The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

by Adam-Troy Castro

  My aching bod felt all the more inadequate as I sank into a seated position on the food chest. “That's him, I guess."

  “That's Dalmo,” Ch'tpok said, adding an unnecessary: “He's a Dance Pilgrim too."

  At least that explained how he could bear a suicidal wife; he had the same odd sense of priorities. “How come he's not out with the missus?"

  Ch'tpok's smile didn't falter, even as her eyes turned grim. “The Vlhani didn't invite him."

  “This party's for Selected only?"

  “Uh huh. Last-minute choreography."

  I tried to imagine the alien protocols that dictated how Shalakan should move one way, and not another, while dancing herself to death. It knew it made a difference to the spiders; it was the basis of their greatest cultural artifact. But did it make a difference to Shalakan? Did she feel the rightness of these last-minute instructions? Did she change a twitch and say, oh, yes, you're right, that part always bothered me, thanks for helping me finally get it right?

  And what about Dalmo? “Doesn't it bother him? Even a little?"

  “Not ... really,” said Dalmo. (I attributed his slow speech to his illness, but I soon learned he always spoke like a drunk, or like a man trying to sound drunk. The words left his mouth at irregular intervals, like prisoners escaping in shifts to avoid the attention of guards.) “Mister Royko,” he said, and licked his lips. There was an especially long pause as he parsed the rest of the sentence. “My wife has important work to do. Good morning, Chuppi."

  It happened to be late afternoon. If Dalmo had gone to sleep the night before, he'd been unconscious for most of a day. But Ch'tpok humored him: “Good morning, Dalmo. Feeling better?"

  “Yes.” He paused. “Never felt bad. Calculating. Had to work out some variables."

  “I figured,” Ch'tpok said. “Any luck?"

  “Some. Real progress."

  “Up to talking about it?"

  “Need to dance first.” He grimaced and lowered his other leg. His flexible Enhanced arms uncoiling, straightening, assuming fixed joints at elbow-height, he soon became an approximation of any other unenhanced human—albeit a painfully thin one, with a lip that drooped to the right. I'd grown up in a habitat too poor for an AIsource Medical contract, so I'd seen what unprosthetized stroke victims looked like. It's a rare sight, some other places. Dalmo walked like that, too: no obvious paralysis, but with the slow deliberation of a man for whom every step required careful planning. Ch'tpok hovered close as if she feared he'd fall. I supposed it wasn't hard to see why the Vlhani hadn't cast him in the great honking suicide-show; they needed graceful dancers, and this poor shmo could barely move.

  I almost didn't want to follow them outside, for fear he'd mistake my recently-acquired limp as mockery. But I did. No point in alienating the hubby.

  Out in the twilight, Dalmo unfolded again, tripling his height, becoming a torso that bobbed like a puppet at the center of four looping and twirling limbs. He showed nothing approaching the grace of a Vlhani, or even of those humans who'd made themselves enough like Vlhani to earn a place in the Ballet, but his performance was still impressive enough, especially the way he made those outstretched arms seem to bubble and twist like vapor buffeted by a strong wind.

  “See?” he said, with strain. “I parsed it. I made it work. It's progress."

  “I believed you,” Ch'tpok said.

  “I'll have to show Shal. She should know."

  Ch'tpok hesitated a few seconds before answering. “You're right."

  Dalmo displayed some more moves, all slow, all impossible for normal human physiology, all well within the peculiar faux-Vlhani anatomy that the pilgrims try so hard to achieve. The performance hurt to watch, but not because of the contortions themselves; I had already seen other enhanced pilgrims twist themselves into even greater knots. Watching Dalmo hurt more because moving that way clearly cost him more. And it hurt for another reason, too: familiarity. There was something about the hold his art had on his life, that felt like an old friend I'd abandoned a long time ago.

  He must have spotted my sympathetic pain. “You like to dance, Mr. Royko?"

