Six Moon Dance (12 page)

She tried never to think of Mama One’s house or of infant Ellin. She had chosen to dance, she had been bred to dance, but she had not chosen to leave Mama One. It wasn’t quite so painful to remember Mama Two, for that time had been spent here, inside History House, and she still saw Mama Two from time to time. She had felt safe and connected with Mama One and Mama Two. She hadn’t really felt safe since.

At six every morning the bells in the dancers’ section would ring to introduce la patronne de ballet, her bony face protruding from the walls above each narrow bed, mouth bent into an unmeaning smile, eyes half shut as she crooned, “Did we have good rest, mes enfants? Are we ready for le jour meilleur, the best day ever?”

To which all the dancers, Ellin included, replied aloud with the cheery voice and happy face the occasion required:

“Oh, oui, Madame. Bon! The best day ever.” Audio pick-ups recorded each response and graded it for wakefulness and enthusiasm as well as for any betrayal of incipient anarchy. Fortunately, the view screens weren’t set to pick up silent rebellion. They didn’t see fingers crossed behind backs or under sheets, or hear the subvocalized, “Corpulent likelihood, Madumb-dumb ballet-hoo. In a swine’s auricular orifice!”

The cheery response to Madame’s greeting still echoed in the cubicles when the morning fanfare sounded, segueing into march music as drum and bugle urged on the jagged reds and yellows of the walls, sawing away at any remaining languors. In less than half the time allotted for hygiene and grooming, Ellin had her wealth of silver hair braided and piled on top of her head and had moved from the sonic cleansers to the service module where she un-racked new disposables: tunic, trousers, slippers. The slight limp she’d had last rotation was quite gone. The injured toes were totally healed. Today she would return to dancing.

She hadn’t been idle. She’d kept up her exercises, and she’d performed her alternate role. Everyone had alternate roles. If you were injured and couldn’t fulfil your primary role, you still had to make every day the best day ever! Otherwise you’d find yourself out of work, and out of work could mean dead. Since Ellin had been raised in at wentieth-century matrix, her alternate roles were all in the twentieth century. This last one had been an elderly shopkeeper, Charlotte Perkins, in the small American town of Smithy’s Corners. She’d been Mrs. Perkins for the whole rotation, which was enough.

Awaiting the breakfast gong, Ellin used the basin for a barre as she bent and stretched. Being Charlotte Perkins was easy on her feet, but it had bored her into knots! Smiling, waiting on people, answering their really dumb questions about the twentieth century. “You mean they didn’t have a Reproductive Center?” and, “Where’s the transporter station?” The days without the discipline of class and performance had left her feeling logy and disoriented, as though all her muscles had turned to cloth. She had to get back to the dance before she lost her mind! Besides, if she didn’t, they might assign her coveted role of Dorothy to someone else!

The gong reverberated; the doors snapped open; the music got louder; the marching tempo carried the dancers out into the hall and thence past the gimlet-eyes of Par Reznikoff, Madame’s deputy in this little bit of heaven. Ellin carefully kept people between her and him when she passed him on her way to the service counter. He wanted to apply for a reproductive contract with her, and she wasn’t interested, no matter what it paid.

At the moment, all she was interested in was food. She had to cut intake when she wasn’t dancing, but the lowered calories left her feeling hungry all the time. She was so preoccupied with making her breakfast last long enough to calm her hunger pains that she hadn’t finished the liquid meal when the work bell clanged. Stage-hands and crew, already in uniform, streamed past the dancers’ refectory toward the shafts that would drop them to the lower floors.

She was still holding the cup to her lips when Par came swiveling through the morning mob and took her arm.

“Elleeen,” he purred, making an indecency out of her name. “You are looking lovely this morning.” He began walking her toward the shafts.

“Par.” She nodded, smiling, trying to hold her body away from the intimate contact he intended. No point in being nasty to him. He was Madame’s little pet, and he’d get even if she did.

“You have a chance, perhaps, to think about the offer I made?” He cocked his head, eyes slitted, lips pursed, as though he were sucking an answer out of her, the answer he wanted.

She kept her voice calm, though she felt anything but. “I don’t have the energy, Par. I’m just getting over an injury, and I don’t think now’s a good time for me.”

