The January Dancer (31 page)

Greystroke looked up. “Well, which was it?”

“It was hard to keep track o’ the excuses as they flittered by. Now,
here
are the tracks of a couple of dozen freighters over the past hektoday. As ye see, and correcting for sidereal drift, they all vanish or appear at the same locus.”

“Not too many points off the entrance ramp for the Silk Road if you take your heading off the Greater Fops,” said Greystroke.

“Aye, and that works tae our advantage. We can heigh as if for the Rift—Xhosa Broadfield lies off the Palisades—but turn aside before the final approaches and pull for the farther point.”

Greystroke pulled his lip. “And if you’re wrong, and we try it, we’re all blinked. Your STC records show us where the entrance
was
and a certain amount of calculation can approximate where it’s gone; but ‘approximate’ isn’t good enough. Sidereal drift is sensitive to initial conditions and the equations have no analytical solution. ‘The Ricci tensors are all agley,’” he added, imitating her dialect.

“A ramp acts as a gravitational lens,” the Fudir pointed out. “You can pinpoint its location without an ephemeris by checking for parallax shifts and the doubling of background stars behind it.” When they all turned to look at him, he shrugged. “I really do hold a rating as an instrument tech.”

“Then after we’re in the groove,” Bridget ban added, “we maun track the phantom fleet from their fossil images, to learn where they turn off. Who knows how many side channels this road has?”

Greystroke knew which ship had the better imaging equipment. The Fates were subtle indeed, for they had led him to take up the hobby years before in preparation for this day. “Then I take the point, and Fudir stays with me,” he said.

Bridget ban agreed to take Little Hugh O’Carroll with her, and she tried not to smile at the prospect and made sure that Hugh saw that she had tried not to smile.

During the long climb toward Electric Avenue aboard the Hound’s ship, Hugh amused himself by preparing lists; and Bridget ban by preparing him. While he tabulated and crossreferenced everything that the team had learned about the Dancer, she tabulated in a more quiet way everything she learned about him. It was far too easy. She saw that in Hugh’s sometimes self-conscious behavior in the confines of her ship. All that wanted was the right moment for him to seize, and she set about providing it.

Their first day out did not bring them together until dinnertime. Bridget ban stayed in the control room coordinating the magbeam booster schedule with Peacock Roads Traffic and fine-tuning the ship’s onboard power reception. Later, she went belowdecks to the power room and ran the readiness tests on the alfvens. She emerged finally to find that Hugh had prepared a dinner for the two of them.

Nothing exotic: a type of fish called a “colby,” found in the great freshwater sea on Dave Hatchley. He had assembled the filet from the vats, coated and broiled it, and served it with an assortment of familiar vegetables. Like her, he seemed to prefer the plain and simple.

“I don’t know why you bother going down to the power room to run the tests,” he said when they had settled to the table. “Can’t the intelligence run them for you?”

Bridget ban separated the flakes of the colby with her fork. “This will be a tricky approach. There are no marker buoys, no quasar benchmarks to steer by; so the engines must be as finely tuned as possible. The intelligence knows only what the instruments tell it. It can nae ken if the instruments are agley.” She waved the fork. “Always run the standards,” she admonished him.

“I shall,” he said, “should I ever grow daft enough to try for astrogation.”

Bridget ban laughed more than the wit warranted and touched him briefly on the back of his hand. She made careful note of how he responded to the touch and on what his eyes involuntarily fell. By the next day, she had programmed her anycloth to accentuate those areas, arranging everything a little tighter, a little higher, and a little lower.

At his request, she pulled up a map of the South Central Periphery and displayed it on the holowall in the conference room, which consequently took on the aspect of infinite depth. She also gave him access to the ship’s open-source databases. “Just be careful,” she said, rapping her knuckles on endless space, “not to walk into the wall.”

He chuckled. “It does look real. Can I shift the point of view?”

She moved inside his personal space. “Just tell the ship the origin and direction of the view you want. For fine-tuning, use this glove and watch where its icon appears in the wall. Then, push or pull on the image. When you shift your point of view, the stars change to account for light-lag, up to my last gazetteer update. Here, do you see that star?” She touched it with her virtual finger. “Watch what happens when I zoom toward it.” She curled her finger and pulled the view forward and they seemed to race through Newtonian space faster than the speed of space. Hugh staggered a little, his balance confused, and Bridget ban placed her left hand on his waist to steady him. “It takes some getting used to,” she said, meaning the cascading stars, not her hand. Hugh opened his mouth to say something—and the star suddenly blossomed.

What had been a red pinpoint became unbounded fury as the star tore itself apart. For a moment, it was as bright as all the other stars combined. The interstellar gases glowed as they were swept along with the wave front.

And then they were through the shell of expanding gases and where the star had been there was nothing but a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. Hugh blew out his breath. “Quite a ride!”

There is a trick well known to those who practice it, of invading another’s “personal space” like a smuggler nestling into a friendly cove. She stood very near to him, not quite touching, and told him, “The supernova is out past the Jenjen, in the Roaring Fork nebula. It appeared five years ago in the skies of Hanower and the intelligence back-dates everything from that; but it won’t be visible from Peacock for centuries. If you watch the backdrop under ‘hyperfast evolution,’ you can see the spiral galaxies age and spawn seyfert pairs and the seyferts spit out matched quasars. It’s quite beautiful, the underlying structure and design. There”—she pointed again, leaning a little across him—“that’s Andromeda, our mother galaxy. There’s a twin Milky Way on the farther side, so the legends say. Andromeda spawned us as quasars when she was a mere slip of a seyfert…And that is Virgo, our grandmother. The sky is our family tree.”

She stepped away, then, but he contrived to let his hand brush against her, and she pretended not to notice.

