Carr, Terry - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.txt Read online

  that told them they were coming near to the vortex, they

  paused in their flight and hung in an interpatterned motion-

  sequence above the dark, rolling sea, conversing only in short

  flickerings of color because they had to hold the pattern

  tightly in order to withstand the already-strong attraction of

  the vortex.

  "Somewhere near?" asked Asterrea, pulsing a quick green.

  "Closer to the vortex, I think," Pur said, chancing a

  sequence of reds and violets.

  "Can we be sure?" asked Fless; but there was no answer

  from Pur and he had expected none from Asterrea.

  The ocean crashed and leaped; the air howled around them.

  And the vortex pulled at them.

  Suddenly they felt their motion-sequence changing, against

  their wills, and for long moments all three were afraid that it

  was the vortex's attraction that was doing it. They moved in

  closer to each other, and whirled more quickly in a still more

  intricate pattern, but it did no good. Irresistibly they were

  drawn apart again, and at the same time the three of them

  were moved toward the vortex.

  And then they felt the Oldest among them.

  He had joined the motion-sequence; this must have been

  why they had felt the sequence changed and loosenedto

  make room for him. Whirling and blinking, the Oldest led

  them inward over the frightening sea, radiating warmth

  through the storm and, as they followed, or were pulled along,

  they studied him in wonder.

  He was hardly recognizable as one of them, this ancient

  Oldest. He was . . . not quite energy any longer. He was half

  matter, carrying the strange mass with awkward, aged grace,

  his outer edges almost rigid as they held the burden of his

  congealed center and carried it through the air. (Looking

  rather like a half-dissolved snowflake, yes, only dark and

  dismal, a snowflake weighed with coal-dust.) And, for now

  at least, he was completely silent.

  Only when he had brought the Three safely into the calm

  of his barren personality-home on a tiny rock jutting at an

  angle from the wash of the sea did he speak. There, inside a

  cone of quiet against which the ocean raged and fell back,

  the sands faltered and even the vortex's power was nullified,

  the Oldest said wearily, "So you have come." He spoke with

  a slow waving back and forth, augmented by only a dull red

  color.

  To this the Three did not know what to say; but Pur finally

  hazarded, "Have you been waiting for us?"

  The Oldest pulsed a somewhat brighter red, once, twice.

  He paused. Then he said, "I do not waitthere is nothing to

  wait for." Again .the pulse of a brighter red. "One waits for

  the future. But there is no future, you know."

  "Not for him," Pur said softly to her companions, and

  Fless and Asterrea sank wavering to the stone floor of the

  Oldest's home, where they rocked back and forth.

  The Oldest sank with them, and when he touched down he

  remained motionless. Pur drifted over the others, maintaining

  movement but unable to raise her color above a steady blue-

  green. She said to the Oldest, "But you knew we would

  come."

  "Would come? Would come? Yes, and did come, and have

  come, and are come. It is today only, you know, for me. I

  will be the Oldest, when the others pass me by. I will never

  change, nor will my world."

  "But the others have already passed you by," Fless said.

  "We are many life cycles after you, Oldestso many it is

  beyond the count of windbirds."

  The Oldest seemed to draw his material self into a more

  upright posture, forming his energy-flow carefully around it.

  To the red of his color he added a low hum with only the

  slightest quaver as he said, "Nothing is after me, here on

  Rock. When you come here, you come out of time, just as I

  have. So now you have always been here and will always be

  here, for as long as you are here."

  Asterrea sparked yellow suddenly, and danced upward into

  the becalmed air. As Fless stared and Pur moved quickly to

  calm him, he drove himself again and again at the edge of the

  cone of quiet that was the Oldest's refuge. Each t:me he was

  thrown back and each time he returned to dash himself once

  more against the edge of the storm, trying to penetrate back

  into it. He flashed and burned countless colors, and strange

  sound-frequencies filled the quiet, until at last, with Pur's

  stern direction and Floss's blank gaze upon him, he sank back

  wearily to the stone floor. "A trap, a trap," he pulsed. "This

  is it, this is the vortex itself, we should have known, and

  we'll never get away."

  The Oldest had paid no attention to Asterrea's display. He

  said slowly, "And it is because I am not in time that the

  vortex cannot touch me. And it is because I 'am out of time

  that I know what the vortex is, for I can remember myself

  born in it."

  Pur left Asterrea then, and came close to the Oldest. She

  hung above him, thinking with blue vibrations, then asked,

  "Can you tell us how you were born?what is creation?

  how new things are made?" She paused a moment, and added,

  "And what is the vortex?"

