The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Ch'tpok moaned with frustration. “Think, Paul. Vlhani don't believe in gods, as far as we can tell, and they're far too smart to worship humans."

  “Riirgaans, then?"

  She laughed. “Nice try. No, that wasn't species chauvinism. They don't worship us either."

  Us, I thought. Another indication of how deeply she identified with her adopted people."Then what?"

  “Come on. It's not hard to figure out. What's their big ritual? The only thing they find sacred?"

  “The Ballet?"

  “See? It wasn't hard."

  “But Dalmo's not in the Ballet."

  “That's right. And he won't ever be. He can't process the variables that quickly."

  “Then why would they give him such special attention?"

  “Because he's still the dance."

  I still didn't get it, and I'd run out of time to complain about it. Because the next shape to emerge from the darkness was Shalakan herself.

  * * *

  6.

  My briefing on Shalakan had included holos taken on the day the Vlhani first selected her.

  Like most of the humans chosen, she was barely out of her childhood at the time. She had been a skinny kid not far into her late teens, with eyes too close together and a chin that came to a point; the brief interviews she'd permitted at the time had painted her as a dazed laureate indeed, neither honored nor thrilled but instead overwhelmed that the future she had sought was hers. Back then, her answers to even the simplest questions had been a series of inarticulate sentence fragments isolated by oppressive silences. She'd ultimately chosen to express her feelings the Vlhani way ... and when she'd danced, following an alien choreography that shouldn't have resonated among humans, she had seemed not only Enhanced but Divine. Her arms and legs, human enough at rest, had elongated and circled her in great, swooping spirals so filled with purpose that it was next to impossible to watch them, even on holo, and not wonder if there was music the average human being was unable to hear.

  That had been two years ago.

  It was now several surgeries later. None had anything to do with augmenting her fitness for the Vlhani ballet; she'd possessed all that equipment at the moment of choosing. The overwhelming impression given by the newest changes, between the fresh green glow of her eyes and the amoebic tattoos in constant motion beneath the exposed skin of her arms and legs, was shallow exoticism for its own sake. There had been imaginative things done to her breasts, her nose, her hands, her hair, all of which had given her a precious, fussed-over beauty of the sort desired by anybody who courts fame above all things. But as she approached her husband, her flexible arms twisting above her head in the wave-forms of Vlhani dance, the changes seemed less vain than defiant: bids to accentuate her humanity even as she gave herself up to this most alien form of speech.

  Then she spotted Ch'tpok and me, patted Dalmo's arm, and moved toward us, her enhanced legs bearing her upper body with grace so total that she didn't even seem to be walking. She was more like a princess being transported by palanquin.

  She nodded Ch'tpok's way, using a Riirgaan honorific: “Hello again, Learned One.” Something had been done to her voice too; it had been doubled, trebled, giving every word she spoke the resonance of a greek chorus.

  “Hello,” Ch'tpok said. She still smiled, but now there was no warmth behind it; it was just the polite rictus of a woman turning civility into a putdown.

  Shalakan turned to me next. “You're the neurec man, right?"

  “That's right,” I said, calculating how all this body tinkering would play for my mass audience. “Paul Royko."

  She shook my hand; though I knew hers to be artificial, there was nothing about its touch that would have alerted me had I not already known. It felt real enough, perhaps even delicate: warmer than the usual touch, but that could be easily explained as leftover heat from a day spent beneath the desert sun. Even so, the moment of contact felt more like a caress: a combination of the added flexibility her enhancements provided her, and what was probably a deliberate attempt to spike her sex appeal for the neurec. I saw through it at once, and didn't care: it still worked on me. “I'm so sorry I'm late, Mr. Royko. The Ballet is fluid, you know. It always requires adjustments, up to the very moment of performance."

  I almost coughed. “So I've been told."

  “It will be worth it the day we dance,” she said. “You'll see."

  The passion in her eyes was that of a woman eager for the moment of her own extinction; it ended my momentary attraction, but only just. She was that good.

