Though Acorna carefully shielded these thoughts, Maati laid a hand on hers consolingly.
Hafiz had also grown bored with Aari’s explanation of Grimalkin’s explanation of time and space. Karina yawned and stretched, burped, and covered her mouth delicately with two fingers.
Hafiz then tapped his wineglass with a jeweled dagger. “And now, honored guests, a special surprise. I have engaged something special for your enjoyment tonight. It is not a hologrammatic entertainment. Tonight you will see actual human performers of great skill and talent, and not incidentally, beauty, imported at enormous expense from the Akemilisan harems. Prepare yourselves to appreciate the astounding aerial acrobatics of Aziza and the Ornaments of Akemi!
“And now, in the time-honored custom of my people I say”—and he clapped twice, sharply—“bring on the dancing girls!”
In a rainbow cyclone of veils and gauzy gaudy gold-encrusted split skirts and puffy pants, their bosoms and hips adorned by silk clothing heavily encrusted with jangling gold coins and jewels, the dancers whirled from the taller bits of shrubbery onto the patio where the diners sat digesting the superb meal.
Their feet were bare, except for tasteful toe rings and little chains of coins worn as anklets, as were their midriffs.
“Nice,” Becker whispered to Hafiz. “Are they just visiting or did you persuade them to be your in-house troupe?”
“They were on their way to another engagement when their ship developed trouble,” Hafiz whispered back. His right eye acquired a twinkle as the left one winked shut, as if he was enjoying a joke that was still a mystery to everyone else. “One of our—associates—evacuated them to her vessel, then persuaded them to come here. Lovely, eh?”
Becker didn’t respond because his jaw had dropped too far to make speech possible.
The ladies appeared boneless. Not for them the skeletal look popular in some of the human ports. Their smooth, rounded flesh undulated effortlessly in time to a drumbeat that varied so that it made Acorna think at some times of a stalking tiger, at others of a cornered gazelle. Their eyes were lined with a black substance that made them look huge, while veils first concealed the lower part of their faces, then were whipped away just as, with an explosion of frothing cloth, the women turned to show the serpentine movements of their backs and shoulders.
She heard Hafiz say to Becker, “The Three Prophets teach that a woman should be modest. See how modest they are, with their veils concealing their identities? And, yet, how lovely. And I do think that to be a good wife, a woman should be well versed in the womanly arts.”
“You’re not thinking of taking another wife, Hafiz?”
Karina’s complacent smile faltered a bit, and she speared her husband with a rapier glance. He licked his lips and drummed his fingers on the sash around his paunch in time to the music. “No, no,” he said with just a touch of regret. “Such barbaric customs are practiced only by blasphemers of the true path, such as the Neo-Hadithians. My interest in these ladies is for the sake of my heir. It is time Rafik began to think of finding a wife. A man’s life should not be all business and good works. He should have a family as well. I once believed that it was important to have sons, until I had one, and he was worthless. On the other hand, I adopted my beautiful granddaughter, who is a jewel beyond price, so I am thinking Rafik must father many children of both sexes, so that he has many heirs to choose from and I have many grandchildren to comfort me in my advancing years.”
“I’ll comfort you, my dynamo of the desert,” Karina whispered.
“And I you, O pearl of pulchritude, and our grandchildren shall comfort us both.”
The drum tempo changed again, and the troupe split off to leave a single dancer, her gossamer veils folded over her body like the wings of a sleeping butterfly. She emerged slowly, stretched backward, elongating her torso and extending her head back toward her ankles. Just as they thought she was going to do a backbend, she simply rolled her torso backward and then up again. Then she raised her arms above her head, facing them, her head moving back and forth like a snake’s. Her feet rose above the ground and she rolled forward. It was not a tumble, simply a leisurely roll. She repeated these maneuvers in time with the music, her weightless body making lazy, graceful figure-eight arcs through the air.
