Space Inc (anthology)

Dancing in the Dark by Nancy Kress

When my brother dropped me off at Lincoln Center on his way down to Wall Street, the alien landing craft again blocked the plaza and Security swarmed everywhere. “The Mollies are back to see the ballet again,” Cal said.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to call them that,” I said, making a face at him.

“Octopi, then.”

“Squidi.”

“Calamari.” We giggled at each other like ten-year-olds. I suspect that morning both of us wished we were ten again. Then Cal wouldn’t have to deal with Sally and I wouldn’t have to make my meeting with Alvarez.

“Well,” Cal said, “at least the aliens’ being so fond of ballet is good for you,” and I didn’t tell him different. Nothing was good for me just then. I knew what Alvarez wanted to see me about.

“See you and Sally tonight,” I promised as I closed the car door, and his face clouded. I shouldn’t have mentioned Sally. His sixteen-year-old daughter was tearing Cal’s heart apart, even though he hadn’t been—wasn’t—exactly the ideal father himself. “Bye, twin-boy.”

“Be good, twin-girl.” But his heart wasn’t in it. I wished we’d ended on that other note, making fun of the aliens.

I threaded my way though their weird craft and our security barriers, concrete and electronic and human. From not too close, I glimpsed one of the aliens being escorted into the New York State Theater. God, probably it was going to be permitted to watch class again. It was creepy, taking class with a Mollie watching. It sits in that plastic cage with its own air, looking for all the world like a six-armed octopus (“mollusk,” “squid”) with a soft, salmon-colored shell, and it balances on two tentacles and waves the other four in time to the music. “Can it keep good time?” Cal asked, and I had to admit that, yes, it could. But its presence didn’t help the timing of the rest of us.

No. It wasn’t a Mollie that had been hurting my timing.

No one knew why the aliens had fallen so in love with ballet. They’d landed on Earth eighteen months ago and had been in communication and translation and negotiation and transubstantiation, or whatever the UN did with them, for all that time. They’d been polite and cooperative and non-threatening and appreciative and benevolent. But nothing had lit their fire until they were taken, as part of an endless round of cultural outings, to see the New York City Ballet dance Coppelia. Then something had unaccountably ignited and they were back, in singles or small groups, every night they could be there. Why ballet? No one knew. “It is beautiful,” was all they’d say.

It was the only thing they’d said that I found interesting. Most of their mission, which apparently involved trading things and ideas I couldn’t pronounce, was as impenetrable to me as whatever Cal did with such passion down on Wall Street.

“Go on in, Celia, Mr. Alvarez is waiting for you,” his secretary said. No reprieve.

“Celia,” Alvarez said from behind his big, cluttered desk, not smiling. My stomach tightened.

“Hello, Diego.”

“Sit down,” he said in his soft Spanish accent. So of course I did.

Twenty years ago Diego Alvarez was perhaps the best male dancer in the world He partnered Greta Klein, and Ann Wilcox, and Xenia Aranova. He never partnered me, of course; I hadn’t risen above the corps de ballet, that unheralded background to stars. Only once in my life had I even danced a solo performance, Io in Jupitor Suite, and then only because both principal and understudy had the flu.

When Alvarez retired from dancing, he took over as Artistic Director of NYCB, a position for which he’d been openly groomed for years. He was a decent, not great, director, and the company struggled along under him as ballet always had, supported by a small percentage of the population, paid cultural lip service by a larger percentage, and ridiculed by the rest. An intense, exquisite, marginal art—until me Mollies changed everything.

“Celia,” Diego said, “I think you know why I called you in.”

I did, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I stayed mute.

“There comes a time in every dancer’s life—”

“Diego, I can take being fired for being too old, but I can’t take pomposity.”

Oh, fuck, now I’d done it. But after a moment of blinking astonishment—I doubt any corps member had ever spoken to him like that before—Alvarez leaned back in his chair and spoke levelly.

“I’m not firing you, Celia. I’m offering you an alternate position. As a teacher.”

Now it was my turn to blink. Second-rate corps members did not become teachers or coaches at NYCB.

“They asked for you, specifically, after watching several performances and studying with me the structure of the company and the usual promotion paths. They understand that there is a ceiling, and you—”

“Who?” I blurted out, but I already knew. Incredibly, I knew.

