James Gardner - Space Inc (collection)

“Ellen, keep your suckers on the floor as long as possible in the plié … damn.” I kept forgetting they couldn’t speak English. “Ellen, look! Look!”

I demonstrated a grand plié , heels down, and then demonstrated what she was doing, shaking my head. Ellen made me a deep reverence —they all loved doing that—and performed the movement correctly.

“Good, good… Terence, don’t wobble… look! Look!”

I’d been aboard ship for four months. My Mollies worked fanatically hard, practicing for hours every day. Randall Mombatu conveyed lavish compliments from all the parents, none of whom would have recognized a correct arabesque if Pavlova herself were doing it. The small squid couldn’t talk to me, although they chattered readily among themselves in chirps and whistles. There was some incompatibility of human words with their tongues. I think. But they understood me well, picking up a huge dance vocabulary quickly. I had the suspicion they were smarter than I was. The adults, I gathered, communicated with our diplomats through keyboards.

Today I had a surprise for the octopi; the toe shoes had arrived. They were specially designed, blocky pink coverings for the back two legs that would support the fragile tentacle ends and add another few inches to their extensions.

But first we had to get from pliés to grands battements. “One and two and—”

“Celia,” Randall said abruptly, spoiling my count. “You have a phone call.”

“Can’t it wait? Jim, no, no, not like that… look! Look!”

“She says not. It’s your niece.”

Sally? I turned to look at Randall. His tone had been disapproving, but now his entire attention absorbed by the alienettes. “You know,” he murmured to me, “we have almost no knowledge about the Visitor young. Their parents are very protective. You’re the only human who’s spent any time with them at all.”

I realized then why I’d been forbidden to record classes for later analysis. I said incredulously, “You mean, this is the only contact between a human and Mollie kids?”

“Between a human and Alien Visitor children,” he corrected, with an emphasis that told me we were being overheard. Probably the aliens taped my classes—something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Well, why not? Except that it would have been useful to see those tapes for dance analysis.

I followed Randall to the comlink phone, which the Mollies had allowed us to install in the human part of the ship. We passed people engaged in urgent, obscure tasks. It occurred to me that very few people aboard this ship ever smiled.

“Sally?”

“Oh,” my niece said, sounding bored, or trying to sound bored. I waited, until she was forced to say, “How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Fine. Except, of course… oh, Aunt Celia, I’m not fine at all!”

It was the last thing I’d expected: the return of the open, honest eight-year-old she’d once been. It got under my barriers as nothing else could have.

“What’s wrong, Sally?”

“Dad’s going to send me away to school again and it’s awful, you can’t know and I can’t bear it! I won’t!” Her voice rose to a shriek.

“Sally, dear—”

“Unless I can come up there and stay with you. Oh, can I, please? I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I promise!”

I closed my eyes and ground my forehead against the wall. “Sally, honey, this is an embassy or something, I can’t give permission to—”

“Yes, you can. The news said the Mollies would do anything for you because they’re so happy about their kids’ dancing!”

That was more than I knew. The pleading in her voice broke my heart. I didn’t want her here. She’d be a bored nuisance. Guilt washed over me like surf.

“Please! Please!”

I said to the presence behind me, who was probably always behind me electronically or otherwise if I only had the interest to look for him, “Randall?”

“The Alien Visitors would allow it.”

“They would? Why?”

“I suspect they’re as interested in our young as we are in theirs.”

But not this particular girl , I didn’t say. Not Sally, not to form impressions of human offspring by.

“If Dad makes me go away again, I’ll… he just wants me somewhere where he doesn’t have to think about me and be distracted from his work!”

And there was enough truth in that despairing pain that I said, “All right, Sally. Come up here.”

“Thank you, Aunt Celia! I’ll be so good you won’t know me! I promise you!”

But I didn’t know her now. Worse, I didn’t really want to. Guilt held me in its undertow, and I just hoped we didn’t both drown.

At first she tried, I’ll give her that. She learned the Mollies’ names. She made no audible jokes about crustaceans. She played the music cubes I asked for in class. She chatted with me over dinner, and she didn’t (as far as I could tell) take any drugs. But she neither understood nor liked ballet, and day by day I could feel her boredom and irritation grow, and my resentment grow along with it.

But that was all background noise. My little cavorting squid had been working for six months, and I’d been informed that a recital for the parents would be a good idea. After a long sleepless night, I’d decided to adapt— radically adapt!—Jerome Robbins’ choreography for Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

In this short ballet, a boy and girl in practice clothes warm up at the barre, facing the audience as if it were a mirror. So great is their concentration on dance that only gradually do they become aware of each other. The first steps they do are easy, basic warm-ups, and I could keep subsequent combinations from getting too difficult. Moreover, I could gradually add more couples onstage until they were all there, with the most accomplished of my young dancers performing solos and the least accomplished forming a corps after their later entrances. The music was lovely; also, it was slow enough that I would not tax my young Mollies’ speed or balance. Finally, I wouldn’t need elaborate sets or costumes, yet I would still be presenting a (sort of) real ballet.

“So what do you think?” I asked Sally over breakfast.

“All right, I guess,” she answered indifferently, but then perked up. “Can I do the lights?”

“Lights?” The studio had never been anything but fully lit. I didn’t even know if we had a light board. But for Faun , the stage should be in darkness at first and then gradually brighten. “Uh, I’ll see.”

“Don’t exhaust yourself,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll be in the video room.” She pushed herself away from the table and sauntered out.

Until Sally arrived, I hadn’t even known the ship had a video room, intercepting broadcasts from Earth. Well, why not. It kept her away from class. The alienettes, I sensed, didn’t like her there, although it would be difficult to say how I knew this, since they understood most of what I said now, but I understood nothing of their squeaks and whistles and chirps. In fact, they were hardly individuals to me. I didn’t worry about this. Ellen had a strong extension, Terry a smooth flowing développé , Denise a graceful port de bras. That was enough to know.

I asked Randall for Afternoon of a Faun , the Royal Ballet production of 2011 which, gods forgive me, I thought superior to the New York City Ballet’s. He looked at me blankly.

“It’s a ballet, Randall. I need a performance recording of it to show my dancers.”

“With people.”

“Of course with people!”

“I’m sorry, Celia, I’m a little slow this morning. The computers have been acting up, and there’s a trade problem with the Visitors and the EEC… but you’re not interested in that.”