As the music picked up, her movements, while grounded, and those in the air grew faster and more acrobatic; and then suddenly the rest of the troupe joined her, all spinning madly, the large faceted jewels in the middles of their coin belts flashing as if lit from within with each turn. And then, like the fluff of seedpods twirling in a high wind, each dancer in turn swept her hand before her belt and spun up into the air, the soles of her feet nearly a meter off the ground.
Karina clapped her hands delightedly.
“Oh, Haffy, this is a truly inspiring performance! Even I, who have studied the sacred erotic dances of ancient Babylon and Nineveh with high priestesses channeled from those cultures, have never seen such steps.”
“Truly they make an artistic tool of the simple antigravity belts they wear beneath their coins,” Hafiz agreed.
The girls spun downward again and, with their feet firmly planted on the ground, swept their veils before them and split off into the shrubbery to leave the stage to another soloist.
Becker was immediately enthralled by the new dancer. She was swathed in veils and skirts that whirled and shifted with her movements rising and falling, appearing and disappearing. The spacer was reminded of one of the clear-faceted kaleidoscopes you could buy at nanobug markets. The kind that took their colors from whatever was around them. If you looked through one of them at a sunlit coastal morning, sky blue, sea green, sun yellow, and spun it around and around, he thought maybe you could come close to the effect the dancer created. But, of course, it wouldn’t be nearly as tantalizing as the flashes of pale skin and bright gold-green eyes glimpsed among the veils and her long, butter yellow hair. Her head was crowned with a circlet of coins that held a green veil whose tail covered her lower face, but there was something familiar about her.
As the tempo picked up, she suddenly approached and cast one of the veils around him. Then, fixing him in a green gaze made more exotic than it might have been by the kohl surrounding her eyes, she waggled her eyebrows up and down at him. Lifting one hip, then the other, she slowly worked her way into a shimmy, the coins at her hips flipping and clanking. She crooked her finger, beckoning, and he stood up and shook his lower half, too, though it didn’t have the same effect.
Laughing, she pushed him back down and deposited her harem-pants-clad behind on his lap. “Better stick to salvage, Becker,” she said in unexotic Basic.
“Andina! When did you get here?”
“I would have come to meet you, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise,” she told him.
“I didn’t know you performed. I thought you were in the cleaning business.”
“I am. But these girls got stranded on a backwater asteroid populated by uncouth space bums not unlike you. I gave them a lift, and they gave me lessons for part of their fare. I persuaded them to let me bring them here instead of to the gig they were headed for when their ship began acting up. I figured Hafiz would pay them enough that they could reimburse me for the trip and fix their ship as well.”
“And if they couldn’t fix it, you knew they could always sell it to me for salvage,” Becker said.
They said a lot of other things, as well, things that Acorna was too polite to listen to.
It appeared that Andina had started a trend when she got Becker up to dance with her, and some of the other dancers began to do likewise. Each dancer swooped, using her veils like wings, to the table, picked up a wineglass, set it on her head, lowered herself to the floor, did a lot of astounding muscular contractions with her abdomen and a few flips, rose again, wineglass still balanced, whirled into the air with it still on her forehead, then, without spilling a drop, whirled back to the table, gave each glass to its owner, and made a gestur
e that they were to down the contents, then whipped a silken veil around the party in question and dragged him (and sometimes her) out onto the dance floor. They repeated this until each diner had a turn, each glass of wine had been aerated, and most of the diners were on their feet and laughing.
As the gentleman at the head of the table, Hafiz would have been chosen first, except that when a lissome, sloe-eyed beauty undulated toward him, Karina sprang into action, placing herself between the dancer and her husband and waving her lavender draperies in a comparatively graceless and unprofessional but nonetheless effective fashion. The dancer applauded Karina with the ululating cry called a zaghareet, bowed to them both, and did her trick with both of their wineglasses. Hafiz and Karina were by then so absorbed in each other that they barely noticed. Still, they dutifully quaffed their wine when the dancer returned it to them, then they left the party with their arms as far around each others’ convex waists as their ample bodies would allow.
