The January Dancer (7 page)

“A goltraí, then,” the harper says.
“A Lament for Hugh O’Carroll.”
And her harp sings so mournfully that half the patrons in the room grow inexplicably teary-eyed.

The scarred man listens for a while, but without visible effect. “They
are
mad, you know,” he says. “The Eireannaughta are. But what can you expect from a folk who live on a raft upon a sea of seething magma? The Big Blow can come at any time, so it’s not surprising that they themselves erupt now and then.”

“Did Jumdar intend to keep the Dancer, or did she really mean to send it to Old ’Saken?”

“Not at first, I think; and in the end, it wasn’t her decision to make. What happened to Jumdar is of little interest, except to Jumdar. No, if you must have a lament, the truly tragic figure in the story is Handsome Jack Garrity.”

The harper is surprised and her fingers hesitate and still. “Is he? Why?”

“Because he was a man who won everything and gained nothing, and what worse fate is there than that? He found himself a deputy commissioner in a minor office. Small beer for the Hero of New Down Town. That’s why his struggle with the Ghost came to consume him. It was the one time in his life when he had mattered.”

The harper strums a mockingly conventional military march. “I’d not call him a hero.”

“No? What is a hero, then? Surely, a man larger than life, who acts with courage, who controls his contending emotions—his anger, fear, and despair—to achieve his goal. Handsome Jack did not succumb to despair until
after
he had won. Can only those be heroes who show courage in causes you favor? The Ghost of Ardow, maybe?” The scarred man gestures broadly with his arm, as if the Ghost has entered the Bar and the scarred man is introducing him.

“No.” And her earlier Lament turns twisted and jangled, and she sets the harp down at last and balls her hands on the table. “But I had thought he was a better man. Not an assassin, not a murderer.” She seems much affected. There are, it appears, emotions whose music is silence.

The scarred man laughs hideously. “But give him this much: at least he excelled. We suppose there is a difference between killing a particular man quickly and efficiently, and killing many men wholesale on a battlefield. Maybe you can explain the difference to us.”

“The heroic man,” she says quietly, “conquers himself.”

At this, the scarred man falls silent for a while. Then he takes his uisce bowl and spins it toward the far side of the table, where the harper snatches it before it falls off. “That’s a struggle,” he suggests darkly, “in which some of us find ourselves outnumbered.” He looks at the bowl and then at the harper.

The message is clear. She signals to the Bartender, and shortly, the “water-of-life” has been replenished. The harper receives unasked a bowl of her own, and she raises it to her lips. It is an awful, numbing liquor with the one obvious purpose of numbing something awful.

“Do you know what’s funny?” the scarred man asks her. But he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Hugh O’Carroll was a schoolteacher by vocation. That was why he was in the Southern Vale when it all broke out. All he ever wanted to do was teach children.”

“Where did he go?” the harper asks. “Where did his men address the crate?”

The scarred man grins like a skull. “Where does any such residuum wash up?”

“Ah.” The harper turns and looks out at the Barroom and studies the men in it. “Not a very glorious end for a legend.”

“Who says that was the end? It wasn’t the end of the man, nor even of the legend, though legends are always harder to end. We spoke, he and I, at that table there by the window”—a bony finger points—“and we got the whole story out of him.”

The harper reaches for her instrument. “So, then it’s to Jehovah next.”

“No. There is one more beginning.”

It began near the Rift, the scarred man says…

…a region where despair has become a feature of the sky. A place where some ancient god had drawn a knife across the galaxy’s throat and left a black gaping flow of blood. In this void there are no suns—or no living suns, an emptiness made all the less bearable by the surrounding shores of light.

On the farther shore of this hole in the sky gleam distant suns with magic names—Dao Chetty, Tsol, the Century Suns—stars whose worlds are storied in antiquity: strange worlds, ancient worlds, decadent worlds, worlds of peculiar and exotic customs. From the hither shore, they appear as they once had been: antique light hundreds of years on the journey, the lamps of the Old Commonwealth before it crumbled. A telescope subtle enough might still glimpse those halcyon days in the tardy images just now breaking on the Peripheral shore.

