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  THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE

  Terry Carr

  This all happened ages ago, out in the depths of space beyond

  Darkedge, where galaxies lumber ponderously through the

  black like so many silent bright rhinoceroses. It was so long

  ago that when the light from Loarr's galaxy finally reached

  Earth, after millions of light-years, there was no one here to

  see it except a few things in the oceans that were too mind-

  lessly busy with their monotonous single-celled reactions to

  notice.

  Yet, as long ago as it was, the present-day Loarra still re-

  member this story and retell it in complex, shifting wave-dances

  every time one of the newly-changed asks for it. The wave-

  dances wouldn't mean much to you if you saw them, nor I

  suppose would the story itself if I were to tell it just as it

  happened. So consider this a translation, and don't bother

  yourself that when I say "water" I don't mean our hydrogen-

  oxygen compound, or that there's no "sky" as such on Loarr,

  or for that matter that the Loarra weren'taren'tcreatures

  that "think" or "feel" in quite the Way we understand. In fact,

  you could take this as a piece of pure fiction, because there

  are damned few real facts in itbut I know better (or

  worse), because I know how true it is. And that has a lot to

  do with why I'm back here on Earth, with forty-two friends

  and co-workers left dead on Loarr. They never had a chance.

  There was a Changer who had spent three life cycles plan-

  ning a particular cycle climax and who had come to the

  moment of action. He wasn't really named Minnearo, but

  I'll call him that because it's the closest thing I can write to

  approximate the tone, emotional matrix, and associations that

  were all wrapped up in his designation.

  When he came to his decision, he turned away from the

  crag on which he'd been standing overlooking the Loarran

  ocean, and went quickly to the personality-homes of three of

  his best friends. To the first friend, Asterrea, he said, "I am

  going to commit suicide," wave-dancing this message in his

  best festive tone.

  His friend laughed, as Minnearo had hoped, but only for a

  short time. Then he turned away and left Minnearo alone,

  because there had already been several suicides lately and it

  was wearing a little thin.

  To his second friend, Minnearo gave a pledge-salute, going

  through all sixty sequences with exaggerated care, and wave-

  danced, "Tomorrow I shall immerse my body in the ocean, if

  anyone will Watch."

  His second friend, Fless, smiled tolerantly and told him he

  would come and see the performance.

  To his third friend, with many excited leapings and bound-

  ings, Minnearo described what he imagined would happen to

  him after he had gone under the lapping waters of the ocean.

  The dance he went 'through to give this description was

  intricate and even imaginative, because Minnearo had spent

  most of that third life cycle working it out in his mind. It

  used motion and color and sound and another sense some-

  thing like smell, all to communicate descriptions of falling,

  impact with the water, and then the quick dissolution and

  blending in the currents of the ocean, the dimming and loss

  of awareness, and finally the awakening, the completion of

  'the change. Minnearo had a rather romantic turn of mind,

  so he imagined himself recoalescing around the life-mote of

  one of Loarr's greatest heroes, Krollim, and forming on

  Krollim's old pattern. And he even ended the dance with

  suggestions of glory and imitations by others, which was

  definitely presumptuous. But the friend for whom the dance

  was given did nod approvingly at several points.

  "If it turns out to be half what you anticipate," said this

  friend, Pur, "then I envy you. But you never know."

  "I guess not," Minnearo said, rather morosely. And he

  hesitated before leaving, for Pur was what I suppose I'd better

  call female, and Minnearo had rather hoped that she would

  join him in the ocean jump. But if she thought of it she gave

  no sign, merely gazing at Minnearo calmly, waiting for him

  to go; so finally he did.

  And at the appropriate time, with his friend Fless watching

  him from the edge of the cliff, Minnearo did his final wave-

  dance as Minnearorather excited and ill-coordinated, but

  that was understandable in the circumstancesand then per-

  formed his approach to the edge, leaped and tumbled down-

  ward through the air, making fully two dozen turns this way

  and that before he hit the water.

  Fless hurried back and described the suicide to Asterra and

  Pur, who laughed and applauded in most of the right places,

  so on the whole it was a success. Then the three of them sat

  down and began plotting Minnearo's revenge.

  All right, I know a lot of this doesn't make sense. Maybe

  that's because I'm trying to tell you about the Loarra in

  human terms, which is a mistake with creatures as alien as

  they are. Actually, the Loarra are almost wholly 'an energy

  life-form, their consciousness coalescing in each life cycle

  around a spatial center which they call a "life-mote," so that,

  if you could see the patterns of energy they form (as I have,

  using a sense filter our expedition developed for that pur-

  pose), they'd look rather like a spiral nebula sometimes, or

  other times like iron filings gathering around a magnet, or

  maybe like a half-melted snowflake. (That's probably what

  Minnearo looked like on that day, because it's the suicides

  and the aged who look like that.) Their forms keep shifting,

  of course, but each individual usually keeps close to one

  pattern.