  I tried to match his flippant tone. “I know a waltz or two."

  “Any good at them?"

  “Well,” I smiled, “Not according to any woman who's ever endured my tries."

  His limbs twirled in great jagged jerks. “Nothing Vlhani?"

  It was a joke. He had to see I wasn't physically equipped for it. “Sorry."

  “Pity.” His limbs retracted, drawing closer to his body. “I hope you're not one of those people who think we're crazy for doing this."

  “Like Ambassador Croyd?” I said.

  “You met him? I'm sorry to hear that. He's exactly the kind of closed-minded bigot I would have expected the Dip Corps to send out here. They don't post anybody who wouldn't like to shut the Ballet down. He won't even keep an open mind. Just calls us crazy cultists and turns his back whenever we try to share what we know."

  “Sounds like him all right,” I said. “If you leave out his nudity."

  Dalmo clucked. “He's still doing that? Ah well. And what's your opinion, Mr. Royko? Of the dance, not the Ambassador's unmentionables."

  “I haven't made up my mind yet."

  “Sometimes, I don't think I've made up my mind either.” He expanded his limbs again. “This isn't an easy thing to want to do with your life. It isn't a normal thing to want. It's especially hard to justify when the people questioning you don't understand the only language capable of providing answers. But the explanation's in the Ballet. The Vlhani see it. Isadora saw it. Shal and I see it. I would be overjoyed to make you see it, too, Mister Roy."

  That's as far as he got. He froze in position before finishing my name, the unspoken “...ko” a breath stuck in his throat.

  I waited, but the rest of the sentence did not seem imminent. After a moment, I turned to Ch'tpok and saw tear-tracks on her cheeks that shone red from the setting Vlhani sun. Her smile was still there, still as unforced as before, but now informed by a sadness as complicated as the Ballet itself.

  She said: “Are you beginning to see the nature of his problem?"

  * * *

  4.

  Back inside the sleepcube, Ch'tpok described Dalmo's ailment as a matter of incompatible software.

  The dance that comprises everyday Vlhani language is easy enough for those born to it. The Ballet is no doubt more difficult, but it's just an advanced application of the same basic tools. They have the whips. They have neural pathways capable of manipulating them. They have brains evolved to parse a complex language that expresses multiple-level datastreams via the wave-form oscillations of their flexible limbs. They can understand it because it's how they're built. They evolved that way.

  We, on the other hand, evolved somewhere else.

  The first dance pilgrim, Isadora, demonstrated by vivid example that certain human beings were not only capable of understanding the Ballet, but somehow vital to its continuing development as the centerpiece of the Vlhani culture.

  This, of course, made no sense. Why would random individuals from a totally different species that evolved three hundred light years away have such a freakish understanding of a ritual that the greatest linguists and behaviorists of a dozen other sentient species were still unable to parse?

  It was impossible.

  It couldn't be true.

  There was no way for it to be true.

  But Isadora proved that it was.

  And the pilgrims who came after her showed that she wasn't a one-of-a-kind fluke. Most of them were not much more than the children Ambassador Croyd alleged them to be: adolescents, or post-adolescents. But alerted to the Ballet's existence by the holos and neurecs distributed throughout Hom.Sap space, before the Confederacy had a chance to appreciate the forces this would set in motion, all of these people saw something vital in the Ballet, something that had to be preserved—something that only their own participation could fix.


  Alas, even those humans who possessed the raw talent couldn't manage the dance without compensating for the limitations of human physiology.

  A Vlhani whip is many thousands of times more flexible than the most elastic cord available to humanity, with flexible segments less than a tenth of a millimeter apart, and muscle/joint combinations facilitating an almost unlimited range of movement between them. The average Vlhani possesses a dozen other whips just like it. Creating prosthetics for human use was a serious mechanical problem, but the operating software was a real bitch. Since we've never been wired to manipulate a thicket of limbs that bend in that many places, let alone to move them with such coordinated grace they can function as performance elements in a complex and demanding art form, humans driven to dance Vlhani need AI and bionics to manage it. The unknown agencies responsible for providing the Pilgrims with their Enhancements—agencies the Confederacy would have liked to identify and prosecute—dealt with the problem by installing networks of sophisticated micro-controllers, which constantly perform the millions of tiny calculations necessary to translate a human dancer's imagination into a Vlhani dancer's grace.

