Her twelfth birthday, she had a big party—a dance in the Rec hall, with every kid in Reseune who was above nine and under twenty—uncle Denys begged off and said he had work, but that was because he hated the music.
He missed something, because Catlin learned to dance. Catlin got the idea of music—it's a mnemonic, Ari said, when Catlin looked puzzled at the dancing: the variations on the pattern are the part that makes it work.
Florian had no trouble at all picking it up—but he was too self-conscious to clown with it in public: that was the funny thing; and it was Catlin who shocked everybody, by trying to teach Sam a step he couldn't get—an azi out on the floor with a CIT. Everybody got to watching, not mad, just amazed, and Catlin, in a gauzy black blouse that covered just about what it had to with opaque places, and black satin pants that showed off her slim hips like everything, —smiled, did three or four fast steps and showed what you could do if you could isolate muscle groups and keep time with the music.
After that every boy in the room wanted to have one dance with Catlin, and it was funny as hell, because all the girls in the room didn't know whether to be jealous of an azi or not.
So Maddy Strassen flounced over and asked Florian, and the other girls started asking him, and the few older CIT kids who had azi their own age began showing them the steps, until the thing got all over the House by the next morning.
"You know," uncle Denys said about it at breakfast, "there are azi that could bother. You really ought to be careful."
"Seely was there," she said, tweaking uncle Denys just a bit. "And a lot of Security. They could have stopped it, anytime."
"Probably the music paralyzed their judgment. They were there to stop Abolitionists with grenades. They needn't have worried. They couldn't get past the noise."
"Well, none of the azi got pushed. Some would dance, some wouldn't, nobody pushed anybody. Florian said Catlin thought it was interesting. She's supposed to protect me, right? And she's not as social as Florian. But she can imitate anything physical and she can act like anybody. So she was having a great time out there. She was psyching everybody and getting the feel of how they moved and they never knew what she was doing. Want to know what she said?"
"What?"
"She said they were all soft and they were generally real vulnerable in their balance. That she could take out any one of them with an elbow."
Uncle Denys sneezed into his orange juice.