“The aliens. They want someone to teach their offspring classical ballet, or at least a modified version of it that—”

“Noooooo,” I moaned. “Not… possible.”

“I wouldn’t have said so,” Alvarez said, and for a second I saw his distaste for this whole enterprise, turning his beloved art over to a bunch of slack-tentacled monsters, and I knew that Diego had steered their choice toward me. Second-rate, overage, never be missed even from the corps, at least don’t legitimize the travesty by assigning a good dancer to it. Diego had never liked me.

“No,” I said firmly.

“They’re offering a salary larger than mine. And, Celia, it is the only way you can continue dancing.”

“But—”

“The only way. Here or, I’m afraid, in any professional capacity at all.”

I was silent. We both knew he was right. I could open a dance studio for little girls—little human girls—somewhere in a garage in Iowa, but that was about all. And I didn’t have the money for a garage in Iowa. Corps members live on air, hope, and a pittance that barely covers Manhattan rent.

“I have, Celia,” Diego said with unusual gentleness, “seen you try to help the young girls who have just joined the corps. I think you will be good at your new job.”

I told Cal at dinner. No one else knew yet. The Mollies wanted to keep it out of the press until I had safely left Earth for their huge orbiting ship.

“For their what?” Cal said. He looked stunned, which was understandable. I felt pretty unstable myself.

“Their ship.”

“To teach ballet to young squid,” he repeated, squinting at me.

“We’re not supposed to call them that.”

“But why do they want—”

“God knows!”

“And so you’re going to teach them to turn out their toes and… and…”

“Point and flex. Arabesques.”

“Those little running steps across stage—”

“Bourées. And ports des bras. That means ‘arm movements.’”

“With four arms.”

We both collapsed into hysterical laughter. It was hilarious, it was terrible, it was going to be my life. As soon as one of us started to recover, the other would curve an arm overhead or point and flex an ankle, and we’d be off again. It went on and on. Finally I staggered upright, wiping my eyes. “Ah, Cal…”

The door opened and Sally strolled in. Everything changed.

My niece had been beautiful, before she scarred the left side of her face while on a deadly combination of snap and rapture. She refused surgery to fix it. One look at her eyes, vacant and filmy, and I knew she was on something again. Oh, Cal…

He sat stiffly, impaled on an instrument of torture I couldn’t know, even though the rack was partly of his own making. Cal has never been the best of fathers. Sally’s mother, a spoiled rich beauty whom I’d never liked, died when Sally was three, and Cal was always too caught up in his work to really attend to her. She had everything material and very little that wasn’t. I saw that now, although I, too, hadn’t been paying much attention as she grew up. Still, plenty of children grow up with emotionally absent fathers without becoming addicts who steal or disappear for days at a time. Cal had got her into treatment programs and boot-camp schools, but nothing had worked. I think he’d been relieved just to have her out of the apartment for those weeks or months. “Sally…”

“Hi, Aunt Celia. Still lifting your legs for money?”

I restrained myself from answering. I’d tried with Sally, too. Now I only wanted to not make it worse for Cal.

“Sally—”

“Don’t return, Daddy mine, to the Sally’s health-and-well-being platform.”

“I never left it”

She laughed, a high giggle, so unbearable—I remembered her at three, at seven—that I excused myself and caught a cab home. They didn’t want me there for the looming fight, and I didn’t want to be there either.

Call me a coward.

They took me up in a Mollie shuttle along with a load of diplomat types. We left a government building somewhere on Long Island through an underground tunnel, then emerged beside an egg-shaped craft that I suddenly thought would make an interesting backdrop for one of DePietro’s geometric ballets. No one spoke to me. These men and women, all dressed in business suits with the latest pleated sashes, looked grim. Was there trouble between humans and Mollies? Not that I knew of, but then I didn’t know much. Cal teased me about never watching a newsvid. Everything on them seemed so fleeting compared to the eternities danced every night on stage.

But for the last week I’d watched vids, and I’d studied about Mollie anatomy, and I’d carefully selected my music cubes, and I was scared to death.

“Miss Carver,” said a human voice, “I’m Randall Mombatu. I’ll be your liaison officer aboard ship.”

I was so glad to see an actual person I nearly cried. The diplomats had all stridden purposefully down a corridor and shut the door after them, leaving me standing in the big empty place where the shuttle had flown in.

