The Abulon Dance (28 page)

“Whatever they’re using to power their equipment, it’s much stronger than ours,” he babbled.

“Keep trying!” shouted Tquan. “Shut down the air circulation system and reroute the extra power! Pour everything you’ve got into it! Now!”

Outside, the crowd had fallen silent as Luan began to speak. His young voice echoed eerily in the still air, fading in and out as the makeshift equipment worked overtime, surmounting all efforts to interfere. He spoke simply, standing unblinking in the bright lights with the rough walls of the tunnels behind him, and opened his heart to his people.

“Those two-faced little alien hermie bastards,” raged Tquan. “He couldn’t have done any of this without them!” Tquan had realized from the beginning that the rebels knew about the tunnels. Like rats, they had now gone underground. He was glad he had taken the precaution of sealing off all entrances that gave access to the palace. Now, he saw his mistake. He should have sealed them all in with the miserable androids, and left them to die! He thumped his fist on the balustrade.

Then, the android marksman who had eluded capture appeared beside Luan, and Tquan knew he had lost. There was nothing left for him now but escape. Like everything else in his careful plan, this too he had prepared for. The route was charted, the place prepared and waiting.

He turned away and hurried into his apartment. He was totally surprised by the sudden entrance of the Merculian Ambassador.

“Good afternoon, Tquan.” Beny stopped and stared at the body on the floor.

“As you can see, it is not a good day for everyone,” remarked Tquan. He wiped the blade of his knife on the dead man’s long hair, relishing the shock in the alien’s delicate face.

“I don’t want any more bloodshed.” The Merculian’s voice shook slightly, and Tquan smiled.

“Then why are you here? Are you people fond of sacrificial gestures?”

Beny cleared his throat. “Far from it.” His face was pale and one small hand was clenched around the hilt of the ridiculous jewel-encrusted toy dagger. “I have come to appeal to you, one more time.”

“I warned you when you first came here that you should never beg. Have you learned nothing from your stay?”

“I have learned that the Great Chief spoke the truth when he told me there are people who cannot resist the lure of power. It is like a fatal disease, insidious and eventually deadly.”

“If you came to moralize, little one, you chose the wrong moment. Out of my way.”

“No.” The Merculian stood his ground.

Tquan began to laugh. “It’s a little late to make a grand show of bravery. There’s no one here to appreciate it but me, and I’m leaving.”

“No, you are not going anywhere.”

“Watch me.” Tquan drew his knife and advanced on the trembling alien. “Don’t even try to fight me,” he said softly. “I don’t want to harm an ambassador, but I will. It makes little difference to me, now.”

“It does to me!” The Merculian leapt at him, taking him totally by surprise, and fastened his teeth in the man’s upper arm. Tquan howled, more with rage than pain, and tried to shake the creature off. But the small body clung to him tenaciously. As Tquan drew back his free arm to plunge the knife in his assailant, his wrist was seized in a grip of steel.

“It is over.” The man was an Imperial Hunter. His sister had been under suspicion for dealing with the rebel androids. Apparently, the rumor about the beautiful Xunanda was true.

“It took you long enough,” stuttered the Merculian, adjusting his silk tunic. His face was ashen. “I thought you said you’d be right behind me. I was just supposed to stall him.”

“My apologies, Ambassador, but we ran into a few delays.”

His two companions tied Tquan’s hands behind his back.

“The game is not over yet,” Tquan said, with an unpleasant smile. “There are still the Elders and the sub-chiefs to persuade. You can’t arrest them all.”

“They are not criminals,” said the Merculian. “You are.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Oh, yes. There will be no difficulty with that.”

Tquan shrugged. “So you say, but I have been around far longer than you, your Excellency. Take it from me, your boy doesn’t stand a chance of making it to Chief.”

As he was marched off to a cell, his mind was busy with the odds. They had swung heavily against him, for the moment. But there was always another day. Another game to play.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Benvolini has no right to order us to perform under these conditions!” cried Alesio, tossing back his red curls.

“He has every right,” Nevon reminded the soloist. “It’s his job to run the Festival.”

“Festival? There is no Festival any more!”