“It’s a lot of money, Ellin. You’ve got AA genes, pity not to use them for something.”

Well, damn it, she was using them for something, couldn’t the idiot see that? She smiled, shook her head as she tried to look as uninteresting as possible. “Sorry, Par….”

He made a moue at her, patted her shoulder, and wandered away, leaving her at the end of the line. He wouldn’t leave it alone. He’d be back, and next time he’d be pushy. She needed a strategy to discourage him, but at the moment she couldn’t come up with one.

A dozen more pods came and went before she snagged an empty one, darted into it, felt the shoulder and waist restraints grip her firmly, felt the neck brace fit itself from shoulder to head as she said, “Wardrobe, Twentieth-Century America, the Arts” and remembered too late she was still holding the cup.

She gasped as the pod fell straight down, then shifted left, right, made a quick spiral, a long horizontal run at top speed, then a quick stop that threw the last of her breakfast all over her. Ellin gasped. She had never been able to breathe in transit. Now she felt like a dropped egg!

When the pod side popped open, she almost fell out, steadying herself on the wall, hearing the pod chant, “Make it the best day ever,” as it zipped away.

Why did Par want her? It was true that History House paid big bonuses to the women characters who were willing to let tourists observe the actual births. Ellin only knew one person who’d done natural pregnancy and public birth, her friend from infant fosterage, Tutlia Omae, formerly known as Tutsy, who had actually had six babies, earning enough in seven years not only to pay off her contract but also to buy tickets off-world for herself and the two youngest children! Of course, not everyone would have been allowed to have six children, but Tutsy had AA genetics on both sides and the quota for American Indigenes was always scraping the bottom. Also, Tutsy had worked in one of History House’s most profitable exhibits,
Old Earth, Cowboys and Indians!
and she got hardship bonuses all the time. Ellin had often wondered what there was about sitting around a fire and eating half raw meat that made it more of a hardship than dancing. At least when Tutsy stepped out of the cleanser cubicle at night, her day’s work was all washed away, no harm done. When Ellin cleaned up at the end of the day, her feet were often still bleeding.

Being pregnant might be profitable, but Ellin wouldn’t care for it, no thank you! All that bloating and being sick! All those months unable to dance! She’d have to gain ten or twenty pounds even to be fertile, and she hated the idea. Her body was precious. It was her, all she had, and she didn’t want it changed. The idea was ridiculous. Sex was ridiculous, despite the stories people told about dancers, about their probable sexual habits, spending so many hours cooped up together. That was a laugh. Mostly the female dancers were too tired and half starved to even think about sex. Some of them didn’t even menstruate.

She was still carrying the cup when she entered Wardrobe. Taking tableware was against the rules, so she sneaked down the closest aisle to her own dressing area, hid the cup on her locker shelf behind the wigs, and wadded the wet disposables directly into the chute, cursing beneath her breath. She’d expected to get at least three or four days out of this set, and here they were, ruined. Disposables were charged to her contract. Meals were charged to her contract. There was no charge for housing, but then, one couldn’t really call a cubicle housing.

Getting into the Dorothy costume took only a moment, the blue-and-white checked skirt, the little apron, the puff-shouldered, high-necked blouse with all the buttons. The blouse had been designed for Ellin, with a high neck and long, slender arms. She took the Dorothy wig from its stand and held it ready as she entered the name of the character in the makeup frame that gaped in the locker door and thrust her face into it, holding her breath while it went dabby-dab-dab, plucky-pluck at her. She focused her mind on the Yellow Brick Road sequence, summoning the music, feeling the role, the stretch and release of muscle, the gathering and loosing of sinew and strength.

When the mirror dinged and she stepped back, someone behind her looked over her shoulder into the mirror. Snow Olafson, who’d sneaked up on her and now lifted an eyebrow, giving her a smoky look.

He whispered, “I hear you and Par are signing a contract.”

She pulled the Dorothy wig over her hair, pushing her stray locks up under it, as she snapped, “Don’t be silly, Snow. That’s ridiculous.”

“Oh, not the way he tells it.”

“He can tell it any way he likes. I am not interested in a reproductive contract with anybody. I’m just beginning to get lead roles, why would I frangle it up?”