“You probably have questions,” Mombatu said. He was a tall, handsome man the color of milk chocolate, dressed in the ubiquitous sashed suit. His face looked like all of the others: sanded, with all emotional irregularities planed out. I nodded, clutching my dance bag.

“Well, this part of the ship is filled with Terran atmosphere, obviously, as your quarters and half the dance studio will be. The gravity is that of the alien planet, a little over two-thirds Earth, as of course you’ve noticed. This troubles some humans—”

I sprang into a pas de chat. Such height for a simple jump! I never got that height at NYCB. Nijinsky-like, I seemed to hang for a moment before landing in a perfect fifth position. I laughed in delight.

“—although others adjust to the gravity quite easily,” Mombatu said, smiling. “This way, please.”

They’d given me a small bedroom, sparse as a monk’s cell. “All this part of the ship is human. Dining room, commons, conference rooms… think of it as an international hotel. Your studio, of course, is new.” He opened a door at the end of a short hall. I followed him and froze.

They were already there, the little aliens. The room was like any other dance studio, lined with mirrors and barres on two sides, a stand at one end for music cubes—except that across from me stood sixteen small Mollies, all staring at me from flat black eyes. I clutched Mombatu’s arm.

“How… how are they breathing…?”

“There’s a membrane down the middle of the room. Invisible, some technology we don’t have, impermeable to gases but not to light and sound. Terran air on this side, theirs on the other.”

“But… how will I touch them?” A teacher needed to straighten a leg, push down a shoulder… except the aliens had no shoulders anyway. Hysteria bubbled inside me; I forced it down.

“You can’t touch them, I’m afraid. You’ll have to demonstrate what you want. We also didn’t know what to do about toe shoes, so we left that until you arrive.”

Toe shoes. Dancers didn’t go on toe until a few years of training had strengthened their muscles… and these aliens had no toes. I turned my back to them and spoke to Mombatu softly, urgently.

“I can’t do this. I’m sorry, I know you probably spent a lot of money or whatever bringing me here but I can’t do it, I really can’t—”

“Yes, you can, Celia,” he said, with complete confidence. It was a professional facade but, gods, was it effective. “And your students believe you can, too. They’re waiting to be introduced.”

He turned me firmly to face the octopi. “This is Ellen—they’ve chosen Terran names, of course, for your convenience—the ambassador’s daughter.”

The Mollie on the right end of the waiting line extended one tentacle full length on the floor in front of her, bent the other five, and bowed forward. It was a ballerina’s reverence: clumsy, hopeful, infinitely touching.

“This is Jim… and Justine…” He knew them all. They all looked alike to me, and when I caught myself thinking that I was suddenly ashamed. These were kids, as eager to learn as I had been at Miss DuBois’ School of the Dance in Parcells, Iowa, thirty years ago.

“Do they understand English?”

“Only a few words. You’ll teach them dance vocabulary as you go.”

He made it sound so simple. I gazed at the line of youngsters, wondered how the hell I was going to teach partnering and lifts, and made a deep reverence toward my class.

“And one and two and three and four…”

Sixteen octopi stood at the barre, doing warm-ups. Dressed in leotard and practice skirt, I walked up and down on my side of the membrane, watching for flaws in position.

The Mollies had no hip sockets. They were vertebrates, not really mollusks, but each of their six limbs emerged from a sort of padded hole in the sort of flexible shell that cased their organs and head. The shell, which had a soft underside for various anatomical openings, was vaguely oval, with the limbs attached halfway up. The result was sort of like Humpty Dumpty with six long, powerful arms. Not an ideal shape for ballet.

Still, it had some advantages. Without hip sockets, turnout was no problem; these kids already had their limbs rotated 180 degrees to their body. The long arms-or-legs were unsegmented and had no bones, just tough cartilage-analogue skeletal tissue, and so a fluid line was much easier to obtain than with all those stiff human bones. The back two limbs were the most powerful; along with the next two, they usually bore the weight in walking. Suckers three quarters of the way down each limb provided sturdy balance. I designated these back two limbs “legs.”

