The cheery response to Madame’s greeting still echoed in the cubicles when the morning fanfare sounded, segueing into march music as drum and bugle urged on the jagged reds and yellows of the walls, sawing away at any remaining languors. In less than half the time allotted for hygiene and grooming, Ellin had her wealth of silver hair braided and piled on top of her head and had moved from the sonic cleansers to the service module where she unracked new disposables: tunic, trousers, slippers. The slight limp she’d had last rotation was quite gone. The injured toes were totally healed. Today she would return to dancing.
She hadn’t been idle. She’d kept up her exercises, and she’d performed her alternate role. Everyone had alternate roles. If you were injured and couldn’t fulfil your primary role, you still had to make every day the best day ever! Otherwise you’d find yourself out of work, and out of work could mean dead. Since Ellin had been raised in a twentieth-century matrix, her alternate roles were all in the twentieth century. This last one had been an elderly shopkeeper, Charlotte Perkins, in the small American town of Smithy’s Corners. She’d been Mrs. Perkins for the whole rotation, which was enough.
Awaiting the breakfast gong, Ellin used the basin for a barre as she bent and stretched. Being Charlotte Perkins was easy on her feet, but it had bored her into knots! Smiling, waiting on people, answering their really dumb questions about the twentieth century. “You mean they didn’t have a Reproductive Center?” and, “Where’s the transporter station?” The days without the discipline of class and performance had left her feeling logy and disoriented, as though all her muscles had turned to cloth. She had to get back to the dance before she lost her mind! Besides, if she didn’t, they might assign her coveted role of Dorothy to someone else!
The gong reverberated; the doors snapped open; the music got louder; the marching tempo carried the dancers out into the hall and thence past the gimlet-eyes of Par Reznikoff, Madame’s deputy in this little bit of heaven. Ellin carefully kept people between her and him when she passed him on her way to the service counter. He wanted to apply for a reproductive contract with her, and she wasn’t interested, no matter what it paid.
At the moment, all she was interested in was food. She had to cut intake when she wasn’t dancing, but the lowered calories left her feeling hungry all the time. She was so preoccupied with making her breakfast last long enough to calm her hunger pains that she hadn’t finished the liquid meal when the work bell clanged. Stagehands and crew, already in uniform, streamed past the dancers’ refectory toward the shafts that would drop them to the lower floors.
She was still holding the cup to her lips when Par came swiveling through the morning mob and took her arm.
“Elleeen,” he purred, making an indecency out of her name. “You are looking lovely this morning.” He began walking her toward the shafts.
“Par.” She nodded, smiling, trying to hold her body away from the intimate contact he intended. No point in being nasty to him. He was Madame’s little pet, and he’d get even if she did.
“You have a chance, perhaps, to think about the offer I made?” He cocked his head, eyes slitted, lips pursed, as though he were sucking an answer out of her, the answer he wanted.
She kept her voice calm, though she felt anything but. “I don’t have the energy, Par. I’m just getting over an injury, and I don’t think now’s a good time for me.”
“It’s a lot of money, Ellin. You’ve got AA genes, pity not to use them for something.”
Well, damn it, she was using them for something, couldn’t the idiot see that? She smiled, shook her head as she tried to look as uninteresting as possible. “Sorry, Par … “
He made a moue at her, patted her shoulder, and wandered away, leaving her at the end of the line. He wouldn’t leave it alone. He’d be back, and next time he’d be pushy. She needed a strategy to discourage him, but at the moment she couldn’t come up with one.