PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

"The dance was a triumph of shock---the shock of dynamic

beauty. . . . . The . . . shape on the golden steps executed

shimmering intricacies of meaning."
---Cordwainer Smith, "No, No, Not Rogov!"

SummaCum he called himself, reputed to be the
most beautiful dancer in the Externality.
His broadcast dance suite, preempting all regularly
scheduled programming, had been a daring gamble---
but ratings polls had exceeded all previous records; and
even public records of that magnitude did not lie.
All eyes, and the semblances of eyes, looked upon him;
all ears, and the semblances of ears, heard the music's plea.
So had written an ancient poet, several T-millenia before
SummaCum had first danced among us.
He had been born among the privileged Originated,
but had chosen to live among one of the Alternated---
because of his two choices: to love one of the Alternated, and to
subsume his beautiful, innate masculinity to the
presentation of his soul's femninity (but that assumes
belief in the existence of a soul---an idea not widely shared in
our modern, skeptic, and realistic age; and the
Externatropes forbid it to the Originated, anyhow.
He was, I should add, only nineteen T-years old, and
should have, by that age, known how to behave better.  As
his performance began, SummaCum approached the
platform on which he would dance. Slender and subtly
muscular, lithe and supple, his physique was definitely
masculine; but eyeshadow, lip gloss, and cascades of long hair meant
feminized in the most blatant and defiant way.  But
trillions of viewers had focused their autoskews on this; and
we were committed to the schedule and content, no
matter how much many of us disagreed, complaining to the
Externality, which had refused to hear our appeal.  To the
Externality, SummaCum's choreography

failed to achieve the sublimity of art in the 
accepted and approved sense of the term, but was mere
Perversity, pornographic tripe (as one had described it); and the
Externality believed that this full disclosure
would prove, once and for all, how useless, subversive, and shallow a
demonstration of this must be, unworthy of emulation.
SummaCum had only minimally covered his nakedness---a
silk thong, and metallic blue, opaque, stockings
held by a suspender belt of pink lace; no shirt, no shoes, no
modesty---that had been his professional habit, and
one suspects, his ordinary lifestyle as well.
Silent himself, his gestures, expressions and movement
seemed to coordinate the instrumental music around him; in
his admittedly superlatively talented way,
he enacted the existence of, first, stars and stones;
then of the vegetal species; then of the lower animals; in
fascinating, and somehow very accurate, posturing
of his scantilly covered body. But then, unexpectedly---
radically---the meaning of his dance sharply altered.
I should have imposed a break, an administrative disruption,
rather than allowing him any further license. But the
Externality had already forbidden this deterrence.
Someone, I knew not who, wanted to experience this.  And
while he leaped, and gyrated, and flexed and contorted,
I began to realize that the rumors I had heard were true.
We knew he loved one of the Alternated, but that
"person's" identity had not been known.  But
now he, SummaCum, himself, 
chose, with immense tenderness, to reveal it:  a
shipboarder---one of the usually adolescent brains
which, for purposes of punitive penalties or the
repayment of overwhelming, unbearable, familial
debt, had been surgically removed from its body
(which was then subsequently destroyed) and
implanted into the Command Procedure Unit of
some large, fully automated, cargo vessel
plodding along through space from point to point.
Such a radical surgical disconnection was rewarded
with a radical lifespan---projected to be T-centuries
more than what even the Originated actually received.  (In
situations like this, the Externatropes were very ruthless,

with neither question nor consideration of fairness.)
Without giving us any identifiers that could, if used correctly,
cause discomfort, or even dysfunction, to his lover,
he showed us the course of their relationship:  the
first hesitant overtures, followed by the realization of
his lover's existential isolation in the depth of space,
reachable only by the most attenuated transmission.  And
yet, despite these obstacles, he gave to his lover---and
now to us, his audience (some unwilling but unable to
look away) the beauty of two adolescent boys
celebrating, together, their eager exploration of
each other's naked, or almost naked, body's natural
capacity for the most explicit and delectable pleasure,
offered to one another in the most curious varieties.  But
more than that, they would never, really, share.
Their existences were too totally differentiated; and no
shipboarder ever returns alive from that vocation.  The
dismal shadow of unspeakable sadness radiated from him as
he had reached the end of the conclusion of this illicit display,
Then a cable, as previously arranged, began to lower down
from the rafters, toward him. He had often used
such a device for some very amazing aerial stunts.  As
he grapsed it with one hand, and one arm's tense strength, the
cable lifted him well above the platform; and
while thus suspended, he used his free, other hand to
wrap the cable's loose, lower end around his neck; and
then let go, neither hand holding on, as his face
purpled, and his limbs began to thrash and twitch.  In a
few moments, that seemed to his audience to be as
as long and slow as a Plutonic orbit (as the ancients said),
we watched the pull of gravity and the knotted cable
wring that last remains of life out of his quivering body.  At
last, he just hung there, dead, and the thong dampened;
his feet, sheathed in those stockings' opacity.
pointing downward---limply, lifelessly. Many in the audience
believed that this was just the climax (oh, that wet thong) of
performance; and not a fatality; but they were mistaken.  And
later, unknown to most of them during their subsequent
consideration of what they had witnessed, one of the Externality's
largest cargo freighters, suddenly and unexpectedly detonated---the
flash, I was told, was like a small supernova, the
the spectrum of radiance crossing all of the available colors, crossing

vast expandes of emptiness that separate us.

Starward