The January Dancer (8 page)

The command center in the heart of
Hot Gates
was a broad, ovoid room, the dome of which was a display screen of impressive and subtle scope. Staff were arranged by units and sections around the room’s circumference—clerks manning the consoles, department heads standing inboard from them at podiums.

Greystroke entered, fastening a red-and-gold dress jacket. “Point Traffic,” he said, “alert me when you spot Cerenkov glow from the Parkway exit. Swift-boats are fast, but that fleet won’t be too far behind.”

The supervisor in charge of Sapphire Point Navigation and Tracking Section acknowledged. “Timer says four metric minutes until arrival.”

“I assume they’re heading for the Silk Road. Communications, hail their commodore as soon as they are subluminal. And Fire Control?”

“Aye, Pup?” The captain of Battle Management Section turned at her podium.

“We’ve gotten no swifties from Hanseatic Point, but we cannot discount the chance that a Confederate fleet has forced the crossing west of us. If so, they’ll come off the ramp firing. Be alert.”

“On it,” said Fire Control; and she directed her staff to key off Traffic’s bearings.

“Customs,” Greystroke said dryly, “prepare for maximum likelihood.”

The supervisor of Customs Section grinned as he set his screens. “Maximum likelihood; minimum impact. Boring.”

“Boring,” said the Hound of Fir Li as he entered through his personal door, “but preferable to the more exciting alternatives.” He wore a tight-fitting suit woven of thread-of-gold, bearing no insignia of rank and but a single decoration: the red-and-blue lapel ribbon of the Appreciation of Valency. It was the only one he ever wore. He strode through a chorus of greetings to the dais in the center of the room and stood behind the rails, gripping them with both hands. “Status?”

“Two metric minutes,” said Traffic.

“Cu,” said Greystroke. “Squadron is dispersed and all ships on amber alert.”

The Hound nodded. “Sensors, dome view. Palisades at focal.”

The ceiling dome darkened to the outside night. To the right and rear of the command station: the emptiness of the Rift. To the left, the frontier stars of the League with the haze of the Periphery beyond them. At the forward focal point, enclosed in red-line crosshairs, the exit from the Parkway. Invisible, an anomaly in n-space, limned in false colors so as to resemble the mouth of a tunnel.

“Ninety beats,” said Traffic. “Sir, a swifty exiting the Parkway.”

“Message from incoming fleet,” said Comm. “Screening for viruses. Clean.”

“Play it.”

A window opened on the dome display just to the right of the crosshairs, revealing a flat-faced man with thin black moustaches and hair done up in greased braids that fell past his shoulders. His skin was pale with a greenish cast. Studs, rings, and gems graced every feature of his face, though effecting no discernible improvement on any of them. A golden torque encircled his neck. A ruby was set in the center of his forehead.

“G’day, to youse, yer honors,” the apparition said, with an easy confidence and a predatory smile. “Don’t be a-frightened at our little outing here, youse. We’re just passing through Sapphire Point. Welcome to it, sez I. Oh, yeah. I hight the Molnar khan Matsumo, me; chairman of the Kinlé Hadramoo out of th’ Cynthia Cluster. We’ve twenny ships exiting th’ Parkway, an’ makin’ cut-off to th’ Silk Road. No reason to go waving yer weapons all about, youse. Oh. And nothing to declare,” he added with a smile.

“Fleet exiting!” called Traffic.

“Hold all fire,” ordered the Hound.

“He didn’t say where he was bound,” Greystroke murmured to his chief.

“I noticed, Pup.” Then, louder, “Comm, put me through. What’s the time lag?”

“A grossbeat.”

“Metric time, if you please, Mr. Lazlo.”

“Sorry, sir. One-point-um-three, now.”

“Compress and squirt, then. ‘Intruder fleet, this is His Majesty’s battle cruiser, ULS
Hot Gates,
Sapphire Point Squadron; Cu na Fir Li commanding. This is interdicted space, and authorization is required for transit. Do you have a visa?’” A wave of laughter rippled across the bridge.

“Let me blast them,” said Fire Control. “Please?”

Na Fir Li shook his head. The Cynthians had twenty ships, all corvettes.
Hot Gates
and her support ships could take any one of them easily, perhaps any five of them; but she could not take all twenty. The Squadron expected to die when the Confederacy crossed the Rift; but there was no reason to die to enforce League commercial regulations on some back-cluster pirate fleet.

