The January Dancer (12 page)

“Fair enough,” the Fudir said. “Have you ever heard the story of the Wish of the Twisting Stone?”

“No. A bedtime story? Really?”

“They tell it on Old ’Saken and a slightly different version on Friesing’s World, and other variants circulate on Die Bold and Abyalon. All in and around the Old Planets, you see. Once…”

“…upon a time…”

“…there was a prehuman king whose scientists presented him with the Twisting Stone, saying it would grant him one wish. ‘Cutting to the chase,’ as we Terrans say, the king brandished it like a scepter and said that he wished only to be obeyed.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be
three
wishes?” Little Hugh suggested.

The Fudir propped himself up on his elbows. “Once the wish for obedience is fulfilled, what other wish can matter? In most versions, two prehuman kings struggle to possess it. ‘Stonewall,’ ‘Hillside,’ ‘Cliff’…The names of the kings vary from one world to another, so maybe there were more than two; but that doesn’t matter. Whichever finally gains possession finds himself obeyed without question. So if we gain you the possession of it…”

“I’ll find myself obeyed on New Eireann. Charming. You know what I think?”

The Fudir hesitated. “What?”

“That prehuman fathers chastised their children by hitting them with bricks, and that’s how the story of a stone conferring the power of obedience got started.”

The Fudir lay back down again. “Maybe it’s the wildest of fables. But isn’t it worth a two-week trip to find out? Did you have something better to do with your time?”

“How do you know what January found was this Twisting Stone?”

“In the stories, the stone is never the same shape twice. January said that the artifact he found changed its shape imperceptibly, like a very slow dance.”

“I’d think that a folk that could make stones twist could also make them dance without them being the same stone.”

“And as long as he had it, his crew followed his instructions. When he gave it away, they reverted to their normal squabbling.”

O’Carroll snorted. “You mean the crew we’re shipping out with? Wonderful. Why’d he give it away, then?”

“Because he didn’t know what he had. He thought the crew had finally pulled together because of the common danger they had faced on the world of the Vault, and they’ve now fallen back into old habits. He doesn’t connect it with having the stone and not having it. And you won’t tell him any different.”

“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t dream of telling him anything like that. Who has it now?”

“Jumdar. She promised January that the ICC would auction it off and January would get a percentage of the profit.”

“Ah! So, Jumdar possess sigil of absolute obedience, and you and I go overthrow her. Everything now clear…”

“Don’t give me that Venishànghai crap. She doesn’t know, either. Or at least we hope she hasn’t learned in the meantime. She and January both think it’s an art object, potentially valuable because it’s prehuman; but that’s all. Any further questions?”

“No, a quixotic quest for a magic token seems about the right way to end the day. One thing does occur to me, though.”

The Fudir raised an eyebrow to the question. “What’s that?”

“If this gadget, or whatever it is, gives its owner such power, then why are
you
helping to gain it for
me
?”

The Fudir snorted. “There go your assumptions outracing your conclusions again. Not everyone yearns for power. Some of us yearn for justice. You were ill-used; and the ICC are crooks. That’s enough for me. Come on, there’s room on this bed for two even without intimacy.”

“No thanks,” O’Carroll said. “Harder beds than this floor greeted my back when I was on the run.”

“Have it your way,” the Fudir said, turning his face to the wall. “Just remember you’ll be stowing cargo most of the morning, starting at oh three hundred.”

“A stone scepter that compels obedience to its holder?” The harper allows incredulity to speak for her.

“So the Fudir thought at the time. A flimsy notion built from half-believed myths. He might not have crossed the Spiral Arm to check it out; but New Eireann wasn’t that far from Jehovah, so what the hell? If he was wrong, what was lost but a little time?”

“Another short, hopeless civil war among the Eireannaughta?” the harper guesses at other losses. She leans forward over the table and adds in a harder voice than she has used up to then: “But what matter is that if absolute obedience might be won?”

“Don’t be a fool, harper. Little Hugh was going back to the Vale. Nothing could have stopped him short of death.
He had promised on his father’s name.
So the only real question was when he would return, and how.”

“That’s two questions.”

“No, because the
when
dictates the
how.
Had the Dancer been a myth, it would have made no difference to what happened. But if it were true after all, there needn’t be blood at all.”

“No. Only blind obedience. I’d rather see the blood.”

“Yes, so long as it’s someone else’s.”

The shot tells. The harper falls silent and her fingers touch idly the frame of her
clairseach.
Ideals in the abstract may be held abstractly, but the devil is always in the details.

“None of which,” the harper says at last, “tells us why the Fudir decided to help Hugh.”

The man leans back into the alcove and laughter emerges from shadows even as he recedes into them. “You don’t get answers this soon in a tale, even if you had the question right.”