  Loarr itself is a gigantic gaseous planet with an orbit so

  close to its primary that its year has to be only about thirty-

  seven Earthstandard Days long. (In Earthsystem, the orbit

  would be considerably inside that of Venus.) There's a solid

  core to the planet, and a lot of hard outcroppings like islands,

  but most of the surface is in a molten or gaseous state, swirl-

  ing and bubbling and howling with winds and storms. It's not

  a very inviting planet if you're anything like a human being,

  but it does have one thing that brought it. to Unicentral's

  attention: mining.

  Do you have any idea what mining is like on a planet

  where most metals are fluid from the heat and/or pressure?

  Most people haven't heard much about this, because it isn't

  a situation we encounter often, but it was there on Loarr, and

  it was very, very interesting. Because our analyses showed

  some elements tha
t had been until then only computer-theory

  elements that were supposed to exist only in the hearts of

  suns, for one thing. And if we could get hold of some of

  them . . . Well, you see what I mean. The mining possibilities

  were very interesting indeed.

  Of course, it would take half the wealth of Earthsystem to

  outfit a full-scale expedition there. But Unicentral hummed

  for two-point-eight seconds and then issued detailed instruc-

  tions on just how it was all to be arranged. So there we

  went.

  And there I was, a Standard Year later (five Standard

  Years ago), sitting inside a mountain of artificial Earth

  welded onto one of Loarr's "islands" and wondering what the

  hell I was doing there. Because I'm not a mining engineer,

  not a physicist or comp-technician or, in fact, much of any-

  thing that requires technical training. I'm a public-relations

  man; and there was just no reason for me to have been

  assigned to such a hellish, impossible, godforsaken, incon-

  ceivable, and plain damned unlivable planet as Loarr.

  But there was a reason, and it was the Loarra, of course.

  They lived ("lived") there, and they were intelligent, so we

  had to negotiate with them. Ergo: me.

  So in the next several years, while I negotiated and we set

  up operations and I acted as a go-between, I learned a lot

  about them. Just enough to translate, however clumsily, the

  wave-dance of the Changer and the Three, which is their

  equivalent of a classic folk-hero myth (or would be if they

  had anything honestly equivalent to anything of ours).

  To continue:

  Fless was in favor of building a pact among the Three by

  which they would, each in turn and each with deliberate lack

  of the appropriate salutes, commit suicide in exactly the same

  way Minnearo had. "Thus we can kill this suicide," Fless

  explained in excited waves through the air.

  But Pur was more practical. "Thus," she corrected him,

  "we would kill only this suicide. It is unimaginative, a thing

  to be done by rote, and Minnearo deserves more."

  Asterrea seemed undecided; he hopped about, sparking and

  disappearing and reappearing inches away in another color.

  They waited for him to comment, and finally he stabilized,

  stood still in the air, settled to the ground, and held himself

  firmly there. Then he said, in slow, careful movements, "I'm

  not sure he deserves an original revenge. It wasn't a new

  suicide, after all. And who is to avenge us?" A single spark

  leaped from him. "Who is to avenge us?" he repeated, this

  time with more pronounced motions.

  "Perhaps," said Pur slowly, "we will need no revengeif

  our act is great enough."

  The other two paused in their random wave-motions, con-

  sidering this. Fless shifted from blue to green to a bright red

  which dimmed to yellow; Asterrea pulsed a deep ultraviolet.

  "Everyone has always been avenged," Fless said at last.

  "What you suggest is meaningless."

  "But if we do something great enough," Pur said; and now

  she began to radiate heat which drew the other two reluc-

  tantly toward her. "Something which has never been done

  before, in any form. Something for which there can be no

  revenge, for it will be a positive thingnot a death-change,

  not a destruction or a disappearance or a forgetting, even a

  great one. A positive thing."

  Asterrea's ultraviolet grew darker, darker, until he seemed

  to be nothing more than a hole in the air. "Dangerous, dan-

  gerous, dangerous," he droned, moving torpidly back and

  forth. "You know it's impossible to askwe'd have to give

  up all our life cycles to come. Because a positive in the

  world . . ." He blinked into darkness, and did not reappear

  for long seconds. When he did he was perfectly still, pulsing

  weakly but gradually regaining strength.

