Terry Carr - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.pdf - Terry Carr - widez2

THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE

Terry Carr

This all happened ages ago, out in the depths of space beyond

Darkedge, where galaxies lumber ponderously through the

black like so many silent bright rhinoceroses. It was so long

ago that when the light from Loarr's galaxy finally reached

Earth, after millions of light-years, there was no one here to

see it except a few things in the oceans that were too mind-

lessly busy with their monotonous single-celled reactions to

notice.

Yet, as long ago as it was, the present-day Loarra still re-

member this story and retell it in complex, shifting wave-dances

every time one of the newly-changed asks for it. The wave-

dances wouldn't mean much to you if you saw them, nor I

suppose would the story itself if I were to tell it just as it

happened. So consider this a translation, and don't bother

yourself that when I say "water" I don't mean our hydrogen-

oxygen compound, or that there's no "sky" as such on Loarr,

or for that matter that the Loarra weren'taren'tcreatures

that "think" or "feel" in quite the Way we understand. In fact,

you could take this as a piece of pure fiction, because there

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are damned few real facts in itbut I know better (or

worse), because I know how true it is. And that has a lot to

do with why I'm back here on Earth, with forty-two friends

and co-workers left dead on Loarr. They never had a chance.

There was a Changer who had spent three life cycles plan-

ning a particular cycle climax and who had come to the

moment of action. He wasn't really named Minnearo, but

I'll call him that because it's the closest thing I can write to

approximate the tone, emotional matrix, and associations that

were all wrapped up in his designation.

When he came to his decision, he turned away from the

crag on which he'd been standing overlooking the Loarran

ocean, and went quickly to the personality-homes of three of

his best friends. To the first friend, Asterrea, he said, "I am

going to commit suicide," wave-dancing this message in his

best festive tone.

His friend laughed, as Minnearo had hoped, but only for a

short time. Then he turned away and left Minnearo alone,

because there had already been several suicides lately and it

was wearing a little thin.

To his second friend, Minnearo gave a pledge-salute, going

through all sixty sequences with exaggerated care, and wave-

danced, "Tomorrow I shall immerse my body in the ocean, if

anyone will Watch."

His second friend, Fless, smiled tolerantly and told him he

would come and see the performance.

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To his third friend, with many excited leapings and bound-

ings, Minnearo described what he imagined would happen to

him after he had gone under the lapping waters of the ocean.

The dance he went 'through to give this description was

intricate and even imaginative, because Minnearo had spent

most of that third life cycle working it out in his mind. It

used motion and color and sound and another sense some-

thing like smell, all to communicate descriptions of falling,

impact with the water, and then the quick dissolution and

blending in the currents of the ocean, the dimming and loss

of awareness, and finally the awakening, the completion of

'the change. Minnearo had a rather romantic turn of mind,

so he imagined himself recoalescing around the life-mote of

one of Loarr's greatest heroes, Krollim, and forming on

Krollim's old pattern. And he even ended the dance with

suggestions of glory and imitations by others, which was

definitely presumptuous. But the friend for whom the dance

was given did nod approvingly at several points.

"If it turns out to be half what you anticipate," said this

friend, Pur, "then I envy you. But you never know."

"I guess not," Minnearo said, rather morosely. And he

hesitated before leaving, for Pur was what I suppose I'd better

call female, and Minnearo had rather hoped that she would

join him in the ocean jump. But if she thought of it she gave

no sign, merely gazing at Minnearo calmly, waiting for him

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to go; so finally he did.

And at the appropriate time, with his friend Fless watching

him from the edge of the cliff, Minnearo did his final wave-

dance as Minnearorather excited and ill-coordinated, but

that was understandable in the circumstancesand then per-

formed his approach to the edge, leaped and tumbled down-

ward through the air, making fully two dozen turns this way

and that before he hit the water.

Fless hurried back and described the suicide to Asterra and

Pur, who laughed and applauded in most of the right places,

so on the whole it was a success. Then the three of them sat

down and began plotting Minnearo's revenge.

All right, I know a lot of this doesn't make sense. Maybe

that's because I'm trying to tell you about the Loarra in

human terms, which is a mistake with creatures as alien as

they are. Actually, the Loarra are almost wholly 'an energy

life-form, their consciousness coalescing in each life cycle

around a spatial center which they call a "life-mote," so that,

if you could see the patterns of energy they form (as I have,

using a sense filter our expedition developed for that pur-

pose), they'd look rather like a spiral nebula sometimes, or

other times like iron filings gathering around a magnet, or

maybe like a half-melted snowflake. (That's probably what

Minnearo looked like on that day, because it's the suicides

and the aged who look like that.) Their forms keep shifting,

of course, but each individual usually keeps close to one

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pattern.

Loarr itself is a gigantic gaseous planet with an orbit so

close to its primary that its year has to be only about thirty-

seven Earthstandard Days long. (In Earthsystem, the orbit

would be considerably inside that of Venus.) There's a solid

core to the planet, and a lot of hard outcroppings like islands,

but most of the surface is in a molten or gaseous state, swirl-

ing and bubbling and howling with winds and storms. It's not

a very inviting planet if you're anything like a human being,

but it does have one thing that brought it. to Unicentral's

attention: mining.

Do you have any idea what mining is like on a planet

where most metals are fluid from the heat and/or pressure?

Most people haven't heard much about this, because it isn't

a situation we encounter often, but it was there on Loarr, and

it was very, very interesting. Because our analyses showed

some elements that had been until then only computer-theory

elements that were supposed to exist only in the hearts of

suns, for one thing. And if we could get hold of some of

them . . . Well, you see what I mean. The mining possibilities

were very interesting indeed.

Of course, it would take half the wealth of Earthsystem to

outfit a full-scale expedition there. But Unicentral hummed

for two-point-eight seconds and then issued detailed instruc-

tions on just how it was all to be arranged. So there we

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Terry Carr - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.pdf

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