A happier time, the stories said; a time before the Great Cleansing. Now the Confederacy of Central Worlds—tightly ruled, patiently waiting, watching the Periphery with hungry eyes—squats upon that distant shore across the gap of stars.

Thankfully few roads cross the Rift, for the electric currents that crease space into superluminal folds depend on the plasmas of roaring suns, and there are no suns in the Rift. Those that do cross are as tenuous as rope suspension bridges across a gaping canyon, their end points snubbed to stubborn blue giants. The crossing points have been carefully mapped by the fleets of High Tara, the Greater Hanse, and the Hatchley Commonwealth. Their survey ships have pricked each on their charts and noted the speed of space—the local-c—and other such qualities of space-time; and by each such crossing they have positioned a squadron of cruisers and swift-boats. These check the bona fides of the trade ships that venture out and of those that venture in; and await the day when Confederate corsairs pour across the Rift in a wave of conquest. Then they will die—for what is a squadron against a fleet?—but the swift-boats will stream out and spread posthumous warnings to all the nearby suns.

The High Taran squadron commanded by the Cu na Fir Li guards the crossing known as St. Gothard’s Pass. This current curls in from a frontier province of the Confederacy and, on the Peripheral side of the Rift, entangles a blue giant called the Sapphire Point Interchange. From there, short Newtonian crawls reach the Palisades Parkway, which skirts the edge of the Rift toward the Old Planets, and the Silk Road, which winds its way around two dozen stars before reaching the great interchange at Jehovah, whence to Gladiola, and Ugly Man; to New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose; to Alabaster, and far Gatmander. A third current flies off from Sapphire Point to the Galactic East, whose worlds are as yet unsettled and unexplored.

It was, in the reckoning of Fir Li, the obvious invasion point. No other crossing offered such ready access to so extensive a volume of the ULP. He had said so, and often, to the Ardry of High Tara, Tully King O’Connor, until, tiring of this Jeremiah in his court, the King had ordered Fir Li to take personal command at Sapphire Point.

So Fir Li had taken his “Pups” and his personal ships, and heighed off to stand the watch. Yet, where his enemies at court saw defeat and exile, Fir Li tallied a triumph. He was a Hound, and Hounds usually get what they want. Since then, captains and men and ships had come, and served their rotations, and gone, but the Hound of Fir Li stayed on—an exile from the court, or a sentry on the wall, depending on one’s point of view.

Over time, some courtiers had whispered, the sight of the Rift, of such an emptiness in the midst of light, could break a man, and drive him mad.

A Hound of the Ardry could be many things and any thing. Loyal for a certainty. Relentless on the scent. The High King had no more loyal servants than the Hounds. They were resourceful; skilled in all manner of arts, both politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could use words the way the Meathmen of New Eireann used claymores—often with the same decapitating results—but they were no strangers to other weapons. A single Hound, dropped at dusk into the Vale of New Eireann, could have stopped the civil war in a night and a day.

Na Fir Li, in his youth, had not been the least of this company. He had overthrown the Fourth Tyrant of Gladiola with a few well-placed rumors dropped in the bars of Florentz City. He had for five years managed the planet of Valency, where his name is yet revered, ending their awful Interregnum. He had directed the reconstruction on Ugly Man after the earthquakes there. He had assassinated fifteen men and women who had deserved death; and rescued twenty-seven who had not. He had even crossed the Rift, to walk the fabled streets of the Secret City on Dao Chetty, where none but Those of Name may tread.