“This is an intermezzo then,” she says, “a bridge.” She plays an aimless conjunction of music, a strain that summarizes what has gone before and promises newer tropes to come after.

“If you wish,” the scarred man says. “But there is a notion that nothing ever happens on a bridge, and that is wrong. People jump off them.”

The harper places her instrument once more upon the table and the silence, now that her fingers have ceased their continuo, is louder than her music had been. “Now you mock,” she says. “Word games. Do you mean that O’Carroll trusted the Fudir too much?”

“Or that he trusted him too little. That’s a delicate point, don’t you think? But—and maybe you haven’t noticed this, either—the Fudir had to trust O’Carroll, too. Up to a point. The question is, was it to the same point? But, come, drink!” He raises his uisce bowl on high. “Drink to the quest!”

The harper disagrees. “The quest itself means nothing. The heart of the matter is Jason—and Medea—not the Fleece. The Argonauts could have sought anything, and their fates would have been the same.”

The scarred man strikes the tabletop with the flat of his hand, and the bowls and the tableware—and a few nearby drinkers—jump a little. “No!
What
you seek determines how you fail. Had Jason sought a Tin Whistle or an Aluminum Coffeepot instead of a Golden Fleece, the failure would have run quite differently.”

“More melodiously in the first case,” the harper allows, “and with greater alertness in the second. But, must it always end in failure?”

“Always.”

“Your cynicism extracts a price. You can never know the thing in itself, because you always look past it for a hidden reality. I would think all failures alike. Coffeepot or Golden Fleece, failure means you haven’t obtained what you sought.”

“No,” the scarred man answers mockingly. “Each failure is inevitably, enormously different from all the others. Each man who seeks does so for a different reason, and so can fail in a different way. Hercules failed in the quest for the Fleece; but his failure was of a different sort than Jason’s.”

“Jason secured the Fleece,” the harper points out.

“That was his failure.”

Many an interchange carries more traffic than Jehovah Roads, the scarred man says…

…but none is ever quite so busy.

Here, ships may shift from the Champs Elysées to the Yellow Brick, from the Silk Road to the Grand Trunk, and to and from several lesser roads beside. They slide in from Alabaster and far-off Gatmander, from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from Peacock Junction and New Chennai, from Megranome and Valency, from Abyalon and Die Bold and Old ’Saken. Here grand liners mingle with humble freighters, with peacekeepers and survey ships and pirates, with commercial carriers, and tourist cruisers and private yachts, with savvy Chettinad merchants from the Lesser Hanse.

All this riot of voyagers—high and low, desperate and indifferent, jaded and eager and matter-of-fact—is tossed and juggled by the magbeam “light houses” spotted about the Jehovan system. Drawing their power off the sun, off the wind, off the two superjovians spinning like dynamos in the outer system, and even off the electric currents of the roads themselves, they push outbound ships toward their portals, cushion those emerging, and coordinate the arrivals, departures, and transits in an intricately choreographed opera of words and deeds.

If the League lives anywhere other than in the secret devotions of her Hounds, it is in this bustling interchange.

New Angeles
leaped into this kaleidoscope, burning off HOJO just behind a Hadley liner plying the inner circuit and just ahead of a Gladiola terraforming ark outward bound for the Rim. At cutoff, when the legendary god Shree Newton would otherwise have seized
New Angeles
and whirled her ’round in endless ellipses, HOJO Platform Number Two shook hands with the onboard target array and its beams accelerated the ship steadily toward the coopers.

Old spacehands call this traverse of Newtonian space “the crawl,” and it generally consumes more time than slipstreaming from star to star. It is a slow lazy interval, for most of the grunt work happens portside and most of the skull sweat on the ramp. The crawl passes in boredom and the troubles consequent thereto.

Portside, there is cargo to load, and although the stevedores handle most of that, the ship still wants a deckhand for the orbital transfer, and no damned
outsider
is going to settle the stowage on a captain’s ship. Little Hugh O’Carroll learned that, in practice, this meant that Maggie told engineering the balance along each axis, Hogan then told Malone to rectify that balance accordingly, and Malone told “Ringbao” to shift containers within the cargo hold. This struck Hugh as rather more chieftains than clansmen, but he had put up with more tedious labors during the Troubles, and so he did the work willingly, if not happily.

Mahmoud Malone, his immediate boss, had been born on Gehpari and proved not a bad sort when there was no work to pass along. In unguarded moments he would revert to a Gehparisian accent, in which stresses showed up tardy and final vowels arose like resurrected saints. He was a man of great depth but of limited breadth, so that while he knew very little, he knew a great deal about it. Women, distilled spirits, distilled spirits applied to women, the laws of probability applied to games of chance, and the mulishness of alfven engines could spark endless conversations. Outside this range, his interests dropped off in inverse squares. The easiest way to shut him up was to change the subject.

