The January Dancer (34 page)

“I take you, missy.”

It is the jowly man in the blue-checked dhoti. His smile is oily; his lip wet with perspiration. “Scar-head, me, goombah. I take you him.” His eyes are harder than his smile and they smolder. The harper hesitates. “Chel, Memsahb,” he says. “He no long one place.”

“Give me one minute.” The harper bends to put the harp back in its case and notices with no surprise that the modest pile of coins that had gathered there is now gone.

But when she straightens, harp case now slung over shoulder, the man in the dhoti stands with a fixed, glassy smile, looking past her. “No, missy. So sorry. Not know him, scar-head.” He turns and walks away and the man behind him, who had eaten the guava, now puts his knife away. He bobs his head to her. “We watch ’um, such men, no touch women. E’en so, eetee woman.”

Then, he, too, turns and walks away.

The harper sits suddenly on the edge of the fountain.

“We don’t know how you came this far,” says the scarred man, who is sitting on the other side of the fountain, his back to her. He rises and comes around to sit beside her. “That was a fool’s play. How did you ever hope to find us?”

“It can’t be so foolish as all that, seeing that I have.”

The scarred man grunts. “He heard you playing
that
theme, and we knew you’d stuck your head in the lion’s mouth.”

“That’s why I played. You can’t catch a man by chasing him. Better betimes to remain still, and he will come to you.”

Several loiterers had edged closer to them and the scarred man jumps suddenly to his feet and cries, “Yo, skevoose! Go see where you gotta be. Scat, before I give you leather in the kuli.” They slink off and he resumes his seat. “Pay the illiewhackers no mind.” He strikes his fist into his palm and rubs it. “Why did you come after me? What is it that she wants?”

“She?”

He turns red-rimmed rheumy eyes on her. “Your mother. The witch.”

“She didn’t send me.”

“No?”

“I’m chasing her, too.”

The scarred man digests that a time in silence. “I see,” he says at length, “that is the ‘One Thing’ that you have loved and lost.”

“Not a thing, a person.”

“And there’s no music for that, is there?”

“Your story’s not at an end yet. And at the end of your story I may hope to find the beginning of mine. What is the second way? In what other way may we speak of the story’s end?”

They sit side by side now, no table between them, but neither do they face each other. “An end,” the scarred man says. “There are qualities each story must possess, and when it has them it has been perfected. However good or bad the story may be, when it has all the qualities it needs to be itself, what can change accomplish but to lose one of them, and so become something less.” He inclines his head toward the harp case, which she has once more slid from her back. It rests now between her knees. “What you played here this afternoon…You will never again play it without remembering this day, without comparing it to this day, and it will never sound half so fine on your fingertips as it did here in a dusty, closed-in plaza of the Corner of Jehovah. You and others may play it from now until the Heat Death, but in that way, it has come to its end. From now on, it will always be a reprise.”

In answer, she recites a proverb: “‘A tune is more lasting than the song of the birds.’”

Perforce, he must complete it: “‘And a word is more lasting than the wealth of the world.’”

“What are those words, seanachy? Your story has yet to perfect itself.”

“What has she already told you?” he asks. “How does
her
version run?”

But the harper only shakes her head and stares silently at the windowless building before her. Eventually, the scarred man grunts. “I’ve never seen any reason for self-deception,” he says. “But she spent her whole life deceiving people. Why should she have exempted herself?”

“You don’t know that,” the harper says without looking at him. “I knew a different woman, sweet, gentle, but always with a sadness beneath her smile. It was a wan smile, the ghost of a smile. You had to look twice to see that it was there. But once you saw it…”

The scarred man nods slowly. “Aye. I knew her long ago, and what man or woman is only one man or woman? She had a god who was supposed to be three without being more than one; but she put her god to shame with the multitude
she
comprised.” He turns his head and his eyes pin her. “Are you certain you want to know how this ends?”

“It’s why I came.”

“It may also be why you go.”

She thinks for a moment, then nods her head slowly. “It may. But the question is: To where?”

