The January Dancer (27 page)

It was his other passenger who puzzled the Pup. O’Carroll, having shaken his initial distress, had resigned himself properly to the Fates, and seemed now to watch his companions with detached amusement. Greystroke did not know the reason for either the amusement or the detachment. There was, to put the matter Eireannically, something funny about his amusement.

One evening, as the ship slid down the Grand Trunk Road, Greystroke tracked O’Carroll to the library and invited him to spar in the exercise room. O’Carroll put the book he had been scrolling on standby. “I doubt I’d be much of an opponent,” he replied.

“Really? I was told you were a fighter.”

“Not that sort. Turn your back, and I can cold-conk you with the best of them. But I don’t brawl.”

“Hmm, yes. A guerilla fighter. Major Chaurasia told me you conducted a brilliant campaign against the government of New Eireann.”

“He lied.”

“It wasn’t brilliant…?”

“It wasn’t against the government.
I
was the government; Handsome Jack was the rebel. You shouldn’t listen to Chaurasia. When the ICC showed up, they took the rebel side. And their factor was hip deep in the original coup.”

“Ah. They do play a rough game.”

“History is written by the winners,” O’Carroll said. “Isn’t that what they always say? New Eireann never had a history before. I hope she never does again.”

Greystroke understood what he meant, but it was his intention to probe at the secret that the Fudir and O’Carroll so evidently shared. And for an introspective man like O’Carroll, that meant putting him on the defensive. “Washing your hands of it, eh? I don’t blame you.”

Anger flickered briefly on O’Carroll’s face. Or was it a grimace of pain? “I used to think it was important that I won,” he said. “Then
I
could write the history. After all, from a cosmic perspective, my position was
right.
”

“And ‘right makes might’?”

A brief smile—and that
was
a grimace of pain. “You’d think so. It certainly makes you unwelcome. But the gods don’t care. No, what it comes down to is this: Handsome Jack was shady and he wanted to dip his beak in the revenue stream and the Clan na Oriel ran an honest administration. But down in the bone, the difference between Jack and me was not worth the life of a single Mid-Vale farmer.”

“Whereas between either of you and the Cynthians…”

“Oh, gods, yes!
That
was a fight worth making—if there’d ever been a chance to make one. Nothing like slaughter to lend perspective.”

Greystroke reached for another chair and sat down across the reading table from O’Carroll. “So, you don’t want to spar?”

“Not that way.”

Greystroke started and recalled that the younger man had been trained in reading people by the famiglias of Venishànghai. He decided to try another angle. “What book is that you’re reading?”

“Fou-chang’s Illustrated Gazetteer of the Spiral Arm.”
Hugh turned the screen so the Pup could see.

“Tribes and Customs of the Hadramoo,”
Greystroke read the chapter title. “They’re a nasty lot,” he agreed. “So, what will you do now?”

O’Carroll turned both hands palm up. “Contact the Home Office, I suppose, and see if they have a position for me. That’s if they haven’t torn up my contract. Always opportunities for a Planetary Manager.”

“Or for an experienced guerilla leader.”

O’Carroll laughed. “Yes. Well, they’re both interesting work, though the retirement plan is better in the one.”

“You don’t sound very confident. About getting your contract renewed, I mean.”

“By now, The O’Carroll Himself—she’s a hard woman with no sense of humor—will have gotten the quitclaim from the ICC and vacated our contract rights. I wish I knew why it’s called a
‘golden parachute.’
The Fudir tells me it’s from an old Terran language, but he doesn’t know what it means, either. Well, legal documents are full of terms from old dead languages. But the Home Office can’t have been pleased with me fighting the hostile takeover. So, maybe I’ll find myself ‘at liberty,’ and go off with the Fudir to the Hadramoo.” He laughed a little bit at that.