He blinked at her like a big cat. “Well, Ellin, if you do decide to … frangle … keep me in mind.”

And he moved lazily away, glancing at her over his shoulder. Snow danced the role of the Wizard—not at all the kind of Wizard who had been in Ellin’s book, but then she wasn’t exactly the kind of Dorothy who had been in the book, either—and the two of them had a long, sultry pas de deux in Act II. Snow was not a contractee. Snow had been hired from outside, and the word was he had a sole-use reproductive contract with two licensed nordic type women in the Wisconsin Urbop. So why was he here flirting with her? Why did men get themselves into sole-use reproductive contracts if they didn’t intend to honor the terms? That’s all Ellin needed, getting dragged into some contract violation case.

She put him out of mind as she put the finishing touches on her wig, tied her shoes, and padded down the stairs. There was a rehearsal studio behind the stage where they could warm up. Below her, she could see Snow arguing with Beise Tonkoff, the choreographer. Probably about that really ugly sequence in the last act, where Dorothy had to choose between staying with the wizard or going home. Both she and Snow hated it. It was ugly! Beise swore it was the same as written originally for the ballet, back right around the end of the twentieth century or start of the twenty-first, though back then it was called Homage to Dorothy, based on the book Ellin had been given.

Snow looked up, caught her eye, and grimaced. Her inclination was to stay away from Snow and never to confront anyone, but in this case …

Beise was saying, “But I can’t simply change something that’s authentically in period….”

“It isn’t,” Ellin said. “There’s nothing authentic about the ballet. In the first place, in the book and the two-dee, the wizard is a fat old man and Dorothy is a girl, a child. They never dance together at all. In an authentic version, Dorothy would dance with the metalman, the strawman, the beastman, and possibly one of the witches, but not with the wizard. So for heaven’s sake, look at it, and let us fix it!”

He sighed, much put upon. “What in particular?”

“The whole sequence! Look at it. The good witch has just told Dorothy about the red slippers, and Dorothy comes forward, sur les pointes, arms widely back, raising the working foot a little higher each time, looking down at the slipper. She’s amazed. She does a grande battement, ending with an attitude an avant, to get the closest possible look at the slipper. That’s fine, but all this time the Wizard just stands there like a lump, waiting for the pirouettes, and then he walks around her like a robot, clunk, clunk, clunk. He’s not the metalman, for heaven’s sake! Both characters look robotic, and there’s no motivation for what he’s doing! He ought to follow her, then as she pirouettes, he should reach out to her. Maybe a slow lunge and glissade. Something! If he wants Dorothy to stay, his body ought to say so.”

Snow raised his eyebrows at her and grinned, leaning toward her yearningly.

She ignored his intent and said, “Yes, maybe like that. Then when we get to the lifts, it’s up down, up down, like someone doing exercises, and Dorothy’s not even paying attention! The whole sequence makes him look like a robot with ugly legs.”

Snow scowled at that, and she quickly turned away. That ought to do it. Snow was very vain about his legs. He wouldn’t let go of Beise from now until the end of time. As she stepped away, she caught the director’s amused eyes on her. He’d heard her.

Well, maybe it was amusing, but dance was her life, her only love. In her head it was a continuous stream, with eddies and falls and high, sparkling splashes. Certainly it shouldn’t ever just
glug, glug, glug
, like a plugged up pipe! Her dream of herself, the dream she’d had since a child, had no glugs in it. When it was right, her body moved without herself being aware of her body, as though she were dissolved in the music.

She walked back across the stage while various back-scenes flicked into and out of existence in the rearstage matrix: fields where the strawman was found; the forest where the metalman appeared; the line of stone where the beastman appeared roaring in the red glow of the sunset, dark against a burning sky. The backscenes used in History House shows were among the best ones anywhere because they were based on tapes of actual landscapes, as they had appeared before all the atectonic land areas were leveled and domed. Somehow computer-generated scenery never looked as real.

She reached the wings just as the tornado flicked into being behind her, first far off, then coming closer and closer while Dorothy and her little dog ran for the house…. Then off and away, the house flying, Dorothy and Toto in it.

Sometimes children were brought backstage to meet the dancers. They always wanted to meet Toto, too, but of course he was only a holo. There were no dogs anymore.