A.D. 2009
Because the courts permitted me to see my daughter every Monday, including leap years, there was at least one compensation for being out of work much of the time. (Thus, my recipe for saying yes to life.) So while everyone else toiled I took the ferry across smooth dark water to the sandstone terraces of Balmain, a snug inner-city gold mine where even the streaky old soap factories (bane of the allergic: invisible gusts of itchy soot) had long since been scrubbed out and refitted as condominiums.
Once the suburb had been a home for poets and ruffians, and before that the honest working class, whose ravages had by now been all but expunged. Native gardens soared from tiny plots in front of the terraces. These days the place was too expensive for poets, and the ruffians all spoke Program and their lawyers knew to a nicety the lyrics of judicial enchantment.
In all truth, I was in fair spirits. The afternoon promised to be a bitch, mad-dog mutual assured destruction at Social Security, but that was later. I pushed it away. The day was a delight. Up through the fragrant leaves of European trees meant for endless sifting rain the morning sky was hot blue yet pale: the heat in it was not Pro Hart's electric enamel but a kind of shivery end-of-summer immanence, February in Sydney.
I went through Birchgrove park smiling, springy on my toes despite heavy hiking boots, and even found myself whistling until I realized with a burst of self-reproof that the park sound system was lilting out wimpy Donovan songettes, sticky with adolescent nostalgia and the dying falls of the misunderstood jongleur and scads of sea gulls. Perhaps there had been more sea gulls around forty-five years ago.
Megan turned from a complicated game with two other little girls and saw me coming up the slope from the sports oval. Shrieking with pleasure, she leapt to her feet, bolted for me, skidded, turned back to excuse herself politely. With some gravity and circumstance her companions allowed her to depart, immediately dividing between them her stock of imaginary play objects. Like a bright yellow bird she darted away again, shot down the grass incline into my arms, and up into the air, the hot transparent air.
"Mmm." Suddenly she was shy, pushing her fat pink cheek into my shirt. I went with it, stood her on her feet and took her hand, walked back the way she'd come, up the path toward her school. They knew I was coming and without doubt had me under scrutiny on their monitors, but Spouse Access regulations insisted that I check through the formalities.
ONE
A.D. 6031
Afloat on a dark hush of air, Sriyanie dreams of dancing.
The figures of her dream are vivid, defined, precise:
Taiko gongs, wind instruments play at Oibuki, pursuing independently their single melody. Each musician tones to the next beat, the following unison, departs again to his own clarity, her own autonomy. Sriyanie sees this clearly and her ears ring as the Gagaku orchestra brings jo to conclusion. With the other dancers she comes forward from the green room...
...yet she is distinct from them also, at once part of the dream and detached, spectator and creator, her dreaming self the stage.
All through the child's sleeping flesh wafts a breath of subtle particles, response to every pulse of her central nervous system. Sensitive as flowers to the sun's warmth, guardian machines inhale that fragrance, cherish her. Do they know she dreams of dancing? Not precisely. Tropic to the contours and gradients of her sleeping mood, they discern the flow of her burgeoning, the chemistry and alchemy of her pubescent mind.
Her dream has approached lucidity: she suspects that she is asleep. The watchful machines detect her disquiet.
Attaining this state of consciousness is an elementary discipline of the Third Level, and the child, the young woman, is at the verge of passage to Fourth Level. But Sriyanie has not intended lucidity. It troubles her.
The dream, though, is beautiful.
Under a pale green sky, many children watch the Bugaku dance in awed delight. They whisper to one another. Several hold hands. The youngest stir with a certain restlessness.
Upon the great platform is a damask-carpeted stage, and the black and red of the platform's perimeter gleam against the grass of the meadow. The dancers move to a largo pace, then quicken their steps as the second movement, ha, is begun.
Joyfully, Sriyanie sees herself dance: the gorgeous Heian costumes--red, purple, and gold, the bright flowers in her hair, the flashing shifts of hue as the dancers disclose the hidden inner sleeves of their gowns.
