“Dance movement?”
“You remember what I said, good.” Gerdes nodded approvingly. “Yes, I told you painting and dance had much in common. To paint well, you must move well and understand movement and rhythm. You will learn it by learning to move rhythmically.” Gerdes moved to a near wall where a crystal was mounted on a panel with a row of colored tabs beneath it.
These triangular crystals, Yarden had learned, were employed by the Fieri in various tasks of communication. Evidently the crystals could both transmit and receive vibrations which could be used to carry signals. Exactly how this was accomplished, Yarden did not understand, but she had seen the devices often enough. Mentors like Talus and Mathiax were rarely without one affixed to their clothing.
Gerdes touched a colored tab, and the room filled with music: soft, lilting music, gentle and evocative. “Close your eyes, daughter. Listen for a moment. Concentrate. Let the music seep into you; let it fill you up until you cannot hold it any longer.”
Yarden did as instructed, closing her eyes as she stood in the center of the room. Gerdes’ voice became softer, remote. Yarden listened to the music, letting it touch every part of her. She felt it in her fingers and arms and legs first.
“Drink it in as if you were very dry and the sound was cool water for your thirst. Feel it in every muscle, every fiber of your body.” Gerdes went on talking, slowly, softly, speaking in time with the music.
Yarden allowed the music to fill up all the places within her that she could think of—shoulders, neck, stomach, chest, hips, thighs … everywhere.
“When you cannot contain it any longer, let the music overflow in movement. Make your body a vessel for the music to flow through, and become yourself that motion. Let it carry you as you carry it.”
Yarden hesitated, uncertain how to interpret Gerdes’ last instruction.
“Don’t think about it, don’t try to make too much sense of it. Just do what you feel. Hear the music, let it fill you and overflow in motion. Move with it.”
Feeling awkward and uncertain, Yarden began to move—tentatively, jerkily. She lifted an arm, dropped it. Stepped forward, stopped. She glanced at Gerdes. “Keep your eyes closed. I know it feels clumsy. That’s because you’re thinking too much. Don’t think about it, just do it. Let your body interpret the music, not your brain.”
So, feeling very awkward and not a little self-conscious, Yarden began to move, slowly, haltingly at first. Arms outspread, legs taking hesitant steps, she turned in a tight circle.
“That’s right,” said Gerdes. “Feel the music. Translate the sound into motion. Good … good.” With this encouragement, Yarden began to take bigger steps and move her arms in circles around her body, approximating the circles the melody made as it circled through the song.
“Relax,” soothed Gerdes, “There are no steps to this dance except those you make yourself; so there is nothing to be afraid of. Fear makes you stiff. The music is fluid; you must become fluid, too.”
It was true—Yarden was afraid of looking foolish before her teacher, afraid of making an awkward movement. She slowed her turning steps and concentrated on relaxing her body. Gerdes noticed the difference at once.
“That’s better,” she said. “Let go of your fear. See? The tension is leaving your shoulders. Now, let your backbone bend—it is not made of wood, it will become supple if you allow it. The music will show you.”
Yarden stopped. “I can’t. It’s too—”
“Shh. Don’t speak. Don’t think. Begin again.” Gerdes came close and put her hands on Yarden’s shoulders lightly. “You’re trying too hard. Don’t fight what is already within you. Your body knows what to do, but your mind intrudes. Relax. Let your body do what it knows. Begin again.”
Yarden closed her eyes once more and began to move, forcing herself not to think about anything. Instead, she willed her consciousness into the music, emptied herself into it, let it cover her and pull her along in its smooth, gently unfolding rhythms. She was surprised to find that her body was already responding. Slowly, but with increasing confidence, she moved, not arms and legs only, but torso and shoulders and hips and neck.
It felt good to move with such freedom. Burrowing deeper into the music, she allowed the music to dictate the motion. For once she had succeeded in silencing that sharply self-critical voice that judged and reported her every action. That was the trick—to divorce the judging self from the feeling self, to remove the bothersome self-awareness altogether so it could not intrude on the pure emotional response, allowing the body to move freely.
