The January Dancer (29 page)

The Fudir blinked and remembered. “Micmac Anne,” he said, introducing her to the others. “January’s First. How is the old bastard? I thought he’d turn straight around and go back for another load of refugees.”

“That’s what I came to ask you. When I saw you, I figured he was back. How is the ship holding up? Maggie B. didn’t let it go to pot, did she?”

“January left New Eireann several days ahead of us,” the Fudir said.

Micmac Anne shook her head. “Then he would have been here by now.”

“And the authorities would already have known about New Eireann,” said Greystroke. “That’s what I was starting to say. Maybe he went somewhere else instead.”

“No,” said Anne. “He’d have come here. He’d have come for me—and maybe for Johnny, too. But he’d have come
here
.”

“Maybe he was delayed,” said the Fudir. “New Eireann was pretty badly wrecked. If some of the food he took on turned out to be bad, he may have had to turn aside at Gessler’s Sun or…”

Anne shook her head. “That old ship is always breaking down. He’ll show up sooner or later, and Hogan will have a big mouthful of excuses. Gessler’s Sun Cut-off is a one-way slide down to the Lower Tier. He’ll be
months
coming back the long way round. What’s this about New Eireann?”

They told her about the Cynthian raid and the devastation they had left behind. “We’re planning to chase after them,” Hugh said, earning disapprovals from his two companions.

But Anne treated the comment as a joke. “You won’t have far to go,” she said. “
Xenophanes,
out of Foreganger, came in, day before yesterday,” Anne said. “Her captain told me that a Cynthian fleet was swissed in an ambush off Peacock Junction, oh, a fortnight ago.”

“A fortnight…” Hugh exchanged looks with the others.

“The timing’s right,” the Fudir said.

“And how many Cynthians fleets can there be?” asked Hugh.

“More than you might think,” said Anne. “There’s always a couple of them out cruising; though they don’t normally venture as far as the Grand Trunk.”

After Anne had gone, Greystroke pursed his lips. “We’d have to pass through Peacock Junction anyway.”

The Fudir frowned over his balled fists. “Seems someone else wants the Dancer.”

“Not necessarily,” Greystroke said. “The ambush may have been fortuitous. No one around Peacock would have heard yet about the rieving of New Eireann.”

“Don’t jump to a conclusion, Pup,” the Fudir said, “You know how those people like to brag. Someone could have known of the Molnar’s intentions beforehand. Another Cynthian clan, maybe. They let him do the hard work, then waited on his return path to seize the fruits.”

Greystroke nodded. “In which case, they have the Dancer now. But it’s more likely the Dancer is flotsam out in the Peacock coopers.”

“That’s not even a needle in a haystack,” said Hugh.

The scarred man smiles. “What a hopeless search that would have been! Needles and haystacks ain’t in it. And yet they set off with a will.” He holds his bowl out to be filled.

The harper knows some wonder that a man could drink so much yet show so little of its effects. “But of course the scepter was not tumbling about in the Peacock coopers. The ambushers seized it with great deliberation. We already know that.”

“Aye, but
they
did not.”

“It is too close in here,” she says. “The air grows oppressive. Perhaps we could take a walk outside. I need to see there is still a larger world.”

The scarred man smiles. “But in here we have travelers from every corner of the Spiral Arm and—who knows?—perhaps even from the Central Worlds? And what world could be larger than that painted by our words. In our stories, we span all times, all places, all people. Out there…” And he gestured toward the Great Doors. “Out there, you will find only the prosaic world of shippers and merchants. In here live heroes and adventures. Here, failure can really matter.”

“It always ends in failure. You told me so yourself. An’ if it always ends in failure, how can it matter at all?”

“Because it matters
how
you fail,” the scarred man says, and in so bleak a voice that the harper cannot answer him. Instead, she plays aimlessly for a time, improvising a lament.

“What happened to January?”

The scarred man shrugs. “Sometimes ships never show up. No one knows why.”

“Everyone else who possessed the Dancer died.”

“Do you
really
believe in curses?”

“They are easier to believe than coincidences.”

“Then believe in possibilities. January isn’t dead until you open the box and look. An odyssey grows crowded unless you leave some folks behind.”

“Then let’s see what folks are ahead,” she tells him when the music has warmed, a little, the winter in his soul. “It will be on Peacock Junction where the princess of Hounds will meet the exiled prince at last.”