The reply packet came, and once more the Molnar showed his teeth. “I’m impressed such an important boy as yourself is standing by to wave at me as I pass through. And dressed so pretty, youse. Sorry ’bout th’ visa, me. Nobody told me, not even th’ late ICC factor. An’ I thought he told me everything he knew before he passed on. Ha ha!” Muffled laughter was heard in the background.

“Where away?” Fir Li asked.

The reply came sooner, as the Cynthian fleet’s trajectory brought it nearer the Squadron. “Oh, some folk need a civics lesson, and we’re to be th’ tutors.” The Molnar had a diamond stud embedded in his top right incisor. When he grinned, it flashed. “There’s been a bit of a dust-up there and they need a strong hand to set them right.”

“You’re going to raid a planet!” Fir Li said.

“Well, we won’t stay longer ’n we need to make our point! Oh. And to tell the ICC people there that they need a new factor on Cynthia Prime. Poor fella’s heart gave out. Cracking on and blinding, he was, how the ICC would settle things in Cynthia, now that they had the Twister.” The Molnar sat straighter in the viewscreen. “Maybe he didn’t know th’ insult was mortal, him bein’ an outlander, and all; but that don’t excuse him saying it. He learned better. Ha ha! So, I figger, once we have this Twister thing, we’ll be safe from th’ ICC. Don’t know why you doggies don’t go barking after
them
and their threatening free folk and all.”

“If you need to tell the ICC anything, you could go straight to Old ’Saken. It’s closer to Cynthia.”

The lag time had begun to increase again as the Cynthians accelerated toward the entrance to the Silk Road.

“Ha ha,” said the Molnar with apparent delight. “That’s a good one. Wait’ll I tell my wives. Old ’Saken, she’s like a lion’s den. Lotsa tracks go in; not many come out. You don’t beard a lion in his HQ, Fido. All we want is the ICC should leave free men be.”

“Free men!” said Fir Li. “Free to pillage! While across the Rift the Confederacy waits to scoop us all up. To travel so far…What profit in that?”

The Molnar’s reply this time came through grim lips. “Hear me, Fido. A man pleasures only in battle. Everything else…” He spit to the side. “Money? Love? Power? The stars care nothing; and death ends all. I live. I eat. I have women and boys. I kill. ‘The bright madness of battle,’ say the holy books. You know how th’ world works, Fido. ‘The strong take what they can; the weak suffer what they must.’ I do it better, me. I live, make sons. The weaklings, their seed is lost. You fear the ’Feds, you? Then be happy some men here know how to
fight
!”

“And…he’s gone,” Traffic Control announced. The pirate fleet had vanished down the Silk Road.

“I live,” said Fire Control. “I eat, I fart, I stink.”

“I have women and boys,” said Comm, “and sheep and small mammals!”

Fir Li said nothing amid the laughter, for the lawlessness endemic to the Periphery was no laughing matter.
Would that the Ardry smite them as they deserve…
But it took too long for the Ardry to learn of matters remote from High Tara; too long for the response to follow. In practice, the will of the Ardry and the Grand Seanaid extended no more than a week’s streaming from High Tara. And wherever his Hounds might find themselves. Each planet or planetary combine kept the peace locally as best they could. And some of them were the worst offenders.

“What was that ‘Twister’ he mentioned?” Greystroke asked. “If the ICC has come up with some new weapons system, the Ardry ought to know of it. Whatever it is, this Molnar is willing to take an entire flotilla on a long trek to grab it.”

Fir Li looked over his right shoulder, at where the Rift spread across the ceiling. “It’s a distraction from our duty. Send a swifty to High Tara and pass this Twister rumor on to the Little One. Let the Master of Hounds decide.”

“Aye, Cu,” Greystroke said and turned to the supervisor of Auxiliary Vessels and Drones; but Fir Li held him back with a word.

“Pup,” he said. “Hear me. No effort is the greatest effort. You stumble because you try too hard not to stumble.”

“A lonely duty,” the harper says and her fingers evoke the loneliness of the Rift, empty, echoing chords that seem to sound from very far away. The scarred man watches her play for a while, then he tosses off the remainder of his drink in one long swallow. His face screws up and his fists clench.

“There’s no pleasure in that draught.”

“Then why drink such slops?”

“Because there’s less pleasure in not drinking it. You need a different mode for that. Something mad. Something off-key.”

The harper introduces a dissonance into the vacancy of the Rift and proceeds in diminished sevenths, inverted. “You think na Fir Li mad?” The strings laugh, but the laughter is a little off.

“Don’t you? He believes in something that doesn’t exist.”