  The Oldest seemed to lean forward, seemed tired. His color

  had deepened again to the darkest red, and the Three could

  clearly see every atom of matter within his energy-field, stark

  and hard. He said, "So many questions to ask one question."

  And he told them the answer to that question.

  And I can't tell you that answer, because I don't know it.

  No one knows it now, not even the present-day Loarra who

  are the Three after a thousand million billion life cycles.

  Because the Loarra really do become different . . . different

  "persons," when they pass from one cycle to another, and

  after that many changes, memory becomes meaningless.

  ("Try it sometime," one of the Loarra once wave-danced to

  me, and there was no indication that he thought this was

  a joke.)

  Today, for instance, the Three themselves, a thousand

  million billion times removed from themselves but still, they

  maintain, themselves, often come to watch the Dance of the

  Changer and the Three, and even though it is about them

  they are still excited and moved by it as though it were a tale

  never even heard before, let alone lived through. Yet let a

  dancer miss a movement or color or sound by even the

  slightest nuance, and the Three will correct him. (And yes,

  many times the legended Changer himself, Minnearo, he who

  started the story, has attended these dancesthough often he

  leaves after the re-creation of his suicide dance.)

  It's sometimes difficult to tell one given Loarra from all the

  others, by the way, despite the complex and subtle technolo-

  gies of Unicentral, which have provided me with sense filters

  of all sorts, plus frequency simulators, pattern scopes, special

  gravity inducers, and a minicomp that takes up more than

  half of my very t
ight little island of Earth pasted onto the

  surface of Loarr and which can do more thinking and analyz-

  ing in two seconds than I can do in fifty years. During my

  four years on Loarr, I got to "know" several of the Loarra,

  yet even at the end of my stay I was still never sure just who

  I was "talking" with at any time. I could run through about

  seventeen or eighteen tests, linking the sense-filters with the

  minicomp, and get a definite answer that way. But the Loarra

  are a bit short on patience and by the time I'd get done with

  all that whoever it was would usually be off bouncing and

  sparking into the hellish vapors they call air. So usually I just

  conducted my researches or negotiations or idle queries,

  whichever they were that day, with whoever would pay

  attention to my antigrav "eyes," and I discovered that it didn't

  matter much just who I was talking with: none of them made

  any more sense than the others. They were all, as far as I was

  concerned, totally crazy, incomprehensible, stupid, silly, and

  plain damn no good.

  If that sounds like I'm bitter, it's because I am. I've got

  forty-two murdered men to be bitter about. But back to the

  unfolding of the greatest legend of an ancient and venerable

  alien race:

  When the Oldest had told them what they wanted to know,

  the Three came alive with popping and flashing and dancing

  in the air, Pur just as much as the others. It was all that they

  had hoped for and more; it was the entire answer to their

  quest and their problem. It would enable them to create, to

  transcend any negative cycle-climax they could have devised.

  After a time the Three came to themselves and remembered

  the rituals.

  "We offer thanks in the name of Minnearo, whose suicide

  we are avenging," Fless said gravely, waving his message in

  respectful deep-blue spirals.

  "We thank you in our own names as well," said Asterrea.

  "And we thank you in the name of no one and nothing,"

  said Pur, "for that is the greatest thanks conceivable."

  But the Oldest merely sat there, pulsing his dull red, and

  the Three wondered among themselves. At last the Oldest

  said, "To accept thanks is to accept responsibility, and in

  only-today, as I am, there can be none of that because there

  can be no new act. I am outside time, you know, which is

  almost outside life. All this I have told you is something told

  to you before, many times, and it will be again."

  Nonetheless, the Three went through all the rituals of

  thanksgiving, performing them with flawless grace and care

  color-and-sound demonstrations, dances, offerings of their

  own energy, and all the rest. And Pur said, "It is possible to

  give thanks for a long-past act or even a mindless reflex, and

  we do so in 'the highest."

  The Oldest pulsed dull red and did not answer, and after

  a time the Three took leave of him.

  Armed with the knowledge he had given them, they had no

  trouble penetrating the barrier protecting Rock, the Oldest's

  personality-home, and in moments were once again alone with

  themselves in the raging storm that encircled the vortex. For

  long minutes they hung in midair, whirling and darting in

  their most tightly linked patterns while the storm whipped

  them and the vortex pulled them. Then abruptly they broke

  their patterns and hurled themselves deliberately into the

  heart of the vortex itself. In a moment they had disappeared.