One element of the art of conversation is to ask the other about himself. Since this is often their favorite topic, or at least a topic on which they are reasonably well informed, it seldom fails to draw them out and put them at ease. It was over a game of shaHmat that Hugh told her of his terrifying childhood on Venishànghai and Bridget ban nearly wept to hear of it.

“They
hunted
you?” she said in disbelief. “The shopkeepers
hunted
you? Like animals?”

“But never alone,” he said with his teeth, but Bridget ban thought it was a false grin, or one of pain. “Understand. We used to vandalize their shops and rob them. I can’t say they’d no reason to hate us.”

“But still…”

“And it did school us in agility and quick-wittedness, and that stood me well in the Glens of Ardow. I was accustomed to being stalked. But, sometimes…” He paused and fiddled with one of his hounds, moved it, changed his mind, and restored it to its position. “Sometimes I wonder how long I could have kept it up. Not in the Glens; in New Shanghai. There were no
old
vermin-boys.”

“You shouldn’t call yourself that. Look at what you’ve accomplished. You’re a certified planetary manager. You’ve run entire government departments and, from all I’ve heard, run them well.”

He smiled thinly. “And I ran a
guerilla,
too. Don’t forget that. There is a part of me that knows what I’ve accomplished. But there’s one small sliver of my brain—somewhere back here in the old cerebellum—that still thinks those shopkeepers were right. It’s not something you can hear for years and years when you’re young and ever entirely forget. And what was my
guerilla
but another and vaster case of vandalism? That’s why I’m fit for—” But he stopped then, and did not say what he was fit for. Instead, he smiled. “And you,
a vawn Chu?
I’ve told you my base-name.” He managed to bow sitting down. “Ringbao della Costa,
b
i rén
. How did you become Bridget ban? Was it your childhood dream to go to the dogs?”

“Are you going to move that piece or not?”

Hugh looked in surprise at his hands and saw that he was playing idly once more with the princely hound. He replaced it on its square and moved a councilor up the white diagonal. “Sorry,” he said. “We should concentrate on the game.”

“It takes the mind off…” She bit her lip as he looked up.

“Off what?”

“Off entering an uncharted road.”

“Greystroke knows what he’s doing. And the Fudir’s a licensed charts-man.”

“Aye…” Bridget ban blocked his councilor by advancing a minion. “But, well…Alright. My base-name is Francine Thompson. There’s no secret in that. I never wanted to be a Hound, though. Oh, I read all the stories growing up. About Efram Still or Moddey Dhu and the others. But I never wanted to be one. I only wanted to be regular Francine Thompson. You see, I grew up on Die Bold, and the most important thing in the world was to be ‘regular.’ At least in the Pashlik of Redoubt, where we lived. All I ever heard was ‘communal solidarity’ and ‘the fingers work together make a fist.’ Things like that. So I studied for my assigned career and worked at perfecting my character for it. I was to be a nurse-practitioner in the Kentwold Hills. It was a good assignment, one worth doing. The hill towns are scattered far between and don’t see a medico very often. But…” She watched Hugh slide a fortress slowly up the leftmost file, as if doing it surreptitiously. But she had expected the move and immediately castled her emperor. Hugh frowned over the board.

“But try as I might with the character-building exercises,” she continued, “I couldn’t enjoy nursing or, more importantly I think, I couldn’t do it well. So, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I lacked the plasticity to mold myself to the type that society needed me to be.”

“And what was it,” Hugh asked, “that you most loved hearing about in those days?”

Bridget ban closed her eyes and became young Francine Thompson, sitting before the televisor in the block community center. There had been a terrible arson in Ark Alpikor. Two hundred people had died. “When the public inquiry agents caught the bastard who did it, everyone was pleased to hear it; but I was…‘ecstatic,’ I suppose is the word. After that, it seemed that every time I opened a newscreen or picked up an idle book at the center library, it was something about policefolk, and more often than not it was a story about one of the Hounds. It was almost as if the
idea
of being a Hound was tracking me, hunting me down.”

“Not all policers are worth the aspiration,” Hugh told her. “The People’s Police on Megranome wouldn’t have cared if the man they caught was the true arsonist or not. And if I’d fallen into the hands of the New Shanghai
pleetsya,
I wouldn’t be here today.” As if to underline the point, he took one of her minions with a counselor and swept it from the board.

“That might be the other question: What did I most
hate
to hear of? It wasn’t anything like the arson itself. That was only tragedy. They rebuilt the dormitory, named it ‘The House of Sorrow,’ assigned new families to live in it, and life went on. No, what I hated most was when I read of innocents wrongly prosecuted.”

“You should have been a Robe, not a Hound. They were always on about ‘justice.’ So when did you—Pay no attention to the counselor. He’s innocent and you’re wrongly prosecu—Damn.” Bridget ban had sent one of her hounds leaping across the field to take the piece. “You weren’t supposed to see that line of attack.”

“If you don’t want me to see your line of attack, you shouldn’t pursue it. Unless you want to play in the dark,” she added in a playful voice. “What was I…? Oh. When I was fourteen, local, the County Planning Board sent me to a medical school across the border in the Kingdom.”

“The Kingdom of what?”

“Just ‘the Kingdom.’ The odd thing is that they don’t actually have a king, just a regent. The story was that they’d had a king once who had been so just and wise a ruler that no king after could hope to measure up. So after he was gone, they set up a regency to await his return. The Kingdom’s medical technology was more advanced than Redoubt’s; so I was supposed to learn what I could and bring it back to the Pashlik. But after a month at the Université Royale, I asked for asylum and was granted it and I transferred my major to criminology. And then one day while I was walking past the Eglantine Traffic Star to my classes, I passed the League Consulate and, purely on a whim, I walked in and asked them how I went about becoming a Hound.”