Four for Tomorrow Part 24

Was she weighing the net, judging the size of the catch? And what for? The books said nothing of fishers on Mars. Especially of men. They said that some G.o.d named Malann had spat, or had done something disgust- ingdepending on the version you read), and that life had gotten underway as a disease in inorganic matter.

They said that movement was its first law, its first law, and that the dance was the only legitimate reply to the inorganic . . . the dance's quality its justification,- fica- tion . . . and love is a disease in organic matter-Inor- ganic matter?

181.

136 I shook my head. I had almost been asleep.

"M'narra."

I stood and stretched. Her eyes outlined me greedily now. So I met them, and they dropped.

"I grow tired. I want to rest awhile. I didn't sleep much last night."

She nodded, Earth's shorthand for "yes," as she had learned from me.

"You wish to relax, and see the explicitness of the doc- trine of Locar in its fullness?"

"Pardon me?"

"You wish to see a Dance of Locar?"

"Oh." Their d.a.m.ned circuits of form and periphrasis here ran worse than the Korean! "Yes. Surely. Any time it's going to be done I'd be happy to watch."

I continued, "In the meantime, I've been meaning to ask you whether I might take some pictures-"

"Now is the time. Sit down. Rest. I will call the mus- cians."

She bustled out through a door I had never been past.

Well now, the dance was the highest art, according to Locar, not to mention Havelock Ellis, and I was about to see how their centuries-dead philosopher felt it should be conducted. I rubbed my eyes and snapped over, touching my toes a few times.

The blood began pounding in my head, and I sucked in a couple deep breaths. I bent again and there was a flurry of motion at the door.

To the trio who entered with M'Cwyie I must have looked as if I were searching for the marbles I had just lost, bent over like that.

I grinned weakly and straightened up, my face red from more than exertion. I hadn't expected them that quickly.

Suddenly I thought of Havelock Ellis again in his area of greatest populauty.

182.

The little redheaded doll, wearing, sari-like, a diapha- nous piece of the Martian sky, looked up in wonder-as a child at some colorful flag on a high pole.

"h.e.l.lo," I said, or its equivalent.

She bowed before replying. Evidently I had been pro- moted in status.

137 "I shall dance," said the red wound in that pale, pale cameo, her face. Eyes, the color of dream and her dress, pulled away from mine.

She drifted to the center of the room.

Standing there, like a figure in an Etruscan frieze, she was either meditating or regarding the design on the floor.

Was the mosaic symbolic of something? I studied it.

If it was, it eluded me; it would make an attractive bathroom floor or patio, but I couldn't see much in it beyond that.

The other two were paint-spattered sparrows like M'Cwyie, in their middle years. One settled to the floor like a triple-stringed instrument faintly resembling a samisen. The other held a simple woodblock and two drumsticks.

M'Cwyie disdained her stool and was seated upon the floor before I realized it. I followed suit.

The samisen player was still tuning it up, so I leaned toward M'Cwyie.

"What is the dancer's name?"

"Braxa," she replied, without looking at me, and raised her left hand, slowly, which meant yes, and go ahead, and let it begin.

The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a ticktocking, like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from the block.

Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, el- bows high and outspread.

The music became a metaphor for fire.

183.

Crackle, purr, snap . . .

She did not move.

The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed.

It was water now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear than green over mossy rocks.

Still she did not move.

Glissandos. A pause.

Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the trem- ble of the winds began. Softly, gently, sighing and halt- ing, uncertain. A pause, a sob, then a repet.i.tion of the first statement, only louder.

Were my eyes complexly bugged from my reading, 138 or was Braxa actually trembling all over, head to foot.

She was.

She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right, then left. Hei fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and I co^'ld see that her eyes were closed.

Her eyes opened. They were distant, gla.s.sy, looking through me and the walls. Her swaying became more p.r.o.nounced, merged with the beat.

