The January Dancer (5 page)

Maggie was already firing the jolly-boat’s engines when O’Toole and January reached the gig. O’Toole popped the hatch and clambered in. January paused at the foot of the ladder and looked behind. Tirasi and Mgurk were sealing up the jolly-boat. He nodded and entered the gig.

“We’ll worry about our orbit after we have one,” he told O’Toole as he slid into the number two seat. “Lift! And lift now!”

So, they did.

Both boats reached the stratosphere ahead of the advancing storm front. Lightning crackled below them. Yet part of the storm had broken through the tropopause—dour thunderheads looking for all the world like billowing giants made of smoke. A tremendous bolt arced
upward
into space. O’Toole cursed.

“Climb, Slugger,” January told the pilot. “Climb as fast as you can. Climb, even if you dry-tank the gig. Annie will pick us up in the lighter if she has to.”

“Aye, Cap’n.” Sweat was pouring off the man. His fingers might leave dents in the pilot’s yoke. “We’re heading east to west, an’ that’s a bad climb f’shure; but we’re stayin’ ahead o’ those sand clouds. ’T isn’t ourselves I’m worrying over, y’ follow, but what that jolly-boat is a slow climber.”

“Where are they now?”

“So far, so good.” O’Toole gusted a sigh and seemed to relax microscopically. “But that’s what Wheezer Hottlemeyer said whan he was after passin’ the second floor, and him falling out av a noine-story buildin’ at th’ toime.”

And a skybolt turned the viewports blue
. The gig shuddered, and one of the panels sparked and died.

“Are we hit?” January cried, half rising in the two gees. “Did it get us?”

O’Toole laid a beefy hand on January’s wrist, touching the sandstone as he did. “Don’t ye be worryin’, Cap’n darlin’.” And January relaxed, weirdly comforted, confident now in the pilot’s abilities to see them through. “Aye, an’ there’s the jolly-boat, too!” the pilot cried, a triumphant shout, finger stabbing the 360-sensor display, piercing its ghostly green wireframe images. “Hoígh, th’
Roger.
All bristol, down there?”

“Hoígh,
Aloe,
” Maggie replied. “Skin of the teeth here, Slugger. There was one bolt, I thought it was gonna peel the paint right off the skin, and leave its autograph. Hell, mebbe it did. Storm’s well below us now. Looks like we made it, you damned Paddy! Now we gotta find the
Angel.
”

“Shure,” said O’Toole, “an’ ut’ll be a story for to tell our grandkids.”

“I don’t even have kids yet,” Maggie said.

“Well, then, let’s you an’ me make some while there’s still time!”

The pilot and the astrogator instructed their respective boats to lock on to the
New Angeles,
plot a suite of orbits, and report back with projected transit times and air and fuel usage. When the engines cut out and the gig entered low orbit, O’Toole grinned and turned about to face January.

And the smile faded. Slugger clasped his fists together into a ball and shuddered. “
She
can joke, but I know how close that was.” He sucked in a deep breath. “It weren’t normal, Cap’n. That storm. It was coming at us east t’ west, an’ that’s aginst th’ prevailin’ winds. Yessir, ’t was, and I nivver heard tell uv a storrum doin’ that. An’ maybe a planet dry like that an’ all can work up a monster static charge, but, Jaysus, Cap’n, that storrum was bigger’n the planet, I’m thinkin’.”

January glanced at the prehuman artifact in his hand. It was twisted along its length like a screw. He had ordered the others to abandon backhoe and molecular sieve, but he had hung on to this. It really was quite pretty when you got used to it.

“I’m guessin’ th’ toorist attraction notion is off th’ table now.”

January laughed with nervous release. “By the gods, yes. But, maybe we can sell this…this dancing rock for enough to replace the gear we abandoned. Looks like Hogan’ll have to cannibalize the ship after all. I don’t think we should go back and try to salvage the equipment.”