Messenger, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, planetary manager—a Hound could be whatever the Grand Seanaid desired when the Ardry spoke “with office” in the name of the ULP, for no one loved the ULP more than the Hounds of “The Particular Service.” It might fairly be said that the League existed as something more than a theory only in the convictions of the Hounds; and if ever there was anything that could drive a man mad, it was not the Sapphire Point Station, but devotion to a thing that was not quite real.

But there is something enervating about a duty in which for the most part nothing happens and where success can be measured by nothing continuing to happen. It was a period of détente, and the border was supposed to be open, so there was a steady, if slow, volume in trade, and this made for an occasional customs inspection, but not often enough or varied enough to counteract the ennui of the long watch. Routine dulls the wits; so the Hound of Fir Li called random security drills and mounted exercises, neither too few to ensure readiness, nor so many as to dull it. It was a fine tuning, like stretching the strings on a harp, seeking the proper pitch without snapping the chords.

And so most time was spent in relaxation—in sports, in games of skill and chance, in debate, in reading and writing and painting and the creation of music. In romance and in quarrel. In all those things with which, since the Caves of Lascaux, human beings had decked their lives. It fell to Greystroke, Fir Li’s deputy, to manage these things, to arrange the concerts and the bounceball leagues and suchlike—and also to apply discipline when the music became too loud, the debate too physical, or the games of chance too certain; to adjudicate all those frictions that develop when those who have been trained to act on a moment’s notice must wait for that moment not to come. Greystroke was journeyman enough to chafe at such mundane duties.

Fir Li’s flagship,
Hot Gates,
was a faerie castle set loose in space. Never intended to enter an atmosphere, it lacked even a pretense of streamlining, and might have seemed more a small village to the ancients than what they had imagined a spaceship to be. It was Greek and Gothic and Tudor and Thai, and Fir Li, who had never heard of any of those folk, had managed to incorporate all the most monstrous aspects of each.
Hot Gates
was a chimera, odd even by the standards of its kind—blocks and spheres and tubes and causeways were all a-jumble, protected within a spherical field and given a whimsical variety of ups and downs by an idiosyncratic use of gravity grids. The faeries had been mad. It would have seemed out of place anywhere—save here on the ragged edge of space.

Fir Li himself had chosen midnight for his skin and moonlight for his hair. He was blacker than the gap he guarded, and in his dim-lit rooms, the white cascade of his mane could be the only visible sign of his presence. When he moved, it was swiftly and silently. Bridget ban, a colleague, had once compared him to a panther; others had compared him to the Rift itself.

He sat in a light-framed swivel chair in the center of an otherwise empty sitting room, one wall of which was an image screen kept tuned to the Rift.
He can
see
the Point,
some in the Squadron whispered.
He got these funny eyes and he can see deep down into the currents. When the ’Feds come, he’ll spot them afore our sensors do.
It wasn’t true, or maybe it wasn’t true; but the Rift drew him, possessed him; and the sight of it had impressed itself upon him like a signet impresses the wax, and a bit of its emptiness had invaded his soul.

Perhaps that was why he kept his sitting room dark at most times. The chair he occupied was an octopus, whose flexible arms caressed the Hound with controls and inputs and outputs. Using them, he could hear what the ship heard, see what the ship saw, speak with the ship’s voice—but he had muffled all but two for the moment. On one, he scrolled through a novel by the great Die Bold writer Ngozi dan Witkin, who had lived in the early days of the Great Cleansing and had written most poignantly of the loss and confusion of those first generations. But because Fir Li was paraperceptic, a second reader displayed statistics for traffic through the Rift. This did not divide his attention, for each called upon different faculties of his intellect. A third faculty, the one that touched on icon and myth and image, contemplated the great rift displayed upon his wall.

Not all the trade ships came back.

So the statistics said, and although Fir Li was aware of the shortcomings of all statistics—“They are first written down by the village watchman, and he writes what he damn well pleases!”—he found the figures troubling.
As troubling as the cruelty of Those of Name, who had uprooted entire peoples of the Old Commonwealth and scattered them beyond the edge of space, Ngozi’s grandparents among them.