“Yes, yes,” said Gerdes with obvious satisfaction. “Much better. You’re feeling the music now. Go deeper into it; let it fill all the empty places. Take it in, and transform it into motion.”
Eyes closed, Yarden moved to the music, her motions growing ever more sure. Gerdes brought her along with softly uttered encouragement until she could feel the music deep inside her as it coiled and spun and flowed like rippling water from the well of her soul. She became the music, entering into it completely, merging with it, taking it in and letting it out again as pure, free-form motion.
She did not notice when the song changed and the tempo became faster, but merely felt the rhythm undulate more quickly, demanding more of her willingness to give herself to it. Gerdes’ words intoned in her ears, but she did not hear them as much as she felt their presence. In fact, she was aware of nothing but the transmutation of music into motion that was taking place in her body.
When the music finally stopped, dwindling away like a whisper on the wind, Yarden felt her limbs slow and sag and knew the dance was over. She stood motionless for a moment and savored the warmth the exercise had generated. Exhaustion and exultation mingled, producing in her a pleasure close to ecstasy.
She opened her eyes to see Gerdes holding out a cloth to her and watching her with a quizzical expression. Yarden rubbed the soft cloth over her sweating face and neck, not ready yet to break the spell of the moment. Finally she could bear Gerdes’ silence no longer; she had to know what her teacher thought of her exercise. “Did I do well?” she asked, somewhat timidly.
Gerdes gazed at her pupil intently. “That is a question you must answer for yourself, daughter. What does your body tell you?”
Yarden shook her head and felt sweat-damp curls slap against the back of her neck. “I scarcely know. I feel… almost dizzy with delight. It’s the most wonderful feeling.” At that, her words tumbled out in a rush. “Gerdes, I became the song—I was inside the music. I felt it throughout my body, inside me as I was inside it. I’ve never experienced anything so strange and wonderful.”
The older woman gave her an appraising look and led her to a grouping of soft-cushioned chairs. They sat, and Yarden leaned back and felt the delicious looseness of a body totally relaxed. Gerdes said nothing, but continued to watch her student with the same thoughtful, questioning expression on her face.
Yarden sensed sympathetically that there was something more than curiosity in her instructor’s mind. She sensed something else. Fear? No, not fear, but close. Awe. This puzzled Yarden. She would have pursued the matter using her sympathic abilities—Gerdes would likely be compatible—but refrained. She did not want to know anything her teacher did not choose to say to her directly. Still, she could not help sensing the force of Gerdes’ mental and emotional reaction.
The two sat for a long time until Gerdes finally arrived at what she wanted to say. Looking at Yarden directly, she placed her hands together and began, saying, “We are all given gifts freely from the hand of the All-Gracious Giver, who gives to all as He will. In my years I have seen many whose gifts shine bright as sunstone within them—and many of lesser endowment whose best efforts are nevertheless worthy enough to adorn the Preceptor’s palace.
“Though I’ve seen gifts great and small in the most unlikely places, I’ve never seen any like yours. You, my daughter, are the bearer of a rare and special gift.”
“Are you certain?” as
ked Yarden. The Fieri woman’s words filled her with a mixture of apprehension and delight.
“Perhaps I was wrong about you becoming a dancer,” intoned Gerdes, speaking mostly to herself. “I believe you have the ability and could be trained. But dance, I think, would use only part of the gift. There is something deeper there—I could see it when you forgot yourself and entered into the music. I could see it, but I don’t know what it is.”
“I felt it, too,” replied Yarden. “I’ve felt it before, but never as strongly as I felt it today. I can’t describe how it was, but I seem to have stepped outside myself. I was not conscious of what I was doing—each movement flowed through me, dictated from some other, greater source.” She smiled suddenly. “Oh, Gerdes, it felt so good, so free and pure.”