Die Bold, like the other Old Planets, is a place where the future was born but whence, like an ungrateful child, it has departed to seek its fortune elsewhere on the Periphery. The Old Planets have been left like aged parents in an empty nest, remembering what things had been like when the future was young.

Like any whelping, the future had been delivered amid pain and blood and cries of anguish, despite it having been, in some sense, a Caesarean birth. In those days, so the stories ran, they really had been Terrans and really had remembered Terra herself, and not just, as now, the memory of that memory. Cast across the Rift, mingled with strangers, they had huddled and despaired and fought with one another and slowly built something new from what wreckage they had saved.

Die Bold was old enough to have a history. Scattered and quarrelsome refugee camps had grown into cities, burned in civil wars, grown again upon the ruins. Conquerors came and went; old arts informed new renaissances; knowledge lost was rediscovered—or its merest memory vanished forever. Archives conserved by loyal priesthoods were cracked and archaic tongues deciphered, and humanity cruised once more along Electric Avenue. Die Bold explorers arrived at Abyalon. A ship of Old ’Saken encountered one from Friesing’s World already in orbit at Bandonope. Megranome found bustling industry on Waius; sustenance farmers on Cynthia; and naught but desolation on the nameless worlds of the Yung-lo Cluster.

Ships went forth to terraform and settle. New worlds incubated, farther from the menacing Rift: Jehovah and Peacock and New Chennai; High Tara and Hawthorn Rose; Valency and Alabaster and far-off Gatmandar.

Until, after a thousand years of splendor, a millennium of effort, the Old Planets settled back to enjoy a well-earned rest.

And so there was in the spirit of each Die Bolder something of the refugee’s despair, something of the youthful rush of rediscovery, something of the querulous satisfaction of old age; and something too of the insecurity of the epigone. Visitors from the rawer worlds of the League often perceived in them a false humility; but there was nothing false about it. Behind their every triumph lay the suspicion that it had been surpassed in the old Commonwealth of Suns, and that they were at best only second best. It took something of the heart out of everything they did and put something heartfelt into their humility.

It was four days inbound from the coopers to Die Bold itself, during which time the Hound and the Pup agreed not to announce themselves officially, nor even to admit they were traveling together. They did not know that the phantom fleet had been bound here, nor that the fleet would expect pursuit, but until then Greystroke would be a merchant from Krinth named Tol Benlever and Bridget ban would be Julienne Melisond, a lady of the court. And because Hugh would be more convincing as Greystroke’s factotum, Bridget ban took the Fudir to play the role of her manservant. The two swapped ships during the layover on Jewel-of-the-Giantess, a transshipment station orbiting the second gas giant in the outer reaches of Die Bold’s system. There was sufficient bustle and coming-and-going so that no one noticed that some people left in a different ship than brought them. Julienne Melisond stopped for the spectacular view of the double rings that the Jewel provided, while her man, “Kalim,” chatted with the servants and kitchen staff. The Krinthian merchant was little seen, as befitted a merchant prince, but his representative, “Ringbao,” was everywhere, discussing trade opportunities and inquiring after recent events with other traders and with Die Bolders outward bound.

That night Bridget ban told Greystroke that she planned to send the Fudir into the Corner of Die Bold once they were down. “Terrans are everywhere,” she said, “and what one knows they all know; but they’d sooner spit than trust an ‘eetee.’”

“An ‘eetee’?” Greystroke asked.

“It’s what they call anyone who is not a Terran.”

Greystroke propped himself on his elbow and ran his hand along her flank. “Do you trust him to come back?” he murmured. “I’d hate to lose him, now that I have him.”

“He wants the Dancer as much as you and I. Beside, I’ve programmed
aimshifars
into the livery I gave him. If he bolts, we can always find him through the anycloth.”

Greystroke chuckled. “Using a bolt to find a bolt. Droll. Very well, Cu. I cannot deny you.”

Aye,
thought Bridget ban sadly, drawing him close.
Ye cannae.

