Ravens

Yes!

A good rehearsal. I smile as I make notes, shifting the old-style cold pack to reduce the bruising where I fell on the bars earlier.

This is dancing within a framework. Some will call it dancing within a cage, and while that's not entirely unintentional it's mostly dancing in the graph-lines. Moving through time and charting the choices on the old axes of group and self, duty and freedom.

The maths of movement as we dock safely in each other's arms and then spring forth. Impulse; moment; trajectory. The strong and weak forces of attraction and repulsion.

Kerem and Auntie Gytha have been bringing Maia and Maako in to watch the rehearsals. It's important that they see, even if they don't yet understand. Maia's doing her first dance classes: part running around pretending to be spaceships, and part learning her first elemental movements and exercises just like the big dancers. Auntie Gytha's been doing the rounds of the teachers while she's in the city, and even teaching some classes herself. It's good to see.

Wind-form. Wave-forms. The subtle difference between parabolic and catenary.

We light the axes of the arena red and blue. Our pale costumes take the colour of the light as we plot our courses, branching even from our origins, and spreading widely from our marking times.

Fire in my left hand, water in my right, as I speed into the void.

Some patterns repeat over the generations. Some alter. Some remain unfinished as data sequences end abruptly. We look forward, and back. We reach for things we cannot hold. We dance branched formulae of public lives and private longings, even as we claim that among our people they're the same.

This could be done in space. I've been dreaming of the dance re-imagined for the void, but I haven't yet found how to dance hope, or regret, or longing, from inside a hull in ways that people who've not been pilots would understand. And all of those are in the dance.

Erendati, I am not your vessel to fill any longer, but I will think, and shape, and remember, and work, and kindle the sense of you within me.