  I was certain this would be a popular neurec.

  “I wasn't told how much you'd changed since your last holos."

  She glanced at the recombinant tattoo extending pseudopods along one arm. “It's nonsense, I know. Vanity. The spiders have no use for such things, but I thought it might be useful."

  “Why?"

  “Because, as a showman like yourself should know, it's precisely the kind of flashy surface detail that fascinates human beings. However long it takes the various recordings of this performance to get past customs—and you know they will, Mr. Royko; the Confederate embargo's a joke—looking like this will ensure them the proper degree of attention in Hom.Sap circles."

  “And that's important to you? The fame?"

  “No,” she said. “But the next generation of human dancers has to come from somewhere."

  Her gaze flickered toward Ch'tpok. I saw no warmth in either that look or the look Ch'tpok gave her in return. I got, and recorded, the clear impression that only the respect prevented the unsheathing of claws. Then she addressed me again: “Whatever happens after tonight, Mr. Royko, I hope you take the time to see Dalmo at work. I know it's easy to underestimate him because of his problems. But he's the dance."

  “Chuppock said the same thing. But she wouldn't tell me what she meant."

  “Maybe she couldn't, Mr. Royko. Hom.Sap Mercantile's such an imprecise language. Maybe the concept would make more sense in Vlhani. But that's still pretty much all there is to it, in words or choreography. Dalmo is the dance."

  I struggled to get that. “Are you saying he personifies it?"

  “No,” she said. “Only that he understands it. That he knows it all the way from the beginning, and all the way to its inevitable end. All its thousands of performances, before and after. And everything that comes after this point, won't happen without him."

  I tried a retreat to the story I knew about: Shalakan herself. “Can you tell me if you'll—"

  Shalakan pressed the tip of her index finger to my lips: it tasted of equal parts human skin and desert sand, not at all the synthskin compound I knew her flesh to be. “Spend some time with him later. Tell him it was his accomplishment, not mine. Tell him I danced because he can't."

  Then she returned to her husband. She wrapped her arms around him: a phrase that would have been a mere hug when performed by most women but was pure literal description when attributed to her. Her arms encircled him once, twice, three times, looping under his arms and over his shoulders and back around his body again. She lashed herself to him so tightly she might have feared being torn away by hurricane winds, and she kissed his lips, his chin, and his shoulders, moving down along the frozen arch of his body with passion that made her malleable spine ripple like a banner. He responded, too: throwing off his paralysis, sinking toward the ground in a moment of absolute surrender, then bracing his limbs against the dirt and lifting both his wife and his himself a full three meters from the ground where we stood.

  For me, it was like seeing Sleeping Beauty, revived by the touch of her own true love ... except with the genders reversed and the participants altered into something more Vlhani than human.

  It was simultaneously the most repugnant and the most erotic thing I'd ever seen.

  “They'll make love now,” Ch'tpok said.

  And that was the most unneeded explanation. “Looks like it."

  I made no other move.

&nb
sp; She placed a hand on my shoulder. “They're still human, Paul. They don't particularly mind if the Vlhani watch; they know the Vlhani don't care much one way or the other. But we should show them some privacy."

  I'll confess to a moment's hesitation. The temptation to record this particular coitus for neural playback was so overwhelming it burned. But even a neurec slinger is subject to appeals for decency. The words were resentful, but they did come. “All right."

  “They'll probably talk to you tomorrow morning."

  Dalmo and Shalakan were all over each other now, thirty meters up: bobbing up and down atop legs like stilts. It looked perverse and grotesque and epic and oddly beautiful. Despite all I would learn and all I would come to understand, it would be the only time in my life I'd ever wish to be Enhanced their way.

  After we re-entered the sleepcube, and Ch'tpok activated a white sound generator to block out the noises from outside, I had the thought which banished my envy forever. “That's goodbye for them, isn't it?"