The youngest member of the troupe was the daughter of one of the dancers. Like the other dancers, she seemed fascinated if somewhat confused by the Linyaari, who ate the centerpieces and drank only water. The other dancers avoided eye contact with the Linyaari diners, but finally the young girl’s curiosity overcame her reserve, and she chose Maati to dance with her. Maati jumped in enthusiastically and imitated the girl’s movements. Both of them giggled at the Linyaari girl’s awkwardness. The dancer giggled even more when she realized Maati was female. “What is your name?” the girl asked as she whipped a veil off some part of her costume and handed it to Maati, showing her how to tie it around her haunches.
Maati told her, and added, “It means harmony, like in music.”
“Ah, my name is Layla. It means evening, in case one is living someplace where that makes any difference,” Layla replied. She then did an aerial flip, after which she extracted a belt from beneath the coins at her waist and handed it to Maati.
Layla made a little circle in the air with her upraised index finger.
Maati nodded excitedly and clasped the belt in place just below her waist. She spun as the little dancer directed, making one or two complete revolutions before she got dizzy and stumbled upward, putting one foot out to catch herself and meeting only air. She was almost a full meter off the ground! Her new friend steadied her and pulled her back down. Maati returned the antigrav belt, but she seemed sorry to have to do so.
Then she saw Laarye laughing at her and Layla, so they pulled him up to join them. He shifted from one foot to the other, watching them with a studious expression, then burst into a sort of prance as he circled them, holding one end of the veil until they were both entangled in it.
Rafik, whose wineglass was upside down beside his plate, was pulled from Acorna’s side when the lead dancer, clad in crimson-and-teal paisley velvet pants and a great deal of clanking gold, did handsprings up to him and captured him with a red veil.
(Culturally fascinating, don’t you think?) Aari asked, using thought-talk. (I wonder if those concealing cloths they wear over their faces and wave around themselves serve a function similar to horn-hats. Do you know?)
(I don’t think the purpose is the same,) Acorna replied politely, if a little stiffly. (I believe they are part of a tableau re-creating a historical mating ritual.)
“So are horn-hats,” Aari said, as if reminding her. “It seems to me, and of course, in this timeline this is the first encounter I have had with human culture, that the cloths they wave—”
“Veils,” Acorna supplied.
“Vaals,” he repeated obligingly, if inaccurately. “I think they are intended to increase the magnetic field around the dancer’s body, thereby attracting more potential mates, whereas the vaals covering the mouths of the dancers serve to intensify the psychic vibrations emanating from their ocular organs. Of course, I could not actually make out what the message was supposed to be, but I feel sure it had something to do with mating.”
“Actually,” Acorna said, “from what I have read of the culture Uncle Hafiz comes from, the dance was originally performed by females encouraging other females when they are in labor with their young. The female about to give birth is supposed to emulate the abdominal movements of the dancers in order to hasten her baby’s entrance into the world. Practicing the dance from the time they are young girls strengthens the muscles required to give birth as well.”
“Ahhh,” Aari said. “I felt sure there was some deeper meaning. Do the acrobatic feats and the airborne activities also play a role in human childbirth?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Acorna said, suppressing a smile in spite of herself. This was starting to sound like Aari after all, with his rather whimsical interpretations of other cultures. “I believe the only function of those movements is to enhance the performance of the entertainers.”
She found her feet tapping and her hands patting her thighs as she listened to the music. Watching Laarye and the girls cavort, with Maati following Laarye’s prance and the dancing girl joining in as if it was a new step, Acorna jumped to her feet, grabbed Aari’s hand, and pulled him into the dance, too. The dancers shimmied and undulated for a moment or two while looking askance at the high-stepping Linyaari, then shrugged and fell in behind, so that Laarye was leading a line of dancers that soon took in the entire audience.
