The dance

"Again!" Hanna cried. "Exactly like the first time!" It was at this moment that it became a dance. Hanna and Blossom facing each other, moving away from the light, then back at each whir and click, and away again to bring on another; Oliver jumping down to the landing, Cheryl shaking her head behind him; and Peter each time moving toward Oliver, then away again, watching the red light flashing on Oliver's cheekbones, Cheryl a vague, moving shadow behind him. Blossom, of course, was the one who broke it.

"No!" she gasped, pushing Hanna aside with her outstretched hand at the beginning of another repetition, and she pounced at the little pile of brown balls. "I'm too hungr—" and her mouth was full. At this, the others pounced too, even Peter. For a moment it was a wild free-for-all, pushing and grabbing, all of them out of breath. Somehow no one got pushed off the landing, and everyone got at least a few bites, but only enough to have a very mild effect on their hunger, although Blossom got more than the others. The meat was just as delicious as it had been before. When there was no more left, Hanna backed away from the others, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"You sure botched that one," she said, still panting slightly.

"Who, me?" said Blossom, looking up at her from where she was kneeling on the floor, scraping up a bit of food that had been flattened under someone's shoe.

"Yes, you!" The whispering and the flashing light were still going on, but as Hanna took out her next to last cigarette, they both stopped, quite suddenly. The stillness was startling.

"Well, you don't have to look at me like that," Blossom retorted, filling the silence with her whine. "We did figure it out. We can always do it again."

"Can we?" Hanna said, blowing out smoke. "Who says so? The other time it worked, doing the same thing didn't make it work again. Why should it be any different now?"

"But …," said Blossom.

"We should have kept going until it stopped on its own, and saved some food for later," Hanna went on. "That would have been the only sensible—"

"Oh, leave her alone," said Oliver, in a voice so uncharacteristically irritable that it sent a small shock through Peter's body. Oliver retreated to Cheryl's stairway and sat down beside her. "We got enough to eat. Stop bitching."

"Maybe you got enough," Hanna said, rubbing her shoulder. "I can still feel it where you pushed me away. God damn, I wish I were stronger than you!"

"Please," Cheryl said. "Stop fighting, please. Look, we did get some food, we should be glad about it. And maybe it will work again. We won't know until we try." Which they did. They tried, awkwardly and with the embarrassment that, due to the excitement, had been missing before. And it did not work.

"I told you so," Hanna said, when they had given up. "Now we're going to have to figure out something else to do."

"Not now," Cheryl said. "Please. I'm exhausted. We've been up for a long time, I want to get some sleep."And so, with a kind of relief, Peter returned to the magic room, where everything was beautiful and strange, and where effort and pain, and stairways, did not exist. Cheryl and Peter had no trouble getting to sleep but it was quite a while before Blossom and Oliver dropped off, and Hanna was the last of all. She was also the first to wake when, about fifteen minutes after she had finally dozed off, the whispers and the flashing light began again.

"Nude in the house of the doomed. Nude in the house of the doomed," whispered hundreds of invisible voices on all sides of her, as Hanna sat up, rubbing her eyes and trying to decide if she really had to wake them all. Yes, she decided, she did have to. It was too important an opportunity to miss, for perhaps their dance would work now, as it had the other time the whispering and the flashing light had come. Cheryl was surprisingly difficult to wake up, and Peter was nearly impossible. It was only after Oliver shook him roughly for nearly a minute, shouting in his ear, that he finally opened his eyes, murmuring, and not seeming to see any of them.

The dance did not go well at first. They were stumbling and dull-witted, and Hanna was in a hurry, for there was no way of knowing how long the special conditions would last. But finally, they did get into the rhythm of it, remembering, in their hunger, their precise movements from before. And it worked. It went on for about ten minutes; and when the light and the whispering stopped, so did the food. They had earned a rather substantial pile, but even Hanna made no attempt to put any aside for later. They devoured it instantly. And so they learned the first rudiments of their dance, and that they were to be told when to perform it. It was not long before they learned as well that the machine was a capricious provider, for even with the flashing light and the whispers and the dance, it did not always work. Nevertheless, it fed them often enough, and kept them hungry enough, so that every time the whispers and the light began, they would instantly begin to dance, hoping that thistime there would be food.

And of course, whether it worked or not was part of a pattern, and there would be other patterns too. But as yet they were too close to the outside world to be able to understand them, or to tolerate what was inevitably going to come.