  It's a hideously complicated process that needs direct communication with the nervous systems involved.

  According to Ch'tpok, the system still had a long way to go.

  “The enhancements work,” Ch'tpok said. “Just not very well. Dalmo's nervous system resists the interface."

  “Tissue rejection?” AIsource Medical had licked that problem, but human surgeons still encountered it once in a while.

  “No,” Ch'tpok said. “Software problems."

  “Does it happen a lot?"

  “Too often,” she said. “Dalmo freezes up several times a day. Sometimes for hours. Data traffic while he plots his movements. He has to make millions of calculations just to choreograph a few seconds of Vlhani dance. Even normal human movement isn't easy for him, which is why he has so much trouble walking and talking. It's a fairly common problem among the pilgrims."

  “I never heard of it."

  “I'm not surprised. Your government may frown on it, but most of human space still glamorizes the Ballet, sees it as something beautiful and even transcendent. Your literature tends to focus on the famous successes like Shalakan or the lost, sainted Isadora.” She rolled her eyes in case I didn't get the sarcasm. “But about thirty percent of those who arrive here with enhancements also suffer some kind of degenerative neurological impairment."

  All the Pilgrims I'd seen, in the various creches and settlements I'd visited, had possessed whipdance enhancements in perfect order. “Where do they keep the disabled ones?"

  “Various places around Vlhan. Inside Vlhani hives. They tend not to mix."

  “And they can't be fixed? Ever?"

  “Hom.Sap medicine can't. Neither can Riirgaan. Even the AIsource Medics say it's impossible. Maybe the folks who originally made the installations could—but they don't provide any of these poor people with the means to contact them for warranty work."

  “Because they're afraid of being exposed and shut down,” I said.

  “You got it,” said Ch'tpok.

  It made grim sense. Vlhan may have been a sovereign world, unbound by human law, but the Hom.Sap Confederacy still remained dedicated to putting those responsible for facilitating the dance pilgrims out of business. Any pilgrim who left the planet could lead our agents right back to them.

  Even so, keeping the surgery underground still seemed a cold precaution in the face of somebody whose Enhancements seemed easier to classify as Disabilities. I peered out the window at Dalmo. He had become unfrozen, his limbs spiraling around him in gestures that communicated both exuberance and frustration. “Thirty percent."

  “Yes,” said Ch'tpok. “Most worse off than him, with nothing to show for it."

  I juggled half a dozen possible followup questions before settling on the certainty I heard in Ch'tpok's voice. It was the sound of a woman who lived close to this subject, and in her own personal way, considered it Sacred: the sound that had been in her voice all day. I put a few things together and came to a realization I'd been building since my arrival. “And you're not here to study Shalakan, are you? You're not even here to study the Vlhani. You're here for Dalmo."

  Her nod was placid. “That's right. I am."

  “Why?"

  “Because he's the visionary."

  The word surprised me. “Visionary?"

  “The only kind that means anything on this world. The Vlhani kind.” She held my solemn stare, then flashed her insistent smile again. “You'll see."

  * * *

  5.

  The hours were pleasant but frustrating. Ch'tpok turned out to be the kind of charming conversationalist who specializes in making sure little of value is actually said. I liked her. I had a good time speaking to her. But she provided me with precious little data I didn't already have.

  She apologized again for Shalakan's lateness. I told her again that it was okay.

  She described the nature of Dalmo's impairments in more detail than my own technophobic education allowed. I pretended to understand.