  Ch'tpok, who had been getting us some buzzpops from her supplies, nodded. “Yes. She'll be going off with these Vlhani shortly after dawn. They're all headed for ... you know."

  “Damn.” I accepted the narcotic but didn't patch any to my flesh. “Won't Dalmo be able to keep her company along the way?"

  “In theory, he's allowed to follow along at a respectful distance. Knowing him, he'll freeze up every few kilometers and get left behind. My government will offer him a skimmer ride to the Ballet as a courtesy (that is, if he even wants to watch), but it doesn't really matter either way as far as his relationship with his wife is concerned; once she leaves here, he won't be permitted any communication with her ever again.” She flipped the buzzpop and slapped more against her bare skin; certainly more than I'd ever taken myself, even in the long hard times after a download. Her eyes glazed. “I really thought I'd be all right with this; it's all I've been thinking of since I came to live with them..."

  I patched a buzz just to be companionable, and bit back a grimace at the feedback. Partaking isn't really recommended for a neurec slinger in record mode. “They're your friends."

  Another daunting sniff by Ch'tpok. “Dalmo is."

  “I noticed you didn't like Shalakan."

  Now, a moment's distance. “I don't dislike her. But we're not friends."

  “Why not?"

  “She's a little too swallowed up by what she intends to do. Everything's about getting ready for her dance. Even her relationship with Dalmo is less about two people supporting each other than it is about providing support for her legend. Until now, I wasn't sure she would have anything left for him even at the end. I was hoping she would, but I didn't think—” She spread her hands, and sat down a little too heavily. “I don't know. Maybe that little display outside is for your benefit, too."

  “What do you believe?"

  She considered that. “I believe they're geniuses who also happen to be flawed human beings. But it's so hard to watch what it's costing them that I sometimes find myself wishing my people could come up with their own phrase for God Damn It. I get so tired of repeating the Hom.Sap version."

  To hell with the feedback. I turned off the recording and patched as much buzzpop as I could stomach. “Yeah. So do I."

  She showed enough class to not look surprised. But her eyes were questioning.

  I heaved a deep breath. “You know the dumbest cliche about slingers? That we're unfeeling sensation mongers. That we're just sterile conduits, piping sights and sounds to the masses.” I took another buzz, shivered, and went on: “The truth is, most of us stumble into the biz running away from feelings we no longer want."

  “Does it work?"

  “Not really. We're not just paid to see it; we're paid to feel it. We have to be sensitive to make it real. We sometimes have to feel it so hard it hurts to go on. Otherwise, it's just pointless, sterile crap."

  She saw from my eyes that there had to be more. “And?"

  “And eventually we see so much we get jaded. We wear grooves in our empathy. And our networks start sending us to bigger and nastier places—catastrophes, civil wars, even assassinations like the one I told you about—just to break through to that part of us which is still capable of being moved.” I cast a thumb in the direction of the sleepcube flap. “Like the Ballet. Like watching two people like that destroy themselves in the service of a cause I can't even understand. So yeah. I know what it's like to get tired of saying, ‘Oh My God.’”

  Ch'tpok chewed on that, then blinked through her tears and switched off the white sound, allowing an occasional gasp or whisper to make its way through the few short meters and thin layer of fabric that separated the two people inside the sleepcube from the two bidding farewell outside.

  A moment more and she plunged us both into matching darkness.

  And, settling by my side, said: “I think I'll go insane if all I'm allowed to do is listen."

  After a moment, I said, “Me, too."

  She nestled a little closer. “You won't take it too personally, will you? If we do something to pass the time?"

  “Not if you won't."

  I was a slinger, after all. And slingers were all about enjoying sensations without allowing themselves to be touched by them.

  * * *

  7.

  What was it like with her? Considering that it was our first time, and the second was a decade away?

  I'd like to say that we took it as more than a moment's distraction from the magnitude of the parting taking place a few short meters away. But I'd be lying. The truth was that neither of us was really there. I was accustomed to considering every sensation, every moment of experience, as an element in a larger story, that needed proper manipulation in order for all the proper notes to be played. I may have thought I liked her, but like all slingers I lived in the service of novelty, considered it my stock in trade, and was too detached, too jaded, to see my few moments with Ch'tpok as much more than that.

