The January Dancer (47 page)

A
nd so the story begins, if it did not begin elsewhere and at another time. The scarred man sits in his accustomed place in the Bar, robed in shadows in a niche cut into the wall. The other niche-seats are favored by lovers seeking shadows—but there is no love here. Or love only of the most abrasive sort.

The early morning is a somber and introspective time, and the scarred man’s visage is nothing if not somber and introspective. He owns a gaunt and hollow look, as if he has been suctioned out, and not even a soul remains. He is all skin and skull, and his mouth sags across the saddle of his hooked chin. He has been known to smile, but not very often and never is it comforting to see. He is weathered, his skin almost translucent. His hair is snow-white, but not the white of purity, for that has been a
long time lost. A checkerboard of scars breaks the hair into tufts like a woodland violated by streets and winding roads. Those scars and a sad story have kept him fed and reasonably drunk for a long time. He has changed the story from time to time just to keep it fresh; but his eyes are never still and the true story may have never been told.

Although it was early morning, the Bar was full. There are those for whom the night is day, and these have slipped in one by one to escape the unconcealing sun, discuss their nocturnal ramblings, and divide the take. Longshoremen have trudged up Greaseline Street from the Spaceport Yards to celebrate the end of their shift. There were sliders and touristas, too, since liners and freighters tocked to shipboard times and it was only by wildest chance that these ever coincided with the Bar’s own meridian. Sliders were as likely to come weary with the dawn as bright-eyed with the eve.

And they talked, all of them. They told tales, aired grievances, warbled songs. They muttered darkly, and whispered intrigues as intricate and Byzantine as their states of intoxication allowed. It all merged into a hum that rose and fell with numbers and furtiveness but which never ceased entirely. It was a joke among the regular patrons that there were conversations still ongoing long after the originators had died; and what jest is ever purely a lie? There are documented cases of ship captains returning after long absences and resuming the self-same discussion.

The scarred man sat to his breakfast and his breakfast was one of daal, and baked beans and sautéed mushrooms, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon. He ate in a silence punctuated by occasional mumbles and subvocalizations, as if he himself embodied in small the chattering crowd around him. Some thought him a little mad because of this, although they were wrong, for there was nothing little about his madness.

Above, a door closed, and the scarred man’s eyes flicked upward for just a moment before he dipped his daal into the beans and lifted the dripping mass to his mouth. Footsteps followed on the wooden staircase, and still the scarred man did not move. Then she was with him, pulling out a seat opposite, and directing a sneer at his noisome breakfast. She herself had only a cup of black coffee—or something that had coffee in its ancestry. (The human diaspora was millennia old, and genes had been tinkered with on this planet or that. The bean went by many names—caff, chick, moke, joe—but even when it bore the same name, it was never quite the same drink.)

“She” was the harper, and that name, too, will serve for now. She had come to him a metric week ago and pricked from his teeth the tale of January’s Dancer, in the process unearthing in him old and hurtful memories.
And he saw in the backlit dawn of the thrown-wide shutters that she intended to hurt him further. For she had walked with purpose in her stride, and purpose meant motion, and, as an ancient sage had once said, “With the motion of creatures, time began to run its course.” And time was the one thing the scarred man had not measured for all these many years.

Her eyes were the hard, sharp glass-green of flint, and her hair was a great flame of red, but her skin was dark gold. The bhisti science-wallahs who had touched the genes of coffee had not forborne to touch the genes of men, and what they had done had wrought wonders and horrors; and it was just as well that their art had been forgotten, for the world can bear only so much wonder.

The harper waited in silence. It was a talent she had, as great a talent as her harping; for silence is a vacuum that sucks words from the throats of men. She lifted the coffee to her lips; set it upon the table; adjusted the cup slightly.

Minutes died.

But the scarred man, too, knew the art of silence, and had had many more years of practice.

Finally, she looked up, halting for a moment his restless eyes. “I’ll be leaving today,” she announced, but in an uncertain voice that indicated an unsettled purpose.

