Dancing to a Different Tune

Nadia, are you ready?

Nadia Mirasova blinked in annoyance as glowing text appeared in mid-air just over Dmitri's head. The voice-to-text "heads-up display" was supposed to be above her normal line of sight, and she supposed that it was — Dmitri was, after all, at least 20 centimeters taller than she was — but it was still distracting. It didn't help that the interface provided no clue as to who was speaking, or where they were; only the fact that Dmitri was looking at someone behind her prompted her to turn toward the speaker.

"Hello, Mr. Boorman," she said. "We are just finishing up here, making sure that the suit is functioning properly." Maddeningly, her own words now scrolled through the air over Boorman's head.

Boorman's lips moved, and a tiny fraction of a second later, more text marched across her field of vision. The suit, yes, the suit, how wonderful it must be that it lets you dance again. When you lost your hearing, you must have thought your career was over…"

Nadia suppressed the urge to snarl at the promoter — a boorish man, indeed. His tuxedo fit him like an overstuffed sausage casing, and the pathetic way he arranged his remaining hair! But he was giving her the chance to perform, to prove herself, when no one else would.

"Yes, it is thrilling," she said. "They could not restore my hearing — the nerve damage was too severe even for the most advanced cochlear implants. But the suit — it lets me feel the music, to experience it with all its nuances intact. In some ways, it may be better than hearing."

Lies. Like the voice-to-text display, it was a poor substitute for what nature had taken away. Changes in pitch and volume were translated into a tingle here, a feeling of heat or cold there, swirlings of color if she activated the visual interface, tastes or odors that changed with uncanny speed. Her first few days in the suit had been a nightmare, twitching and stumbling about in response to a thousand phantom touches, sneezing as smells changed from sweet to foul in instants. Dmitri had been a saint, comforting her when she wept in frustration, endlessly adjusting the sensitivity of the sensor mesh and fiddling with the software that changed sound into everything but sound.

And she had learned. The brain is a wonderful thing, capable of adapting to the most bizarre and extreme changes in circumstance. Dmitri had showed her old video of psychology students who learned to function normally while viewing the world through prisms that inverted everything. Then, when the prisms were removed, they had to learn to see normally again! Blind people with early versions of artificial vision systems had found ways to derive meaning from a few dots or lines of light; deaf people had been able to interpret the crude stimuli provided by primitive cochlear implants as sound and speech.

She had applied a dancer's discipline to turning signals that would be symptoms of madness in any other context into mood and rhythm. It was not music as anyone had ever experienced it before — but it was far more subtle than the thumping bass beats that allowed other hearing-impaired people to imitate the clumsy flailing that passed for dancing in the clubs.

Miss Mirasova, it's time.

Nadia nodded at the stage manager who had, thank God, spoken where she could see him, and glided past Boorman and onto the stage.

Stage right, she saw the grand piano, with her old friend and accompanist Vladislav Tzerbinski at the keyboard. Seated beside him, Janice Tillman cradled her cello between her legs like an old familiar lover. The set was simple — a few wooden chairs, a lectern upon which a large book lay open, folding screens to represent walls. Nadia knew that the book was actually a hardbound collection of cartoons, but the audience would imagine it to be something more profound, — a Bible, or a hymnal, perhaps.

The audience exploded in applause, thrilled to see her perform — or try to perform. Perhaps they expected a clumsy, freakish display as "that dancer who went deaf" tried to move to music when she couldn't hear a single note. The "suit" and neural implants translated the shouts and clapping into something like the crawling of ants over her arms and legs, a sharp scent — vinegar and musk — and the taste of burnt sugar. If they hadn't prepared for this moment with recordings of live concerts, she would have been overwhelmed.

Instead, she let her right arm drift upward, as if pulled by invisible strings. Vladimir pounded out the opening chords of the "Queen of the Sea" solo from Lacotte's Ondine, and the audience fell silent.

And she danced.

People often said that they felt music washing over them. Nadia truly felt the music now, but it did not pass over and through her like water. It poked and teased and caressed and chilled and burned her. It filled her nostrils with the scent of violets and the reek of decay, changing in a heartbeat to chocolate tinged with celery and rhubarb.

Somehow, out of that chaotic storm of sensory input, she drew a melody. The pain of dancing en pointe, the strain of extending her limbs beyond what most would consider their normal range of motion, even the thud of landing after a grand jete, merely served as punctuation for the torrent of sensations flowing from the sensor web under her costume to the circuitry implanted in her brain.

With only a few moment's pause, Vlad and Janice launched into an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, specially arranged to allow the low thrum and moan of the cello to guide Nadia's limbs through Sergeev's intricate choreography. And she danced…

When the performance ended, when the last note had been played and the last step taken, the applause was… deafening.

Find more by Robert Moriyama in the Author Index.

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