“Jaysus, no! I’d ruther be back home on New Eireann awaitin’ for th’ Big Blow. Our equipment’d be all lightning’ed over by now, anyways, the backhoe and Bill’s toy. Nothing lift uv thim but slag. But I shure hope the storrum didn’t hurt those other things—the Midnight Egg, the Slipstone, the whatever heathen name Johnny gave the pot…”

“The Budmash Lotah.”

“Yeah. I don’t know for why Johnny don’t speak fookin’ Gaelactic like th’ rist uv us.”

“I don’t think they were hurt, the Unmovable Objects. And, Slugger? I don’t think that was a natural storm, either. I think the prehumans made something they had second thoughts about and they locked it away forever, but…” The gig’s orbit, looping around the planet had brought them back up over the site, but January saw nothing out the viewport but a black, writhing mass covering a quarter of the planet. Maybe it was fading, settling out now. He couldn’t tell.

“But?” O’Toole prompted him.

“But even forever ends.” And he relaxed in his harness, stroking the lovely sandstone, thankful that they had escaped the Irresistible Force.

“It’s to be a
geantraí,
then,” the harper says. “A joyous stain. A triumphant escape from the unknown—and
with
the prize in hand!” She has uncased her harp, and setting it upon her lap, it sings the happy tune her fingers pry from it. About the room, men, half listening, smile without quite knowing why; and one (a woman, of course) frowns and turns toward the darkened alcove, as if seeking the source of such unwonted delight.

The scarred man grins, though the rictus is joyless. It is the smile more grieving than sorrow; the delight that is dark as despair. “Beginnings often are,” he says. “Otherwise, who’d go on? Sorrow is for conclusions, not commencements.”

The
geantraí
grows hesitant, pivots from the third mode into the darker fourth, hints at sorrow underneath the joy. But, then…

She lays her palm flat across the strings, silencing them, and those in the room—other than the scarred man, who is impervious to all music—sigh a little from apprehensions released. Music has charms, but it is not always charming.

“No,” says the harper. “That’s a cheat. That’s seeing the past with the eyes of the future, which is why the past is never quite seen correctly. Let them have their gaiety. No one ever knows it’s only a beginning they have. Let them be in their moment. The past must be seen as if it were still present, and the future all possibilities.”

The grin of the scarred man is not pleasant. “As if Tristam might yet succeed? But it’s over. It’s done. What happened, happened and you can’t change it. There is no moment without a future in its gravid belly. No tragedy issues but from the womb of the happiness that bore it.”

The harper’s smile is brighter, more pleasant, more deadly. “And ulta-pulta,” she answers. “Topsy-turvy. Yin-and-yang. Sorrow births joy.” Her fingers tickle the harp, which laughs in reprise of Tristam’s theme. “He did succeed. Tristam’s death was his triumph.”

The scarred man grunts. “He might liefer have failed, then.”

The harper forbears to argue the point. The scarred man has confused triumph with survival and she has no wish to antagonize him, not before she has sucked the wellspring dry of its story. Her fingers evoke January from the harp, and the discovery of the Dancer. It is all fragmentary, only motifs and themes. It is not yet a song. She limns the forlorn wastes of the unnamed world, the mystery of a city under the sand, the curious beauty of the Chamber and its unmovable Contents—earth, water, fire, and air. The relentless approach of the Irresistible. And the figures end in a dance of danger and escape—wild reel and stately quadrille, whirling waltz and graceful ballet. That much is true, at least. Waltzes and reels are dangerous, and she suspects there is dancing yet to come.

“And so, they cannibalized part of the ship anyway,” she says over the fading chords. “It’s what they should have done in the first place.”

“Yes,” the scarred man answers. “That’s something to keep in mind. And you’ve made the same mistake that January made.”

“What mistake is that?”

But the man shakes his head. “That’s for the ending, and it’s a poor end that has but one beginning.”