The scarred man smiled—because he had won a small victory in the art of waiting. A part of him wished to bid her adieu, but another part wished her to stay. “Where away?” he said, serving a neutral response.

“To find my mother.”

The scarred man nodded slowly. He could see the mother in the child; should have seen it earlier; should have seen it in the moment the harper had first strode through the Bar like the Queen of High Tara. The harper was not quite so striking, not quite so wild in her look as had been Bridget ban; but neither was she quite so hardened. For Bridget ban had practiced the art of seduction, and nothing quite so coarsens the soul as to use too roughly a tool so soft. The harper preserved something deep within herself that in her mother had grown rigid and worn.

“Your mother was a witch,” he said. “A harlot queen. She is best left unsought.”

He had hoped for some reaction from the harper, but the young woman only dipped her head. “I understand your hurt. You loved her once and lost her; but I knew a different woman.”

“Don’t be so sure you did,” the scarred man responded. “A leopard does not change her spots. It was not my idea to love her, but hers. It is not in any man to resist her if she but chooses that he not. She played me like
you play your harp, until I sang her tune. What chance does a child have against such snares as
she
could lay?”

“I think you are too bitter. You made your own choices. It was
you
who left
her
.”

“I
escaped
.” The scarred man remembered an early morning in the slums of Chel’veckistad, on Old’ Saken: stealing from the bed of Bridget ban, cold-cocking Hugh, and heading off to secure the Dancer for himself.

Of all the hard things he had done in his life, those three had been the hardest.

“How long has she been gone?” he asked grudgingly. A part of him wanted to know. A part of him was curious.

“Three years. She left when I was sixteen metric.”

“And only now you’ve come looking?”

“Don’t think you were easy to find. I followed clues, rumors. They led here.”

“They shouldn’t have. No slip of a girl should have tracked me down.”

“Mother is a Hound. She taught me things.”

The Hounds of the Ardry were resourceful agents—skilled in arts politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could be many things, and any thing: messenger, scout, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, savior, planetary manager. Child-rearing was not beyond the multitudinous talents of Bridget ban.

He pushed his breakfast aside. “And what makes you, a harper, think you can find a Hound if she does not wish the finding? A Hound may be years on a case. She may be on her way back even now.”

“Gwillgi came to see me on Dangchao, on our family’s ranch.”

“Gwillgi!”

“He was searching for Mother and thought I might know something, some small detail. That’s how I knew she’d gone missing and was not simply a long time on her task.”

“All the more reason not to get involved. I’ve met enough of the Ardry’s Hounds to be wishful of meeting no more; Gwillgi least among them.”

“He did seem an… intense little man.”

“He could kill you with a flip of his wrist.”

“You know how thinly the Kennel is spread. There are always more missions than Hounds to take them. They cannot neglect their other missions.” She reached out and seized the scarred man’s wrist. “Fudir,
they’ve called off the search”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Know one small detail.”

The harper thought for a moment, fingering a medallion that hung on a silver chain around her neck. “I… don’t know. Mother had been conducting disaster relief on Thistlewaite. She came home, took a fortnight’s home leave, then she was gone.” The harper’s voice hardened just a little bit at this, and the scarred man gave her a sharp look.

“And she didn’t tell you where she was headed.”

The harper gave him a look. “If she had,” she snapped, “I’d nae be searching! She ne’er told me aforehand. Hound’s business… It was nae for me tae know!”

Irritation washed across the scarred man’s face and he grimaced. “All right,” he said, as if to himself. “I’ll ask.” Then, addressing the harper: “How did she seem to you while she was home?”

“Like… Mother. We had dinner. She attended one of my concerts. She spent a lot of time in her office, reading, writing her reports. She gave me this.” The harper took the medallion from around her neck and held it out to him.

The scarred man reached out and seized it: a simple black ceramic disk with a diamond set in its center. Below the diamond, a sinuous ruby sliver zigzagged to the rim. “It’s broken off at the tip,” he pointed out. “It used to extend beyond the rim. How like her to bestow a defective gift.”

“It’s only a memento from Thistlewaite. She often did that when she came home from a mission. But it’s her whence, not her whither.”

