Now was the time to tax my ingenuity, to really drive the lessonshome. I had purposely refrained from plunging into the major textsuntil I could do justice to them. I had been reading minorcommentaries, bits of verse, fragments of history. And one thing hadimpressed me strongly in all that I read.

They wrote about concrete things: rock, sand, water, winds; andthe tenor couched within these elemental symbols was fiercelypessimistic. It reminded me of some Buddhists texts, but even moreso, I realized from my recent recherches, it was like parts of theOld Testament. Specifically, it reminded me of the Book ofEcclesiastes.

That, then, would be it. The sentiment, as well as thevocabulary, was so similar that it would be a perfect exercise. Likeputting Poe into French. I would never be a convert to the Way ofMalann, but I would show them that an Earthman had once thought thesame thoughts, felt similarly.

I switched on my desk lamp and sought King James amidst my books.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; allif vanity. What profit hath a man...

My progress seemed to startle M'Cwyie. She peered at me, likeSartre's Other, across the tabletop. I ran through a chapter in theBook of Locar. I didn't look up, but I could feel the tight net hereyes were working about my head, shoulders, and rapid hands. I turnedanother page.

Was she weighing the net, judging the size of the catch? And whatfor? The books said nothing of fishers on Mars. Especially of men.They said that some god named Malann had spat, or had done somethingdisgusting (depending on the version you read), and that life hadgotten underway as a disease in inorganic matter. They said thatmovement was its first law, its first law, and that the dance was theonly legitimate reply to the inorganic...the dance's quality itsjustification,--fication...and love is a disease in organicmatter--Inorganic matter?

I shook my head. I had almost been asleep.

"M'narra."

I stood and stretched. Her eyes outlined me greedily now. So Imet them, and they dropped.

"I grow tired. I want to rest for awhile. I didn't sleep muchlast night."

She nodded, Earth's shorthand for "yes," as she had learned fromme.

"You wish to relax, and see the explicitness of the doctrine ofLocar in its fullness?"

"Pardon me?"

"You wish to see a Dance of Locar?"

"Oh." Their damned circuits of form and periphrasis here ranworse than the Korean! "Yes. Surely. Any time it's going to be doneI'd be happy to watch."

I continued, "In the meantime, I've been meaning to ask youwhether I might take some pictures-"

"Now is the time. Sit down. Rest. I will call the musicians."

She bustled out through a door I had never been past.

Well now, the dance was the highest art, according to Locar, notto mention Havelock Ellis, and I was about to see how theircenturies-dead philosopher felt it should be conducted. I rubbed myeyes and snapped over, touching my toes a few times.

The blood began pounding in my head, and I sucked in a couple deepbreaths. I bent again and there was a flurry of motion at the door.

To the trio who entered with M'Cwyie I must have looked as if Iwere searching for the marbles I had just lost, bent over like that.

I grinned weakly and straightened up, my face red from more thanexertion. I hadn't expected them that quickly.

Suddenly I thought of Havelock Ellis again in his area of greatestpopularity.

The little redheaded doll, wearing, sari-like, a diaphanous pieceof the Martian sky, looked up in wonder--as a child at some colorfulflag on a high pole.

"Hello," I said, or its equivalent.

She bowed before replying. Evidently I had been promoted instatus.

"I shall dance," said the red wound in that pale, pale cameo, herface. Eyes, the color of dream and her dress, pulled away from mine.

She drifted to the center of the room.

Standing there, like a figure in an Etruscan frieze, she waseither meditating or regarding the design on the floor.

Was the mosaic symbolic of something? I studied it. If it was,it eluded me; it would make an attractive bathroom floor or patio, butI couldn't see much in it beyond that.

The other two were paint-spattered sparrows like M'Cwyie, in theirmiddle years. One settled to the floor with a triple-stringedinstrument faintly resembling a samisen. The other held a simplewoodblock and two drumsticks.

M'Cwyie disdained her stool and was seated upon the floor before Irealized it. I followed suit.

The samisen player was still tuning it up, so I leaned towardM'Cwyie.

"What is the dancer's name?"

"Braxa," she replied, without looking at me, and raised her lefthand, slowly, which meant yes, and go ahead, and let it begin.

The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a tick-tocking,like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from theblock.

Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, elbows high andoutspread.

The music became a metaphor for fire.

Crackle, purr, snap...

She did not move.

The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed. It waswater now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear thengreen over mossy rocks.

Still she did not move.

Glissandos. A pause.

Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the tremble ofwinds began. Softly, gently, sighing and halting, uncertain. Apause, a sob, then a repetition of the first statement, only louder,

Were my eyes completely bugged from my reading, or was Braxaactually trembling, all over, head to foot.

She was.

She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right,then left. Her fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and Icould see that her eyes were closed.

Her eyes opened. They were distant, glassy, looking through meand the walls. Her swaying became more pronounced, merged with thebeat.

The wind was sweeping in from the desert now, falling againstTirellian like waves on a dike. Her fingers moved, they were thegusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a counter-movement.

The gale was coming now. She began an axial movement and herhands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulderscommenced to writhe out a figure-eight.

The wind! The wind, I say. O wild, enigmatic! O muse of St.John Perse!

The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Herhead was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between hergaze, passive as Buddha's, and the unchanging skies. Only the twomoons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana ofuninhabited turquoise.

Years ago, I had seen the Devadasis is India, the street-dancers,spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxawas more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama,incarnation of Vishnu, who had given the dance to man: the sacreddancers.

The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the stringsmade me think of the stinging rays of the sun, their heat stolen bythe wind's halations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girlnamed Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statue cometo life, and inhaled a divine afflatus.

I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with hislaudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarme and Aleister Crowley. Iwas, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darkersuit, the hymns and the organ's wheeze transmuted to bright wind.

She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in theair. a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to theground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up anddown like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momentarilyabove a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job'sargument with God. Her dance was God's reply.