The wind was sweeving in from the desert now, jail- ing against Tirellian like waves on a dike. Her fingers moved, they were the gusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a counter-movement.

The gale was coming now. She began an axial move- ment and her hands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulders commenced to writhe out a figure- eight.

The wind! The wind, I say. 0 wild, enigmatic! 0 muse of St. John Perse!

The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, pa.s.sive as Buddha's, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, in- terrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of un- inhabited turquoise.

184.

Years ago, I had seen the Devadais in India, the street- dancers, spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxa was more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu who had given the dance to man: the sacred dancers.

The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the strings made me think of the stinging rays of the sun their heat stolen by the wind's inhalations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girl named Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statute come to life, and inhaled a divine afflatus.

I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with his laudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarme and Aleister Crowley. I was, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darker suit, the hymns and the or- gan's wheeze trans.m.u.ted to bright wind.

She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air, a clothes-line holding one bright gar- ment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momently above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as for- mal as Job's argument with G.o.d. Her dance was G.o.d's reply.

139 The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held.

She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move.

There was silence.

I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now?

Applaud?

185.

I sought M'Cwyie from the comer of my eye. She raised her right hand.

As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose. So did M'Cwyie.

I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, "It was beautiful," inane as that sounds.

I received three different High Forms of "thank you."

There was a flurry of color: and I was alone again with M'Cwyie.

"That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thou- sand, two hundred-twenty-four dances of Locar."

I looked down at her.

"Are the dances of your world like this?"

"Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa-but I've never seen anything exactly like hers."

"She is good," M'Cwyie said. "She knows all the dances."

A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me ... '

It was gone in an instant.

"I must tend my duties now." She moved to the table and closed the books. "M'narra."

"Good-bye." I slipped into my boots.

"Good-bye, Gallinger."

I walked out the door, mounted the feepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.

II.

I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief 140 grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eaves- dropped: 186.

Morton's fruity treble: "Guess what? He said "h.e.l.lo' to me awhile ago."

"Hmmph!" Emory's elephant lungs exploded. "Either he's slipping. or Y011 were standing in his way and he wanted you to move."

"Probably didn't recognize me. I don't think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I pa.s.sed his door at 0300-1 always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it."

"The guy is working hard," Emory admitted, grudg- ingly. "In fact, I think he's taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of gla.s.sy-eyed these days.

Maybe that's natural for a poet, though."

Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then: "Regardless of what you think of him, it's going to take me at least a year to learn what he's picked up in three weeks. And I'm just a linguist, not a poet."

Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It's the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did.

"I took a course in modem poetry when I was back at the university," he began. "We read six authors-Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger-and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said, 'These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and h.e.l.l shall not prevail against them.'

"Myself," he continued, "I thought his Pipes of Krishna and his Madrigals were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on.

"I think he's spoken two dozen words to me since I met him," he finished.

The Defense: "Did it ever occur to you," Betty said, that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his 187.

appearance? He was also a precocious child, and prob- ably never even had school friends. He's sensitive and very introverted."

"Sensitive? Self-conscious?" Emory choked and gagged.

"The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he's a walking in- 141 sult machine. You press a b.u.t.ton like 'h.e.l.lo' or 'Nice day' and he thumbs his nose at you. He's got it down to a reflex."

They muttered a few other pleasantries and drifted away.

Well bless you, Morton boy. You little pimple-faced, Ivy-bred connoisseur! I've never taken a course in my poetry, but I'm glad someone said that. The Gates of h.e.l.l. Well now! Maybe Daddy's prayers got heard some- where, and I am a missionary, after all!

Only . . .

. . . Only a missionary needs something to convert people to. I have my private system of esthetics, and I suppose it oozes an ethical by-product somewhere. But if I ever had anything to preach, really, even in my poems, I wouldn't care to preach it to such lowlifes you. If you think I'm a slob, I'm also a slob, and there's no room for you in my Heaven-it's a private place, where Swift, Shaw, and Petronius Arbiter came to din- ner.