Gerdes nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that is the body responding to the inner gift. The body knows how to move—it’s made for movement after all. We have no need to teach it what it already knows.”
“Liberating the body to do what it knows how to do—is that it?”
“Yes,” agreed Gerdes. “You learn quickly.”
Yarden jumped up. “I want to do it again. Please? Right now. I don’t want to forget the feeling. I want to remember exactly how I did it.”
“Very well,” said Gerdes, rising slowly and making her way to the panel on the wall. “Ready yourself.”
In a moment the music drifted into the room and Yarden, poised, ready to receive it, heard the first wispy notes and began to sway, guiding herself into the music and away from the critical awareness of her movements. It was easier this time, now that she knew what she was attempting. In no time at all she had entered into that state where her mind soared up through the dreamy, many-toned layers of sound, leaving her body free to respond in its own way.
The session left Yarden exhausted, but flushed with triumph and eager for her next lesson. “Thank you, Gerdes,” she said, a little reluctant to leave. “I intend to practice every moment until I return. To think I had this—this wonderful gift inside me all this time and never knew it. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for showing it to me.”
“Your joy is thanks enough,” Gerdes replied. “But you must not think that it will always be so easy. We have much hard work ahead of us, and yes, some pain as well. Tears are as much a part of creation as joy.”
“I know that, Gerdes.”
The older woman shook her head gently. “No, you don’t. But it’s all right. We will take it as it comes. Good-bye now.”
Yarden said good-bye and walked home, luxuriating in the deep, warm, languorous feeling of physical exhaustion and the knowledge that her special gift had only begun to be explored. There were much finer things awaiting her, she knew; she thrilled to think what they might be.
NINETEEN
It seemed to Treet that he floated in space wrapped in cloud-soft vapors that curled around him, enveloping him and bearing him through endless corridors of darkness. He had floated this way from time immemorial, eternally traveling, yet never really going anywhere at all.
This celestial voyage was perpetually interrupted by vivid hallucinations: the one where he became trapped inside his own heart was a favorite torment, but there were others equally grotesque and frightening. One of them concerned being swallowed by a great transparent eel and enduring a living death inside its hideous stomach. Another saw him entombed inside a coffin-sized slab of crystal, frozen forever, unable to move or cry out, while all around him people moved and lived and breathed, oblivious to his torture.
In his lucid moments, Treet still knew himself to be suspended by wires in a tank of buoyant liquid, undergoing the process of conditioning. He knew this and told himself over and over in what had become for him a litany: I will survive … I will survive … I will survive … I will … survive …
But the periods of lucidity were shrinking, and the boundaries between consciousness and the nightmare region grew ever more amorphous. And his litany of resolve sounded more like naive optimism, cheap and mocking in his own ears.
Still, he would not give in to the creeping despair he could feel gathering around him, and instead continued to fight for his clarity of mind. Yet, to give himself over to the insanity of his weird visions would be far easier than constantly maintaining such a scrupulously tight rein on his mental processes. What did it matter whether he thought he was inside a giant eel? What did it matter what he thought about anything? He was never going to leave the tank with his head intact. In many ways it would be easier on him to simply give in, accept whatever insanity presented itself, and be done with it. Then at least he’d be released. The longer he held out, the longer he’d remain in the conditioning tank and the longer the torture would continue. Better to give in and regain freedom as quickly as possible.
A lesser man would have given in, as untold hundreds of Hladik’s victims had. Here, however, Treet’s innate stubbornness and frugality came to his aid. As a man who had lived the better part of a century with little more than the price of the next meal in his pocket at any one time, he simply could not allow himself to give up anything that had taken so much precious effort to accumulate in the first place. His mental acuity was a hard-won possession, arrived at only after years of painful and painstaking effort. It was, Treet had learned during the course of his life, no small achievement to be completely sane.
Mental clarity required such tremendous expenditures of discipline, vigilance, and perseverance, that Treet was awed to think he had succeeded where so many, many others had utterly failed. He did not fault those who had failed. Theirs was a fate he had come too close to sharing for him to find any wide margin of comfort in his success.