“I hand it to yew, Ringbao,” Malone had said, once
New Angeles
had settled on the hyperbolic trajectory to Electric Avenue, “you air certainly a better workair than that Mgurk. We made the trim of the vessel say bone.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, pressed it to his lips, kissing it. Hugh did not tell him that on several worlds of his acquaintance the circle of thumb and forefinger signified an asshole.

Of course, “we” meant that Malone had given orders and watched while Hugh sweated cargo containers into place with hand truck, crane, and old-fashioned block-and-tackle—by the end of which Hugh had gained a certain sympathy for the storied Johnny Mgurk.

“Good,” he answered. “Then
we
can relax until we reach New Eireann,” with just the lightest ironic emphasis on the “we.”

Malone’s shrug was eloquent. Who knew what tasks might await the unwary deckhand in his idle moments?

The deck went on watch-in-four, and the Fudir found himself assigned the third watch, sandwiched between Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi. For the first several rotations, Maggie motherhenned the deck after being relieved, and Bill strolled on early, so that Kalim’s shoulder was never entirely unlooked over. He signed the log and the responsibilities were his, but the other officers were not yet comfortable with him.

Any crew that has worked long together wraps itself snug into a little society—a culture of shared beliefs, customs, legends, and practices. A newcomer never quite fits in, at least not easily and not right away. There are things that went without saying that now must be said; unspoken accommodations that could no longer be accommodated. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece, the newcomer must turn this way or that until he can nestle comfortably.

So the acting first and the acting astrogator posed problems to this unknown in their midst. They ran him through the gamut of the instrument tech’s art, from magbeam targeting to Doppler readings to parallax imaging. It wasn’t
exercise,
of course. This was a for-profit voyage, not a bleeding nursery school—as Tirasi pointed out—and the problems Kalim worked were all relevant to
New Angeles
’s progress. If, over the first week or so, the results were double-checked by others, the Fudir didn’t mind. “They just want to make sure,” he told Little Hugh afterward, “that I am what I say I am.”

“Sure, there’s comfort for you,” O’Carroll replied, well aware that the Fudir was not what he said he was. “I suppose when you counterfeited the certificates, you counterfeited the skills that go with them.”

“The best disguise,” the Fudir told him with a wink, “is yourself.”

Past the orbit of Ashterath, Jehovah Space Traffic Control passed
New Angeles
on to Platform Number 18 cupped in Ashterath’s L5; then afterward to others, until finally the push was taken over by the platforms feeding off Shreesheeva, a superjovian in the outer reaches of Jehovah Roads. Each time the direction of the push changed, Maggie B. took her astrogator’s cap back from Tirasi and adjusted the ship’s deflection to maintain the flight plan. Artificial intelligences were all well and good, but they weren’t the natural sort, and there was always that one percent that could not be left to thoughtless algorithms.

The intelligence perceived only abstract mathematical objects and theoretical approximations. It believed the data it was fed. But magnetic bottles and steering jets and parallax imaging cameras were real objects made of composites and metals and fields, and subject to all the ills of nature. Models only approximate the physical world, especially at the extremes; and the extremes were precisely where
New Angeles
was bound.

By the time she passed the orbit of Shreesheeva, she had achieved a sizable fraction of light speed, and was homing for a hole in space. You can’t get much more extreme than that and stay inside the universe.

Which, of course, they would not.

“We call it ‘threading the needle,’” Maggie B. told Ringbao one day in the wardroom when she had come below for a bite before turning in. Ringbao had just finished an overhaul to the portside air-scrubber under Hogan’s profane direction, and he and the engineer had also come to have a supper. O’Toole was present, too, a shwarma pita in one hand, a small beer in the other, and a flatscreen propped on the table before him which he studied intently.

“Course, both the thread and the needle’s eye are fookin’ invisible,” the pilot said without lifting his eyes from the flatscreen.

“He means the ship’s trajectory and the entrance ramp,” Hogan explained to Ringbao.

“Surely, entrance well known,” the deckhand said. He had to take care, especially around O’Toole, not to use an Eireannaughta accent, and consequently had been falling more and more into the rhythms of his childhood.

“Well, now, ’tis and ’tisn’t,” O’Toole told him. “I’m only the pilot. It’s Maggie who has to find the fookin’ hole in space.”

“All them stars,” said the ship’s hole-finder, “are a-movin’ relative to each another, which pulls on the currents connecting them—changes what we call the speed of space—and that means the entrance ramp is movin’, too. So, we have to take dopplers and triangulations during the run-up to pin down the position. You gotta hit the dang thing just under light speed, and at just the right angle.”

“Otherwise, ye skid,” said O’Toole, giving Maggie B. a significant look.

“Skidding isn’t good,” Hogan added helpfully.