Greystroke did not so much as blink.
Off to the Hadramoo!
the passing bicyclist had cried as Fudir had led him up New Street Hill. He glanced again at the screen O’Carroll was reading. No, the man did not expect renewal. Off to the Hadramoo? Were they mad? Or planning a career move…? He tried to imagine the two men as pirates. Fudir, he thought, could pull it off, but not Hugh. Piracy required a certain degree of thoughtlessness. “Yes,” he ventured, “Fudir said something about that.”

“He told you, did he?”

“Only in passing. He said that once he’s done giving his testimony, he plans to go to the Hadramoo and…” By artfully slowing his cadence, he left a hesitation at the end for O’Carroll to fill.

“And get that fool statue back from the rievers.” O’Carroll laughed and shook his head.

Greystroke concealed his satisfaction. His perplexity was another matter. “You didn’t reach New Eireann until after the Cynthians had gone. How could they have taken his…”

“Oh, it wasn’t
his.
He went there to get his hands on it, but the pirates beat him to it. He was going to smuggle me back on-planet, and I would get him into Cargo House. That was our quid pro quo. He’s a romantic; a believer in fables.”

Greystroke recalled what he had overheard when he met with the Committee of Seven on Jehovah.

Perhaps the Fudir was right about the Twisting Stone…

He understood now. The Fudir had been planning to steal this statue—the Twisting Stone?—to sell to some wealthy art collector on Jehovah who had commissioned the theft. Such petty criminality was hardly worth a Pup’s effort but, technically, inter-system crime fell within the Kennel’s jurisdiction, and who knew? Shake a tree, and low-hanging fruit might drop in your lap. Greystroke had been born on Krinth, where Fate ruled all, and the random concatenations of the universe always worked to an end. As a youth, he had thrown the yarrow stalks, rolled the urim and the thummin, cast the horoscope, spattered the rorshacks, and always the runes had yielded a meaning—or could have a meaning read into them—but what it came down to in the end was that if you didn’t shake the tree, you’d never get the fruit.

“A believer in fables…?” he prompted.

“Oh, the statue is a prehuman one, and has a tale associated with it.”

“They all do. It must be very valuable.”

“Sure, and it was. January—he was the tramp captain we shipped with. He found it way out in the back of beyond, if you can believe him—oh, maybe a dozen fortnights ago. But he had to trade it to Jumdar in exchange for ship repairs and a percentage of the eventual price. The barbarians took it from her.”

“Are the Kinlé Hadramoo art lovers, then?” Greystroke asked.

O’Carroll flipped his hands. “They do love splendor; but from what I’ve been told, this Dancer is not very splendid. January said it looked like a sandstone brick, when it wasn’t twisting itself into a pretzel.” O’Carroll laughed. “There was a replica of the Ourobouros Circuit in the vault—a much prettier prize, if you ask me, though a man might get dizzy looking at it—but the rievers didn’t take it.”

“Well, a replica isn’t valuable like an original. The ICC must have adopted the Circuit as a corporate symbol. I’ve seen copies of it in several of their facilities.”

“Considering what they paid House of Chan, they had to do
something
with it. Isn’t Lady Cargo a collector of prehuman artifacts?”

“I’ve heard that she has a private museum on Dalhousie Estates.” And Greystroke suddenly flashed on the Molnar, garish in his jewels and mascara, repeating the ICC factor’s boasts. They “would settle things in Cynthia, now that they had the Twister.” So the barbarians had not grabbed the statue in passing. They had gone to New Eireann
intending
to snatch it. The Molnar had thought it a weapons system, and must have been greatly disappointed to find only a statue, and an unlovely one, at that.

Yet, why should the ICC factor have made such a boast? Greystroke could not imagine that the unruly clans of the Cynthia Cluster would submit to ICC dictates simply because Sèan Company held an impressive art collection.

The mystery deepened that evening, when the intelligence alerted him to a whispered argument between the Fudir and O’Carroll. It had begun in the library and resumed when the Fudir had followed the younger man to his room. There, he had turned on the player, setting a round of Drak choral singing to high volume. The intelligence dutifully subtracted the music, and though it was unable to reconstruct most of the argument, the fragments it did recover were enough to reveal the gist of it. The Fudir was angry that O’Carroll had mentioned the Twister to Greystroke, and O’Carroll seemed amused at the anger.