  As for Ch'tpok, I don't think she really cared about me being there at all: I was just a useful emotional anaesthetic that didn't work as well as expectations. I tasted the anger in the form of the tears on her cheeks, and though I could not understand the Riirgaan phrases she whispered both during and afterward, I could still tell they were not directed toward me. I would later wonder if they were words she wished Dalmo could hear, but I don't think that's what they were. They were curses, muttered by the lost.

  Much later on, when we were both floating on the edges of sleep, the sounds from outside the sleepcube had faded, Ch'tpok placed a hand on my chest and murmured another Riirgaan word: “Darrr'pakh."

  I didn't open my eyes. “What?"

  “Riirgaan word. Means teacher. A very special kind of teacher.” Her index finger found a hair on my chest, played curling games with it. “He teaches a lesson that all Riirgaan children need to learn, and learn well, in order to earn the rights of a free adult in their society. It's a difficult lesson, I understand; it takes a full year, by their calendar, and some children fail. I won't say what happens to them, except to say that their productive lives are, essentially, over; they don't get educations, they don't get jobs, they don't mix with the general population, they don't have futures. They don't get a second chance."

  A breeze from somewhere cooled sweat on my forehead. “Did you take the course, Chuppock?"

  “Of course. I was legally Riirgaan, and bound by Riirgaan tradition."

  “And?"

  She tapped my chest again. “I was also a human being, and I failed."

  The regret in her voice was so palpable I searched for her other hand, found it, gave her a reassuring squeeze. “But you're here. They didn't do ... whatever they do to the others."

  “That's because I'm human. They knew that I couldn't. They couldn't penalize me for that. But they also knew that I could never be Riirgaan too unless I was at least given the chance to try. The end result is that I'm one of them all right ... but I'm also the only one who
never had to meet the one sacred standard that otherwise allowed no exceptions. So I'm also always apart."

  I groped for something to say about that. “Maybe it's not the right place for you."

  “Maybe.” She let that hang for a while, perhaps challenging me to come up with something more relevant to say ... then accepted my silence and sat up, facing the sleepcube wall as if hoping to see what was happening on the other side. I reached for her but she was just out of reach; and when I didn't try to pull her back, she moved still farther away, receding into shadow. Her profile became a distant crescent floating in darkness, like the narrowest phase of a moon searching for the place it was meant to orbit.

  * * *

  8.

  I never got my interview. I never learned Shalakan's real name, or where she came from, or how she'd reached the decision that this one ritual was more important than any human endeavor. I probably shouldn't have expected to do so; in those early years of the Human-Vlhani connection, the dancers made a point of rejecting their pasts. Like her predecessors Isadora and Gabriel and Xavis, who had taken this journey before her, or Melaniherz, whose own infamous performance would follow, Shalakan admitted to nothing but humanity ... and she entered the dance knowing that ten thousand worlds would pretend to be her birthplace.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, staring through a thin layer of sleepcube canvas at a sun still bright enough to glare, she and the Vlhani had already fled for the Ballet now only four days away. I lifted the still-sleeping Ch'tpok's arm off my chest, fell back into the same clothes from the night before, and emerged from the sleepcube to find the desert bright, stiflingly hot, and empty but for one. That one, Dalmo, sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at a horizon that had probably swallowed his departing wife hours before. Though his eyes were dry, his hands still drew obsessive patterns in the dirt.

  I might have thrown a fit about broken promises, but there wasn't any point. This man, misguided or not, had just lost a lot more. So I sat down beside him, and for a minute or so shared a companionable silence. In this light, it was easy to see that he was just a kid, not much older than Shalakan, but his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and the sense of unavoidable loss made him look ancient, as well: like a man who had progressed from childhood to dotage without a stop in between.