  Pur waited till his color and tone showed that conscious-

  ness had returned, then moved in a light wave-motion calcu-

  lated to draw the other two back into calm, reasonable

  discourse. "I've thought about this for six life cycles already,"

  she danced. "I must be rightno one has worked on a prob-

  lem for so long. A positive would not be dangerous, no matter

  what the three- and four-cycle theories say. It would be

  beneficial." She paused, hanging orange in midair. "And it

  would be new," she said with a quick spiral.. "Oh, how newl"

  And so, at length, they agreed to follow her plan. And it

  was briefly this: On a far island outcropping set in the

  deepest part of the Loarran ocean, where crashing, tearing

  storms whipped molten metal-compounds into blinding spray,

  there was a vortex of forces that was avoided by every Loarra

  on pain of inescapable and final death-change. The most

  ancient wave-dances of that ancient time said that the vortex

  had always been there, that the Loarra themselves had been

  born there or had escaped from there or had in some way

  cheated the laws that ruled there. Whatever the truth about

  that was, the vortex was an eater of energy, calling and catch-

  ing from afar any Loarra or other beings who strayed within

  its influence. (For all the life on Loarr is energy-based, even

  the mindless, drifting foodbeastscreatures of uniform dull

  color, no internal motion, no scent or tone, and absolutely

  no self-volition. Their place in the Loarran scheme of things

  is and was literally nothing more than that of food; even

  though there were countless foodbeasts drifting in the air in

  most areas of the planet, the Loarra hardly ever noticed them.

  They ate them when they were hungry, and looked around

  them at any other time.)

  "Then you want us to destroy the vortex?" cried Fless,

  dancing and dodging to right and left in agitation.

  "Not destroy," Pur said calmly. "It will be a h'/e-change,

  not a destruction."

  "Life-change?" said Asterrea faintly, wavering in the air.

  And she said it again: "Li/e-change." For the vortex had

  once created, or somehow allowed to be created, the Oldest

  of the Loarra, those many-cycles-ago beings who had com-

  bined and split, reacted and changed countless times to

  become the Loarra of this day. And if creation could happen

  at the vortex once, then it could happen again.

  "But how?" asked Fless, trying now to be reasonable,

  dancing the question with precision and holding a steady

  green color as he did so.

  "We will need help," Pur said, and went on to explain that

  she had heardfrom a windbird, a creature with little intelli-

  gence but perfect memorythat there was one of the Oldest

  still living his first life cycle in a personality-home somewhere

  near the vortex. In that most ancient time of the race, when

  suicide had been considered extreme as a means of cycle-

  change, this Oldest had made his change by a sort of negative

  suicidehe had frozen his cycle, so that his consciousness

  and form continued in a never-ending repetition of them-

  selv
es, on and on while his friends changed and grew and

  learned as they ran through life cycle after life cycle, becom-

  ing different people with common memories, moving forward

  into the future by this method while he, the last Oldest,

  remained fixed at the beginning. He saw only the begin-

  ning, remembered only the beginning, understood only the

  beginning.

  And for that reason his had been the most tragic of all

  Loarran changes (and the windbird had heard it rumored, in

  eight different ways, each of which it repeated word-for-word

  to Pur, that in the ages since that change more than a hundred

  hundred Loarra had attempted revenge for the Oldest, but

  always without success) and it had never been repeated, so

  that this Oldest was the only Oldest. And for that reason he

  was important to their quest, Pur explained.

  With a perplexed growing and shrinking, brightening and

  dimming, Asterrea asked, "But how can he live anywhere

  near the vortex and not be consumed by it?"

  "That is a crucial part of what we must find out," Pur said.

  And after the proper salutes and rituals, the Three set out to

  find the Oldest.

  The wave-dance of the Changer and the Three traditionally

  at this point spends a great deal of time, in great splashes of

  color and bursts of light and subtly contrived clouds of dark-

  ness all interplaying with hops and swoops and blinking and

  dodging back and forth, to describe the scene as Pur, Fless

  and Asterrea set off across that ancient molten sea. I've seen

  the dance countless times, and each viewing has seemed to

  bring me maddeningly closer to understanding the meaning

  that this has for the Loarra themselves. Lowering clouds flash-

  ing bursts of aimless, lifeless energy, a rumbling sea below,

  whose swirling depths pulled and tugged at the Three as they

  swept overhead, darting around each other in complex pat-

  terns like electrons playing cat's-cradle around an invisible

  nucleus. A droning of lamentation from the changers left

  behind on their rugged home island, and giggles from those

  who had recently changed. And the colors of the Three

  themselves: burning red Asterrea and glowing green Fless

  and steady, steady golden Pur. I see and hear them all, but I

  feel only a weird kind of alien beauty, not the grandeur,

  excitement and awesomeness they have for the Loarra.

  When the Three felt the vibrations and swirlings in the air