It began on New Eireann, the scarred man says…

…a world of black volcanic glasses and uplifted basalts. What little green the world owns is in its name and in a narrow winding valley that ends in a small glen just below the summit of Ben Bulben. Like all the worlds, it has been terraformed; but it is too young for such maturity and only this one high valley had been conquered before seed and stock and will gave out. The world was barely weaned from its molten infancy, and still threw tantrums of molten rock and pyroclastic ash, and the Vale remained a great green wound upon the planet’s sullen red-and-black flesh. Little by little, to those who measure these things, the boundaries of the valley contract, as basalt and granite and diorite win back what they had long ago lost.

(“But let them have their moment,” the scarred man sneers. “For now, they live in a green paradise and the black igneous reality lies out of sight, beyond the crest of the Reeks. All the eruptions, all the steam and lava, burst forth in the Barrens below, where the plates are thinner and the core breaks through. So their future doom is yet to come. Unless…”)

…unless one day the Vale of Eireann, too, erupts. The Big Blow, they call it, making it a joke. There are hot springs in the glen below Ben Bulben…

And so it is a world of sad songs (
which should please you, harper
). When they want to make merry, the
Eireannaughta
don’t sing. They fight. And that they do often enough to lighten the mood that surrounds them.

They have little enough in the Vale. They can feed themselves and make the most basic things, and they have far more power than they need from thermal stations, but there’s little to do for diversion and their arts are ordinary. Drinking is one (and there they do show considerable talent) and conversation is another (and that they class as a martial art). Orbital factories, built by companies from better-endowed worlds, have come in search of cheap power. New Eireann makes most of its off-world exchange by beaming excess power to them, and a little more by supplying them with fresh food. ICC ships come and go with other supplies for the stations and haul away their products. Very little finds its way to the world below.

The other major source of off-world income is the tourist trade. People have come from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from the Lesser Hanse and Gladiola, from even High Tara itself. They come to climb the Western Reeks and stare at nature raw, at the great geysers and fountains of lava, at the rivers of molten rock and the basalt glaciers. “An’ d’ye be seein’ the wee pyroclastic cloud there? Sure, an’ I hope ’t isn’t blowin’ our way…Ah, mind the drop here, yer honor; wouldn’t want ye t’ fall into yon lava pool.” Oh, they play it up, the Reek Guides do: a great mouthful of the blarney and just enough hint of the danger to make the tourists shiver in delight.

(“An’ shure ’tis only an image,” the scarred man mocks the accent. “They are no more Irish than you or I are Tibetan. Nor any less. Across so many centuries, everyone on Old Earth was our ancestor. It takes more than eponymous settlers or carefully contrived archaisms to resurrect something that long dead. But what can a people do when they have no future, save reconstruct some storied past?)

Then the tourists ride the gondolas back down into the Vale from which the rest of the planet, out of sight behind the Reeks, can seem a bad dream. They stay in Da Derga’s Hostel or in quaint tourist cottages in the Mid-Vale or sample the excitements (such as they are) in New Down Town. They spend some more money and remain until they grow bored (which happens soon) or frightened (which happens sooner). One morning, the tourist throws open the shutters in the terribly cute guest room, and takes a deep breath of the bright green grassy Vale—and the breeze is just a trifle too warm and bears just the tiniest acrid wisp of molten stone. And “terribly cute” seems suddenly more than merely “cute.” So they think,
Who in their right minds would ever have settled here?
And
then
they think,
Who in their right minds would
stay
here a moment longer?

So the tourist numbers aren’t very great in the wider scheme of things. Far more people flood Alabaster to see the Cliffside Montage. But enough of the curious come to satisfy a small world like New Eireann. They bring hard currency—the Shanghai ducat, Gladiola Bills of Exchange—and they bring something near as important: news of the great wide world. Messages travel only so fast as the ships on Electric Avenue, and only to where those ships touch orbit, and so news arrives in snatches and batches at irregular intervals and often from unexpected places. The Eireannaughta were tolerably well informed of doings on New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose, and somewhat less so regarding Jehovah or the Jenjen Cluster. But High Tara? The Hatchley Commonwealth? Far Gatmander? Oh, those were magic names and faraway places! At times it was easy to believe that there really was a sprawling United League of the Periphery out there, and itchy youths like Slugger O’Toole might ship out on a passing tramp and go searching for the planet crusted with gold.

