A Dream of Falling Water, Flowing Green.

In the small hours of night, Mouche dreamed he stood in the mists of an unlit chasm while a cataract fell before him out of darkness into darkness. The source was so far above him, the catch basin so far below that no sound of water reached him. The curved emerald surface of the water and the gla.s.sy shadows moving within it were lit by a single ray that pierced the darkness from behind him. In his sleep he could not name this falling water, yet he knew it poured forever through that solitary beam, a perfect and eternal miracle made manifest by this single and incomplete enlightenment.

So, Mouche remembered in his dream, had the emerald hair of the dancer poured forever across the dark and empty chasms of his heart, with only his flawed perception disclosing its mystery. The dance, the scent of the food and the smoke, the sound of the drums and the voices, the flutes and the bells, all became an experience that lifted him as on an unending tide, out of nowhere into everywhere, while mystenous mists rose around him, spreading the possibility of marvel through the moist and fecund darkness.

Certainly the dream mists permeated his sleep, soaking into certain opinions that had been already petrified when he had received them and which nothing in his life until now had served to soften. Each time he woke, he was different, as though his very bones had become pliable, bending to become the framework for some other, as yet unparticularized person. Hidden in the deep embrasure beneath the patinaed dome, he suffered the nightly torments of the unknown and itched with a fascination that drove him closer to madness every time he scratched it.

The change was a fearful thing. As it progressed he found he could take nothing as a matter of course. He could no longer submit to the ministrations of the invisible ma.s.seuses without wondering what color hair they had, and whether they sang in the evening, or whether they danced, and what their true purpose was and why they had come. He did not see their eyes upon him, equally wondering and weighing. He could no longer look aside from the brown-clad forms who swept the street without wondering where their homeland had been and whether they hated their present confinement or whether even that was part of the flow he could sense happening.

He did not see their glance follow him as he went, the gestures their hands made, signifying to any tim-tim watching that this was Mouchidi, the one Flowing Green had come for, the one Flowing Green said Bofusdiaga wanted.

The change overflowed the night hours and ran into everything he tried to do. Mouche could no longer pace the dignified measures his dancing master required without flowing far too gracefully, as though to emulate the dances of those he imagined were watching from behind the walls. He could not leap without being lifted, like a balloon. He could not twirl without spinning. He was become a dervish, all too full of inordinate intention.

"What's come over you Mouche? You dance like a windlily!"

Mouche apologized, and went on apologizing, to the fencing master, to the conversation director, both of whom found him odd, eccentric, no longer focused, but oh, interesting, very interesting. He, meantime, was too busy to find himself interesting, for he was desperately attempting to interpret what was happening to him, and he was without tutelage, completely on his own. He was possessed without knowing how to be a possession. Even if he had sought help, he could have found no adviser among the mankind inhabitants of Newholme.

Suspecting as much, he confided in no one. He borrowed the oil can from Simon's workroom and oiled the latch and hinges of the window where he sat night after night; he borrowed a brace and bit and drilled a narrow hole into the woodwork of his bookcase, into which a short length of metal rod could be inserted from the front, thus preventing anyone else from repeating the movements that had led to his current predicament. That had been purely accidental, he told himself, unaware of the hands that had manipulated the door from behind the walls to be sure he had found the way they had opened for him.

It seemed that everything he did was accompanied by feelings of exhilarating joy or of overwhelming melancholy, that deep, unfocused grief he had felt before, in which Duster, and Papa, and his own dreams of the sea were merely drops in an unending tide. With every pa.s.sing day he became more convinced that both joy and pain were signals, meant for him alone, requiring him to find the sufferer and offer ... something.

It would have been more comfortable to return to his former state of ignorance and contentment, but he could not. The longer it went on, the more secret and precious his delight in the watching became, the more painful that other emotion, that one from outside, as though the delight continued sensitizing him to the agony. They were inextricable. He could not have the one without the other. When he shuddered himself awake in the night, overwhelmed by an agony of loss and horror, he knew that they, too, wakened, hearing that pain as he heard it, like the tolling of a great alarm bell deep in the world. Somewhere on this planet, something suffered and grieved. It wasn't himself. It wasn't the dancers. Not his family, or House Genevois or anyone he knew. But something!

23.

Dancers in Transit.