“The threat from the CCW.”

“No, the ULP.”

“Ah. The gap between theory and practice. He’s obsessed, not mad. There’s a difference. It’s the man who cares for nothing who may be mad. The root meaning of ‘care’ is
to cry out, to scream;
and what sane man is careless?”

The scarred man grunts without humor. “You caught the irony, of course. On the one hand, Fir Li regretted the Molnar’s power to pillage; but on the other, he wished his Ardry had the power to crush him. What is the difference between a pirate chief and a king but the number and quality of the ships at his command?”

“The pirate butchers; the king milks. On the whole, I’d rather be milked. Fir Li knew the difference.”

The scarred man runs a hand through the remnants of his hair. “I hate Fir Li. We hate the very thought of him. He thinks too much.”

“Normally,” the harper answers, “thinking would be accounted a good thing.”

“No, we mean his paraperception, his multitasking, or however your milk-tongue puts it. For a man so single-minded, he’s had too many minds.”

“I don’t know how the encoding works for parallel perception, but…”

“You don’t want to know. Beside, Fir Li doesn’t matter. He wasn’t a player, except on the edges. A fit role for a man on the edge of the sky, and perhaps on the edge of his own sanity. Although being of more than one mind, he might be edgier than most.”

“Who was the player then…? Ah. Greystroke.”

“Yes, the man no one sees. He could be sitting here at this table with us, and you’d not mark him, so well does he blend in.”

The harper laughs. “Surely, an exaggeration!”

The scarred man smiles, and his smiles are not pleasant. “Surely. An exaggeration. But what sort of music would you play to limn a man like that? Music wants to be heard, to call attention to itself, and that is the very opposite of the Grey One.

“I can hide a melody in the chords. It’s not always the top notes that sing, you know.”

“The trick,” the scarred man says, as if to himself, “is for all the notes to sing in concert.”

“January, Little Hugh, and now Greystroke. We’re for Jehovah now?”

The shrunken head dips, the smile turns bitter. “For now. There are a few others who aren’t in it yet. But we have enough to start with.”

It began on Jehovah, the scarred man says…

…because this is the place where everything begins or where everything ends, and we are not yet at the end.

The Bar of Jehovah hums like a bagpipe. All those private conversations blend together and couple with some curious resonances due to the architecture of the room. There is a permanence to this sound. Like those eddies that form in flowing water, it persists independently of the men and women who flow in and flow out. It is said that there are conversations still going on, long after their originators have passed away. The hum seldom changes in pitch, though it will rise and fall in volume and even, by random chance, drop into momentary silences.

The Bar is a place where the dispossessed take possession. The skyfaring folk—freighters and liners and survey ships and military vessels—come and go, but there is a substrate beneath these transients, a more permanent population for whom the Bar is less a refuge than a home. Here, old grudges are endlessly rehashed and new plans continually laid. Here, the past is always remembered and the future never comes.

There were five at the table, speaking in that desultory way of chance acquaintances. Drink and smoke and crowding and craft had placed them together. They spoke of ship arrivals and departures; of the quality of the drinks or the inhalations. The weather came in for much debate, not only the electric potential around the Jehovah Interchange and the local speed of space, but also the mundane weather planet-side. It looked like rain.

“I saw a storm once,” Captain January told his companions. “A dust storm. Maybe seven, eight weeks back, it was. It covered half the planet, and the lightning flashed like popcorn.” It was a big Spiral Arm, with a lot of planets, and nothing has ever been seen or heard but that someone else hasn’t seen or heard a bigger. No one disputed January’s bragging rights; but Micmac Anne, sitting beside him, recalled that the storm had covered only a quarter of the southern hemi sphere. How long, she wondered, before raconteurial evolution produced a version that blanketed the entire world?

She could not recall that escape without a shudder. She had seen the lightning spike upward five or six leagues from the cloud bank, to ground in the solar wind itself. It had licked each of the boats like the tongue of an indigo snake. She studied Amos under lowered lids and sought refuge from what-might-have-been in a tankard of beer.
He
could laugh about it; but he had only
lived
through it. He hadn’t had to
watch
.

