The January Dancer (20 page)

But Olafsson shook his head. “Sorry. I’ve very little room on board, and I’ve only come here to pick up a friend.” He had finished filling out his entry form and handed it to the clerk, who looked up startled from his damage lists and requisitions.

“Yer a quiet one,” he said, squinting at Olafsson. Then, noticing the Fudir also, he added, “Top ’o th’ morning there, Fudir.”

“And the rest o’ th’ day for yerself, Donal. This way,” he said to Olafsson. “I’ll take you out the back. The refugees outside the main terminal building will be all over you, begging for passage.” He thought if he gave Olafsson enough assistance, the man might feel more inclined to take him along as a favor. “Maybe I can help you find your friend.”

Olafsson glanced at the customs clerk, then at Fudir, and almost smiled.

They crossed town on foot, the streets being still too rubble-strewn for most vehicles. The Fudir walked his bicycle, explaining the delicate political situation, pointing out the progress already made. All this, the newcomer absorbed in unnerving silence. They had passed the shell of J. J. Brannon’s Mercantile Emporium before the man spoke.

“You said you were from Cargo House,” Olafsson said. “Do you work for the ICC?”

A peculiar and irrelevant question. “No, the United Front co-opted the building for its council. It was the only large structure still more or less intact. But the co-managers refuse to call it Council House. I’m taking you there to meet them.”

“Co-managers,” Olafsson repeated. “A tramp captain I passed coming in said there was a disputed leadership. Is this ‘United Front’ some temporary truce?”

“January’s a born pessimist. We’re hoping it proves more than that.”

The business district had been badly mauled by the Cynthians. Now jackhammers shook the pavement. Timbers crackled and broke and fell. Work gangs hauled debris away. Straw bosses hollered out directions. One man, apparently tired beyond endurance, covered with the gray dust of demolition, had sat himself down on the curbstones and was quietly weeping. His fellows continued to work around him, affecting to take no notice.

“By the gods,” Olafsson said after they had passed him by, “I could smash the bastards who did this.”

The Fudir turned and gave him a twisted grin. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

The road turned right and climbed New Street Hill toward Cargo House. A young boy on a bicycle, with the plain green pennant of the Front snapping on an antenna behind his seat, came spinning down the hill crying, “Make way! Make way!” The Fudir and Olafsson stepped to the side of the road.

“They’re gaining some of their spirit back,” the Fudir said, watching the boy out of sight. “We arrived just after the raid, Hugh and I did. You should have seen these folk then. They’d had the sand kicked out of ’em. We barely missed it ourselves—the raid, I mean. They tell me an ICC courier boat did arrive right in the thick of it, the poor bastard.”

Olafsson said nothing, and the Fudir thought,
You’re a stunning conversationalist
. They walked together in silence until they came to a stretch of road just below Cargo House itself where there was no one about and no houses nearby. “So, who is this friend you’ve come to find?” the Fudir asked. “You can see things are all confused here, but the Housing Council may have some records of his whereabouts, if he’s still alive.”

“His name’s Donovan.”

The name was a blow in his stomach, but the Fudir did not allow it to show. “Donovan, is it?” he said breezily. “Can’t be more than a couple thousand people with that name on New Eireann.” There was still the possibility of coincidence. Somewhere in the Spiral Arm there must be ordinary men named Olafsson Qing who had ordinary friends named Donovan.

“This one lives on Jehovah.”

“Ah. Does he, now? Then, I hate to tell you, but you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

Olafsson shrugged. “I was given a channel by the Seven of Jehovah. Fudir, they said, and he has gone to New Eireann.”

“They said that, did they? Well, not so many go by that name,” the Fudir admitted. “All right. You want Donovan…What’s your business with him?”

“For him to know,” Olafsson said.

“He doesn’t like me to…”

“Those of Name greet you, Fudir.”

And there it was: the very thing he had dreaded since hearing the name of the arriving pilot. It was enough to make the Fudir believe in the gods, or at least in the crueler sort. He had been looking for a ship. Now a ship had come looking for him.