The front two limbs were “arms.” The middle two, the alienettes (I couldn’t refer to them as “dance students,” not even in my own mind) kept folded close to their body except at the height of posed steps, when they would slowly unfold for great dramatic effect. That was the plan, anyway. Right now, we were working on warm-up stretches and simple extensions. Warm-ups got a lubricating fluid flowing in each limb socket, so no one got injured when we started throwing limbs as high in the air as possible in grands battements.

“Ellen, keep your suckers on the floor as long as possible in the plié… damn.” I kept forgetting they couldn’t speak English. “Ellen, look! Look!”

I demonstrated a grand plié, heels down, and then demonstrated what she was doing, shaking my head. Ellen made me a deep reverence—they all loved doing that—and performed the movement correctly.

“Good, good… Terence, don’t wobble… look! Look!”

I’d been aboard ship for four months. My Mollies worked fanatically hard, practicing for hours every day. Randall Mombatu conveyed lavish compliments from all the parents, none of whom would have recognized a correct arabesque if Pavlova herself were doing it. The small squid couldn’t talk to me, although they chattered readily among themselves in chirps and whistles. There was some incompatibility of human words with their tongues. I think. But they understood me well, picking up a huge dance vocabulary quickly. I had the suspicion they were smarter than I was. The adults, I gathered, communicated with our diplomats through keyboards.

Today I had a surprise for the octopi; the toe shoes had arrived. They were specially designed, blocky pink coverings for the back two legs that would support the fragile tentacle ends and add another few inches to their extensions.

But first we had to get from pliés to grands battements. “One and two and—”

“Celia,” Randall said abruptly, spoiling my count. “You have a phone call.”

“Can’t it wait? Jim, no, no, not like that… look! Look!”

“She says not. It’s your niece.”

Sally? I turned to look at Randall. His tone had been disapproving, but now his entire attention absorbed by the alienettes. “You know,” he murmured to me, “we have almost no knowledge about the Visitor young. Their parents are very protective. You’re the only human who’s spent any time with them at all.”

I realized then why I’d been forbidden to record classes for later analysis. I said incredulously, “You mean, this is the only contact between a human and Mollie kids?”

“Between a human and Alien Visitor children,” he corrected, with an emphasis that told me we were being overheard. Probably the aliens taped my classes—something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Well, why not? Except that it would have been useful to see those tapes for dance analysis.

I followed Randall to the comlink phone, which the Mollies had allowed us to install in the human part of the ship. We passed people engaged in urgent, obscure tasks. It occurred to me that very few people aboard this ship ever smiled.

“Sally?”

“Oh,” my niece said, sounding bored, or trying to sound bored. I waited, until she was forced to say, “How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Fine. Except, of course… oh, Aunt Celia, I’m not fine at all!”

It was the last thing I’d expected: the return of the open, honest eight-year-old she’d once been. It got under my barriers as nothing else could have.

“What’s wrong, Sally?”

“Dad’s going to send me away to school again and it’s awful, you can’t know and I can’t bear it! I won’t!” Her voice rose to a shriek.

“Sally, dear—”

“Unless I can come up there and stay with you. Oh, can I, please? I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I promise!”

I closed my eyes and ground my forehead against the wall. “Sally, honey, this is an embassy or something, I can’t give permission to—”

“Yes, you can. The news said the Mollies would do anything for you because they’re so happy about their kids’ dancing!”

That was more than I knew. The pleading in her voice broke my heart. I didn’t want her here. She’d be a bored nuisance. Guilt washed over me like surf.

“Please! Please!”

I said to the presence behind me, who was probably always behind me electronically or otherwise if I only had the interest to look for him, “Randall?”

“The Alien Visitors would allow it.”

“They would? Why?”

“I suspect they’re as interested in our young as we are in theirs.”

But not this particular girl, I didn’t say. Not Sally, not to form impressions of human offspring by.

“If Dad makes me go away again, I’ll… he just wants me somewhere where he doesn’t have to think about me and be distracted from his work!”

And there was enough truth in that despairing pain that I said, “All right, Sally. Come up here.”

“Thank you, Aunt Celia! I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”

But I didn’t know her now. Worse, I didn’t really want to. Guilt held me in its undertow, and I just hoped we didn’t both drown.

At first she tried, I’ll give her that. She learned the Mollies’ names. She made no audible jokes about crustaceans. She played the music cubes I asked for in class. She chatted with me over dinner, and she didn’t (as far as I could tell) take any drugs. But she neither understood nor liked ballet, and day by day I could feel her boredom and irritation grow, and my resentment grow along with it.

