The Lightning Dancer — Full Story
By Deborah L. Davitt
Josephine Tremblay could count her rivals on the fingers of one hand. She raised that hand now for a glove, staring stolidly at the chaotic sprawl of Lichtenberg fractals that scarred from her fingertips down the back of her hand, disappearing under the sleeve of her suit. Underneath, they ran to her shoulder.
A lover’s kiss from a storm that had torn a glove from her hand; a kiss that might have killed her, but hadn’t.
She still didn’t know why she’d lived.
Most prima ballerinas wore white full-length tutus for a ballet blanc; Josephine wore a Faraday suit crafted of copper and nickel and a helmet that might not have looked out of place on a medieval knight, with a tinted glass visor behind a cage of metal wire to protect her eyes from light brighter than that of any arc-welder.
And yet, the outfit was the most exquisite marriage of science and magic—modern technomancy at its finest. For instance, embedded in the forehead, a carbuncle ruby glimmered; a scrying stone to allow viewers on the ground to see what she saw, high in the air.
Around her, the junior dancers of the troupe were getting ready, checking each other’s gear, buckling straps. Each of them had similar gems above their visors, to try to catch the fast-moving action. A low, cheerful hum of voices from the other women, but none of them tried to assist Josephine, or even get in her line of sight. None of them wanted to break the prima ballerina’s concentration before a performance.
She appreciated that more than words.
Her dressers pulled the Faraday material tightly around her—a little too tight, in fact, and she waved them off impatiently. “I’ll finish on my own, thank you.”
She adjusted the gloves, and checked again the harness inside the suit—a perfect confluence of science and sorcery. It would take the million volts of a lightning strike and convert them to propulsion to power her flight, just as the Faraday suit would transform her into a living capacitor, untouched by the storm’s wrath.
The dressing area was carefully cordoned off from the cameras on the roof of this skyscraper, but she could feel the thrum of the Tesla coils in her teeth as their ‘orchestra’ played interlude music to warm up the crowd, both here, and on black and white television sets around the world. The orchestra would look like dancers themselves, undulating with the arcs of electricity coming off the big generators . . . but none of them dared to fly with the storm itself.
As she warmed up at the barre with the other women, still out of sight of the crowd, she heard the first rumbles of thunder in the distance. “Have you heard about Thomas?” the second-highest ranked dancer, Ariana, murmured to Josephine sidelong.
Josephine gave her a pointed look. She didn’t take kindly to gossip. But Thomas was the lead danseur, with a temper as volatile as any storm, as any number of girls from the chorus had discovered over the years. He’d often berated them for bad moves, lack of grace, flubs that made the principles look bad. He wasn’t wrong to correct errors. It was just the way he went about it, leaving girls in tears, that left a bad taste in Josephine’s mouth. And these were things that could have been left to the director, too. “He is going to dance tonight, yes?”
Ariana grimaced. “Haven’t heard that he won’t. But word is that Andre broke up with him.”
Josephine’s entire body, which should have been bent into a perfect plie, flinched. “Oh god,” she muttered. “Andre Carbonneu is one of the principal investors in the troupe.”
“I’m less concerned about the finances, and more worried about whom he’s going to take his bad temper out on tonight.” Ariana’s lips turned down. “When Sophia broke it off with him last year, you had bruises on your wrists for a week, Josephine.”
Josephine shrugged. “That was just a bad lift during rehearsal.” Still, she schooled her face to impassivity. She’d just lied to cover for Thomas and his temper. Again. But so long as he doesn’t take it out on any of the younger dancers, it’s fine.
Ariana’s eyes glittered with mischief as she changed sides to work her other leg. “His loss was my gain. Sophia’s much happier with me.”
“Say it a little louder—make sure he hears you,” Josephine whispered in return.
As if invoked, the door thumped open and Thomas Herve strode into the dressing area with quick, impatient energy. “Forecast is for a big one,” Josephine greeted him, watching the other ballerinas melt out of his path. If they’d worn white tulle, they’d have looked like so many dandelions wafted away on a breeze.
Behind him, Guy, the master of the ballet, peeked around the cloth that separated them from the world. She saw Guy’s expressive eyeroll at Thomas’ back, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Message received.