The man on January’s left had entered a world where none could follow, his face nestled in his arms on the table. From time to time, he roused himself and spoke. “Had me ’n ancestor on Die Bold, praise be,” he announced in a local accent, and the table chuckled. Who did
not
have an ancestor on the Old Planets? “Lef’ me a legacy,” he went on. “Got a ’ficial notice, an’ all. Lord knows I could use ut.” His hand snaked out and pulled to him the hose from which he sucked the smoke of his own particular fantasy. Air bubbled through the huqa, cooling the smoke, lying to the lungs. He exhaled slowly, contentedly, and the table filter gathered in the brume and it was no more. “There’s this guy there, on Die Bold,” he explained. “He can sennit t’me, God willin’, but he needs two thousan’ ’n Gladjola—’n
Glad-i-o-la
—Bills t’ file th’ right papers.” The man’s fingers moved restlessly, playing with the hose. “Fren’s ’r helpin’ raise th’ bills.” He paused hopefully, then added, “M’ fren’s can share the ’heritance whennit comes, God willing.”

The others looked to one another and grinned. He had no friends here. Not for so transparent a ruse as that.

Another of the tablemates, a woman as thin as a willow branch, mahogany-dark with blue eyes and bright yellow hair, wondered aloud how many “gladdys” the enterprising Die Bolder had already snared from fools such as this one. “It doos not take mooch,” she assured the others, her Alabaster origin revealed by her accent. “He oonly needs to fool soom o’ the pipple soom o’ the time. Small change, boot he meks it oop in voloome.”

“Someday,” said the fine-featured man who wore a shirt of many colors, “there really will be a legacy discovered, and none of the heirs will believe it.” Lamplight glittered off his jewelry as he waved a dismissive hand.

Their banter was interrupted by a giant. Twenty-one hands tall with shoulders broad to match. Red, shoulder-length tresses entwined with glass balls of various colors. The scar that crossed his face should not by rights have left as much nose behind as it had. This apparition leaned his fists on the table. “I’m looking for a man,” he said without preamble.

“Aren’t we all,” said the mahogany woman to general laughter.

The fine-featured man studied the newcomer with interest. “Any man in particular?” he asked.

The smoke-drunk native began to snore gently.

The giant looked around the room, studied the people at the table, leaned closer, and lowered his voice. “The O’Carroll of New Eireann.”

The fancy man and the mahogany woman shook their heads. January scowled and Anne, who had picked up some notion of Eireannaughta politics in their brief stopover there, said, “Who wants to know?” She had it from Colonel-Manager Jumdar that this O’Carroll had been an assassin and a rebel whose death was sought by many.

“Sweeney. He’ll know the name—aye, an’ the nose. Should ye be runnin’ into him here…” And the giant again scanned the Bar. “If ye be sayin’ him, tell him the clans o’ th’ Southern Vale wait his retarn an’ th’ overthrow o’ the ICC tyranny. Those wards, exactly.”

As Sweeney straightened, January muttered, “I’d overthrow the ICC myself, if I could.”

The giant cocked his head. “And what foight is it o’ yers?”

“They took something of mine. A dancing stone. They’ll sell it for me, they said. I’d get a finder’s fee, they said. I’ve got a paper signed by Jumdar. But I don’t trust them.”

Micmac Anne laid her hand on his arm. “Hush, Amos. They fixed our ship.”

“They do have a way,” the giant said, “of coming into things that don’t belong t’ them.” And so saying, he departed to inquire at the next table.

The fancy man watched the departure. “He’s not going about his quest very discreetly. Or is a loud whisper what passes for stealth on his simple world?”

“The Eireannaughta,” said Anne, “are rather a straightforward lot.”

The mahogany woman raised her brows. “A dancing stoon? What iss this tell?” The others clamored to hear the story and January recounted, with relatively little embellishment, his discovery in Spider Alley. “And I signed it over to Jumdar,” he concluded. His ruddy face beamed as if happy that he had done so. “I don’t know what came over me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it sits in the ICC vaults on New Eireann.”

“Or it’s oon Gladioola by now,” said the Alabastrine.

January shook his head. “No, they’ll send it all the way to Old ’Saken. I hear Lady Cargo is a collector of antiquities. Gladiola’s in the wrong direction, and there hasn’t been time yet for a message to reach ’Saken and a courier ship arrive.”

“Woodn’t this Joomdar send it right oof?”

“I don’t think she could spare a ship. She’d already sent two troop carriers on to Hawthorn Rose just before we got there, and needed the other two to keep order on the planet.”

The man in the colorful shirt asked, “Do you plan to go back for those other…What’d you call them? Immovable Objects?”

