Age of Silicon: a screen-saver program called Electric Fire. The effect was hypnotic—but a kind of hypnosis that made the pulse race and the breath come faster, a heightening of alertness. Forks of lightning still flared here and there among the clouds, imbuing the whole scene with a sense of energy, largeness, danger. Perhaps there were subsonics buried in the score as well. One sensed that something awful, cataclysmic, might happen if one of the dancers missed a movement, distorted the weave of the incomprehensible pattern they were shaping together. Something on the scale of Ragnarok. The speed and intensity of the dance increased, until all twelve were racing to and fro at the highest speeds they could reach without crashing into the unseen audience, threatening to lose control and do so. The very clouds seemed to back away from them. In their boiling frenzy, they came to resemble the classic historical footage of the Fireflies confronting Shara Drummond… save that they were not red. Each glowed a different color now, twelve distinct shades; together they seemed the shards of a proto-rainbow struggling to form.
As the music swelled and steadied, they succeeded: seemingly by chance, they settled one after another into the same stable orbit, a great ring whose axis kept changing, like the “orange-slice” orbit of Peace Monitor satellites around Terra, like a primitive model of an atom with twelve electrons. Their trails became one orbit in length: a coruscating rainbow chased itself around the globe.
A short blast of trumpets, and the rainbow flared, doubling in brightness. Each and every cloud dissolved into a trillion spherically expanding droplets of water, a trillion seeds, each carrying with it a tiny reflection of the rainbow. As they dispersed and vanished, the stormclouds lightened in color and mass, thinned out, became wispy, melted away save for a handful of benign white clouds. The storm was broken; the sun returned, and the achingly familiar blue of the Terran sky. (Even spaceborns, studies had long shown, resonated emotionally to that color; it seemed to be in the DNA somewhere, though none could say how.) The music moved gradually up the scale, from deep baritone horn sounds to medium frequencies that sounded eerily like human voices, yet moved in ways no human culture sang. The dancers glowed so fiercely now that they seemed to have enlarged, and their features were indistinct.
Then the rainbow-ring came apart, and they were again the playful, independent sprites they had been in the first movement—but shining, gleaming. The voices became a vast choir, hundreds of voices singing their hearts out in a language Eva had never heard before. The net effect was dysharmonic, but occasionally little resolutions came and went, as if the choir were singing a dozen songs in a dozen keys simultaneously.