Thomas glared around him. “Did you read Velisnikov’s opinion in Le Monde today?” he demanded without preamble. “Went on and on about how our lack of choreography indicates lack of discipline.”
“Choreography isn’t possible when you don’t know where you’ll be in the next sixteen seconds, let alone when you’re traveling at one third the speed of light.” Josephine shrugged. “We extemporize, and do it well.” She essayed a smile.
A flicker of faint malice flickered across Thomas’ face. “He said you were too athletic. That the suit allows you no flexibility or true grace.”
The echoed words stung. But she sighed, keeping her tone amiable and calm. “I’d rather wear the suit and live, than strip it off and die.”
Josephine dipped into a fresh plie, testing her mobility in the suit, even as he paced and ranted, “And then there are the cameras. Eyes for every vulture in the world. All of them waiting for the matador to be tagged by the bull. For the automobile to explode on the racetrack. For one of us to make a mistake and die—”
She closed her eyes. No parachutes were possible; they’d have to be on the outside of the suits, and would be instantaneously fried by the very power that lifted them into the air. Oh, they had membranous wings that ran from wrist to ankle attached to their suits, but one mistake, one leap too many beyond the reach of the enchanted harnesses under their suits, and they’d crash to earth like Icarus.
It made every dance a leap of faith.
“Try not to be such a stupendously talented bitch, darling.” She rose from the deep, extended plie, and watched as his expression warred between appreciation at the compliment and outrage at the insult.
“I’ll take the stupendously talented bit,” he finally acceded, his temper suddenly leashed. “Sorry that Velisnikov is an idiot, darling.”
It was as much of an apology as she was going to get. And yet, where would she ever find another partner willing to ascend into a storm’s heart with her? Velisnikov never would. Nor would anyone else of similar caliber.
Thunder rolled overhead, bringing the first drops of rain. “Let’s go dazzle the world, shall we?”
“They sicken me, you know. All of them.”
“Smile,” she ordered through her teeth as the master of the ballet returned to the door and informed them that it was time to ascend the platform.
They filed out together, quick, light, graceful steps, to the applause of the small audience here, atop a skyscraper’s spire. The spire connected to a lightning rod that ran the length of the building, already humming with the energy of a dozen Tesla coils. Their orchestra moved in unison, directing the otherworldly voice of their instrument, so much like a Theremin writ large, and then held out their hands to direct raw electricity towards the structure, creating the conditions for the upstroke.
Josephine smiled and raised a bronze-clad arm in unison with the other girls, watching as the cameras focused on her and Thomas—gracefully, darling, gracefully, no matter what Velisnikov says—as they greeted their audience, here, and across the world. What did the lead danseur of the Bolshoi know? What did any of them know, who didn’t dare to pirouette and jeté among the clouds?
The hum of the coils rose to a crescendo as they took their places to either side of the spire. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Thomas had something in one of his hands as he assumed fifth position, arms raised—he’s bringing a prop? But it’ll be torn from his hands on the first ascent, surely—
Then she cleared her mind of all distractions and looked up at the clouds as if at the face of a lover.
A flash of white, a jolt of power through the harness around her frame. As she rose into the air, she looked down in time to see Lichtenberg fractals tracing themselves through the concrete where she’d just stood in runes of fire.
And then, soaring, all the other bodies rising with hers into the air like the cluster of a firework on some holiday. Wind tearing at her helmet with a thrumming scream that the Tesla coils couldn’t have matched if they’d tried. The suit had hardening along her neck and spine to protect her from the intense G-forces; the magic of the harness strained and whined, protecting her internal organs from instant liquification.
She began to dance in the air. The harness provided a dim sort of ‘floor’ against which she could push off, a cushion of air pressure against her feet, and nothing more.
But now, spinning tours that no other ballerina could’ve managed, bound by gravity to a stage. Spinning around the other ballerinas while they still had proximity to each other for the initial choreographed routine. Their eyes on her, hers on them, sending images of grand jetés back to the ground. One of the primary criticisms of their art was that without a background, other dancers for scope and scale, every performance became a wild, abandoned swirl on the television screen. She had to make the most of her partner and the chorus while she still had them.