  They seemed to feel neither motion nor lapse of time as

  they fell into the vortex. It was a change that came without

  perception or thoughta change from self to unself, from

  existence to void. They knew only that they had given them-

  selves up to the vortex, that they were suddenly lost in dark-

  ness and a sense of surrounding emptiness which had no

  dimension. They knew without thinking that if they could

  have sent forth sound there would have been no echo, that

  a spark or even a bright flame would have brought no reflec-

  tion from anywhere. For this was the place of the origin of

  life, and it was empty. It was up to them to fill it, if it was

  to be filled.

  So they used the secret the Oldest had given them, the

  secret those at the Beginning had discovered by accident and

  which only one of the Oldest could have remembered. Having

  set themselves for this before entering the vortex, they played

  their individual parts automaticallyselfless, unconscious,

  almost random acts such as even non-living energy can.

  perform. And when all parts had been completed precisely,

  correctly, and at just the right time and in just the right

  sequence, the creating took place.

  It was a foodbeast. It formed and took shape before them

  in the void, and grew and glowed its dull, drab glow until it

  was whole. For a moment it drifted there, then suddenly

  it was expelled from the vortex, thrown out violently as

  though from an explosionaway from the nothingness

  within, away from darkness and silence into the crashing,

  whipping violence of the storm outside. And with it went the

  Three, vomited forth with the primitive bit of life they had

  made.

  Outside, in the storm, the Three went automatically into

  their tightest motion sequence, whirling and blinking around

  each other in desperate striving to maintain themselves amid

  the savagery that roiled around them. And once again they

  felt the powerful pull of the vortex behind them, gripping

  them anew now that they were outside, and they knew that

  the vortex would draw them in again, this time forever, unless

  they were able to resist it. But they found that they were

  nearly spent; they had lost more of themselves in the vortex

  than they had ever imagined possible. They hardly felt alive

  now, and somehow they had to withstand the crushing powers

  of both the storm and the vortex, and had to forge such a

  strongly interlinked motion-pattern that they would be able

  to make their way out of this place, back to calm and safety.

  And there was only one way they could restore themselves

  enough for that.

  Moving almost as one, they converged upon the mindless

  foodbeast they had just created, and they ate it.

  That's not precisely the end of the Dance of the Changer

  and the Threeit does go on for a while, telling of the honors

  given the Three when they returned, and of Minnearo's reac-

  tion when he completed his change by reappearing around the

  life-mote left by a dying windbird, and of how all of the

  Three turned away from their honors and made their next

  changes almost immediatelybut my own attention never

  quite follows the rest of it. I always get stuck at that one

  point in the story, that supremely contradictory moment when

  the Three destroyed what they had made, when they came

  away with no more than they had brought with them. It

  doesn't even achieve irony, and yet it is the emotional high-

  point of the Dance as far as the L
oarra are concerned. In

  fact, it's the whole point of the Dance, as they've told me with

  brighter sparkings and flashes than they ever use when talking

  about anything else, and if the Three had been able to come

  away from there without eating their foodbeast, then their

  achievement would have been duly noted, applauded, giggled

  at by the newly-changed, and forgotten within two life cycles.

  And these are the creatures with whom I had to deal and

  whose rights I was charged to protect. I was ambassador to a

  planetful of things that would tell me with a straight face that

  two and two are orange. And yes, that's why I'm back on

  Earth nowand why the rest of the expedition, those who

  are left alive from it, are back here too.

  If you could read the fifteen-microtape report I filed with

  Unicentral (which you can't, by the way: Unicentral always

  Classifies its failures), it wouldn't tell you anything more

  about the Loarra than I've just told you in the story of the

  Dance. In fact, it might tell you less, because although the

  report contained masses of hard data on the Loarra, plus

  every theory I could come up with or coax out of the mini-

  comp, it didn't have much about the Dance. And it's only in

  things like that, attitude-data rather than I.Q. indices, psych

  reports and so on, that you can really get the full impact of

  what we were dealing with on Loarr.

  After we'd been on the planet for four Standard Years,

  after we'd established contact and exchanged gifts and favors

  and information with the Loarra, after we'd set up our entire

  mining operation and had had it running without hindrance

  for over three yearsafter all that, the raid came. One day

  a sheet of dull purple light swept in from the horizon, and as

  it got closer I could see that it was a whole colony of the

  Loarra, their individual colors and fluctuations blending into

  that single purple mass. I was in the mountain, not outside

  with the mining extensors, so I saw all of it, and I lived

  through it.

  They flashed in over us like locusts descending, and they

  hit the crawlers and dredges first. The metal glowed red, then

  white, then it melted. Then it was just gas that formed billow-

  ing clouds rising to the sky. Somewhere inside those clouds

  was what was left of the elements which had comprised

  seventeen human beings, who were also vapor now.

  I hit the alarm and called everyone in, but only a few