Èlfiuji was capital of the Kingdom and the largest city on Die Bold, a soaring metropolis hard by Morrigan’s Ford on the River Brazen. The ford had given the city its original rationale, but had long since faded to irrelevance. Thopters and whirlies now buzzed between the towers and the New Royal Bridge arced across the treacherous currents, indifferent to the age-long absence of royalty.

Hugh made the rounds of the traders’ clubs near Port Èlfiuji in the Mercantile Loop, where he engaged in idle chatter over light snacks and strong drinks. Merchants, he found, came in three sorts. First, there were the fat, confident ones, comfortable in their wealth, who enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh and for whom no contract was so dry or so technical that it could not provide an occasion of sin. The second sort, more vulpine, were those on the make. They were all in the air, for all their wealth was in the venture itself, and their first failure would be their last. Since “Ringbao” lacked the standing to speak with the “merchant princes,” and the “paper tigers” could spare no time to speak with him, he sought out the third sort.

These were the “reps,” and gossip was their stock in trade. They came to buy and sell—mostly to sell—but they also knew when and how to turn off and simply chat with chance-met strangers. Not that selling was ever far from their minds, but men and women of their school believed that “establishing a relationship” was the key to selling, and they never blew another off as of no account. “You never can tell,” they would tell one another, “when a shabby stranger might prove a wealthy customer.”

Krinth was outside the immediate region, off to the Galactic West, where the suns packed closer and the night cast shadows, and so as a rep for “Tol Benlever,” Ringbao attracted considerable interest. What had Krinth to offer that might sell dearly here? What did Krinth desire that might be bought cheaply here? Hugh had been thoroughly prepped by Greystroke and what he didn’t know, his implant told him; and what his implant didn’t know, he simply made up.

“I hear it’s dangerous out there,” said a rep for a Gladiola firm that made entertainment simulations, “and a man’s life isn’t worth a demi-ducat.”

“No more dangerous than it is here,” Hugh replied, seeing an opening. “On Jehovah, I heard that some planet out that way had been attacked by barbarians.”

He was sitting in a high, wing-backed chair, facing three other reps around a low table of hors d’oeuvres. A woman representing Obisham MC, and feeling very good about herself for having already met her quota, said, “New Eireann, I was told.”

“The bandits, they came outta the Cynthia,” added a thin man with a Megranomic accent.

“There,” said Hugh, “you see. I heard Die Bold itself was scouted by a fleet of warships no more than four, five metric weeks ago.”

“When was that in local time?” asked the Obisham rep. “Waiter, how long are four metric weeks here?”

The man replenishing the tray of cold meats and cheese shook his head. “Please, got no head numbers, missy, please. I ask.”

“Terrans,” the woman said as the man scampered away. Hugh wasn’t sure what she meant by that. It wasn’t as if
she’d
known the conversion factors.

“For all I know,” he said, “that fleet is still around, maybe waiting for a fat merchant to waylay. Think they’re the same bunch as hit New Eireann?”

The thin man waved a hand, which held a wedge of some dark, grainy sausage impaled on a wooden pick. “Naw,” he said. “Them Cynthians is more disciplined than that bunch was. Couple of the ships fired on each other, can y’ believe it! I was inbound transfer at the Giantess when they passed through. And didn’t that startle the traffic folks up yonder! Die Bold’s JPCG cutters—that’s Joint Planetary Coast Guard, babe,” he added to the Obisham rep—“they can take the price of a raid out of your hide, so mostly the pirates lay off the Old Planets. But still, JPCG was taken by surprise, and didn’t like it one stinkin’ bit.”

“If the fleet’s not still lurking up in the coopers,” Hugh said, “where’d it go?”

Shrug complemented shrug.

“I think it broke up,” the fourth man said. He was a man of ruddy, almost orange complexion, and wore his hair lime-white and pulled into spikes, a fashion popular on Bangtop-Burgenland, although he himself repped for Izzard and Associates out of the Lesser Hanse. “I heard that some ships took the Long March down to the Cynthia, some took the Piccadilly to Friesing’s World, and the rest went the other way round the ring to Old ’Saken.”

