I rose from my twisting on the bunk and crossed the darkened cabin to a port. The desert was a carpet of endless orange, bulging from the sweepings of centuries beneath it. “I am a stranger, unafraid–This is the land–I’ve got it made!” I laughed. I had the High Tongue by the tail already–or the roots, if you want your puns anatomical, as well as correct. The High and Low tongues were not so dissimilar as they had first seemed. I had enough of the one to get me through the murkier parts of the other. I had the grammar and all the commoner irregular verbs down cold; the dictionary I was constructing grew by the day, like a tulip, and would bloom shortly. Every time I played the tapes the stem lengthened. Now was the time to tax my ingenuity, to really drive the lessons home. I had purposely refrained from plunging into the major texts until I could do justice to them. I had been reading minor commentaries, bits of verse, fragments of history. And one thing had impressed me strongly in all that I read. They wrote about concrete things: rock, sand, water, winds; and the tenor couched within these elemental symbols was fiercely pessimistic. It reminded me of some Buddhists texts, but even more so, I realized from my recent _recherches_, it was like parts of the Old Testament. Specifically, it reminded me of the Book of Ecclesiastes. That, then, would be it. The sentiment, as well as the vocabulary, was so similar that it would be a perfect exercise. Like putting Poe into French. I would never be a convert to the Way of Malann, but I would show them that an Earthman had once thought the same thoughts, felt similarly. I switched on my desk lamp and sought King James amidst my books. _Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all if vanity. What profit hath a man…_
My progress seemed to startle M’Cwyie. She peered at me, like Sartre’s Other, across the tabletop. I ran through a chapter in the Book of Locar. I didn’t look up, but I could feel the tight net her eyes were working about my head, shoulders, and rapid hands. I turned another page. Was she weighing the net, judging the size of the catch? And what for? The books said nothing of fishers on Mars. Especially of men. They said that some god named Malann had spat, or had done something disgusting (depending on the version you read), and that life had gotten underway as a disease in inorganic matter. They said that movement was its first law, its first law, and that the dance was the only legitimate reply to the inorganic…the dance’s quality its justification,–fication…and love is a disease in organic matter–Inorganic matter? I shook my head. I had almost been asleep. “M’narra.” I stood and stretched. Her eyes outlined me greedily now. So I met them, and they dropped. “I grow tired. I want to rest for awhile. I didn’t sleep much last night.” She nodded, Earth’s shorthand for “yes,” as she had learned from me. “You wish to relax, and see the explicitness of the doctrine of Locar in its fullness?” “Pardon me?” “You wish to see a Dance of Locar?” “Oh.” Their damned circuits of form and periphrasis here ran worse than the Korean! “Yes. Surely. Any time it’s going to be done I’d be happy to watch.” I continued, “In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to ask you whether I might take some pictures-” “Now is the time. Sit down. Rest. I will call the musicians.” She bustled out through a door I had never been past. Well now, the dance was the highest art, according to Locar, not to mention Havelock Ellis, and I was about to see how their centuries-dead philosopher felt it should be conducted. I rubbed my eyes and snapped over, touching my toes a few times. The blood began pounding in my head, and I sucked in a couple deep breaths. I bent again and there was a flurry of motion at the door. To the trio who entered with M’Cwyie I must have looked as if I were searching for the marbles I had just lost, bent over like that. I grinned weakly and straightened up, my face red from more than exertion. I hadn’t expected them _that_ quickly. Suddenly I thought of Havelock Ellis again in his area of greatest popularity. The little redheaded doll, wearing, sari-like, a diaphanous piece of the Martian sky, looked up in wonder–as a child at some colorful flag on a high pole. “Hello,” I said, or its equivalent. She bowed before replying. Evidently I had been promoted in status. “I shall dance,” said the red wound in that pale, pale cameo, her face. Eyes, the color of dream and her dress, pulled away from mine. She drifted to the center of the room. Standing there, like a figure in an Etruscan frieze, she was either meditating or regarding the design on the floor. Was the mosaic symbolic of something? I studied it. If it was, it eluded me; it would make an attractive bathroom floor or patio, but I couldn’t see much in it beyond that. The other two were paint-spattered sparrows like M’Cwyie, in their middle years. One settled to the floor with a triple-stringed instrument faintly resembling a _samisen_. The other held a simple woodblock and two drumsticks. M’Cwyie disdained her stool and was seated upon the floor before I realized it. I followed suit. The _samisen_ player was still tuning it up, so I leaned toward M’Cwyie. “What is the dancer’s name?” “Braxa,” she replied, without looking at me, and raised her left hand, slowly, which meant yes, and go ahead, and let it begin. The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a tick-tocking, like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from the block. Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, elbows high and outspread. The music became a metaphor for fire. _Crackle, purr, snap…_ She did not move. The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed. It was water now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear then green over mossy rocks. Still she did not move. Glissandos. A pause. Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the tremble of winds began. Softly, gently, sighing and halting, uncertain. A pause, a sob, then a repetition of the first statement, only louder, Were my eyes completely bugged from my reading, or was Braxa actually trembling, all over, head to foot. She was. She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right, then left. Her fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and I could see that her eyes were closed. Her eyes opened. They were distant, glassy, looking through me and the walls. Her swaying became more pronounced, merged with the beat. _The wind was sweeping in from the desert now, falling against Tirellian like waves on a dike._ Her fingers moved, they were the gusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a counter-movement. _The gale was coming now._ She began an axial movement and her hands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulders commenced to writhe out a figure-eight. _The wind! The wind, I say. O wild, enigmatic! O muse of St. John Perse!_ The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, passive as Buddha’s, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of uninhabited turquoise. Years ago, I had seen the Devadasis is India, the street-dancers, spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxa was more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, who had given the dance to man: the sacred dancers. The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the strings made me think of the stinging rays of the sun, their heat stolen by the wind’s halations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girl named Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statue come to life, and inhaled a divine afflatus. I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with his laudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarme and Aleister Crowley. I was, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darker suit, the hymns and the organ’s wheeze transmuted to bright wind. She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air. a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momentarily above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply. The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held. She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move. There was silence.