Sway

When Sway was six, her grandmother taught her to be a dance-caller.

Her grandmother was a tall white crane in a long red shawl. She had been the dance-caller for the village for forty years. Every harvest, every wedding, every solstice, the village formed up in long lines and circles, and her grandmother stood at one end and called the figures. Step. Pivot. Trade. Pull. The dancers obeyed. The dance worked. Sway watched from a low stool at the edge of the field for one whole year before her grandmother let her stand beside her.

"What do you see?" her grandmother asked her, on a cold autumn evening when the dancers had finally stopped.

"They follow you," Sway said.

"No," her grandmother said. "Watch again."

So Sway watched. The next dance, and the next. She saw the pairs spinning around each other — one dancer's pull answered by the other's lean — and the whole circle holding together because each pair held together.

After three more dances, she understood.

"They follow each other," she said.

Her grandmother smiled. "Yes. The caller doesn't make the dance. The pulling does. Each pair pulls. If one pulls too hard, the pair stumbles. If neither pulls enough, the pair drifts apart. The dance is the pulling. Everything else is just the music."

That night Sway lay awake under her quilt and thought about pulling. She thought about her parents pulling on each other when they walked to the river. She thought about the moon pulling on the tide in the bay. She thought about the way her grandmother's red shawl moved when her grandmother turned — as if the wind itself were pulling.

She decided then that she would spend her life on the pulling.

She just didn't have a name for it yet.

When Sway was seventeen, she walked to CosmosForge Academy and asked to teach.

The head of the academy was a wise old owl named Master Nova. He sat on a high perch in an observatory tower with a long telescope at his side. He peered down at her over his round spectacles.

"What would you teach, young crane?"

"Gravity," Sway said. "I would teach that gravity is the partner-dance of the cosmos. Every mass pulls every other mass. Orbits are just falling without hitting. The Sun pulls the Earth. The Earth also pulls the Sun. The Moon falls toward the Earth this very second. We are falling toward the Sun. We just keep missing because we're also moving sideways so fast."

Master Nova was very still for a moment. He had taught gravity for sixty years. He had heard it called a force, a curvature of space, a manifestation of mass-energy. He had never heard anyone call it a partner-dance.

He blinked his round yellow eyes.

"Show me how you would teach it," he said.

Sway took her paired-step stance. She held out one wing.

"Take my wing-tip," she said.

Master Nova flapped down, faintly amused, and gripped her wing-tip in his small clawed foot.

"Now lean back," she said. "Not far. Just a little."

He leaned back. Sway leaned back too, the same amount. They were balanced.

"Now lean back farther," she said. "And keep going."

He leaned. Sway leaned. They were still balanced, just at a sharper angle.

"That," Sway said, "is gravity. Two of us. Pulling on each other. If you pull harder, I pull harder. If you let go, I fall. The Earth and the Sun do this. Right now. They are leaning on each other, both of them, equally."

Master Nova was silent for a long moment, still leaning.

Then he said, very quietly, "You are appointed."

In her workshop at the academy, Sway begins every first lesson by asking the new students to stand in pairs.

The workshop is a round room high in the observatory tower. The walls are painted with stars. The floor is a polished wooden disk. There is no furniture. There is just the floor, the stars, and one large round window that looks out at the actual sky.

Sway stands in the center of the polished floor. The students stand around her, in pairs, looking nervous.

"Take your partner's hand," she says. "Now lean back. Both of you. The same amount."

The students lean. Some of them giggle. Some of them are too shy to lean. Sway moves gently from pair to pair, adjusting their balance.

"That feeling," she says, "is gravity."

"It just feels like leaning," says a small mole.

"That's the secret," Sway says. "It IS leaning. The Earth and the Sun are leaning on each other right now. The Sun is bigger, so its lean is harder to feel. But the lean is mutual. Both directions."

She moves to the middle of the floor.

"Now," she says, "an orbit."

She takes the smallest student — a tiny bat — and asks them to walk around her in a circle while keeping their wing on her shoulder. The bat does it. Sway makes the bat walk faster. The bat walks faster. Sway makes the bat let go of her shoulder and just keep walking.

"You're an orbit," Sway says, as the bat walks in a careful circle around her. "You're falling toward me. I'm pulling you. But you're moving sideways fast enough that you keep missing me. That's the Moon. That's the Earth around the Sun. That's a whole galaxy of stars going around the middle."

The bat keeps walking in a circle, eyes wide.

"Am I really falling?" the bat asks.

"You really are," Sway says. "Beautifully. You haven't hit me yet, and you won't, as long as you keep walking."

The bat keeps walking. The other students watch. Outside the round window, the actual sky is going about its actual business — a slow partner-dance, three-quarters as old as time.