But that was all background noise. My little cavorting squid had been working for six months, and I’d been informed that a recital for the parents would be a good idea. After a long sleepless night, I’d decided to adapt—radically adapt!—Jerome Robbins’ choreography for Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

In this short ballet, a boy and girl in practice clothes warm up at the barre, facing the audience as if it were a mirror. So great is their concentration on dance that only gradually do they become aware of each other. The first steps they do are easy, basic warm-ups, and I could keep subsequent combinations from getting too difficult. Moreover, I could gradually add more couples onstage until they were all there, with the most accomplished of my young dancers performing solos and the least accomplished forming a corps after their later entrances. The music was lovely; also, it was slow enough that I would not tax my young Mollies’ speed or balance. Finally, I wouldn’t need elaborate sets or costumes, yet I would still be presenting a (sort of) real ballet.

“So what do you think?” I asked Sally over breakfast.

“All right, I guess,” she answered indifferently, but then perked up. “Can I do the lights?”

“Lights?” The studio had never been anything but fully lit. I didn’t even know if we had a light board. But for Faun, the stage should be in darkness at first and then gradually brighten. “Uh, I’ll see.”

“Don’t exhaust yourself,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll be in the video room.” She pushed herself away from the table and sauntered out.

Until Sally arrived, I hadn’t even known the ship had a video room, intercepting broadcasts from Earth. Well, why not. It kept her away from class. The alienettes, I sensed, didn’t like her there, although it would be difficult to say how I knew this, since they understood most of what I said now, but I understood nothing of their squeaks and whistles and chirps. In fact, they were hardly individuals to me. I didn’t worry about this. Ellen had a strong extension, Terry a smooth flowing développé, Denise a graceful port de bras. That was enough to know.

I asked Randall for Afternoon of a Faun, the Royal Ballet production of 2011 which, gods forgive me, I thought superior to the New York City Ballet’s. He looked at me blankly.

“It’s a ballet, Randall. I need a performance recording of it to show my dancers.”

“With people.”

“Of course with people!”

“I’m sorry, Celia, I’m a little slow this morning. The computers have been acting up, and there’s a trade problem with the Visitors and the EEC… but you’re not interested in that.”

“Not in the slightest. Can you have a cube transmitted up?”

“Of course.”

It was there by the time we’d finished barre warm-ups and took our break, before moving to center work. Half my mind was on Jim’s fouette of adage, which was terrible. He could pilé on one leg all right, could slowly lift the other and extend it to the side in one smooth movement, and his overhead arms stayed steady. But he couldn’t seem to coordinate the side arms with the extension, no matter how hard he tried. The result was too many appendages out of sync with each other, so he looked more like an opening umbrella with broken spokes than like a ballet dancer. I was not in a good mood.

“Okay, troops, this is the dance we’ll do for the recital. I’ve adapted it for you, of course. But we’ll look at this version first. Look! Look!”

I started the cube. It projected onto the wall. Darkness, and then dimly, at first barely seen through the gloom, a dancer. She stood in a gap in the back curtain. A deep plié, two steps forward, and then, just as you became sure what you were seeing in the shadow, she began to warm up with deep stretches and bends. It was Royal Ballet principal Rebecca Clarke, in all her long-legged, perfectly poised loveliness, her luminous calm. The stage gradually brightened around her.

Ellen fell to the floor, screaming.

“It’s apparently biological,” Randall said, running his hand over his perfect cropped hair. He looked as close to upset as I imagined he got. His sash might even have been a quarter inch crooked. “We only know what we’ve been told about their home planet and evolution, of course. The Visitors aren’t sea dwelling, despite their superficial, to us, resemblance to cephalopods. The home system lies in a populated part of the galaxy with many bright stars and three large moons. More important, there may be a constant atmospheric form of gaseous photoelectric energy, something like marsh gas, and perhaps also an enhanced visual spectrum compared to ours, extending possibly to wavelengths that—”

“Randall, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“They hate the dark.”

