Nancy Kress - Dancing on Air

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Dancing on Air

by Nancy Kress

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First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1993

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

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>>>"When a man has been guilty of a mistake, either in ordering his own

affairs, or in directing those of State, or in commanding an army, do we not

always say, So-and-so has made a false step in this affair? And can making a

false step derive from anything but lack of skill in dancing?"<<<

-- Moliere

Sometimes I understand the words. Sometimes I do not understand the

words.

Eric brings me to the exercise yard. A man and a woman stand there. The

man is tall. The woman is short. She has long black fur on her head. She

smells angry.

Eric says, "This is Angel. Angel, this is John Cole and Caroline

Olson."

"Hello," I say.

"I'm supposed to understand that growl?" the woman says. "Might as well

be Russian!"

"Caroline," the man says, "you promised..."

"I know what I promised." She walks away. She smells very angry. I

don't understand. My word was _hello_. _Hello_ is one of the easy words.

The man says, "Hello, Angel." He smiles. I sniff his shoes and bark. He

smells friendly. I smell two cats and a hot dog and street tar and a car. I

feel happy. I like cars.

The woman comes back. "If we have to do this, then let's just do it,

for Chrissake. Let's sign the papers and get out of this hole."

John Cole says, "The lawyers are all waiting in Eric's office."

Eric's office smells of many people. I go to my place beside the door.

I lie down. Maybe later somebody takes me in the car.

A woman looks at many papers and talks. "A contract between Biomod

Canine Protection Agency, herein referred to as the party of the first part,

and the New York City Ballet, herein referred to as the party of the second

part, in fulfillment of the requirements of Columbia Insurance Company, herein

referred to as the party of the third part, as those requirements are set

forth in Policy 438-69, Section 17, respecting prima ballerina Caroline Olson.

The party of the first part shall furnish genetically-modified canine

protection to Caroline Olson under, and not limited to, the following

conditions..."

The words are hard.

I think words I can understand.

My name is Angel. I am a dog. I protect. Eric tells me to protect. No

people can touch the one I protect except safe people. I love people I

protect. I sleep now.

"Angel," Eric says from his chair, "Wake up now. You must protect."

I wake up. Eric walks to me. He sits next to me. He puts his voice in

my ear.

"This is Caroline. You must protect Caroline. No one must hurt

Caroline. No one must touch Caroline except safe people. Angel -- _protect

Caroline_."

I smell Caroline. I am very happy. I protect Caroline.

"Jesus H. Christ," Caroline says. She walks away.

I love Caroline.

* * * *

We go in the car. We go very far. Many people. Many smells. John drives the

car. John is safe. He may touch Caroline. John stops the car. We get out.

There are many tall buildings and many cars.

"You sure you're going to be okay?" John Cole says.

"You've protected your investment, haven't you?" Caroline snarls. John

drives away.

A man stands by the door. The man says, "Evening, Miss Olson."

"Evening, Sam. This is my new guard dog. The company insists I have

one, after ... what's been happening. They say the insurance company is

paranoid. Yeah, sure. I need a dog like I need a knee injury."

"Yes, ma'am. Doberman, isn't he? He looks like a goooood ol' dog. Hey,

big fella, what's your name?"

"Angel," I say.

The man jumps and makes a noise. Caroline laughs.

"Bioenhanced. Great for my privacy, right? Rover, Sam is safe. Do you

hear me? Sam is _safe_."

I say, "My name is Angel."

Caroline says, "Sam, you can relax. Really. He only attacks on command,

or if I scream, or if he hasn't been told a person is safe and that person

touches me."

"Yes, Ma'am." Sam smells afraid. He looks at me hard. I bark and my

tail moves.

Caroline says, "Come on, Fido. Your spy career is about to begin."

I say, "My name is Angel."

"Right," Caroline says.

We go in the building. We go in the elevator. I say, "Sam has a cat. I

smell Sam's cat."

"Who the fuck cares," Caroline says.

I am a dog.

I must love Caroline.

Two days after the second ballerina was murdered, Michael Chow, senior editor

of _New York Now_ and my boss, called me into his office. I already knew what

he wanted, and I already knew I didn't want to do it. He knew that, too. We

both knew it wouldn't make any difference.

"You're the logical reporter, Susan," Michael said. He sat behind his

desk, always a bad sign. When he thought I'd want an assignment, he leaned

casually against the front of the desk. Its top was cluttered with print-outs;

with disposable research cartridges, some with their screens alight; with

pictures of Michael's six children. _Six_. They all looked like Michael:

straight black hair and a smooth face like a peeled egg. At the apex of the

mess sat a hardcopy of the _Times_ 3:00 p.m. on-line lead: AUTOPSY DISCOVERS

BIOENHANCERS IN CITY BALLET DANCER. "You have an in. Even Anton Privitera will

talk to you."

"Not about this. He already gave his press conference. Such as it was."

"So? You can get to him as a parent and leverage from there."

My daughter Deborah was a student in the School of American Ballet, the

juvenile province of Anton Privitera's kingdom. For thirty years he had ruled

the New York City Ballet like an annointed tyrant. Sometimes it seemed he

could even levy taxes and raise armies, so exalted was his reputation in the

dance world, and so good was his business manager John Cole at raising funds

and enlisting corporate patrons. Dancers had flocked to the City Ballet from

Europe, from Asia, from South America, from the serious ballet schools in the

patrolled zones of America's dying cities. Until biohancers, the New York City

Ballet had been the undisputed grail of the international dance world.

Now, of course, that was changing.

Privitera was dynamic with the press as long as we were content with

what he wished us to know. He wasn't going to want to discuss the murder of

two dancers, one of them his own.