Still leaping towards the uppermost portion of her arc, teeth gritted, Josephine flung her leg back in a perfect arabesque. Lacks grace, indeed.
Which is when Thomas caught her for a lift and turn, gloved hands digging into her hip and shoulder far too tightly. She hadn’t been braced for contact, not realizing how close he was; thankfully, their speeds were still matched, and neither of them transferred momentum to each other. “Be careful!” Josephine shouted above the wind, peering down at Thomas through her visor. Something on his wrist—yes, some sort of cylinder, attached by a lanyard—
“I’m always careful, darling,” he shouted back, and threw her.
Perhaps couples ice skaters performed such maneuvers, but she was, again, unprepared for how much temper—how much recklessness—was in her partner tonight. She managed to recover, spinning wildly in the air, spreading out her arms to let the silk panels that ran from her wrists to her ankles unfurl, and begin to break her fall. He’s going to get one of us killed tonight if he doesn’t pull it together.
The uppermost part of the arc, when the harness had expended most of its initial surge of energy, was always the most nerve-wracking point. She felt as if she were simply hanging, suspended in space, waiting for the next lightning bolt to find her in the clouds. And behind her, she could see that Thomas remained in motion, now executing a jeté cloche with style and verve as the chorus scattered around them, some already beginning their dives back to the ground, others having risen higher than either Thomas or she had done.
She couldn’t help but admire his bravura, even in this moment of breathless pause, as the void yawned beneath them, a mile and more to fall, helpless, bodies tumbling. . . .
“Catch us,” she whispered, feeling the first tug of gravity, the first hint of the downward arc. “Save us.”
And as if the storm heard her, another searingly white flash dazzled her through the visor, and then she was heading on a lateral path, far from Thomas as the lightning forked, dividing them.
This was why there was no choreography after the initial rise. The storm played the only music that mattered. In truth, the storm was more her partner than Thomas was. And she danced for it. Innocent. Sensual. The untouchable fairy queen. The slave girl in the harem. Each levinbolt she rode changed the role as she landed in a field, dropping into a deep plie in the long grass.
By chance, Ariana landed near her. “Will there be an upstroke?” the other ballerina shouted, running towards Josephine.
“Yes! There!” Josephine pointed southwest and then ran, chasing the next bolt. She could feel it, tingling, incipient in the air—no one knew why some dancers could sense it. Natural talent, buried magical gifts, too much iron in their blood; the great mystery. But she could, and they caught the upstroke of negative electrons up into the sky once more. Laughing. Crying.
The dying swan. The new-crowned empress. Even, daringly, several roles usually reserved for men—the wooden soldier, the woodsman, the bold hero. She embodied all of them, as Ariana caught it all in the ruby gaze of the carbuncle scrying stone in her helmet.
“You’re on fire tonight!” Ariana shouted at the top of another arc.
Dizzily, Josephine shouted back, “We’re lightning in our own minds! Each thought an electrical flash. What if, right now, we ride the thought of a god in this storm? Do we bring it dreams?”
“I can’t hear you!” Ariana screamed in reply as the storm rumbled and the wind howled around them.
Tumbling back towards earth. The vertiginous fear that this time, the suit would be out of energy. This time she wouldn’t be able to navigate to another strike in time—
Then, the unthinkable. The storm snarled, a howling wind, as twin bolts brought her back across Thomas’ path, a high-speed pas de deux that chaos theory couldn’t have predicted. She leaned right, trying to avoid a mid-air collision at this speed, mind numb—and noticed, as if in passing, what he held in his right hand. . . .
The stock of a whip, but where the lash should have been, a brilliant coil of light. Even as she watched, he scourged the clouds as he passed her, whipping them, driving them.
And then she was past, hovering mid-air, arms outspread to cup the air in the thin membranes of cloth, trying to give herself time to think. To find the next levinbolt. “Thomas, what are you doing?” she shouted into the teeth of the storm. Where the hell is Ariana? Does she see what’s going on? Can anyone on the ground see, transmitted through my scrying stone, what he’s doing?
Dancers weren’t supposed to bring additional magical items with them. They certainly weren’t supposed to try to control the storm—the purity of the art was in giving way to the storm, becoming one with it, a part of it, a perfect symbiosis of human, technology, magic, and nature.