“Alesio’s got a point,” another principal pointed out. “He’s stopped the other performers from coming here because it’s too dangerous.”

“That’s because the I.P.A. has withdrawn its sponsorship of the event, thanks to what’s been discovered about the Kolaris,” Nevon pointed out.

“Be that as it may,” said Lari, the lighting designer, “but giving a performance on that day as a gesture of support to Luan is a political act. Is this not going too far?”

“From what I hear, Luan might not even appear at this great Name Day event or whatever they call it,” said Alesio. “Then where would our great gesture of support be? We’d look like fools!”

“That wouldn’t be hard for you, sweetie!” Triani shouted. “For god’s sake, we’ve been dancing here every day anyway. What’s the difference?”

“Oh, we all know why you’re behind this mad scheme!” Alesio shouted back. “Anything to get Cham on stage!”

“You seem to forget that this ‘mad scheme’ will also get you on stage, Alesio, dancing Eulio’s solos!”

“Of course I’ll be on stage! I’m a principal! And I should be dancing the entire role!”

“So that’s it!” Triani snapped his fingers. “And you accuse
me
of having an agenda!”

Serrin stepped forward and laid a hand on Triani’s arm. “There’s another difference you seem to have forgotten between a practice session and a performance. There’ll be an audience here. A possibly hostile audience, armed, dangerous and unpredictable.” There was silence for a moment. The dancers were standing on the stage in the glare of the working lights. Most of them were in dance clothes, having come ready for a company workout. The young members of the chorus lingered in the shadows, watching the principals tensely, murmuring amongst themselves. Cham hovered off to the side in an agony of anxiety. He wanted his chance to dance so badly it was making him physically ill, but the fear on the part of the others was valid. They were not allowed out in the city. An armed guard escorted them to and from the theater. From their windows, they could clearly see the ravages of the civil war that seemed to be still smouldering, in spite of the First Minister’s arrest, the Elders’ frequent calming bulletins and the sudden appearance of Quetzelan in the public square. There were growing rumors of the First Minister’s secret execution, which only added to the confusion. Even now, there were guards posted around the theater, outside and in.

A noise behind him made him spin around, his heart in his mouth. “Oh, Ambassador, you scared me! You were so quiet!”

“I was concentrating.” Beny smiled. “Next time I’ll make a noise, although with all the commotion in here, I don’t think any more noise is what’s needed.”

Beside him, Eulio held tightly to his hand, staring straight ahead. Sweat gleamed on his pale forehead. “Did we interrupt something?” he said. His voice was calm, clear and pitched to carry across the stage.

The others clustered around him, welcoming him back, but although their pleasure at seeing him was genuine, there was no real joy.

Beny walked to stand beside Nevon, leaving Eulio with the others. He clapped his hands for silence. When he had their attention, he began to speak. “Whoever said this was a political event, was right. This whole Festival, our presence here, everything that has happened is political, and we’re fooling ourselves to think otherwise. This is Abulon’s first experience of Merculians. People call us ‘the entertainers to the galaxy’, and in this role, we have made quite a splash here.” There was a low murmur of assent at this understatement. “However, I want to give them something more; something they will understand in the context of their lives; something that will show them how we think, how we live, how we support our friends.”

“Like Luan,” Eulio said.

“We came here to represent our culture, to show them what belonging to the I.P.A. meant. To me, it means supporting other members. Luan needs our support to get him this last step of the way, so he can take over from his father and complete the work his father started. This young male went out on a limb to help us. Surely we Merculians can go out on a stage and do what we do best—entertain!”

“What about the danger?” called a voice from the chorus.

Triani spun around. “Who said that?”

“He’s right,” Beny said. “There will be danger. But we knew that when we agreed to come here. Implicitly, at any rate. Precautions will be taken. We will have experienced Abulonians and Kolaris to guard us, people who know about such things. Merculians have not had to fight for centuries. The symbol of warfare, our daggers, has become nothing but an ornament to us, a symbolic present to receive on reaching physical maturity. The soldiers will do their job. Let us do ours!”

It was Eulio who started the clapping, Cham noticed, but the others soon joined in, growing more and more enthusiastic. Cham wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

“Holy shit,” muttered Triani. “I didn’t know you had this in you, Orosin.”