“Not if ye don’t have a top pilot t’ compensate, it isn’t.”

“
One
time,” said Maggie B. “
One
time!”

“Twice.” O’Toole tapped the flatscreen with his nail. “That’s why Jehovah Traffic is after giving us the current parameters here—electrical potential, plasma direction, flow rate of space. Your boyo, Kalim, takes the readings, Maggie checks with the astrogation program, and the intelligence computes our heading and speed.”

“We’ll be on the alfvens by then,” Hogan interjected, to show that the power room had everything in hand.

“The square-head there”—O’Toole wagged a thumb at Hogan—“thinks
he’s
flyin’ the ship.”

“Piece of pie,” said Hogan.

“I don’t know why they were telling me all that,” Hugh said to the Fudir later, when relieved by Tirasi, the Terran had come down to the wardroom. The two of them were now alone. “Sure, and I’ll never be astrogatin’ a starship.”

“You were a new pair of ears,” the Fudir said, shoving a readymeal of
gosht baoli handi
into the cooker. “Each of them was trying to impress you with how skilled he was, and how he had things well in control. There’s a Terran word for it: ‘upsmanship.’”

Hugh sniffed the meal’s aroma and made a face.

“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir said, without even looking up.

“It lacks
something.
What’s the ‘true coriander’?”

“No one knows for certain. We find it called for in many recipes, but whether a vegetable, a spice, or the flesh of some rare Terran beast, who can say? It was found only on Old Earth and the secret of it has been lost for centuries.” With a distant look, he added, “It is all that we have lost, and all that we hope once more to have.” He nodded toward the spiral stairs. “On Old Earth,” he added, “the intelligence could have handled everything, with no human needed to take bearings or make piloting adjustments.”

“Sure, and it must have been a wonderful age, the age of Old Earth,” said Hugh.

“It was. We had
true
AI. We had nanotech. A lot was forgotten during the Cleansing.”

“Coriander,” Hugh suggested.

“We had
science.
Not just engineering, but the real thing. There hasn’t been a new discovery in centuries. Back on Old Earth, we discovered seven impossible things before breakfast.”

“It does make you wonder,” Hugh said, “how the Dao Chettians managed to overthrow it all.”

The Fudir looked disgusted, but the cooker chimed and the Fudir took his lunch to the table and sat across from Hugh. He looked about the wardroom to check that no one else had entered. Then he leaned across and lowered his voice. “January may give us trouble. Upstairs, we were talking about his little adventure. He wants the Twister back.”

“Wants it back…?”

“As in, ‘
you
don’t get it.’”

O’Carroll bowed, striking his breast. “So unworthy, signore. Ringbao only simple deckhand. Not understand deep thoughts of elder.”

The Fudir looked disgusted, again checked the wardroom, listened for footsteps on the spiral stairs leading up to the control deck. “You know what I mean. If he gets the Twister—the Dancer, he calls it—then there goes your chance to restore the rightful government to New Eireann without another civil war.”

O’Carroll turned thoughtful. “I don’t know. The first one left a few things unsettled.” When the Fudir said nothing, he sat back, very square, and tucked one hand under his other arm, cupping his chin with the latter. “It’s like chemistry. Jumdar stopped the reaction before it had gone to completion. Matters hadn’t fully precipitated. Jack Garrity already sent one man to kill me. Am I supposed to let that go unanswered?”

“Why? Do you take turns?”

“If I restore the rightful government, Jack has to understand that and accept it.” Hugh said “rightful government” without the slight irony that the Fudir usually gave it. Things were always clear in his mind. There was a bright line dividing right from wrong and you were on one side or the other. Yet, as a Terran proverb states, “Ultimate justice is ultimate injury.” Justice is metaphysical, more abstracted from the reality of men and women than even the mathematical objects the ship’s intelligence pondered, and what is bright and clear in that realm may become muddy and approximate in the lower. To the Fudir, that “bright line” was rice flour drizzled in complex patterns, like the kolams that Terrans drew on their doorsteps. It was not always clear just where the other side was, or even if there was one.

“Are you so certain it was Jack who hired the assassin?” he said.

The hand fell from Hugh’s chin. “Who else then?”

The Fudir shrugged. “There’s a Terran proverb: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Sometimes the exiled leader is a better rallying cry than the one who comes back. Prince Charlie was a lot bonnier while he was awa’.”

The younger man leaned forward, so that his face and the Fudir’s were inches from each other. “My Loyalists…!”

“…may have gotten used to your absence. If you come back,
someone
has to step down.” The Fudir was surprised that the scenario had not occurred to O’Carroll. He sat back and, after a moment, O’Carroll did, too. “Don’t worry,” he said. “With the Twister in your hands, it won’t matter what they
or
Handsome Jack think.”