Nothing compelled a ship departing Sapphire Point to obtain her return frank there, save the commercial regulations of the League. But the Hound of Fir Li had obtained the customs information from all of the crossings and had cross-tabulated them, and…

…not all the ships came back.

Many of the crossings were narrow, and a ship ill-piloted might run afoul of the shallows and beach catastrophically into the subluminal mud. The god Ricci, who caresses each point of space, had graced the roads with a “speed of space” far greater than flat space, and a ship might slide down them comfortably below local-c yet far above Newtonian-c. A ship at translight speeds that found itself suddenly in Newtonian space would become a brief but spectacular burst of Cerenkov radiation. Such mishaps were not common, but they did occur. Yet models existed that related that probability to the local properties of space, and the number of disappearances exceeded the expected value at the five percent risk level.

The Dao Chettians had exiled their defeated foes with deliberate disregard for cultural homogeneity. A Babel of exiles could not combine and conspire if they could not even understand one another. Like all the others finding themselves far from home in the company of strangers, Ngozi’s grandparents had tried to maintain the old country customs—but there were too few compatriots and they were scattered too widely and over too many worlds. “The center cannot hold,” an ancient poet had written, and so things had flown apart. Ngozi herself had lived at just the right moment in history and could look back upon her grandparents’ struggles to maintain the old, and forward upon her grandchildren’s struggles to create the new.

How to explain the
excess
in the number of lost ships? Those of Name had become decadent—Fir Li had seen this for himself—and they had forgotten many things; but they had not forgotten how to be cruel. The code that had allowed them to disperse whole peoples, to dissolve living cultures into artfully re-created and inward-looking archaisms, would not forbid the seizure of an occasional ship for no better reason than the joy of it.

And so each faculty of his attention came to rest upon the same object. From settlement days on the Old Planets to the disappearance of ships in the present to the sight of the starless abyss, the menace of the Confederation ran like the drone note of a bagpipe.

“Yes, Pup,” he said, for three channels did not exhaust his paraperception. “What is it?”

Greystroke always stumbled a bit when he entered his Master’s quarters. It was not so much the three-fourths’ gravity as it was the sight of the Rift. The span of the wall screen played with one’s peripheral vision and so it seemed as if the ship’s hull had been stripped off and the emptiness without had poured within. Fir Li’s quarters were deep within the vessel—no architect was so foolish as to put a commander’s suite at the very skin of the ship—but the illusion always caught some part of a man’s mind off-guard, and no one ever entered the suite when the screen was active without a sudden and unwitting hesitation in his step.

Greystroke was no exception, and the momentary stumble was a source of great vexation to him, for he tried to school himself against it. It irritated him that an illusion would catch him up.

He was a young man the color of his name, so average in appearance and demeanor that he had achieved an operational sort of invisibility. This could be advantageous for a journeyman Hound. When he desired so, he could remain unnoticed for a very long time. “Cu!” he said.

Fir Li scrolled a page on his viewer. “Something unusual.” Fir Li’s voice was a bass rumble, something between a growl and the grinding of rocks.

“Aye, Cu.”

“But not an emergency at the crossing, or I would have been summoned by the alarms.”

“Aye, Cu.”

The Hound scrolled another page on the reader. “Traffic control, then. A ship on our side of the Rift approaching the Interchange, but not a typical merchant or you’d not disturb my rest at all.”

“Cu, the pickets have detected the bow waves of a large fleet coming up the Palisades.”

The Hound was about to turn another page, but paused in thought for a moment. “A fleet,” he said. “How many ships?”

“The swift-boat counted twenty. All corvette class.”

The Hound bobbed his head side to side. “Too small for a colony fleet; too many for a survey expedition. A war has started somewhere.” He turned off his viewer and stood gracefully from his chair. “I will be in the command center shortly. Such a grand fleet, I must dress for the occasion.”