“Except this isn’t thistlework. They don’t shape jewels in quite this way. They prefer the gaudy and elaborate.” He handed it back to her, and the harper tucked it once more between her breasts. “Trade goods,” he said. “You’d get two, maybe two-fifty shekels in the Jehovah market. Less, if you dealt with the Bourse.”

“I showed it to jewelers in Dangchao City. I even took it over to Die Bold herself, to the Mercantile Loop in Port Èlfiuji. No one recognized the style.”

A shrug. “It’s a big Spiral Arm.” He dipped his bread once more into the beans and swirled it around. Then, with a gesture of disgust he threw the bread into the bowl. “Happy? Sad?”

“What?”

“Your mother! Did she act happy, sad, depressed, the week she was home? Afraid? Maybe she was running from something, and that’s why she didn’t tell you where she was going.”

“Mother, afraid? I wouldn’t even know what that looked like. She seemed… excited, I suppose. I asked her what, and she only said that it was something so outrageous and so wonderful that it could not possibly
be true. But if it
was
… If it was, we need no longer fear the Confederation.”

The scarred man looked up sharply. He himself had been, at one time, an agent of the Confederation of Central Worlds, though one insufficiently devout—as the scars on his scalp testified. Her rulers were cold and ruthless—beside them the Hounds were eager puppy dogs—and he knew a moment’s unease. If the daughter had been asking around, the words she had just spoken had been dropping into any number of ears, and it was as certain as death that Those of Name would hear them eventually and take an interest. They did not believe that there should ever be anyone who did not fear Them.

The harper held out a slip of notepaper. “She left nothing but this note.”

The scarred man reacted with genuine anger and snatched the slip of paper from the young woman’s hand. “I’m no harp, girl. I don’t like being played.” He unfolded it, saw it was handwritten, and succeeded in astonishing himself. All these years flown past, and he could still recognize her handwriting.

Out on the edge
, it read.
Fire from the sky. Back soon.

“Fudir, what does it mean?”

The harper had again used one of his names—or he thought she had. He chose to believe that she had not called him something else.
Go ahead, “Fudir,”
a part of him jibed,
tell her what it means.

“What do
you
think it means?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.’ Out on the edge.’ Perhaps she went into the Rift, or out to the Rim, or perhaps to the edge of settled space, past Krinth or Gatmander, or to the unsettled worlds of the Galactic East.”

The Fudir grunted. “Which pretty much brackets the Periphery.” He gave her back the note, and it, too, vanished into her clothing. “But it might not mean that sort of edge. It might have meant the challenge would drive her to the edge of her talents.” He waved his hand to get the Bartender’s attention and pointed to his table. The Bartender, a Jehovan who went by the office name of Praisegod Barebones, understood. Like cock’s crow, the scarred man’s first drink heralded the new day. He brought a bowl of uiscebaugh to the table and set it before him.

“I don’t know that she has an edge to her abilities,” the harper said, “or that any challenge could push her to them.”

“The more fool, she.”

“Otherwise, why write ‘back soon’? She thought this would be a simple task. But months became years. And then Gwillgi came. His visit frightened me.”

“A visit from Gwillgi would frighten anyone.”

“No. I mean, it is a big Spiral Arm, like everyone says, and it’s often weeks and weeks between stars. But she’s been gone too long now, and no one knows where, or why, or what happened to her. I thought…” And the hesitation in the harper’s voice drew his attention from the uisce bowl.

“What?”

“I thought that you would help me find her. You’re clever. You can see things.”

The scarred man stared into the bowl, from the amber reflection of whose contents he stared back. “I’m too old to travel,” he said. “Too old for adventure.” He ran a hand across the table. “But she hasn’t gone into the Rift. That far, I can conjure her meaning. If she had gone there, she would have said ‘in,’ not ‘out.’ Any Leaguesman would. It’s the Confederates who say ‘
out
to the Rift.’ And now I will tell you, being as how I am so very clever, why you should not chase after her, and should leave the search to the Hounds.”