But little by little, despite Treet’s heroic efforts, the machinery of the conditioning tank worked on its victim. He found his sane moments fewer and more tenuous and the hallucinations fiercer, more frequent, relentless. He felt his grip on reality eroding bit by bit; the plunge could not be far off.
Nevertheless, striving to hold off the inevitable a little longer, Treet undertook yet another of his experiments in sympathetic communication. Thus far these efforts had produced nothing of benefit, save giving him something to do. As he had done many times before, he began by sending his thoughts like hands outstretched, feeling, like radar waves spreading out, searching.
Only this time, instead of his mental radar streaming out into the endless void, something came back. Like the echoed ping of sonar bouncing back from a solid object, Treet sensed something moving at the farthest edge of his awareness. Something massive. He felt like one of those oceanic divers who, in the cold, dark depths of an arctic sea, feels the turbulence of the giant humpback’s flukes as the creature glides silently, invisibly past.
The contact shocked Treet so much, his fragile concentration shattered. What was that? Another hallucination? Had he begun hallucinating that he was lucid and receiving impulses from his mental experiments? Or had it really happened?
Cautiously, Treet flung out his mental net once again. He caught nothing, so forced himself to concentrate, to stretch the strands to the utmost. The effort was taxing; the hair-fine filaments of consciousness trembled with exhaustion. He was about to collapse the tenuous net when he felt the mysterious shudder again, and stronger this time.
There was no mistake. He was not imagining it. It was there.
A presence, an intelligence that was not his own, hovered nearby, watching him, regarding him with keen interest, dwarfing him like the whale dwarfs the deep sea diver. Yet, he had nothing to fear from the leviathan his net had snagged. This he sensed intuitively even as his net shrank reflexively from the contact. Whatever he had attracted with his feeble efforts meant him no harm. That much came through instantaneously.
Treet attempted another probe, but could not sustain the effort and withdrew to puzzle over his surprising discovery. There was something out there—he had imagined his mental universe as space, infinite and empty … until now. Now, there was a presence lurki
ng out there on the rim of his imagined universe. Something or someone.
Could it be Yarden? Treet wondered. He dismissed the possibility at once. Yarden, he reasoned, would feel familiar to him somehow. Her presence would be colored by her personality, and he would know her. This thing, this entity was no one he knew. Perhaps it wasn’t even human. Perhaps it was something entirely indigenous to Empyrion, an alien intelligence drawn by his puny experiments. Of course, it could easily have nothing at all to do with Empyrion—a being of pure mental energy inhabiting a separate plane of existence, perhaps.
The possibilities were endless. He simply did not have enough information to know what he was dealing with, and until he did it was useless to speculate. So Treet put the matter aside for the time being and determined to rest up for another attempt at contact later. He wanted his next effort to be his best. He did not know if he’d have another chance.
The Nilokerus glanced up quickly from his work as his superior came in. He stiffened and made a hasty salute. “Forgive me, Director, you were not announced.”
“Does order and efficiency exist only when I am announced?” The scowl on Hladik’s face made it clear that no answer would be sufficient and none was wanted. The Hageman kept his mouth wisely shut. “Where’s Fertig? I want him.”
The Nilokerus glanced around the stone-cut room quickly, as if the Subdirector might be found crouching in one of the corners. “He has not been seen, Director.”
“Find him. I want to see the new prisoner. Where is he?”
“Skank—”
Hladik turned abruptly and started for the conditioning chamber. “Find Fertig and send him to me. I want to see him immediately,” he called over his shoulder as he marched into the narrow corridor of cells leading to the room where the conditioning tanks were kept. It had been a sour day for the Nilokerus Director, a day for distractions and irritations. He had the uneasy feeling that things were imperceptibly going wrong, that his authority was crumbling under his feet and he could not see it. He’d soon put it right, however.
Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome Page 12