Be careful what you wish for.

“Why should they greet
me
? They know nothing of me. I don’t work for them.”

“From your lips to Donovan’s ear. That makes you a proper object of Their attention. Come. I need only a name, such a little thing. The next link in your chain to Donovan. That is all. You betray no one. You need not even leave this place.”

And what sort of assurance was that when leaving was the thing he desired most? But he looked off down the hillside to the wrecked city and listened for a moment to the sound of hammers and crashing masonry and wondered if that was true. Could he run out on Hugh in the midst of all this? For the first time in many years he was party to something worth doing and the problem was that it clashed with something else more worth doing. He had to follow the Twister, even if it meant running out on New Eireann. What was one man less in the Reconstruction?

He rested his body against the bicycle, gazing on nothing in particular. He thought of the intricate quadrille now taking place on New Eireann. Handsome Jack. Little Hugh. Voldemar and the Direct Action Faction. Now, Those of Name. The betrayals would have to be set up very carefully.

“The name?” suggested Olafsson with an air of tried patience.

The Fudir sighed. “I can’t give you her name.”

“I am grieved to hear it.”

“Save your tears. I mean I
can’t
give you her name. Donovan set things up so that if the wrong person makes contact, the chain breaks apart. They disappear into the Corner, and you’ll
never
find them. Try it, and you end up in the lime pits on Dunkle Street.”

“Then, you have a problem. I need Donovan, and that apparently means I need you on Jehovah to vouch for me. I’d rather not disrupt matters here, but shall I tell The Names you refused? There are other agents at large, this side of the Rift. They might be given other assignments.”

The Fudir recalled that couriers were often sent out in pairs. He screwed up his mouth. “Like assassinating reluctant Terrans?”

Olafsson did not deny it.

Another messenger bike passed, this one pedaling uphill. The girl raised a fist and squeaked, “On to the Hadramoo!”

Olafsson raised an eyebrow after she had passed. “Surely, the Eireannaughta are not contemplating a reprisal against the Cynthians!”

But the Fudir didn’t answer. Suddenly, he smiled. “You’ll have to arrest me, Br’er Fox,” he said.

“What?”

“Can you pretend to be a Jehovan proctor?”

Olafsson waved a hand. His pretenses ran wider and deeper than that. “Why?”

“No, make that a League marshal. Then they can’t refuse extradition. Give me one day to make some arrangements here, then serve me with a writ. I’ll give you the details later tonight.”

“That seems a bit elaborate; or do you deceive as a habit?”

The Fudir closed his eyes briefly. “I don’t want people here to think I’ve run out on Little Hugh.”

“Why should you care what other people think when the Secret Name calls you?”

“Indulge me. You’re getting what you want. Only don’t tell Hugh until you actually ‘arrest’ me. He may try to stop you.”

“He may try.”

“Don’t underestimate the Ghost of Ardow.”

All that evening, as he met with the people he needed to meet with and made the arrangements he needed to arrange, the Fudir weighed the ulta-pulta, the yin and yang, the drivers and constraints.

On the plus side, he could leave New Eireann now, and resume his chase of the Dancer. On the minus side, he must go in the company of a dangerous man who expected a service that the Fudir was disinclined to render. There was something about the courier that was not right. Like a cracked bell, the tone was a little off. Something he had said…The Fudir did not know what it was; nor was he especially eager to learn. The greater a man’s knowledge, the shorter his life.

He didn’t care what the “Hombres con Nombres” wanted of Donovan. It was a distraction from the Dancer, and he cursed Donovan for ever joining the Great Game. Over the years, as no assignments came, Donovan had gradually come to believe that They had forgotten him. He had pursued other avocations, and found them quite fulfilling. Had Those of Name somehow discovered his abdication?
Was the courier in fact an assassin?

A bad thing, then, to lead such a man to Donovan. Yet, the Fudir couldn’t very well refuse a direct summons. And Olafsson might be no more than he appeared—an ordinary courier with an ordinary message, requiring Donovan only to pluck some particular fruit from the tree of knowledge.