A number of years earlier the Eireannaughta had hired the Clan na Oriel to manage their government contract and the Clan sent in an honest administrator, who took the office-name of Padraig O’Carroll, though his real name was Ludovic Achmed Okpalaugo. By all accounts he ran a clean and honest administration, though at first the Eireannaughta didn’t realize that because they didn’t know what one looked like. When they did, they revolted, because an administration that won’t take bribes generally won’t hand out favors, either.

There are appetites that ought not be fed, for they grow on their feeding. As an extra inducement to potential renters, New Eireann had invited the Interstellar Cargo Company to service those orbiting factories. ICC ships ranged throughout the ULP, “from Gatmander to the Lesser Hanse,” as their slogan had it. And they had the magic touch: uncannily anticipating where each good would demand the best price. It worked well for everyone: customers received goods they wanted, producers found greater profit, and the ICC pocketed a handsome fee. So the ICC pretty much owned the traffic for everything in New Eireann space.

Except the tourist trade.

There was a nice cash flow in that pipeline. Not much compared to what the ICC already had; but consuming all that wealth had only made them hungrier. And when a fat man feasts, there are always those who gather the crumbs. Oriel wouldn’t kick back or fix contracts, but the ICC was more flexible in that regard. They did not consider buqshish to be
wrong
. They were not bound by the moralities of ancient religions and made no secret of it. They believed in sharing the wealth, too, so long as they had the larger share.

Neither did they lack for corporate ethics. When you take a bribe, you give good value in return. If you kick something back, you make sure of performance. One time on Agadar, the ICC let a contract to build a road along the Inkling Ocean. The contractor skimped on the materials and the road washed out in the first monsoon. So the ICC factor called up his house militia and they found the contractor and put him to work on the repair gang, out in the hot sun with a tar-brush in his hands and a
terai
-hat on his head. And they gave the repair contract to his biggest competitor. There’s something charming about such an honest corruption. The kidnapping and forced labor weren’t legal, not until afterward when they had bought the Assembly; but it was poetic. You can’t argue that.

So when Certain Persons approached the ICC factor on New Eireann and suggested that a change of administration might be to the benefit of all, the factor—whose name was Vandermere Nunruddin—replied that while he could not condone such a thing, he saw no reason why the ICC could not do business with whatever administration held Council House. He may even have suggested a few management corporations that might bid on the job, one of which was, in the spirit of open competition, not an actual subsidiary of the ICC.

No one expected what happened.

Nunruddin probably anticipated a quiet coup, with Clan na Oriel offered a golden parachute and an ICC subsidiary brought in. Cynics often think that everyone else is just waiting to cut a deal, and that even saints are selfish. The Certain Persons who dined with him probably thought the People were behind them. But if an honest administration that gives no special favors and taxes at a reasonable rate for matters palpably in the public good engenders a certain loathing in the hearts of some, it evokes genuine fondness in the hearts of others. Most of the Eireannaughta would likely not have minded dipping their snouts in a government trough, but most of them didn’t believe that Certain Persons would ever let them anywhere near that trough. So if it surprised the cabal and the ICC factor when so many people rose up against the coup, it surprised everyone else how many backed it.

A war is always ugly, and a civil war the ugliest of all. An invader may be expelled and sent back to where he came from, but a neighbor remains a neighbor after the fighting is over.

New Eireann had no army. The Vale was too narrow and too rugged to support contending states. The nearest other state was the Maharaj of New Chennai, three days hard streaming down the Grand Trunk Road; and New Chennai had no interest in nor even much awareness of the Vale of New Eireann.