I gaped at him. He leaned closer and spoke softly. “Oh, the adults tolerate it, of course. But they prefer to carry on all activities, including sleep, in full light. They can’t smell at all, you know, and there is probably an evolutionary history of locating prey by motion. Most Terran cephalopods— not that there’s a one-on-one analogue, of course, but still—most advanced Terran cephalopods are pretty ferocious carnivores, with fairly common cannibalism. Those powerful arms and suckers… If the Visitors’ evolution was highly competitive, it might include a strong bias for light. In the young, some might even have a vestigial neural response to darkness, pain or otherwise, until they learn to compensate. I’m afraid the ambassador’s daughter may be one such youngster.”

Ellen was the ambassador’s daughter. I’d forgotten that; I thought of her as the squid with a good strong extension. But… “Powerful arms and suckers“… “cannibalism“… I shuddered. All at once my charges seemed genuinely alien, much more so than when we concentrated together on dance.

“It’s not a major problem,” Randall said, misinterpreting. “You simply have to start your recital with the lights full on and keep them on, not starting in the dark as on the cube performance. The ambassador’s daughter is being told that’s what will happen. She’ll be fine.”

The ambassador’s daughter. Ellen. Powerful arms and suckers to destroy prey, and cannibalism. Extension and développé and ports de bras.

“Fine,” I said.

But after that, I couldn’t look at them the same way. I don’t know if they could tell. What we were doing wasn’t ballet; it was a grotesque travesty with six arms and no necks and a pathetic parody of beauty. The recital was in five days. I hated every minute of rehearsal.

The morning of the performance, the computer glitches were traced to Sally, and Randall told me, tight-lipped, that she was going back down to Earth.

“How could you?” I raged at her. “We’re guests here! You promised to behave! You promised! Then you go messing up UN computers!”

“So what did I do that’s so major?” She was back to her worst self, sneering and indifferent. “I futzed a few programs. Big show. They caught me easy enough. It isn’t like I’m all that good at smashing firewalls to have any big impact on the great First Contact thing.”

“Only because you’re so stupid! If you could have screwed the system majorly, you would have!”

She didn’t answer, only shrugged. I was so mad I had to get away from her, and I slammed doors all the way to the studio.

It was set up for the recital. The membrane had been moved somehow so that now nine-tenths of the room had Mollie air, leaving me only a strip along the wall with my door. The adjacent wall had been rigged with a curtain that defined backstage; the octopi could stand there in their air and I, in one corner from which I could view the audience, could breathe mine. My corner held the stand for the music cube. In the curtain were cut two rectangular holes like doors, which led to a stage raised a foot or so above the floor. Barres ran along three sides of the stage. On the floor sat chairs for the parents. Or chairlike things, anyway. Everything was as brightly lit as an operating room.

In two more hours the proud parents would troop in, eager to see their offspring desecrate Robbins and Debussy. It would be obscene, a mockery, and they would love it. I slid down the wall until I slumped on the floor, and waited.

My only consolation was that if recordings were made—and of course they would be—I would never have to see them.

The first pure, slow notes of the Debussy. One, two, three, four… I nodded at Denise, the first on stage. She stepped into position in the open rectangle, slowly pliéd, and began to dance. A few bars later Terry appeared in the second opening in the curtains.

No Mollie in the audience so much as breathed.

It was then I knew how wrong I’d been.

I could feel it, their reaction. I knew it, had known it my whole life: that rapt attention of an audience responding to the beauty of dance. It was more than parental love; this was the real thing. The extra arms, the childish adaptations I’d made to the Robbins choreography—none of it mattered, and not only because these were their children, or because they didn’t know any better. This audience was, on their own weird terms, experiencing beauty.

Terry and Denise stood side to side, still unaware of each other, each with one tentacle on the barre. In the rectangular openings appeared the second couple, Ellen and Tom. No one was yet on toe; I had choreographed only a few minutes of toe work for these inexperienced dancers, at the end of the piece. But Ellen’s lovely long extension, made longer by her toe shoe, paralleled Denise’s port de bras.

Some adult Mollie, somewhere in the back, made the first audience noise, a long sort of dying chirp. Even I could tell it was admiration.

All the lights went out, and the room was plunged into blackness.

Cacophony, crashing, screaming. I blundered into the music stand and knocked it over; the blackout was total, shocking. It only lasted a moment and then someone flung open a door somewhere and some light, not enough, flowed in from a hallway. Parents clambered forward, tripping over chairs and each other. The dancers stood paralyzed, or huddled on the floor, or writhing in the middle of the stage. No, only one writhed, crying and screaming piteously: Ellen.

