The flesh in the furnace

behind the largest spotlight.
        After a long search, he located the machine's switch. It was on the top, directly in front of his face, a small gray toggle. He laughed at himself for having so much trouble finding something so obvious. He turned the spot on.
        Yellow light sizzled down to the black stage. A curiously perfect circle appeared there, as if a hole had been carved in the boards to allow a hidden sun to show through.
        He watched for a while, then changed the yellow gel for a blue one and settled back on his chair.
        He felt an excitement he could not explain.
        His hands shook on the cold grips of the spotlight casing.
        It wasn't often that he could explain why he felt happy sad or tense or relaxed. He never tried to analyze, merely accepted.
        In a way, the feeling he had now was like that he had had when he had fallen off a theater scaffold in Brightwater and had broken his leg. Falling, he had been certain he was dying. It had not been fear so much, more of a long, sighing release of anxiety.
        The theater was quiet now.
        The center of the stage glimmered bluely as Sebastian waited for someone to come out there and begin doing something. But who?
        Then he remembered that blue was the color that ended the story of Bitty Belina, when she stands in sequined gown on a small pedestal with her prince kneeling before her and the body of her demon-possessed stepmother lying with the prince's sword buried in its throat. The puppets f That was what excited him. Tomorrow, the puppets would be forged in the furnace, and maybe Bitty Belina would be among them.
        He slid off the stool and crossed the projection room in the dark. He stumbled once, fell. But he did not waste time feeling sorry for himself. He got up and untangled the cord from his feet, went downstairs. He crossed the theater and climbed onto the stage and stood in the circle of blue light and waited.
        His flesh was blue. And if he pretended hard enough, he could believe he was small, a puppet. He was the prince in the story of Bitty Belina, and he had saved her. And now when he looked at the boards he could see Bitty Belina herself, poised on her dainty feet, her smooth legs strained taut, her yellow hair to her shoulders, her eyes shining, her face turned toward him, beautiful, beautiful
        Then she was gone.
        He was alone.
        He got down on his hands and knees, but he could not find a single trace of her. And then he remembered that tonight was tonight and that Bitty Belina would not be forged until late tomorrow afternoon, when Pertos stoked the furnace. If then.
        He walked back through the empty seats up the stairs to the projection room, and he turned out the spotlight with the blue gel capped to the end of it.
        Ten minutes later he was in bed asleep. He knew that he would need all his energy to do well tomorrow. He often got sleepy, but he could not let himself miss a moment of time with the puppets.
        He dreamed of Bitty Belina. She was dancing on a flower. In the dream, he had grown as small as she and held her hand and laughed with her and fled from one bright petal to another, kicking droplets of dew into the air…
        
        On the planet Shaftau, a world eight times the size of Earth with only twice her gravity, there lived a race of creatures that men called spider-lizards and told many tales about. The spider-lizards called themselves Vonopo and spoke little about themselves.
        The Vonopo were each as large as two men, with twelve spindly appendages not quite like arms and not quite legs. Each appendage was tipped with a fleshy tool, each tool with a different purpose and design, like fingers and yet utterly unlike fingers. Their skin was really scales and the color of polished amber. They swallowed their food directly into their stomachs through a mouth on their bellies, and they shivered in disgust at the thought that men fouled their vocal apparatus with food pulp.
        Despite this fierce appearance, the Vonopo were a gentle people who shied from publicity and valued privacy above all else. Each lived separately in a subterranean warren, with all the comforts of a super-technical society. If one Vonopoen met another more than twice in any single week, he felt it necessary to purge himself with rituals no human had ever witnessed. No other race was permitted to live on Shafta,u, for the