Suspecting as much, he confided in no one. He borrowed the oil can from Simon’s workroom and oiled the latch and hinges of the window where he sat night after night; he borrowed a brace and bit and drilled a narrow hole into the woodwork of his bookcase, into which a short length of metal rod could be inserted from the front, thus preventing anyone else from repeating the movements that had led to his current predicament. That had been purely accidental, he told himself, unaware of the hands that had manipulated the door from behind the walls to be sure he had found the way they had opened for him.
It seemed that everything he did was accompanied by feelings of exhilarating joy or of overwhelming melancholy, that deep, unfocused grief he had felt before, in which Duster, and Papa, and his own dreams of the sea were merely drops in an unending tide. With every passing day he became more convinced that both joy and pain were signals, meant for him alone, requiring him to find the sufferer and offer … something.
It would have been more comfortable to return to his former state of ignorance and contentment, but he could not. The longer it went on, the more secret and precious his delight in the watching became, the more painful that other emotion, that one from outside, as though the delight continued sensitizing him to the agony. They were inextricable. He could not have the one without the other. When he shuddered himself awake in the night, overwhelmed by an agony of loss and horror, he knew that they, too, wakened, hearing that pain as he heard it, like the tolling of a great alarm bell deep in the world. Somewhere on this planet, something suffered and grieved. It wasn’t himself. It wasn’t the dancers. Not his family, or House Genevois or anyone he knew. But something!
23—Dancers in Transit
Though Mouche had no inkling of it, another player in the Newholmian drama also itched with fascination, though of a more introspective kind. Whereas Mouche slept and changed in his sleep, Ellin, toward the end of the first stage of the trip toward Newholme, often found herself unable to sleep at all. The ship did its part, lowering the lights and the temperature and sending sleepy sounds through the ducts, like drowsy birds. The window-wall suddenly became a landscape, trees seen against a moonlit sky and a glittering body of water with a background of low mountains. It was the kind of scene that she had avoided on Earth, but here on the ship she had let it be. Who could feel claustrophobic in space? One either was well off inside or one was outside and dead.
None of her old sleepy-time rituals did any good. Her eyes stayed stubbornly open while she fretted. Since awaking from electronically induced deep sleep, which, though it had not seemed to last any time at all, had really lasted quite a long while, she and Bao had spent many waking hours reading, or having the monitors read to them, everything the Council of Worlds knew about Newholme plus a good bit the COW had no inkling of.
Though Ellin had always been a reader, she had not been much of a student, except of the dance. Ballet was taught by example and repetition, and Ellin learned best in that way. The official reports were couched in wordy bureaucratese that hid information rather than disclosing it. Trying to find meaning amid the polysyllabic jargon made her cross and irritable and wakeful, like an itch that wouldn’t go away.
The view panel was there, of course. It didn’t have to depict trees and moonlight. She could ask for virtually anything ever written to be printed or dramatized, and she’d tried that a few times, but the panel remained obdurately there, between her and whatever story it was trying to convey. A book would be better. With books, she wasn’t conscious of anything except living the narrative.
Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being somebody else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement. In the books she was greeted by others who said, in effect, “You are so and so, and I know who you are!”