  She made the same grandiose claims about the Ballet's significance that the dance pilgrims and her own government's translation project had made a thousand times before. She failed to persuade me.

  At one point she quizzed me about my profession. Where had I been? What had I seen? Had I downloaded anything that got distributed in Riirgaan space? I told her about my biggest coup to date, a spectacular close-up view of a bloody political assassination so carefully orchestrated by the opposition party that its scheduled time and location were actually posted in advance via hytex. Then I dove back into my own questions. What I got in return was charm, and very little that differed from the Pilgrim party line.

  We heard the first Vlhani three hours after nightfall. People who don't live on planetary deserts can't really appreciate how dark it had become. With the exception of the dim circle of yellow light that surrounded the Dalmo/Shalakan residence, there was nothing, from unseen horizon to unseen horizon, that gave off or reflected any illumination at all. It imparted a terrific sense of isolation, more psychological than sensual, which made it impossible to catch on neurec even with the gains set on full: a lot like being in a locked closet without any doors.

  Nor could I gauge the distances of the sounds carried by the cool evening air—the whispering thwuf-thwuf-thwuf made by the pointed ends of many Vlhani whips spearing the earth for traction could have been either meters of kilometers away. I wondered how many there were and if they approached from all directions. Aware that this particular sound hadn't always meant good news for the human beings who heard it (as in the Embassy Massacre of a few years earlier), I even felt a twinge of fear.

  But Ch'tpok led me outside, to a spot only meters from the immobile Dalmo. His face, lit on one side by light from the sleepcube, was a pale yellow crescent, glistening where beads of sweat had collected during the day. His eyes had turned toward the desert to follow the thwuf-thwuf-thwuf moving closer with every breath.

  “Look,” Ch'tpok murmured.

  The first Vlhani became visible only as a spot of yellow light: an image of the sleepcube, reflected off the smooth chitin of its great round head. That head, almost an arm's-length across, came into focus a heartbeat later, bobbing along atop four striding whips while three others gestured wave-forms in the open air. It bypassed Dalmo, moved toward us, and undulated its whips at length.

  “A greeting,” Ch'tpok said. “An acknowledgment. An offer of peace."

  “What do we say back?"

  “We don't have to say anything. We're not wearing whip-harnesses.” That was a Riirgaan invention which, when worn, allowed diplomats to mimic Vlhani movement enough to permit some basic communication. “Unenhanced people are more or less mute as far as they're concerned, and that it would be silly to expect a response. As long as we do nothing to the contrary, it will assume we got the message."

  The V
lhani moved away from us and approached Dalmo. Extending its whips to their full length, lifting its head thirty meters into the air, it stepped over Dalmo and spiked the dirt on all sides of him, imprisoning him in a cage of its own sinuous limbs.

  Another yellow reflection popped out of the darkness. Another Vlhani. This one didn't bother to pay its respects to us, probably because its cousin had already taken care of that formality. This one went straight to the living structure that now enclosed Dalmo, and extended a pair of whips inside. They touched Dalmo's cheeks, then withdrew. The newcomer moved aside, not returning to the darkness, but instead waiting as a third and a fourth and a fifth Vlhani also emerged from the desert to caress the altered man's face.

  By the time the sixth Vlhani showed up, I knew I was in for a parade that might last a while. “What are they doing?"

  “What do they look like they're doing?” Ch'tpok asked.

  “I don't have the slightest idea. I don't know Vlhani."

  “I don't know it either; this thing,” she tapped the silver memory disk on her forehead, “gives me the best working reference my people could compile, but I don't need its help to understand what I'm seeing. Come on, you have eyes. What is this?"

  I didn't much like the sensation of being quizzed like a primary-schooler in the prep classes before his first upload. “Are they worshipping him?"

  “Good guess. But you're not quite right."

  “Where am I off?"

  “They're worshipping something."

  The Vlhani marching out of the desert all approached Dalmo with clear and unmistakable reverence. But what could be drawing them, if not Dalmo himself?