Though Mouche had no inkling of it, another player in the Newholmian drama also itched with fascination, though of a more introspective kind. Whereas Mouche slept and changed in his sleep, Ellin, toward the end of the first stage of the trip toward Newholme, often found herself unable to sleep at all. The ship did its part, lowering the lights and the temperature and sending sleepy sounds through the ducts, like drowsy birds. The windowwall suddenly became a landscape, trees seen against a moonlit sky and a glittering body of water with a background of low mountains. It was the kind of scene that she had avoided on Earth, but here on the ship she had let it be. Who could feel claustrophobic in s.p.a.ce? One either was well off inside or one was outside and dead.

None of her old sleepy-time rituals did any good. Her eyes stayed stubbornly open while she fretted. Since awaking from electronically induced deep sleep, which, though it had not seemed to last any time at all, had really lasted quite a long while, she and Bao had spent many waking hours reading, or having the monitors read to them, everything the Council of Worlds knew about Newholme plus a good bit the COW had no inkling of.

Though Ellin had always been a reader, she had not been much of a student, except of the dance. Ballet was taught by example and repet.i.tion, and Ellin learned best in that way. The official reports were couched in wordy bureaucratese that hid information rather than disclosing it. Trying to find meaning amid the polysyllabic jargon made her cross and irritable and wakefiil, like an itch that wouldn't go away.

The view panel was there, of course. It didn't have to depict trees and moonlight. She could ask for virtually anything ever written to be printed or dramatized, and she'd tried that a few times, but the panel remained obdurately there there, between her and whatever story it was trying to convey. A book would be better. With books, she wasn't conscious of anything except living the narrative.

Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being somebody else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement. In the books she was greeted by others who said, in effect, "You are so and so, and I know who you are!"

Often, when she finished a book, she came to herself with a sense of loss at what she'd surrendered in reading that last page. Closing the book was a finality that stripped her of ident.i.ty, severed her life, left her squatting in the shallows of her mind, surrounded by polliwogs and ooze, with all the depths drained away. How often in her life had she longed for the story to become real! And yet now, here she was, far, far out in s.p.a.ce, getting closer and closer to a dramatic doing, a wonderful adventure, a terrible excitement beyond all her expectations, and all she could do was worry that when the time came she'd be so self-conscious or frightened that she couldn't engage the event!

Her basic worry, excavated from the depths of her being through many fretful midnight sessions, was this clone business. Could a clone accomplish something it wasn't designed for? Dancer clones were supposed to be dancers. Musician clones were supposed to be musicians, entertainers entertainers, supervisors, scientists, genius generalists, all to be what they were! Just as many were cloned as were needed, with none left over-except for the occasional nus.

Nuses were mistakes. They were errors of system or development, and in moments of despair, Ellin comforted herself that she was definitely not a nus. She was exactly as per order, good legs, dancer's build, and with a mind that was ... oh, filth, filth, filth, step one foot outside the stage and it was an absolute blank! Hadn't her clone parent had a brain? Hadn't the brain been pa.s.sed on? If Ellin wasn't a nus, why did she feel like one? She clenched her pillow and groaned.

A moment later there was a rap at the door before it opened a crack to reveal a sleepy-eyed Gandro Bao peering in at her. "I am hearing moans? Are you being sick?"

Had she moaned? Perhaps it had sounded like that. "Maybe I let out a sigh or something," she confessed. "I was thinking about something."

"About all the volcanoes on Newholme blowing up?" he asked, insinuating himself into the tiny stateroom and perching on the foot of the bunk. "About the strange indigenous peoples existing there?" Some of this information had reached COW through official channels. Other facts, if indeed they were facts, had been picked up from the gossip of BIT or freighter crews who had landed briefly on Newholme to deliver or pick up materiel.

"Those are the only two things I could get out of all those filthy reports," she snapped. "Did you find anything else?"

"No. Indigenous race is being there, even though indigenes were not being there before settlement. Volcanoes are threatening to blow up world, even though they were never doing so before settlement. This is making me think settlement is, perhaps, unsettling."

He mugged a comic face, making her laugh, then cry, petulantly: "Why did it take them a thousand pages to say that?"

"Aha," he said with a serious face. "You were moaning over number of pages. That is being very understandable. Number of pages is often causing moaning, groaning, temper tantrums."

She flushed, embarra.s.sed, confessing, "Nothing so relevant, Gandro Bao. I was thinking it would be easier if this was a book."