The eyes of the scarred man are hard, and so it is difficult to note them hardening further. “There is a word for a female hound. Why you think her a princess, I cannot fathom. I knew her. And as for exiled princes, she will have three to choose from, for each of the three is exiled in one way or another.”

“It was the one way that I was thinking of. And she will choose
him.”

She does not expect a response, for the scarred man has made an art form of avoiding response; and so she is startled when he says, “She chose each of them, and none of them.”

That answer, unlooked for, stills the strings of her harp. “Oh?” she says. And then again, in a smaller voice, “Oh.”

The scarred man allows her the silence. Perhaps he even gloats. But eventually he teases at her. “Is the pattern complete yet? Is it a song? Each time the Dancer changes hands…”

“…it moves closer to the Rift. A curious coincidence.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in those. All things move toward their natural end, but ‘end’ can be spoken of in three ways.”

“What!” cries the harper. “First you tell me a story with too many beginnings? Now it is to have too many ends!”

The scarred man grimaces. “No, these are different
kinds
of ends. The first, and simplest, is simply the terminus, where action stops, because there is no more potential for further action. ‘The End,’ as we like to say when a story comes to a stop. As if any story ever truly came to a stop. There’s always an ‘ever after,’ isn’t there?”

“I’ve heard it said,” the harper responds dryly. “But it’s life that goes on; the story stops.”

“And so all of life is a dreary sequel once the climax is past?” But the sarcasm dies on his lips and his eyes turn inward. “Why, so it is,” he whispers in surprise. “So it is.”

“And the second way? Surely, your story has not come to a termination!”

But the scarred man does not answer.

In the thirteen metric days since her acquisition of the STC records, the scarred man says when he resumes the tale, Bridget ban’s ship had become something of a convent,
from which she spurned the enticements of the profane world and within which she had busied herself with conventional duties. There was never a shortage of administrative tasks. Her report on the Delphic was still unfinished and there were one or two other matters of a similar nature. Now and then, she prodded Pulawayo about the STC records, to maintain the pretense that she did not already have them. Still, the stall could not be prolonged forever. What she needed was a plausible reason to abort her search for the phantom fleet, and she sat tight in the hope that something would come up.

Instead, something came down.

Bridget ban did not expect her dilemma to be so neatly solved by a
deus ex machina,
but it was not the
deus
that surprised her. It was the
machina.
The Spiral Arm is vast and the Kennel thinly spread. So when her communicator announced the arrival in Peacock Roads of a ship of the Service, she did not at first believe the machine. Yet, surely it was beyond the skills of the ’Cockers to emulate the Blue Code; and it was this that finally convinced her. Greystroke, the beacon informed her—Fir Li’s chief apprentice, sent to seek a Confederate Agent on Jehovah—returning now, she assumed, with the intelligence desired.

She decided to use this unexpected crowbar to pry herself from the surface of the planet.

She sent a message in the Red Code telling him to pretend that he had come with a new assignment for her and, in case he had heard of it on Jehovah, warning him
not
to make that assignment the Cynthian ambush.

The Pup’s response was as minimalist as the Pup himself. It read: “?”

This led to a series of time-lagged exchanges, in the excruciating course of which they laid out a plan. Bridget ban learned to her astonishment that Greystroke, too, was in search of the Twisting Stone and had come to Peacock Junction holding the other end of the same tangled skein of events.

The coincidence did not astonish the Pup. “It was fated, Cu. You followed one end and I followed the other. The Friendly Ones used the Molnar as their woof to weave this rendezvous; but we never see their tapestry, save in hindsight.”

“The past is always inevitable,” she grumbled. “I’ll believe in yer Fate, when ye know of it aforehand.”

Peacock STC could not be unaware that deeply encrypted communications were flowing between the two ships of the Service. So Bridget ban called Pulawayo at STC and, when the elf’s visage had appeared on the comm, told him—or her—that there’d been a change of plans. “Greystroke’s brought a new case. He and I are tae rendezvous at Lunglopaddy High an’ discuss it. So I’m needing a traffic window as soon as yer folk can arrange it.”

Pulawayo made a pout. “I thought we might have another rendezvous of our own,” he said. If he meant to lure her into another ambush, it did not show on his face.

“Oh, darlin’, I’d hoped so, too,” Bridget ban replied with all the feeling she could fake. “But, Hound’s business, ye know. I’ve been tied up here with admin work on four cases while I waited…Which reminds me…Hae ye no got the STC records, e’en yet?”