I didn’t even think. I plunged toward the anguished dancer—my dancer—who had been injured, interrupted, kept from dancing. I didn’t remember the membrane until I’d plunged through it.

The lights went on.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get air into my lungs, couldn’t breathe… then I could, in a great gasp, and my lungs were on fire, burning like the hell I didn’t believe in… help me, Col…

Darkness.

Randall swam into view above my bed. It hurt to look at him. It hurt to breathe him in, to breathe anything in.

“Don’t talk, Celia. You’re going to be all right. It will take a while for the burns on the esophagus to heal, but they will heal, I promise you.”

“I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”

I croaked, “Sally?”

I had never seen his smooth diplomatic face look so grim. “Yes, she did it. She—”

“See… her?”

“She’s in custody, waiting deportation.”

“See… her!”

“No.”

“Vid…” God, he better stop making me talk!

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “That’s some niece you’ve got there. You have no idea how upset the Visitors were. The only reason the whole dance program didn’t end right there, with ripple-effect consequences throughout the entire range of human-Visitor relations, is those kids’ affection for you.”

Affection? For me?

Ten minutes later Sally’s face appeared on an interactive cube ponderously wheeled to my bedside by a disapproving medtech. Sally looked terrible. Her face had bloated from crying, her nose was red and raw, and words tumbled from her like a falling building.

“Aunt Celia, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to injure you, I never thought you’d go on stage, it was just supposed to be a stupid prank. Oh, God, you’re the only one who’s ever cared what I did—”

I had a sudden insight, completely unlike me. This was a rare moment. Sally was completely vulnerable, as I’d never seen her before and would probably never see her again, and she would answer truthfully whatever I asked her. Provided I asked her quick.

“Sally… why?” The words hurt my burned esophagus.

“You paid all that attention to them! I was… I was…”

Jealous. She was jealous.

“… but I never thought anyone would get hurt, not even them! I never thought I could hurt anything!”

And there it was. She never thought she’d have any real impact. Just as she’d never had any true, deep effect on my workaholic brother, or on her selfish mother, or even on me. Yes, I cared what she did, but not as much as I cared about ballet. I wasn’t going to apologize for that, though… I couldn’t apologize for it. Ballet had been my life, was my life, gave my life shape and meaning. Even if that shape now had six arms instead of two and bouréed forward on suckers. It was still ballet, and it still made its exquisite impact. I’d just seen that.

But this child… she didn’t believe she’d ever had any real impact on anything, or anyone. Until now.

“Sally,” I croaked, “you did… very bad. Might… wreck… all human-Mollie… relations…”

She looked scared, and horrified, and impressed. “Really?”

“You… must…” I couldn’t get any more words out. One last huge effort. “Make… right…”

“How?”

I shook my head and cut off the link. Then I pressed the button for Randall.

He arrived quickly, but I couldn’t talk anymore. I made him sit me up and get me a handheld. Everything in my body hurt. Nonetheless, I keyed in:

… Tell Sally she nearly ruined all alien contact for good. Make this very important. Very! Let her think everything hinges on her apology, let her make it, and get her a community service job on Earth with kids who really need her…

He snapped, “I’m not running a juvenile rehabilitation program, Celia!”

I glared at him and picked up the handheld again.

… Do it, or I quit as dance instructor…

Then I fell back on my pillows and closed my eyes, the exhausted dictator.

Would it work for Sally? I didn’t know. We don’t pick the things that define us—they pick us, which is a fucking random arrangement. But having an impact on something… yes. Even a negative impact was better than none. And a positive impact, however weird…

Yes.

When I had rested a bit, I’d call Randall again. I had to tell him he needed to reschedule my ballet students’ recital of Afternoon of a Faun.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty books: twelve novels of science fiction or fantasy, one YA novel, two thrillers, three story collections, and two books on writing. Her most recent book is Probability Space, the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Probability Moon and Probability Sun. The trilogy concerns quantum physics, a space war, and the nature of reality. Kress’ short fiction has won her three Nebulas and a Hugo. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages, including Croatian and Hebrew. She writes a monthly “Fiction” column for Writer’s Digest magazine, and lives in Maryland.