The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (17 page)

“Oh, gods, Valentin,” she said, letting him go. “Where did you get that? Don’t you know bootleg machines can be dangerous?”

But he had gone silent now. She recognized the look.

“Let’s go upstairs and get you ready for school. I’m going to have to nesh a message to M. Tioko, though. Valentin, if you were guising all night—!” She stopped, too full to go on. What was she going to do with him? Oh, gods, and she and Kori were supposed to leave soon for the rehearsal. What if Valentin was too sick to go to school and she had to stay home with him? At once, she felt ashamed of her own selfishness, and then angry at Valentin for acting this way. “Come on!” She grabbed his wrist and hauled him to his feet. He coughed a final time and followed her meekly.

“He hates me,” said Valentin suddenly.

“Who—? What? Anatoly Sakhalin? You’re feeling sorry for yourself, Valentin. He doesn’t hate you at all.” She voiced off the cellar light and they climbed the stairs and blinked hard in the morning sunlight.

“He can’t like me,” mumbled Valentin, and clammed up again.

“Where’ve you been?” demanded Anton when they slipped into the flat. In the camp, phantom jaran busied themselves about their morning tasks. Nipper had arrived and she waved at them and went back to carding wool, sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the fire. She had the baby now. Its pale head peeped out above the brightly woven sling.

“Go eat something,” said Ilyana.

“I’m not hungry,” said Valentin.

“You’ve been guising again,” said Anton.

“Shh!” hissed Ilyana, but Nipper was too far away to eavesdrop.

“I want to go play soccer tonight,” said Anton.

Valentin sighed. “Oh, all right, I’ll take you,” he said, paying out on the blackmail. “Let’s just go to school now, Anton. You’re not going to school today anyway, are you, Yana?”

“Valentin—”

“I’ll tell M. Tioko. I promise.”

She bit at her lip. “All right. But go. Before—”

“Ah, there you are, Yana,” said her father, emerging from the big tent. Valentin grabbed Anton by the wrist and led him away.

“Good morning,” said Ilyana cautiously. Vasil looked sunny this morning. That was always suspicious.

“It isn’t often you get a day off school and I get a day off rehearsal at the same time,” he said cheerfully. “How about I come with you today?”

The ceiling could have fallen in on her and she wouldn’t have felt any more crushed. “That would be wonderful, Father,” she said brightly. “But I don’t know if they’re running open rehearsals…”

“Oh, I’ve already cleared it with the stage manager. Don’t worry about that. Take Evdokia upstairs. She’s to sit with Portia until your mother wakes up. She’s very tired today.”

Sometimes, in her more uncharitable moments, Ilyana wondered if her father was really as solicitous and considerate as he seemed, or if it was all acting. A snap sounded from the door panel, and the double chime of a nesh message sounded.

“Receive sight only,” said Ilyana, and watched as Kori appeared, standing in the front of the door, her image so real, so three-dimensional, that she could just as well have been standing there. “Transmit sight,” added Ilyana, and Kori’s eyes tracked round the room and caught on Ilyana. She grinned.

“Uncle Gus and I are leaving now. You wanna skate over and come with us?”

Ilyana winced, wondering if Kori or her uncle knew about Vasil’s plans. “I gotta take Evdi upstairs, so I guess I’ll meet you there.”

“See you, then. And out.” Kori vanished.

Vasil agreed to take regular transport, thank the gods, but Ilyana knew people were staring at them. They got off the Underground at Covent Garden and walked to Covent Annex, which snuggled up behind the Royal Opera House. The porter at the stage door recognized Vasil at once—he had performed here when he was still with the Bharentous Repertory Company—and they let themselves into the back of the auditorium. Kori sat in the back row, watching as Uncle Gus and the other dancer chatted with the musicians, and two members of the tech crew paced and repaced the stage, marking out the light and nesh coordinates.

“First tech rehearsal?” Vasil asked Kori in a low voice.

If Kori was surprised to see him, she didn’t show it. “Neh. Second. Yesterday was first, but the new lighting system kept shattering the nesh so they’re trying different settings today. Uncle Gus says the designers and the nesh tech had a terrible argument yesterday but it was really only because the light designer’s grandmom just hit the Decline, so he needed to be angry with someone.”

“Is that Ajoa Sen?”