The Director appeared both devastated and embarrassed. “No, they’re in
such
a mess. Heads will roll over this, dear, I promise.”

Bridget ban repressed a shudder, suspecting the statement as more than a metaphor. “Well, there’s nae time for it the now. The ambush is bumped tae a lower priority. Greystroke an’ I are for Xhosa Broadfield—and I cannae say more o’ that—but I’ll be back when we’ve finished our business there—say, in two or three metric months. Ochone! We gang where the Little One sends us, but the trail will wax muckle cold by then. I imagine ye’ll have the information properly organized before I return.” The last, she said in a chastising tone.

Pulawayo nodded, puppy-eager. “Oh, yes. Surely. Yes. By then. We must look like such sillies, to let our database grow corrupted like that, and the bureaucratic confusion—not to mention the diplomatic implications. We
are
an independent state, you know, and we can’t just turn our records over to anyone who asks.”

“Silly” was not the word that occurred to Bridget ban. She brought the conversation to a rapid and superficially friendly close before Pulawayo could lay any more excuses on the barricades. Shortly after, she received her clearance to lift for the geosynch station. Even if the ’Cockers remained uncertain about the night of her visit to Pulawayo, they would dare nothing with Greystroke now watching from the high ground. A Pup’s field office was no battle cruiser, but it had more than enough fire-power to avenge any treachery.

Never had a departure so pleased her as her departure from Peacock Junction. Hedonism, incompetence, and treachery made a deadly mix, for each quality led inexorably to the next. Just before breaking the connection with Pulawayo, the limpid eyes of the gentle boy-girl had hardened for a bare instant into black adamantine, and she had glimpsed the viper coiled within the paradise.

Lunglopaddy High was, for obscure reasons, called a “twenty-four.” It circled Peacock in a geosynchronized orbit midway between Shalmandaro and Malwachandar Spaceports. Bridget ban arrived first and waited for Greystroke in the Dapplemoon Lounge, where she watched the ballistic ships through the broad view-window. It was an early hour in the station’s cycle and the Lounge was nearly empty, which in theory should have ensured attentive service, but did not.

Several ballistic ships had decoupled from the passenger dock to fall toward the atmosphere when the Hound became aware that the Pup was sitting at the table with her.

Greystroke smiled. “Have you been waiting long?”

“A couple of hektominutes.”

“Newton is a cruel god.” He snagged a passing attendant by the sleeve and ordered a pot of tea. “Chanterberry Lace,” he said.

“Order it ‘to go,’” said Bridget ban.

He raised an eyebrow. “It’s been three and a half weeks since the Cynthians were ambushed. The trail is as cold as space. What do a few minutes matter?”

“It grows a mickle colder.”

“Hah. Did you know that ‘weeks’ and ‘months’ are old Terran tempos? The ‘month’ is how long it took their moon to make one complete circuit.”

“A month is forty metric days. What moon was ever turned in so neatly divisible a manner?”

“Fudir says the metric day is a little shorter than his Earth’s day, but that the one was based on the other, back in old Commonwealth times. The Terran day was divided into twenty-four ‘hours’ instead of the ten horae we use now, and their week had seven days.”

“A
prime
number? Awa’ wi’ ye! And why not a nice divisible ten?”

Greystroke shrugged. “Or twelve, like they use on the Old Planets. Fudir said there were seven moving lights in the skies of Old Earth. Each one was a god, so each one was given a day in his or her honor.”

She thought a chance assortment of planets a foolish standard against which to mark the passage of time. Too many suns crossed too many skies to privilege the motion of any one of them. “Ye ken a muckle o’ glaikit knowledge today, Grey One.”

“Oh, Fudir is the fountainhead. He can be entertaining when he puts a hand to it. And more entertaining still when he doesn’t.”

“An ye bear a regular geggie o’ folk wi’ ye.”

“Cu, you’re challenging my translator’s tolerances. Can we use Gaelactic Standard? Ah.” This he added to the attendant, who had brought a teapot and cup. “Thank you, old ’Cock.”

Bridget ban sighed and spoke to him, this time in the Yellow Code. “He of Fir Li and I are not rivals. He seeks no place at the court; and the God Alone knows I seek no place by the Rift. And even were we rivals, our interests converge the now on this strange scepter. Ye serve him better by joining me.”

He smiled. “You are even more attractive than the stories pretend.”