"Why is it being easier in book?"

"If the book came to a troublesome part, I'd just lay it down for a while. Or I'd jump ahead a page or two, to see if it came out all right. That way my stomach wouldn't hurt, and I wouldn't get pains in my head. And in a book, you get told who you are. You get the right words and the right clothes and the dialogue, everything, props and all. You don't have to work it out for yourself."

"This is being true in dance, too, but dance is not excluding extemporaneous art. So, be extemporizing."

"It's easier if you have a personality, that's all," she said in a defeated tone. "You know. Roots."

"You are fine nordic dancer. There are being many roots to go with nordic dancer."

"I know that." She sat up, annoyed. "I looked it up. There's a lot of warlike hordes moving around, and lots of stomping and kicking dances and several complicated religions, and a lot of violent wars. I don't feel connected to any of it. It's not like a family."

He leaned against the wall, taking one of her feet in his hands and digging his thumbs into her sole. "Why are you wanting a family?"

She felt her leg relax in a spasm of pleasure. "I meant it would be ... nice to know who my parent was and what she did and where she lived, because she was a whole person and sometimes I feel like I'm just one sixth of one."

He mused, "I am reading a little bit about chaos theory: many things explained by chaos theory, many new discoveries about it even after centuries! This teaching is that tiny differences in original event can cause great difference in result. So, you and sister clones are each having many little differences, beginning in laboratory, going on into rearing. End result is six differing persons with similar appearance and skills. You are not being them, they are not being you. People have always been having twins, triplets, also clones. They are not being identical people."

He moved his fingers up to the arch of her foot. "If you really are wanting to know parent, records are letting you find out. All that is being included in records."

"That's not what I meant," she whined. "It's ... I was born to be a dancer, and that's all I've ever known about. I didn't grow up wanting wanting to be a dancer, I was born one. I didn't to be a dancer, I was born one. I didn't choose choose to be a dancer, that was already decided. I didn't even have to worry about whether I'd succeed, everyone knew I would. If I'd had to ... explore, to try other things, I'd have had some ... I don't know, some variety." She heard the snivel in her own voice and silently cringed. Shameful, carrying on this way! to be a dancer, that was already decided. I didn't even have to worry about whether I'd succeed, everyone knew I would. If I'd had to ... explore, to try other things, I'd have had some ... I don't know, some variety." She heard the snivel in her own voice and silently cringed. Shameful, carrying on this way!

"Female," he said, almost affectionately, putting down the foot and picking up the other. "You are being female all over. Now to me, who is only being female impersonator, it is not making difference how I get to be a clown so long as I am really wanting to be clown. But you are wanting to try something else so you can have doubts about talents you have?" He shook his head at her.

"Listen, Ellin, in Kabuki, we get persons coming after us. What is the old word? Groupies? It is like singers or actors, persons writing notes, asking are we free for dinner, you know? Mostly, I am not paying attention, but a few times I am going to dinner to meet people. I am seeing me through their eyes, and I am finding this confusing. They are picturing me so differently. Some are men who are thinking they love the woman I am pretending to be. Some are women who think they are loving me, actor, because I am obviously understanding women and they are needing understanding. Some are being as you say, vice versus, backward, women in love with woman character, men in love with man actor.

"So, I am being confused, and some days I am looking at face in mirror and thinking, who is this? Is this male or female? Is this real person or only actor? Knowing father and mother is no help. They are being them, I am being me. They are not even knowing me. When I was being small boy sent home from school for being jokester, Mother was saying to me all the time she could not figure who I am being. I am thinking every parent is looking at every child sometimes thinking, who is this? So, when I am twelve, I am hearing famous Haraldson song and deciding I am whoever I am wanting to be! Who I am choosing to be!"

"But that's just it! I can't choose who to be! I never had a choice!"

He began to work on her ankle, drawing his brows together. "You cannot choose to be horse, or fish, or tree, no. But it is like this. You are like small seed, and this ship is like big wind, and it is blowing seed from small plant far, far away where is no other such plant. And plant is not saying, "Oh, oh, I cannot be oak tree, I cannot be bamboo, I cannot be cactus, I have no choice.' Plant is not so silly as that. Plant is putting down roots of own self and growing! And while it is growing, when things are difficult, it changes a little bit, so when it is grown, it is not exactly like the plant it was coming from. It adapts."

