One’s cubicle, however sterile and cramped, held all one had of home. Ellin Voy’s cubicle, for example. On her narrow bed lay the stuffed bear Mama One had given her when she was three and the dolly Mama One had given her when she left for History House. On the shelf above was a little holo of herself and Mama One and Mama Two when they met at the ballet school for Ellin’s thirteenth birthday. There was the book that Mama Two had given her for a sixteenth birthday present: The Wizard of Oz, a facsimile of a real book written centuries and centuries ago.
Hung above the shelf were other pictures memorializing brief holidays and ephemeral friendships. There was Ellin standing next to the bionic bull and the real bullfighter, the time she was assigned to History House in Spain; standing next to a handsome guard at the Tower of London when she’d been assigned to History House in England. Artists got reassigned among the History Houses all the time, or their contracts expired, or they paid off their contracts and left. There was no one in the corps de ballet that Ellin had known longer than two years. She looked at the pictures of herself with this one and that one, and sometimes it was hard to recall their names.
At night, the three inner cubicle walls could be set to show views chosen from among an extensive library of landscapes and interiors and events, both Terran and other worldly. Most of the artists chose something from their assigned periods of earthly history, something homey: a fireplace with glowing logs; a summer garden, glorious with flowers; an autumn landscape, with trees changing color and a little wind riffling the surface of the pond; a city with broad avenues where spring blossoms fell gently onto the horses and carriages; views of things that no longer existed and places that no longer were.
Honorable Artist Ellin Voy chose otherwise. The sight of morning sun through autumn leaves made her cry. The sight of a fire burning on a hearth hurt her, as did trees dancing in moonlight. Views that made her think about the walls themselves made her choke, unable to catch her breath. Some fault within her, some unsuspected weakness that should have been eradicated before she was allowed to develop, had escaped the scrutiny of the monitors.
No matter what other artists did, Ellin kept her walls set on patterns only: receding colors of infinite depth, currents full of eddies and swirls, shapes that opened up and ramified and became other shapes, or endless streams of bubbles changing hue as they floated up and away. She curled on her narrow bed after lights out, dissolving in the patterns like a lump of sugar, unskeining like syrup into the liquid movement, becoming clearer and clearer, fading into transparency. Somewhere in that fluid motion was the thing she longed for, the total absorption, the absence of painful memory. In a few moments her eyes would blink, and soon she would fall asleep to dream of the same patterns and of herself as part of them.
She tried never to think of Mama One’s house or of infant Ellin. She had chosen to dance, she had been bred to dance, but she had not chosen to leave Mama One. It wasn’t quite so painful to remember Mama Two, for that time had been spent here, inside History House, and she still saw Mama Two from time to time. She had felt safe and connected with Mama One and Mama Two. She hadn’t really felt safe since.
At six every morning the bells in the dancers’ section would ring to introduce la patronne de ballet, her bony face protruding from the walls above each narrow bed, mouth bent into an unmeaning smile, eyes half shut as she crooned, “Did we have good rest, mes enfants? Are we ready for le jour meilleur, the best day ever?”
To which all the dancers, Ellin included, replied aloud with the cheery voice and happy face the occasion required:
“Oh, oui, Madame. Bon! The best day ever.” Audio pick-ups recorded each response and graded it for wakefulness and enthusiasm as well as for any betrayal of incipient anarchy. Fortunately, the view screens weren’t set to pick up silent rebellion. They didn’t see fingers crossed behind backs or under sheets, or hear the subvocalized, “Corpulent likelihood, Madumb-dumb ballet-hoo. In a swine’s auricular orifice!”