A sudden updraft buoyed her, and she felt as if a giant hand pressed against her belly in a gentle, secure lift, raising her up. A pivot, trying to spot Thomas again—yes, there—
“That’s impossible,” Josephine whispered as the storm snarled sullenly in its voice of thunder.
Once again, Thomas raised the whip, sending a mix of magical and electrical potentials into the clouds. Summoning the lightning. Invoking it. Sending it down towards a target.
“Dear god, aren’t those the Haussmann flats? Isn’t that where André lives—oh.” Of course it is. God damn it, Thomas, we’re artists. We respond to the storm, we partner with it. We don’t use it to murder people!
Smoke rising from the building so far below. A swarm of tiny people fleeing from it like ants from a kicked nest. Outrage boiled inside her alongside shock. Alongside horror. Alongside sorrow that her friend had fallen so low.
Electrical potential in the air, shimmering around her. A sense that she was being . . . watched. From somehow closer than all the cameras pointing up at the sky. “Can you get me to him?” Josephine asked the air, feeling both mad and exultant at once. It almost seemed that the storm would respond to her words, her need, as she’d so often responded to its winds and fury. “I have to stop him. All those people in those apartments—”
No upstroke. Rather, a lateral strike sent her hurtling towards Thomas, whose back was towards her, and she aimed herself like an arrow, a bullet, at the target. She reached out and snatched the whip from his hand as she sped past. Momentum transferred from her rapidly-moving body to his slower-moving form. She had just enough time to register his scream of agony, and looked down to see his hand, torn from his arm, fall from the whipstock towards the ground.
Josephine screamed into the wind, trying not to throw up, and hurled the whip away from her with reflexive horror.
A dark shape blew past her in the air—she could have sworn the air currents around her twitched, saving her from being struck in turn. A collision at that speed would have killed both of them instantly, crushing their bones—
—and then Thomas, bleeding from his mangled arm, dove after the tumbling whip. But the same air currents that buoyed her up as she spread her arms and legs like a starfish, fought Thomas like the current of a river fighting a salmon swimming upstream.
“His suit—his suit’s compromised! The next bolt he catches will kill him!” She didn’t know which of them she was trying to warn. Thomas, or the storm. “Thomas, let go.” Of vengeance. Of anger. Of pettiness. “Just try to fly out!”
He’d just caught the damned device, and laid about him with the whip furiously, beating the storm into providing lifting air currents. “No! I’ve paid too much for this to stop now! You’ve taken my hand, André stole my pride!”
He sounded drunk. Shock. He won’t live long, bleeding like that. But he’ll live just long enough to kill me— “Do it,” Josephine whispered to the storm. Knowing, somehow, that it understood her.
A white flash turned Thomas’ form to blackness. She kept her eyes open behind the welder’s-dark glass, feeling rain slap against her, wind gently curl around her. And watched him fall, slow and limp and without grace. That’s not how a performance is supposed to end, she thought numbly. Even the tragedies end in beauty.
The wind caressed her. Tugged at the straps of her suit. Begged her to let herself be embraced, enfolded. To let it kiss her once more.
She understood it. Longed for it. To let herself be subsumed, to become a thought in the mind of a . . . god that loved her. Was it a god? Did it simply gain coherency, thought, when a storm grew sufficiently complex, when enough lightning flared through its clouds to engender thought, sapience. Could she dance in its dreams forever?
And yet . . .
Josephine closed her eyes. “Not today,” she whispered. “Someday, perhaps. But not today.”
The storm accepted it. Allowed her to make her slow, graceful descent from the heavens, to answer all the questions that would await her on earth. It could wait.
It would wait, she knew.
And every dance after this, if she dared to ascend again, it might be harder and harder for her to refuse the bliss the stormgod, alien and ineffable, offered her.
Afterword
While I’ve never worked in dance (I have two left feet), I did work in theater in college for about three years, primarily in the costume shop. I found getting my actors quick-changed in time for their next scene to be both exciting and nerve-wracking (compounded, in one case, by members of the general public bumbling into our dressing area while the actors were in their skivvies, and refusing to acknowledge that the area was marked as off-limits, because their need to smoke was far more important than the actors’ right to privacy. Such is life.)