A month ago Nicole Heyer, a principal dancer with the American Ballet

Theater, had been found strangled in Central Park. Three days ago the body of

Jennifer Lang had been found in her modest apartment. Heyer had been a

bioenhanced dancer who had come to the ABT from the Stuttgart Ballet. Lang, a

minor soloist with the City Ballet, had of course been natural. Or so

everybody thought until the autopsy. The entire company had been bioscanned

only three weeks ago, Artistic Director Privitera had told the press, but

apparently these particular viro-enhancers were so new and so different that

they hadn't even shown up on the scan.

I wondered how to make Michael understand the depth of my dislike for

all this.

"Don't cover the usual police stuff," Michael said, "nor the scientific

stuff on bioenhancement. Concentrate on the human angle you do so well. What's

the effect of these murders on the other dancers? Has it affected their

dancing? Does Privitera seemed more confirmed in his company policy now, or

has this shaken him enough to consider a change? What's he doing to protect

his dancers? How do the parents feel about the youngsters in the ballet

school? Are they withdrawing them until the killer is caught?"

I said, "You don't have any sensitivity at all, do you, Michael?"

He said quietly, "Your girl's seventeen, Susan. If you couldn't get her

to leave dancing before, you're not going to get her to leave now. Will you do

the story?"

I looked again at the scattered pictures of Michael's children. His

oldest was at Harvard Law. His second son was a happily married househusband,

raising three kids. His third child, a daughter, was doing six-to-ten in Rock

Mountain Maximum Security State Prison for armed robbery. There was no

figuring it out. I said, "I'll do the story."

"Good," he said, not looking at me. "Just hold down the metaphors,

Susan. You're still too given to metaphors."

"_New York Now_ could use a few metaphors. A feature magazine isn't

supposed to be a TV holo bite."

"A feature magazine isn't art, either," Michael retorted. "Let's all

keep that in mind."

"You're in luck," I said. "As it happens, I'm not a great lover of

art."

I couldn't decide whether to tell Deborah I had agreed to write about

ballet. She would hate my writing about her world under threat.

Which was a reason both for and against.

* * * *

September heat and long, cool shadows fought it out over the wide plaza of

Lincoln Center. The fountain splashed, surrounded by tourists and students and

strollers and derelicts. I thought Lincoln Center was ugly, shoe-box

architecture stuck around a charmless expanse of stone unredeemed by a little

splashing water. Michael said I only felt that way because I hated New York.

If Lincoln Center had been built in Kentucky, he said, I would have admired

it.

I had remembered to get the electronic password from Deborah. Since the

first murder, the New York State Theater changed it weekly. Late afternoon was

heavy rehearsal time; the company was using the stage as well as the studios.

I heard the Spanish bolero from the second act of _Coppelia_. Deborah had been

trying to learn it for weeks. The role of Swanilda, the girl who pretends to

be a doll, had first made the brilliant Caroline Olson a superstar.

Privitera's office was a jumble of dance programs, costume swatches,

and computers. He made me wait for him twenty minutes. I sat and thought about

what I knew about bioenhanced dancers, besides the fact that there weren't

supposed to have been any at City Ballet.

There were several kinds of bioenhancement. All of them were

experimental, all of them were illegal in The United States, all of them were

constantly in flux as new discooveries were made and rushed onto the European,

South American, and Japanese markets. It was a new science, chaotic and

contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures

at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been developed specifically

for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the population. But

European dancers submitted to experimental versions, as did American dancers

who could travel to Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive

privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological "machines."

Some nanomachines carried programming that searched out deviations in

the body and repaired them to match surrounding tissue. This speeded the

healing of some injuries some of the time, or only erratically, or not at all,

depending on whom you believed. Jennifer Lang had been receiving these

treatments, trying desperately to lessen the injury rate that went

hand-in-hand with ballet. The nanomachines were highly experimental, and

nobody was sure what long-term effect they might have, reproducing themselves

in the human body, interacting with human DNA.

Bone builders were both simpler and more dangerous. They were altered

viruses, reprogrammed to change the shape or density of bones. Most of the

experimental work had been done on old women with advanced ostereoporsis. Some

grew denser bones after treatment. The rest didn't. In ballet, the legs are

required to rotate 180 degrees in the hip sockets -- the famous "turn out"

that had destroyed so many dancers' hips and knees. If bones could be altered

to swivel 180 degrees _naturally_ in their sockets, turn out would cause far

less strain and disintegration. Extension could also be higher, making easier

the spectacular _arabesques_ and _grand battement_ kicks.

If the bones of the foot were reshaped, foot injuries could be lessened

in the unnatural act of dancing on toe.

Bioenhanced leg muscles could be stronger, for higher jumps, greater

speed, more stamina.

Anything that helped metabolic efficiency or lung capacity could help a

dancer sustain movements. They could also help her keep down her weight

without anorexia, the secret vice of the ballet world.

Dancers in Europe began to experiment with bioenhancement. First

cautiously, clandestinely. Then scandalously. Now openly, as a mark of pride.

A dancer with the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi or the Nederlands Dans Theater

who didn't have his or her body enhanced was considered undevoted to movement.

A dancer at the New York City Ballet who did have his or her body enhanced was

considered undevoted to art.

Privitera swept into his office without apology for being late. "Ah,

there you are. What can I do for you?" His accent was very light, but still

the musical tones of his native Tuscany were there. It gave his words a

deceptive intimacy.

"I've come about my daughter, Deborah Anders. She's in the D level at

SAB. She's the one who -- "

"Yes, yes, yes, I know who she is. I know all my dancers, even the very

young ones. Of course. But shouldn't you be talking with Madame Alois? She is

the director of our School."

"But you make all the important decisions," I say, trying to smile

winningly.

Privitera sat on a wing chair. He must have been in his seventies, yet

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Nancy Kress - Dancing on Air

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