“Was the winners heighed for Old ’Saken,” the thin man said.

“Didn’t one stay behind?” the woman asked.

“One of its officers, I heard,” said the Gladiolan. “A Gat. He asked for asylum or something.”

“If it please, missy,” said the waiter, who had returned. He looked at a sheet of scratch paper on which some figures had been scrawled. “Is four metric weeks one-
punkt
-six case doozydays. Which be thirty-eight days straight up.” He bobbed several times and scuttled off.

“Doozydays,” said the Gladiola man. “Why can’t the Old Planets use metric days like everyone else?”

The Megranomer grinned at him. “Why cain’t the rest of the Periphery use doozydays? Twelve makes more sense than ten. More
divisible,
d’ye see.”

The woman for Obisham Interstellar frowned. “What did he mean—‘thirty-eight days
straight up
’?”

Hugh hid a grin. The waiter had meant Terran days, but he saw no reason to enlighten his chance companions.

The Fudir had not been to the Corner of Èlfiuji in many years and found that he did not know it as well as he once had. The patois was a little different; and the smells and foods and noises, a trifle exotic. Much depended on the mix of ethnicities that had been settled here during the Great Cleansing. There was more wealth here than on Jehovah and the people moved with less of the edginess that marked the Jehovan Corner. Yet one hand knows the other and a few grips were enough to gain him access to the Brotherhood’s clubhouse where he met with Fendy Jackson.

“Had I known thou wert coming, Br’er Fudir,” the man said, “I had prepared a finer welcome.” He was tall, with a vulpine face and a wiry beard that covered all and fell to his chest. “How fareth our sister, the Memsahb of far Jehovah?”

“She doth well, Fendy.” The Fudir and his host sat on soft hassocks in a richly carpeted room draped in gossamer curtains of red, gold, and black. To the side, a servant prepared tea and a bowl of chickpea paste. “And happy she was to see the back of me.”

Fendy Jackson struck his breast with his fist. “May her loss be my gain. What service dost thou ask of our fellowship, Br’er Fudir? What hath brought thee to my miserable porch?”

“A complex story, I fear me. But at the end of it lieth the Earth, free once more.”

The Fendy paused with his teacup half raised to his lips, and the servant, too, in the act of handing a second cup to the Fudir. “Is’t so?” the Fendy asked. “A tale long told, but with no such ending yet. But there stood once a city there that it is in me to visit. It is an obligation that my grandfather’s grandfather longed to meet. How might we see such an end?”

“It is a matter of utmost delicacy that must be plucked from any number of grasping fingers. Thou knowest the story of the Twisting Stone? There may float a bean of truth in the pot of legend.”

“‘The man one day older is a man one day wiser.’ The prehumans left much behind them, though more in fancy than in fact.”

“Thou hazardest nought. I risk the search. If nought lieth at the end of it, how art thou diminished?”

The Fendy considered these words while he tore off a piece of bread, dipped it in the hummus, and handed it to the Fudir. “How might our brothers and sisters aid thee?”

“There is a man,” the Fudir said around the mouthful. “In himself, he is nothing. But some few weeks ago a fleet passed through Die Bold. Seven ships, we believe. Perhaps eight. They fought. Who they were and where they went are matters of interest. But it is said that one ship remained behind, or perhaps only this man; and him, we seek.”

The Fendy ate for a time in silence while behind him a monkey screeched in a brass cage. Then he inclined his head and the servant hastened to him and they bent their heads together in whispers. A wave of the Fendy’s fingers sent the man from the room.

“I have put the question out,” he said. “An answer may return on the echo. Meanwhile, be thou my guest and I shall call in women who know a little of the
rock sharky
and we shall dine on sweetmeats and dates.” He clapped his hands. “I am miserable that I cannot offer thee better than these poor inept dancers; but they do not oft stumble, and should one catch thy fancy…” He made a fig with his fist.