It took a moment for the eye to get it into correct perspective: it was not just enough Symbiote for two people, but enough and more than enough for six, therefore somewhat farther from us than it had seemed to be. Six Stardancers had mingled their Symbiotes and were joined at the feet, held together by their linked hands, a hundred meters from us. The snowflake shifted and flowed, as the six dancers who comprised it changed their position in unison from one pattern to another by flexing elbows and knees, contracting and releasing.
The music acquired a slow, steady pulse in the bass. The pattern of the spinning snowflake changed with each beat, as if it were some great red heart clenching rhythmically. Percussion instruments and a Michael Hedges-like guitar began adding counterpoint accents to the rhythm. The total mass of Symbiote began to swell away from the dancers it contained, until it was a translucent crimson disc with six people at its heart, perhaps twenty meters in diameter. The disc swelled from the center and became a convex lens, nearly transparent; pink stars swam behind it, rippling. Lights came up. The lamps themselves were invisible to us, since they were tiny and dull black and pointing away from us, but we saw their blue and yellow reflections come up as highlights on the crimson lens, highlights that bled all the other colours there are at their edges.
The six children of the lens separated like a bud opening into a flower, fanned out in six directions and wedged themselves into the narrow parts of the lens wall. One of them doubled and jaunted back to the center of the lens, came to rest there…and began to move. Even at a hundred meters, even behind that carmine film of Symbiote, even wearing a different body, there was no mistaking her. The familiar motif that emerged in brass in the underlying music only confirmed it. Jinsei’s body it may have been, but it was Shara Drummond, the greatest dancer of our time, who took the first solo.
She wore thrusters at wrists and ankles, but could not have used them inside that lens, I think. She danced only with body and muscles, moving three-dimensionally in place, with her unmistakable fluidity and precision of line. It reminded me of a piece I’d seen years ago by a colleague recovering from a leg injury called Dancing in Place: confining himself to one spot on stage, standing on one leg, he had explored more ways of dancing and looking at dance than most performers can do using an entire stage. Shara/Jensei did the same now, tumbling, arching, turning, while her center stayed anchored to the center of the lens. She could have been a butterfly gifted with limbs, or a leaf in flight, or a protozoan swimming in the primordial soup. The brass stopped hinting at Shara’s Theme and made a new statement, underlined by strings. Soon, inevitably, she drifted far enough from the center of the lens to touch its inner surface, and used it to jaunt back to her original place at the periphery.
This time two figures moved to the center and met there. Linda Parsons and Tom McGillicuddy, the hippie and the businessman who had met in space, fallen in love, and become the fourth and fifth founding members of Stardancers Incorporated (after Charlie, Norrey and Raoul). McGillicuddy at least was easy for me to identify: he had always been the least trained of the original company; even after decades of practice, and even wearing a better-trained body than his own, there were minor limitations to his technique. But Linda compensated for them so perfectly after thirty-four years of dancing with him that I don’t think anyone else noticed. They did a pas de deux at the heart of the lens, like mating hummingbirds, and now the brass and strings made different but complementary statements to accompany them.
When they returned to their places at the rim, three figures replaced them. Charlie and Norrey and Sascha, legendary partners and friends, did a trio piece loosely derived from their famous Why Can’t We?, as woodwinds brought in a third theme that fit the brass and string motifs like an interlocking puzzle; all three resolved into a major chord as the trio broke up and returned to the rim again.
Next a quartet of both Drummond sisters and Armstead and Yakovskaya, faster and more vigorous, interacting with the kind of precision and intuition that nontelepaths would have needed weeks of rehearsal to achieve; a great pipe organ added its voice to the music, which rose in tempo and resolved into a four-note diminished chord at the quartet’s end.
Then everyone but Shara met at the center for a flashing quicksilver quintet, tumbling over one another like kittens in a basket; the music was all tumbling five-note ninth chords.
Finally all six danced together as a single organism, making strange, indescribable geometrical figures in three dimensions. As they danced, the lens filled out, became a sphere, which slowly contracted in on them, thickening and darkening as it came. Before long there was only a nearly opaque glowing red ball of Symbiote, flexing and shifting in time to the racing music. It quivered, trembled—
—then burst apart, becoming six separate Stardancers flying in different directions like a firework detonation. Their thrusters protruded through their individual coatings of Symbiote now, and they used them to put themselves into graceful wide loops, so that they returned to their starting point, missed colliding by inches, and then arced out again. Each had a different-coloured thruster exhaust; comet-tails of red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple attended them as they flew, leaving the afterimage of a multicoloured Christmas ribbon against the star-spangled blackness. The music swelled and soared with them as they danced, spilling trills in all directions to match their thruster spray. Eventually they all came together again in a tight formation like exhibition aircraft, and took turns passing each other back and forth from hand to hand.
There was joy in their dance, and hope, and endless energy, and manifest love for one another; from time to time one or another of them would laugh for sheer pleasure. I found that I was smiling unconsciously as I watched their dance unfold. I sneaked a look at Kirra and Ben; they were smiling too.
There was a short movement in which they were performing a kind of kinesthetic pun, moving mentally as well as physically, passing their selves from one host body to another. I don’t know how many others caught it, but I clearly saw Shara Drummond’s essence change bodies several times. Once or twice I spotted Yakovskaya or McGillicuddy transmigrating too. I think that for a time, the bodies’ original owners were present and dancing as well.
Then Shara was stationary, spinning slowly around her vertical axis, apart from the other five as they continued to interact, watching how their dance changed in her absence; then in a reversed reprise of their solo-to-group progression. Tom dropped out, then Linda, then Charlie, then Norrey. Quintet, quartet, trio, pair, finally Yakovskaya was soloing within a pentagon of stationary spinning companions, and then he too stopped dancing and went into a spin. The music had decayed too, to a single voice, a cello, and the theme it was quoting was not Shara’s signature motif this time, but Kirra’s Song of Polar Orbit.
By some means I didn’t and don’t understand, all six of them began to move relative to one another, around their common center, as though they were jointly orbiting some invisible mini black hole. The orbits tightened inexorably, until they darted like the Firefly aliens themselves, like electrons dancing in mad attendance on some invisible nucleus. Hands met and joined just as the Song of Polar Orbit reached its coda; again they were a six-personed snowflake. Thrusters sprayed coloured fire and smoke, and they became a living, madly spinning Catherine Wheel.
The thrusters went dark, and they were a scarlet pinwheel.
Their Symbiotes merged, and they were a disc again.
A hole appeared in the center, making the disc look for all the world like an old-fashioned phonograph record (all right, I’m dating myself) spinning on a turntable, seen from above. My parents used to own an album like that, red and translucent, a novelty gimmick. The hole enlarged, so that the disc looked like a 45 RPM single; paradoxically its spin slowed rather than speeded up.