’Tis but a fable,
the Oriel manager had said.

We can’t take that chance. If it’s true, and the Cynthians learn—

—a matter for the Hounds—

And
No!
the Fudir had cried, incautiously overriding the intricate motet with which he had tried to blanket the words.
Olafsson’s no Pup. He’s a Confederate agent! If this fell into Confederate hands, it would doom the League.

Greystroke considered that comment—and the Fudir’s loyalties—for some time before retiring.

The next day, Greystroke hosted a meal for his two passengers, during which he laid some of his cards on the table. The meat was a filet of Nolan’s Beast, a form of bison peculiar to Dangchao Waypoint, a dependency of Die Bold, and simulated by the intelligence from the protein vats. But the savor of any meat lies in the sauce, and that Greystroke had prepared himself from a roux of elderberry and mango from his own reserve. He served a black wine with the meal—Midnight Rose—and offered with it a toast: “On to the Hadramoo!”

The Fudir did not lift his glass. Instead, he gave O’Carroll a venomous glance. “Hadramoo’s not the healthiest place for travel,” he grumbled.

“Perhaps not, but certainly a place from which to recover stolen goods.”

The Fudir indicated O’Carroll. “He told you about January’s Dancer.”

“Some. The ship’s library filled in a bit more. King Stonewall’s Scepter. Do you really think it confers the power of obedience?”

“
He
does,” said O’Carroll, hooking a thumb at the Terran.

“But if it
is
true,” Greystroke said, fixing the Fudir with his glance, “it’s too dangerous to remain in the hands of the barbarians. Sooner or later, one of them may read a book.”

“Small risk of that,” said the Fudir, “but even more dangerous for
you
to have it.”

“Meaning the Confederacy. Have you forgotten your duty?”

The Fudir drew himself up stiff in his chair. “Dao Chetty oppresses my homeworld. I don’t want your reach to cross the Rift. Does that sound foolish and sentimental to you, Olafsson? Well, I’m foolish and sentimental.”

“He is,” agreed O’Carroll, but the Fudir stifled him with a glare.

“It does sound foolish,” Greystroke admitted, “to say such things to my face.”

“I might have led you to Donovan,” the Terran continued. “He dropped his coat years ago, but I might have led you to the man who could have led you to…But no matter. Whatever business you had with him, I will
not
permit you to go after the Dancer.”

Greystroke had relaxed into his seat at this tirade; now he permitted himself a smile. “You will not
permit
me? Do you think your permission would mean much to Those of Name?”

“Well,” said O’Carroll mildly, “he’d have my help.”

Greystroke blinked at him, then allowed himself a hearty laugh. “All right,” he said when he had wiped the amusement from his eyes. He was satisfied now about the two men. “Let me ease your mind.” And he reached into his pocket and brought forth his badge. The opal glowed a bright yellow.

The Fudir gave it only a glance. “I know a tinsmith in Bitterroot Alley who can cobble a better badge than that one.”

“May I?” said O’Carroll. Greystroke allowed him to handle the badge and the opal faded to a smoky gray.

“By the Fates,” Greystroke said, “the criminal mind is a slow one! Didn’t you wonder how I could masque myself as a Pup so quickly?”

“My mind was paralyzed,” the Fudir confessed, “at the terror of the Names.” Hugh choked on a swallow of wine and coughed it out. He handed the badge back to Greystroke. “I believe him,” he told the Fudir. “I think he really is a Pup.”

The Fudir pursed his lips. “You were very convincing,” he told Greystroke, “as a Confederate agent…Alright, so you’re a Pup. What should we call you? Not Olafsson, I hope.”

“My office-name is Greystroke.”

“So. And what happened to the real Olafsson?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really; but what about the Other Olafsson? They travel in pairs, I’ve heard.”

“I’ve been watchful. There’s been…little sign of him.”

“Probably won’t be more than that until it’s too much.”