She caught her breath. It adapts. And she had adapted. Even if her clone didn't have a brain, presumably she had adaptability. "So that's all I am? A seed blown on the wind?"

He snorted. "Seed on wind and being adaptable. Same as me, Ellin. Same as everybody. All of us, seeds. Seed is ninety percent precursor mammal, like mouse. Seven or eight percent chimpanzee-human primate precursor. One point nine nine nine percent generalized h.o.m.o sapiens. Tiny fraction one percent me, or you, different from everybody else. One healthy creature being able to blow on wind and still live! Able to choose."

He threw up his hands, scowled at her, then patted her foot with a gesture that was pleasant without being in the least threatening. There, there, he seemed to say. Settle down.

"Oh, go away," she said, turning to bury her face in the pillow. "Very soon we'll be meeting that other ship, and I don't want to be all messed up in a frangle with you about my ident.i.ty-or lack of it!"

"Lacking of it?" He grinned. "I make it rule only to talk to ident.i.ties. Stop fretting and sleep."

Though unconvinced by anything he had said, shortly after he shut the door, she slept.

Back in his own stateroom, however, Gandro Bao did not sleep. Instead he stared into the mirror, his brows tented in query, one nostril lifted, as though scenting a trail. "Here I am being helpful," he murmured to himself. "Lecturing all about roots and growing in s.p.a.ce where is nothing to grow on. Maybe is being only wind under us, and no place for us to hold to? Who is this Bao Bao Down to be giving Ellin Voy small contentments, like mama giving cookies?"

He smoothed his face, making it expressionless, calm, accepting. "Demand much of yourself and little from others," he quoted to himself from the a.n.a.lects. "You will prevent discontent."

That would have to do, for tonight.

24.

Hara.s.sments.

Bane and Dyre began hara.s.sing Mouche the moment they were moved into Consorts' quarters, as they had to be very soon, for the protection of the new students. "Dirt rubs off," as Madame was wont to say, and with Bane and Dyre dirt took all forms from att.i.tudinal, to behavioral, to linguistic.

At first the two of them merely placed themselves within Mouche's view and stared endlessly, the lidless stare of serpents. Mouche ignored them. Within a few days, Simon had them so busy they had no time for staring.

Nights were still free, however, so they moved from covert threat to overt violence. One night, as Mouche was returning to his suite, Bane and Dyre leapt out at him from behind a protruding pillar, grimacing in theatrical fashion, mouthing their intentions in voices far too loud for secrecy, and with knives snaking from between their fingers. The a.s.sault was interrupted by Fentrys and Tyle, who came around the corner too late or just in time, depending on one's point of view. They were all wounded by the time it was over, and it took all three of them to put the two brothers down and send them off, b.l.o.o.d.y but still threatening.

"What started that?" Fentrys wanted to know.

"I told you about Duster," Mouche said, dabbing at a cut on his hand. "Those two did it, and they recognized me the first day they were here. Now they want to punish me for what they did."

"Well," said Tyle, "if they're that sort, they'll want to punish all three of us. We'd better travel in company for a time, to watch one another's backs."

And so they did, sticking so tight with each other or around the instructors that they thwarted several more attempts at violence. Simon, whose job required keen observation, noted this collective stance almost immediately, but it took him several days to determine the cause. At that point Simon took an early opportunity to call Mouche aside and have an informal conference.

"What is this?" Simon asked the boy, after seating both of them comfortably in Simon's quarters and pouring two gla.s.ses of wine.

"Those two used to live near my family's farm," said Mouche. "They killed my dog. Worse, they made poor Duster suffer!"

"What cause did they have for doing that?" Simon wondered. "Or was it random meanness?"

"Oh, they thought they had cause," Mouche admitted. "Duster and I stopped their killing some little native creature, killing and torturing it, too, I'd guess. I didn't hurt them any, and this business of trying to wound me or kill me just doesn't make sense. Why are they doing it?"

"I'd say your not hurting them is part of the why," said Simon. "Remember what Madame has taught you about gaming groups, packs, tribes? If you'd beaten them b.l.o.o.d.y, they might have fawned on you. Some men want more than anything to have a place in a pack and follow a lead dog. But if you won't fight for the role of lead dog, then you're an outsider, someone who interfered with their doing as they liked, and to men like Bane and Dyre, outsiders, particularly interfering ones, are the enemy. Prey, property, or enemy. You have to be one of the three."