For the first time since Aari’s arrival, Acorna’s tension vanished, a thing of the past as if each dance step kicked it farther away. Aari capered and kicked behind her, and she sensed his own relief. He truly had not meant to hurt her—he didn’t even know her. Perhaps Rafik was right—they needed to get to know each other all over again, then everything would be fine.
Finally, the giddiness of Acorna’s relief turned to weariness. She said good night to Rafik and her friends and sought her usual sleeping mat in Hafiz’s guest quarters.
Tired as she was, she hoped she’d sleep well. The sleep Maati had interrupted had been unsatisfactory, plagued as it was by dreams that in some way involved the Khleevi, from what she could recall. She did not wish to return to that kind of sleep again, but she told herself the bad dreams only came when she fell asleep in the time lab.
Hard as she tried to reassure herself, she could not find a comfortable position on the mat. Other thoughts, disturbing in a much pleasanter way, kept intruding, adding to her restlessness.
Aari’s presence stirred her on a number of levels, including the most basic physical ones. She had become used to responding to him, and now, even though her mind was telling her it wasn’t a good idea, her body still wanted to. She wondered again if there was a way the time device could be used to integrate her original Aari with the current one—so that memories of her and his other friends were not merely hearsay to him, but experiences he had been a part of, that had moved and changed him emotionally.
She had to admit, though, that the new Aari sure could dance.
But something else bothered her too much to allow her to sleep. While dancing with the entertainers, she had caught random snatches of thought from those around her.
“After…find out where…back to ship…”
Those thoughts, especially in a group of space travelers such as those at the dinner, could have been perfectly innocent. But she was almost certain she’d picked up the words from the dancers. And she felt that there was something secretive behind them, just as there was something profoundly unfriendly lurking behind the women’s professional smiles.
Perhaps it was nothing. Maybe it was simply that the dancers had led rather difficult lives and feared to trust the people they met on their travels. The young girl Layla had seemed to like Maati. Those feelings had been genuine, Acorna was sure. Layla had gone out of her way to be amiable to the young Linyaari girl. Of course, Maati was easy to like.
It was certainly true, in Acorna’s experience, that many humans found the Linyaari comforting to be around and enjoyed their company.
But the soothing Linyaari aura had not seemed to affect these dancer
s in the same way it did ordinary humans.
Acorna tossed and turned restlessly for perhaps two hours of Standard time. Maati was not sleeping on the pallet beside her as she usually did when they both visited MOO. Perhaps she, too, had been troubled by the thoughts of the newcomers.
Acorna finally decided that, between her thoughts and the energetic dancing, she was too stimulated to sleep. She got up from her pallet and quickly dressed. She would go for a walk in an attempt to calm herself into sleep mode.
Night and day were engineered events on MOO, so there were activities available for people whose bodies were on other schedules than the one programmed into the enormous envirobubbles housing each major area of MOO’s multitude of domestic quarters. She might go to the lab, see if Aari’s parents were working there, and get their impressions of their newly returned sons. Or perhaps she’d look for Maati. The girl was fond of hanging out in the com shed and talking to others who were the human equivalent of her age. She had made friends with many of the Moonbase students and the denizens of the Haven when they were in port.
Acorna walked out of the guest quarters and stepped onto the pedestrian thoroughfare connecting the various envirobubbles with each other. The terminal and docking bays were in one direction, the laboratories in the opposite one. She closed her eyes and conducted a mental search for her friends. She didn’t call to them. She simply tried to locate them by tracking their auras. Her mental powers had grown tremendously since she first rejoined her people. The earliest glimmer of psychic ability she had demonstrated, the power simply to look at an asteroid through a com screen or view port and discern its mineral content, had matured into a sort of mental sonar that allowed her, when she concentrated, to discern many details about her environment and to locate specific features contained within it.
Never before had she attempted to use that sense in this particular way, but now, in her indecision, she searched for people as naturally as she would grasses or metals or other aspects of her surroundings.
Acorna's Triumph Page 4