“Neh. He got the commission to do the first run at Concord, so he’s gone for at least two years. It’s Kwame Jones Bihua.”

“He did the lights for the
Mahabharata
,” said Vasil instantly. Ilyana had long since noted that her father had an astonishingly poor memory for people who couldn’t do him any good, especially if they had no essential power which they might turn to his benefit, but, conversely, he had total recall for anyone whom he deemed useful. He showed particular notice to lighting and costume designers. In return, they treated him well.

Uncle Gus glanced up, saw them, and lifted a hand in acknowledgment, then went back to his discussion. After a bit, they took their places, Gus stage right and his partner stage left. The woman dancing the part of Parvati was long-limbed and tall and voluptuous, a typical dancer, graceful and confident in a way that gave Ilyana the usual pangs of envy. She was barefoot, the soles of her feet in pale contrast to the lush mocha color of her skin, and she was dressed in a sari spangled with tiny shimmering mirrors, an anklet of bells around each ankle. She triggered her nesh, and
she
appeared center stage. Behind her, upstage center, stood a small shrine draped with a garland.

When Ilyana had first come to Earth, she had not been able to distinguish a person from her nesh, if both were indoors. It was easier outside. The right kind of light betrayed many things, including the lack of weight. Inside, Ilyana had learned subtle cues: For instance, the mirrors sparkled and flashed to angles of light that didn’t match the way the lights illuminated center stage. The dancer stamped her feet and spun, both of her spun, and the mirrors shot splinters of light all through the auditorium while the bells shook and rang. She stopped and bells whispered to silence.

Gus triggered his nesh. He wore plain rehearsal clothes, and he stood a foot downstage so that his nesh stood alone in front of his partner’s nesh while he turned once and twice. They both squinted expectantly toward the back of the auditorium. An unspoken command reached them. Gus took one step back, and the two neshes intermingled. It looked strange at first, Gus superimposed on the woman, she on him, and yet each separate on either side. Their stillness radiated out like a force in the hall. Ilyana held her breath. Then a drum opened a beat, a sitar and flute entered, and Shiva and Parvati began to dance.

Ilyana rested her arms along the silken back of the seat in front of her and stared. The Hindu god Shiva was many things; among others, he was Lord of Dance, who, dancing, set the universe in motion. He was also a renowned lover. His second wife, Parvati (who was the reincarnation of his first wife), was so beautiful that he loved her divine body without respite for a thousand years. Ancient artisans in India carved statues of Shiva and Parvati integrated into a single body. Thus had Uncle Gus named this piece “Ardhanarishvara,” the Lord whose Half is Woman.

As he and his partner danced in perfect separation so their nesh dance commingled, blending together until their arms became the four arms of a single being, their bodies sculpted and flowing so that at times they were hermaphroditic and at times sexless and at times a seamless unity, as any divine beings might love, coalescing into a new form that partook half of the female and half of the male. Parvati’s braid, as thick as a child’s arm, floated up as she—as they—spun, wrapping around her—around their—waist like a belt, like a symbol of their joining, and fell back again. Their hands made the most expressive gestures, nuanced and emotional, speaking of longing and love and bliss. Ilyana was amazed by how strong and supple the dancers’ feet were.

Ilyana forgot time, caught in the endless cycle of birth and death, destruction and rebirth, union and sundering, the melody itself repeating with different rhythmic intonations and the dance repeating and changing and then her breath caught and suddenly it was over.

Two new people walked onto the stage and an intense discussion ensued. Ilyana sat back and grinned at Kori.

“That,” proclaimed Kori, “is why I’m gonna be a scientist, not a dancer. I could never be anything but Augustus Gopal’s niece. Isn’t he grand?”

Ilyana realized that her cheeks were hot. “Do you think that’ll get past the Protocol Office?” she asked, not that the dance was explicit, just that it suggested so much.

Kori grunted. “Already cleared. It’s not as if they really touch, after all.” They remained silent for a moment. Then Kori added, in a very low voice, “Do you think that’s what it’s like?”

Ilyana’s cheeks burned. “I dunno!” she retorted. A second later she realized that her father was missing.

She looked around, but he wasn’t in any part of the auditorium that she could see. “Where’d he go?”

“Shh,” said Kori. “They’re starting again.”