Mouche ducked his head to hide the angry tears at the corners of his eyes. He always teared up when he thought of Duster. "Do they get pleasure out of acting like that?"

Simon leaned forward and laid a rough hand on his shoulder. "Look, Mouche, you've got to understand what Newholme men are about, not from Madame's point of view but from our own. Now most men get taught early on that being dutiful is good, so they think they're being good when they work themselves into exhaustion and meanness. And most men know that pleasure distracts them from duty, so that teaches them pleasure is shameful. But at the same time, we have these restless brains inside that tell us to keep pushing toward the top so we can make a hole, crawl through, and see what's up there. All of us, even Consorts and supernumes, figure we've got a natural right to be there, on top and we use whatever we've got to get there. Humor. Or eloquence. Or skill. Whatever.

"Bane and Dyre, now, they've got the idea mutual pleasure is sissy stuff, so the only pleasure they get is sn.i.g.g.e.ring and bullying and destruction. And they don't like duty either, so they avoid it. The only thing that gives them satisfaction is anger, so being angry is how they go looking for themselves, like vandals taking a city: throw, hit, break, kill, shatter-it's all one to them. Destroy enough stuff, suddenly they'll find the hidden door with heaven behind it."

Simon looked at his gla.s.s, swirling the liquid in it, watching the patterns it made. "I try to tell you boys, best I can, that there isn't any door. You climb over people, you push and shove and get up there on top, it's empty. I try to tell you pleasure's a good thing, and it's easier with Hunks than most, because you're being trained to give it. And I try to tell you that duty's good, too, but you've got to balance it. And you've got to study yourself to know how much of each you need, for no one man is a measure of all."

"What do you mean, study?" Mouche asked.

"If you want to know about a Purse fish, you don't beat the fish to death or drain the sea dry. You look at the fish where it is. You study how it swims and what it eats and how it lives. You don't take hold of it, or kill it, you watch it. So, if you want to know who you are, you don't go laying around with a pickax. You try to catch yourself when you're not pushed by anybody or anything and watch yourself. You see what you do, and you figure out why, and you decide how that makes you feel, and how it affects others, and whether it makes you joyful or proud.

"It's amazing how many people don't know their own nature, even though they can't do anything with it until they know what it is. How can you move toward joy if you don't know what makes you happy?" Simon shook his head. "n.o.body's required to live in pain. We should always try to move toward joy...."

He looked up to meet Mouche's smile, suddenly radiant.

"Oh, Simon," he said, "It's not easy, but you're right. And even the pain lights a road for you, doesn't it? It beckons you to fix it! Like if you know something's hurt, you can try to mend it."

Simon, surprised into near silence, agreed it could.

He later mentioned the matter to Madame, when they were alone and very private, for she had asked him, as a favor, to come warm her bed that night and he had, as much from affection as duty, done so.

"Mouche is right," murmured Madame, sitting naked on the side of the bed, her hair loose about her shoulders, while Simon knelt behind her, kneading her neck between strong hands. "They beg for murder, both of them."

"Have you no pity for them, Madame?"

"Of course I pity them, Simon. I pity the mad dog that bites the child, the bull that gores the herdsman, the boar pig that tears the swineherds leg to shreds with his tusks. If they were wild creatures, we would say, with Haraldson, that they have the right to be as they are and the fault is ours for straying into their territory. The fact is, they are not wild creatures, they are protected and doctored and fed by mankind, and are thus kept according to mankind's rules. So it is with Bane and Dyre."

He went on kneading. "An odd thing happened when I was talking with Mouche. I was talking about discovering oneself, the lecture you often give ..."

"... so our Consorts can help their patronesses discover their joys ..."

"And their own. Yes. And he got this expression on his face. I've never seen such ecstacy on a face!"

She said softly, "Mouche is a good one, isn't he Simon? Quite out of the ordinary. Something about him...."

Simon moved his hands to the other side. Yes, he thought to himself. There was something about Mouche.

25.

The Long Nights.

At midwinter the people on Newholme took a long holiday which coincided, Mouche found, with the disappearance of the Timmys. When the Timmys went away, everything shut down, and in winter it stayed shut down for seven or eight days.