A man could live most of his life forgetting the Confederation or the League existed at all. Life’s real problems ran far below that august level, but League and Confederation ground like millstones along the Rift; and now something of that abrasive emptiness had drifted down Electric Avenue and touched him. An ancient Terran god had once said, “You may forget about politics; but politics will not forget about you.”

Yet the Fudir knew that he must follow the Dancer into the Hadramoo. As stolid and remorseless as were the oppressions of Dao Chetty, the wild cruelties of the barbarians of the Cynthian Cluster were worse. The Dancer might be no more than myth; but if there were the slightest chance that the old legends were true—and the experiences of January and Jumdar hinted that they might be—then at the least he owed it to the Spiral Arm to attempt recovery before the Cynthians discovered its powers.

Not that the Spiral Arm would ever thank him.

The next day, Olafsson strode into Hugh’s office wearing what seemed very much like the undress uniform of a Hound’s Pup and waving papers of official appearance “demanding and requiring” the person of one Kalim DeMorsey, d.b.a. “The Fudir.”

Hugh was by turns startled by the intrusion, intent on the warrant, angry, saddened, and finally resigned. “It seems your sins have found you out,” he told the Fudir. Then, laying the extradition papers on his desk, he addressed Olafsson. “These seem to be in order, but I would like to enter a protest—”

“So noted,” Olafsson snapped, but then added more softly, “Don’t concern yourself, PM. We’ll send him back when we’re done with him. He’s a material witness, not a suspect.”

The Fudir hadn’t really expected the courier to follow through on that particular touch, and was pleased that he had. It would reflect badly on Hugh if he had been friends with a wanted felon. Of course, the Fudir was a wanted felon, but perceptions matter. So “material witness” was a small kindness wrapped in a greater cruelty. The Fudir would not meet Hugh’s eyes, and hung his head as if in shame.

Olafsson took him by the arm. “Come along,” he said. “There’s a good fellow. No need for the shackles.”

The Fudir turned to Hugh and said, “Just remember when you first met old Kalim DeMorsey.”

Hugh nodded and said, “Amir Naith’s Gulli. I owe you my life.”

Olafsson did not handle him roughly, but did keep a firm grip on his arm as he guided the Fudir down the hallway. Handsome Jack Garrity came out of his office as they passed. The Fudir nodded infinitesimally to him, and Handsome Jack returned the gesture, and the Fudir continued under Olafsson’s guidance, satisfied with this microscopic farewell.

Olafsson’s yacht had carried a light ground car that could ride on surface effect, magnetic tramline, or inflated wheels, as circumstances required. Granted, it was not much of a vehicle. Made of “solid smoke” for lightness and jointed to fold compactly, it nevertheless worried the Fudir when he saw it. Confederate couriers normally traveled lean and swift; stealth was more their mode. Had Olafsson stolen a ship from someone else? And if so, what had he done with the owner?

The streets were encumbered with construction materials and demolition debris, around which Olafsson wove with patient skill. At the intersection of Port and MacDonald, one of the new gardies halted them for a time while he waved a debris lorry backward into the lot where a row of shops were coming down. The site contractor saw the Fudir and came over to the ’buggi waving a paper. “Tell Hugh,” he said, “that the composites haven’t come up yet from Fermoy for the Jackson Street reconstruction.” The Fudir smiled and said he would.

Olafsson made no comment until the gardy had waved them through and they turned onto Port Road. “When did you plan to tell him?” was all he asked.

On the spaceport hard, the Fudir stood by Olafsson’s yacht while the robot hoist folded the d
buggi and raised it into the cargo hold, and the boarding stairs deployed from amidships. The Fudir chafed at the speed of it all, and glanced repeatedly toward the maintenance gate, through the maze of wrecked shuttles and lighters and bumboats that the Cynthians left behind. He was anxious to leave, but the timing had to be right.