Dance at the Edge
8.
A few nights later when Emma arrived home from a recital given by Pelagia Compton, the principal master with whom Letitia Shadows studied, she was surprised to find Viola Knight in the bathroom—staring at a narrow patch of Edge that had manifested in the small open space bordered by the walls of basins and stalls. It looked very strange to her there, and for a moment she didn’t know why. It seemed to be a green stew of seaweed, heaving with irregular tidal swells over sharp crude craggy bits of rock showing the sheen of pink, violet, and green slime wherever they were exposed. As an Edge, it was, Emma supposed, fairly typical. And yet something about it struck her as not quite right.
“Reminds me of birthing,” Viola said. “If we could smell it, I imagine it would be damned rank.”
Emma had trouble tearing her eyes away from it—even to look on Viola’s freshly scrubbed face. “There’s something strange about it,” she said.
“Yes,” Viola said. “We don’t expect to find a Seam appearing in the middle of a room, especially one so small as this.”
One usually got thin strips along walls free of shelves or furniture. But a solid—albeit small—block, right out in the middle? Of course, if either of them moved into that area, it would be bound to disappear. But…Viola, as though musing aloud, said, “Makes me wonder if the conventional wisdom—that the only place major fields can appear are on the ice at the poles and in desert or tundra, might not be correct. Imagine building an enormous empty space enclosed by four walls and just waiting to see if a field appeared.” Apparently recalling that Emma was totally ignorant about tachyon fields except for what she’d told her on the walk back to the bus, Viola smiled condescendingly. “You see, it’s always been assumed they’re random and cannot be systematically studied,” she said.
Full of wonder, Emma said, “Do you think the engineering guild would build such a place, if they knew about this appearance?”
Viola, still favoring Emma with that same smile, shrugged. “That’s doubtful. They’d have to be able to justify the expenditure. I suppose they could simply say they wanted to study tachyons. But it would be risky. Certainly it would put all engineers involved in danger of breaking their oaths.”
“Don’t you see,” Emma said passionately—but had to stop when Eudora Fromm and Gilda Pershing came in, so absorbed in a conversation about avian ethology that they never noticed the odd way Emma and Viola were positioned.
The women crossed into the Edge, causing it to vanish. Presumably it would come back. But since the small bit of Edge that had been in her room at the beginning of the term had vanished the previous week without being replaced by another, Emma felt bereft, anyway.
9.
The Edge in the bathroom did not reappear. Or was it that it had gone and would not return? Thinking, for the first time, about some of the possible implications of the little that Viola had told her about “Seams,” Emma Persimmon realized she didn’t know whether there was a difference between the perception of an Edge and its actually being there. When one stopped perceiving an Edge—say, when one moved into it, forcing it to retreat, did the field itself—as Viola called it—vanish because it was utterly disrupted, or did it just seem to disappear? Though she had long since lost her infantile delight in playing fort/da, she had never stopped testing Edges. Usually the Edge did return when one had moved out of it.
As Emma thought up a whole new set of questions about the Edge, she grew disturbed about the loss of that particular Edge in the bathroom—and with Viola Knight, whose attitude she irrationally began to associate with the loss. Viola’s apparent obliviousness to her feelings, Viola’s certainty in the wisdom of her guild’s secrecy, irked her. A sense of grievance swept over her. She took up her old habit of following Viola, but now with a doggedness that was almost angry.
Emma dreamed of bees swarming busily around their hive, lapping up honey almost as fast as they made it. Swooping and buzzing indoors, loaded with nectar she could not deliver, night after night Emma flew into the bright odorless meadow of an Edge, only to smash into the wall, thwarted each time she sought to escape, destined to kill herself trying.
At meals Emma picked desultorily at her food and often lost track of conversations. Her friends thought it a simple case of unconsummated love. But to Emma, there was nothing simple about it, though what wasn’t simple she dared not say aloud.
One evening Ledora Fairly drew Emma into her room, to offer her advice and instruction. “Embolden yourself, Emma!” she said. “When you know what you want, you must take it.”
Ledora had no furniture except for a drafting table and matching high stool. The walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors and lights. Flinching from her own reflection, Emma thought that only the physical perfection that dancers necessarily embodied would make it possible to live in such an environment, where one could never escape the reality of one’s appearance.
Ledora Fairly positioned the stool near the small window. She said, “Please, Emma, sit.” Every movement the dancer made suggested extravagance. Even the simplest gesture of arm evoked grace and… immediacy. As though nothing mattered so much as the moment. Emma got a little excited. Dancers were such unpredictable creatures.