“Neither did I,” Beny returned under his breath.

An hour later, the company went into rehearsal.

* * *

Cham was happy. In spite of the armed guards at the stage door. In spite of the tension that crackled like static in the air. A few days ago he wouldn’t have thought it possible that he could feel like this, light and high, full of hope and plans for the future. Triani had brought him back to life, back to the world of the dance that they both loved with such passion. He thought of Triani, as he had seen him so often, backstage in the glare of the rehearsal lights, his body an instrument of fluid beauty under his total control, practicing alone by the hour, searching for perfection. He thought of him arguing for the final performance, not because he cared about Abulon, but because he cared about Cham. “That’s the person I love,” Cham thought. “And that’s what I want to be.”

Cham sat in the narrow hallway leading to the stage, with his back against the wall, waiting for his call to go on. His stomach was doing odd flip-flops, but other than that, he felt reasonably calm. Beside him, his Kolari bodyguard, Jaxor, played idly with his long hunting knife.

“I wish you’d put that away,” Cham said. “It makes me nervous.”

Jaxor slipped the knife into its sheath at once. “Forgive me, master.”

“You’re not supposed to say that any more.”

“Oh, yes. I keep forgetting.” He smiled shyly and touched the soft fuzz of brown hair that covered his head. The feel of it was still unfamiliar to him.

Cham had grown quite fond of his Kolari companion. While he was in the mountains, the Kolaris had been unfailingly kind to him and Cham now thought of them as protectors. Jaxor made him feel safe, especially now, when the tensions in the city threatened to explode into violence even in the theater.

“I’m going to miss you when I go home,” Cham said.

“Maybe I go with you,” Jaxor suggested, hesitantly.

“You don’t have any papers. I explained about that.”

“Dhakan Biandor is going with his ma—I mean, with the Ambassador.”

“I know, but that’s a special case. I’m sorry. You have to stay here. Things will be different, now. Better. You’ll see.”

“The man on the wall said we all have to go to school,” said Jaxor glumly.

“That was Luan. And he meant just until you learn about things. People like Xenobar will teach you.”

But although Cham cared about Jaxor and sensed his confusion clearly, he was too excited to concentrate on the young Kolari’s problems. He was finally going to dance a solo! Alone in the spotlight! Part of the famous Merculian National Dance Company, if only for one night. This role was always danced by someone very young, the ‘up-and-coming youngster destined for great things’, as the critics would say. It was a tradition. If only nothing went wrong…. If only he didn’t make any mistakes….

A buzzer sounded on stage. Cham jumped to his feet. “It’s time, Jaxor! Wish me luck.”

The young Kolari looked at Cham solemnly. “May you dance always in the sun,” he said.

The Merculian paused, realizing the significance of the words for a man who had been born into slavery, destined never to see the daylight. “Thank you.” He bowed and raced back to the stage area. Jaxor hesitated, then followed at a distance.

Cham had never danced on stage with Triani before. Now he was thankful for the long hours of practice they had done together. Without this, he would never have been able to cope with the utter impersonality. This was no longer his tender, teasing, demanding lover. This was a stranger. Triani, the great dancer, who lived only for his art. Cham was shaken. Before, when they had practiced together, Triani had played the part of the teacher. Now they were fellow artists. There was no personal link. He gave perfection and demanded it from others. After an hour and a half, Cham was exhausted, his bright pink top soaked in sweat. Adding to the tension, he couldn’t help being aware of the watchful, alien presence of the guards.

Dancing with Eulio, he soon discovered, wasn’t much better. He was equally demanding, although not so verbal about it. Even though he couldn’t see, he seemed to be able to tell exactly the height of Cham’s extension or the curve of his back simply by the light touch they always maintained. It was uncanny. Both dancers had quick tempers and lost patience with him often.

“You’re not this mean with Alesio,” muttered Cham to Triani, trying not to cry.

“Alesio is a pro, for god’s sake!” exclaimed Triani. Finally, by forgetting who these people were and thinking only of the roles they were dancing, he was able to win their acceptance. Nevon even praised his work.