Consequently, there were no tanks or warplanes or artillery on the planet. But New Eireann had a police force—the gardy—and the gardy was armed because there are plug-uglies in the slums of any world and even a small world has its share. When the cabal rushed the Council House to seize Padraig O’Carroll and his ministers, half the gardy and a third of their commanders raised the Oriel banner atop the Hotel Wicklow in New Down Town. At this signal, the Spacedockers Union defied their own bosses, stormed Union Hall, and announced a general strike in support of The O’Carroll. The revolutionary cabal was utterly stunned by all this.

The farmers out in County Meath, in Mid-Vale, went the other way. They had always grumbled about the “off-world managers” from Oriel. So they formed up a militia, burnt out a few neighbors who wouldn’t go along with them, and sent a company’s worth of eager youth to the City to support the “Revolution.”

When the Loyalist gardies tried to retake Council House, some of the Oriel household troops took heart and fought back against their shocked and distracted captors. A fire was started—by accident, everyone says—and The O’Carroll and three of his ministers died of smoke inhalation. Terrance Sorely, who was a Certain Person, became a little less certain after that. He hadn’t expected deaths. He told the others he wanted out, and they told him it was too late, “the die was cast,” and all that, and he said he was out anyway, and so Handsome Jack Garrity shot him dead right there at the boardroom table, and he got his wish.

A war is always ugly, and never more so than this one. Planes and tanks and precision munitions at least keep things sanitary, and most everyone you kill is out of sight. But pistols, rifles, gelignite—they called it “jolly good-night”—are up close and personal. You can make a peace with someone you’ve fought at a distance; but it’s harder to do that with someone whose stinking breath is in your face and his knife an inch from your throat.

And it did get down to knives and swords and pikes. New Eireann had not much of a munitions industry. Just enough to keep the gardy better armed than the plug-uglies. There was no hunting because there was no wild game in the Vale; and target shooters used harmless infrared “beamers.” It didn’t take long after the Burning of Council House to use up the stocks, and whatever might have been in production at Reardon and Harrigan’s munitions factory was denied to both sides by the partners, who set fire to the Works, created a crater of impressive dimensions on the outskirts of Galway Town, then shook hands and went their separate ways, Reardon to join the Revolution, Harrigan to the Loyalists. There was something admirable about that small gesture, something even gentlemanly. They limited the magnitude of the war, even at the expense of their profits and everything they had ever owned. That aura of self-sacrifice made Reardon a poor fit in the cadre of the Revolution. The other Persons distrusted him just the smallest bit.

A few people made “jezail” rifles and “zip” guns, but these were regarded as the weapons of barbarous folk, and the Eireannaughta much preferred the cutlass, the dirk, and the two-handed claymore sword. Why send a high velocity slug of lead ripping through someone’s organs when you could cleave him from collarbone to groin with a well-aimed stroke? You can shoot a man by accident, but you need real commitment to lop his head off.

War is always ugly. It is guts streaming from opened abdomens. It is a head trying to speak its last few words as it stares in astonishment at the body it once topped. It is learning the ghastly meaning of the term “human remains” in the ruins of Da Derga’s Hostel, after some boyo has used up the last of a dwindling supply of jolly good-night.

So there had better be a damned good reason for it, because even if it is good, it is still damned. Yet, better to fight over liberty and loyalty than over tuppence difference in the tariff on lace. Bigger wars have been fought for a great deal less. And if a man will not fight to keep his liberties, he is a slave to the first tyrant who would kill to take them. That doesn’t make things less ugly, but it might mean that in later years, when a man wakes in the dead of night in a cold, shivering sweat, he can, at length, go back to sleep.

Now the Revolution did not set out to be tyrants. They only wanted to dip their beak in the tax money flowing through Council House. But events, once unleashed, consume their makers. Certain steps became “necessary.” After two weeks’ fighting, none of the original cabal were still alive, except Handsome Jack, who, though crippled, still directed things from the Broadcast Center. Even the ICC factor was dead. The rumor had gone out that he had instigated the coup, and the Loyalists bid Nunruddin a jolly good-night in his ground car one spectacular evening.