Sriyanie is a bird, adrift. She knows ("she" "knows") that this is Warawa-mai, the children's Bugaku, a Left-dance, elegant and slow--her departure, in truth, from Third Level. She dances to a melody older than machines, older at any rate than any machine she has ever known, and its Ichikotsuchô mode is alien to the musical canon of her people, for it is based in a tetrachord; yet she has lived now with Karyôbin, the bird, for many months, and the archaic Nihonese music is an intimate caress across five thousand years.
Somehow that immediacy of its patterned beauty alarms her. The orchestration of her sleeping brain peaks and trembles; sadness and loss suffuse the images of grace.
Elsewhere, awake, her Friend is informed of the child's grief and gets sighing to her feet, strangely moved by her little girl's readiness to leave childhood behind. Engineered hormones have retarded Sriyanie's physical development, freeing the child's mind for spectacular growth; she has been prepubescent for close to thirty years. Now mind and body are ready to take the next elective step into maturity.
Beth speaks without words to the guardian machines, goes out into the night air. Third Level youngsters are not permitted to use the Transit teleportation system. For their Friends, therefore, walking is an obligatory act of praise.
In dream the kakko player strikes his side drum. They are in the kyû movement, dancing allegretto, the shô sounding to its player's breath, the tiny hichiriki piping like a soul in agony, like the Kalavinka, the magic bird; in its complex entirety the music drones, it drones exquisitely. The dance is near its end. Gong and drum announce their coda of percussion. The dance is done; Sriyanie is exhausted and elated, transfigured; the child is asleep and the dance is in the child, is done, is in the past, is the past; the blind dance of Sriyanie's closed eyes stills and she stirs, groaning, waking, the aninertial field holding her weightlessly aloft as she wakes, her mood confused and resentful. Beth is waiting in the dim light and takes Sri to her breast.
She holds the child at arm's length and regards her with loving patience. Sriyanie smiles ruefully, knuckling sleep from her eyes, drops her hands to her lap and gazes at them. "I felt so sad, Ummy. Did I waken you?" Through the foul haze overhead a handful of stars glints.
"I was making colors, sweet," Beth says, touching a loose lock of the child's white hair. "You know I don't mind. Would you like to tell me, or should I withdraw for a little while?"
Sriyanie smiles again, a sudden radiance. She puts her arms about her Other and hugs her tightly. "I love you, Beth. Please stay."
For a time they sit in silence. The older woman sinks into receptive meditation, attending to the background murmur of the machines as they cherish the child's integrity, watching her face through half-closed eyes, adding colors to her own private composition.
"I saw the reality of mujokan," the girl says at last, slowly. "The--the fleeting impermanence of our lives, of our work. I dreamed the bird dance, and I saw how beautiful it was, and I thought of those silly, lovely Heian people drifting to extinction like falling cherry blossoms, all governed by tact and taste and ritual, and how their freedom was--was isomorphic to the rules of their world, and, I guess, how the uploaded Lords restrict us within the bounds of their own possibilities, knowing so infinitely much more than we ever can, weaving their tremendous stupid patterns out between the stars where we can never go, and we're watching from behind the platform while they dance, hardly understanding any of it, and what's worse, even the ull Lords themselves are contained by limitations of their own, by the cold illusions of their freedom, and Beth, it was so sad."
Her Friend looks at her with tender concern. Eventually Beth says: "There's a scene in one of Chikamatsu's plays, Love Suicides at Sonezaki, where the lovers begin their final journey. Do you know it, Sri?"
Blinking her tearful eyes, the child shakes her head.
"It goes like this," her Other says, in Old Nihonese:
"Farewell to this world
and to the night, farewell.
We who walk the way to death,
to what should we be likened?
To the frost on the road
to the graveyard
vanishing with each
step ahead:
This dream of a dream
is sorrowful."
Barefoot, they walk in wet grass, sleeping flowers crinkling beneath their toes. A luminous theorem glows like fire in the sky above the Fifth's arena, its axioms flickering in a gorgeous aurora of transformations. Sriyanie's melancholy is dispelled in the crisp night; her breath puffs on the air; she feels a rush of love for her Friend, her friends, her world. Even the brooding ubiquity of the ull Lords, their energies cracking through the world like an invisible, inaudible electric storm, does not blight this new assent.
)