January turned to him. “If I could, they wouldn’t be bloody well
immovable,
now would they?” His vehemence surprised the others. He finished his ale and set the pot down with emphasis. “I shouldn’t have made that deal,” he said again. “I’ve good mind to go there and demand the Dancer back. Damned thieves, that’s what the ICC is.” He said that a little too loudly, for several men in ICC uniforms at nearby tables frowned in his direction.

“I think we’re well shut of it,” said Micmac Anne, but she wouldn’t say why.

“Maybe with better equipment,” said the fancy man thoughtfully, “they’d not be so immovable.”

“They’re guarded by the Irresistible Force,” January reminded him.

The fancy man shrugged, as if to say that irresistible forces were a ducat the dozen and he dealt with them handily every day.

“A friend oov mine from Friesing’s World,” said the mahogany woman, “he mentioned a stoory from Oold ’Saken aboot a Twisting Stoon. I wonder if that’s the same oobject.”

Anne asked how the story went, but the woman didn’t know. “It was joost in passing. I think he said it was a scepter, maybe.”

“The scepter of King Stonewall?” Anne named the prehuman king that Johnny Mgurk had mentioned.

The other woman shook her head. “He never sayd.”

“What difference,” grumbled January, still intent on his own grievances. “It’s all fantasy anyway.”

And yet the stone had moved and turned and twisted. That much was no fantasy.

Evening had gotten on and the streets outside the Bar had dissolved into patterns of darkness broken only intermittently by streetlamps or the cyclopean headlights of auto-rickshaws shuttling between the Bar, the Hostel, and other, less comfortably named places.

The Corner of Jehovah was a ramshackle collection of buildings sprawled behind the Bar and permeated by a circulatory system of narrow and twisted alleys. It was here that the First Ships had landed and ecofast dwellings had been built for each of the crew on half-acre lots. There had been a river running through it at the time; but it was an underground sewer now, and acted the part. The original crew housing had been modified over the generations with additions and extensions and sublets as the population grew. Each addition was more slapdash than its predecessor, and it seemed as if a building were a growing thing anxious to maximize the area into which it would one day collapse. It was said that every building in the Corner was in the process of going up or coming down, and the only way to tell which was by the degree of entropy in the construction materials piled beside it. The Corner was a warren now, a topological network of unknown connectivity. The original lots were buried beneath the jumble. Boards and runways coupled rooftops; tunnels linked basements—and not always the ones expected. Occasional flyovers leaped across street or gulli from the mid-story of one building to a mid-story of another. To enter one edifice in the Corner was to enter all.

Not that entering was a good idea.

From the rooftops, the lights of Port Jehovah and of the capital itself seemed a distant galaxy. The man who called himself the Fudir danced along the skyway of planks and rickety bridges with a squirrel’s cunning, tracking the figures stumbling through the moonlit alleys below. “Big dikh,” he muttered to himself, “but the man’s my key.”

Sweeney the Red had stopped at the alleyway’s entrance and, pushing his charge deeper into the narrow street, turned to face the way they had come.

“Murkh,” the watching man said. “Fool. That’s Amir Naith’s Gulli. A dead end.” And it would be a dead end, too, he saw. The red giant pulled a long knife from his belt. “I wonder if that was the least conspicuous man they could have sent.”

Or had he been sent with his conspicuousness in mind? There were layers here.

The Fudir scurried to the corner of the meat-duk
n that overlooked the intersection, and from it he studied their back-trail. Yes.
There
was the third man, minus now his colorful shirt and flashy jewelry, moving easily from shadow to shadow past the shuttered shops and kiosks that lined Menstrit. This late in the evening, there was little traffic, only an occasional auto-rickshaw to momentarily spot-light the hunt. At each cross street and gulli, the pursuer paused and looked briefly into the deeper shadows of the narrow lanes.

The watcher considered the red-haired giant. “If you don’t want him to know which gulli you’ve gone down,” he whispered, “don’t stand in the mouth of it like a hotel doorman.”

The pursuer came finally to Amir Naith’s Gulli. He and the giant made eye contact, and the giant gestured into the alleyway with a toss of his head.

“So, it’s like that,” the Fudir decided as Sweeney stepped aside. “I hope you were well paid for the treachery.”

The fine-featured man turned a little as he passed Sweeney, and the redhead jerked three times and slumped to the ground.

“And paid quickly, too,” the watcher muttered, not without some satisfaction. Sweeney had been a fool to expect any other coin. The Fudir pulled a whistle from his cloak and gave three short blasts. Then, throwing his hood up, he clambered down a ladder affixed to the side of Stefan Matsumoto’s pawn-duk
n. As he descended he began to sing.