“And you, even more drab. Shall we pass over my beauty for more weighty matters?”

But Greystroke shook his head. “I never said you were beautiful.” He poured a cup of tea and, placing a lump of honey-sugar between his teeth, drank the hot liquid. “Shall we continue this conversation in your office?” he said when he had set his cup on its saucer. “I’ve asked my deputies to join us there.”

“Deputies! A geggie I said, and a geggie, I mean. Next, an’ it mought be stray cats yer takin’ in. I’ll be speaking tae each of them before I agree tae travel wi’ ’em. Send them to my office. Then go and see about the supplies we’ll be needing.”

Bridget ban called her ship
Endeavour
and unlike Greystroke’s wildly exuberant interior, it was a model of form and function, the one following the other in orderly fashion. There were no beasts on her control knobs, thank you very much, nor even much in the way of adornment, although the few pieces that were displayed might have been revealing to anyone perceptive enough to read them. She had a custom of keeping some memento of each case that she worked.

She had donned a dinner jacket of pure white in which to conduct the interviews. On it, she wore beside the insignia of the Particular Service only the Badge of Night. It pleased her that Greystroke was taken aback by the sight of it, and by what it said about her and what she was prepared to do when necessity had won the field.

Someday,
she thought at him,
you may earn this badge yourself, and wish you hadn’t.

Little Hugh O’Carroll proved a well-built young man: self-confident, and with an easy smile. He had been forced upon Greystroke at Eireannsport, but the Pup had kept him on when he could have left him on Jehovah. The Pup was much given to whimsy, and one never knew what would catch his fancy. Bridget ban had supposed that it was only because O’Carroll had become Sheol to the Fudir’s Jehovah—a satellite carried along by its primary. The Pup was not about to let the Terran go until he had been led to Donovan, and that meant keeping O’Carroll, too.

But Hugh was certainly a potential asset to the team. His skills in the deadly arts were useful, but his tactical sense and his ability to marshal and organize resources could prove invaluable. No one rises to assistant planetary manager without considerable talent in those fields.

His air of patient competence reminded her of a jaguar lounging on a tree limb. He was not a schemer, to arrange circumstances to his own advantage, but he was ever aware of what those circumstances were, and could spring quickly and unexpectedly when an opportunity appeared among them.

“What do
you
think we should do with the Dancer?” she asked him at the conclusion of their interview.

“Me?” he said. “Frankly, I never believed the old legend. The Fudir was only a way to get back to New Eireann. Now…?” He shrugged. “If the Dancer is just a funny brick, then this whole expedition is a fool’s errand. But if it is what the legends say…I didn’t like the idea of the Cynthians having it. Still less, whoever had the stones to take it from them.”

“You don’t want the Dancer yourself, then, to regain control of New Eireann?”

O’Carroll threw his head back and laughed. “No.”

He said it far too easily, given that he had waged a guerilla for just that purpose. “You’ve kept your office-name,” she pointed out.

“It was the name the Fudir met me under, and Greystroke, too. Why go back to my base-name?”

“Because it’s your true name?”

He looked away a moment. “That, it is not.”

At first, the Hound had thought to use O’Carroll’s friendship with the Fudir as the handle to control him; but she had seen in certain glances he had sent her way during the interview that there was an older and far more reliable handle for that.

It would be only a matter of providing the right opportunity for him to seize.

The Fudir was in many ways the more intriguing of the two. In her private bestiary, she labeled him a “fox.” She suspected from his conversation that he was a clever man. From his silences, she knew he was. Indeed, she thought he might be the cleverest one on the team. Certainly,
he
thought so, and that could be used against him, should the need arise.

“So,” she said. “’Twas yourself who started all this.”

The Fudir sat at ease, with a small tight smile lightening his otherwise morose face. His eyes had fallen on her badge, and she saw in the briefest of flickers that he had recognized it for what it was and that, in some fashion, he approved. “I wouldn’t say I started it,” he said. “Maybe King Stonewall started it millennia since. But the quadrille was already spinning before I heard tell of it. January had consigned it to Jumdar, and the Cynthians had seized it from her before I even reached New Eireann. So I arranged for Greystroke to take me off New Eireann—”

She interrupted. “That’s not the way he tells it.”

Again, that taut smile. “He has his perspective and I have mine. Greystroke is good, but I’m glad you’re leading this team and not him.”

“You think him deficient as a leader?”