The music began again. The dancers started, but now they worked in fits and starts, fine-tuning the nesh and the lighting and whatever else they had to niggle with. Vasil did not return. After a while, Ilyana leaned up against Kori and whispered, “I gotta go use the loo,” and crept out like a spy or a refugee.

She didn’t have to use anything, but it bothered her that her father had vanished like that. Why would he make such a business of coming with her and then disappear? If he had wanted to act the whore with Gus Gopal he certainly couldn’t do that with the dancer on the stage the whole time; not that Uncle Gus had ever shown any sign of being interested in Vasil. Ilyana often suspected that her father simply did not
believe
that any person could be uninterested in him. Maybe that was why he was so attractive: sort of like a self-fulfilled prophecy.

She slunk back into the dressing rooms, but there was no one there. She tried below, remembering the layout of this theater from the times the Bharentous Repertory Company had performed here, with Vasil as part of the company, and she and Valentin had explored the place. Those had been good days, before Valentin had discovered neshing. Or at least, most of those days had been good. The Company had given Vasil stability and Karolla some measure of support, and Owen had always been able to squash Vasil’s worst pretensions without alienating him.

She climbed the metal stairs to the attic storage rooms, not expecting to find him—why would he come up here?—but recalling with sudden clarity the musty smell of the costume attic where she and Valentin would hide, burrowing beneath mounds of old moldering costumes and choking down giggles when their father or Yomi, the stage manager, came looking for them. Old habit made her cautious and quiet.

The hallway was unlit. She found the door more by touch than by sight. It was an old swing style door. With a slight pressure from her fingers, it opened silently into the vast murky loft of the costume attic. A thin slit of windows cut through at the eaves. Dust spun like snow there, blending into twilight and thence into the swollen shadows that filled the rest of the space. Racks of clothes like lines of summer trees ranged along one side of the space. Barrows rose behind them, burial mounds for forgotten costumes. Some creature was rustling around up here, a mouse maybe or a cat or…

Her eyes adjusted at last.

Like Shiva and Parvati, commingling in nesh, two people stood back among the costumes, intertwined, kissing. Dust settled in silence, leavened by the soft rustling of their feet, shifting, and their breath forming into sounds that were not quite words and yet not only sighs. One was her father. She knew his shape instantly. The other she did not recognize, except that the cut of the clothing he wore seemed oddly familiar but unidentifiable in the dimness. Did they not realize she was here? Or did they simply not care?

Ilyana had seen her father flirt. She had even seen him insinuate a hand on a lover’s arm or thigh, a half-hidden, intimate gesture, always brief. But she had never seen him actually in the act before. She was mortified. She couldn’t stop watching. She just stood there, rooted into the ground, staring through the darkness at them, at the way a hand snaked up a thigh and buttocks to come to rest on the small of the back, at the way a finger interposed between lips and was itself kissed and made part of their joining, at the way their bodies flowed against each other, pressing, moving, seeking a new fit.

Vasil’s lover arched back just enough so he could play with the buttons on Vasil’s tunic, and somehow, with the angle altering subtly, Ilyana felt as if she had just succumbed to a sudden hallucination. A dark-haired, bearded jaran man, undressing her father with slow sensuality. It couldn’t be… except she knew those clothes. But no other jaran had left Rhui. The other man had Vasil’s tunic half off. Ilyana didn’t know what to do. If she moved now, they would surely notice her. If she didn’t move, then she would see everything, things no child ever ought to know about their parents, her father and Ilya Bakhtiian—

Ilyana’s heart pounded in her ears like the stamp of feet. For an instant, she could believe it, even though she knew it wasn’t true. For an instant, she thought it was still her heart beating so loudly.

The door swung open behind her, just missing her back, and a wash of noise and the press of bodies bore in behind it and thrust her forward as on a rising tide into the room.

A light snapped on, flooding the attic with unforgiving brightness.

M. Pandit came to rest not three steps from Ilyana. She had a half-dozen thugs dressed as quisling officers with her.

“Separate them,” she said in a frigid voice.

The thugs swarmed past Ilyana, but by the time they reached the two men, Jazir had already jumped away from Vasil. Pandit’s husband was indeed dressed as a jaran rider: scarlet shirt, black trousers, black boots. Under the hard light, he looked absurd.