The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  Sedon had not been aware of the lack of light until it returned. For the first time since his Consecration, someone dared to touch him without permission--and then to hurt him, bringing Sedon the distant awareness of bones in his right hand being broken, of the stasis bubble's key being wrenched free. Compared to the pain of the kitjan it was nothing, but even in the midst of the pain he noticed it, promised himself an accounting.

  Abruptly there came a stinging sensation at the base of his throat, followed by an immense emptiness, a reduction of pain, of all sensory input. Sedon became aware of chemicals traveling his bloodstream, blocking synapses, calming the wrenching of his muscles. His heart was not beating and Sedon attempted again to restart it, but without success; the control of his neural system, the thing that made a Dancer what he was, had been taken from him. The sense of violation that descended upon him was astonishing; he had not suspected that even the Shield respected him so poorly.

  As his body stilled, ceased its senseless thrashing, he felt himself sink toward the finality of true death.

  Lightning tore into him.

  "Could I please have some silence?" Holtzmann stood at the front of the briefing room. He glanced down once at the readout floating in his handheld's field, looked back up. "Everybody? Please?"

  It was just after 7:00 p.m.

  McGee stood at the back of the room, and watched the others watching Holtzmann, wearing a variety of expressions that spanned the spectrum from fascination to seething anger.

  "Okay," said Holtzmann. "Here's what's happened, as far as we can figure it. De Nostri is inside the sphere. Most of you missed that, but the holos show it clearly; he was visible for a twelfth of a second before the sphere formed around him, and he's holding something in his hand that we think is the generator." Holtzmann paused. "Frankly, the item he's holding seems too damn small to me to hold the necessary power source, even as a MAM reactor, but I wouldn't bet my reputation on that. Maybe there's some form of collapsed matter inside it. At any rate, De Nostri should be safe; as soon as we can, probably early tomorrow, we'll generate the Tytan field again, and even if we can't turn the generator off we'll pull him out the same way he pulled out our guest." Holtzmann was silent, then plunged into it. "As for our guest--that's what we've been calling him--well, he's definitely human; at a guess he's contemporary to the period the sphere came from. His--clothing, I guess we'll call it--would seem to indicate that's the case. The medbots find some things about him--physiologically--that are a bit odd, but we have no idea what significance to place on those anomalies." Holtzmann glanced at his handheld. "He died again just before I came out to see you. That's three times so far; twice his heart, brain death once. The 'bots have brought him back each time, but he's getting weaker. Part of the problem is the 'bots don't know what's wrong with him. One of the first things they did to him was pump in a sedative to stop the convulsions, but it looks like that might have been a mistake; the sedatives appear to have shut down everything, his entire neural system. They've had to jump start his heart twice now as a result. The expert system running the medbots conjectured that the section of his brain that's responsible for keeping his heart beating is under his conscious control; when we sedated him we shut it down. His nervous system is inflamed both at the neural and gross physiological levels; the medbots have injected a nanovirus designed to bleed off some of the pressure inside his skull, and that seems to have helped some. Given the circumstances, the medbots are doing as well as can be expected. But we still need to get our guest to a real hospital, to human doctors who can diagnose something they haven't seen before." Holtzmann stopped all at once, as though he'd run out of energy and things to say at exactly the same time, and stood almost motionless, swaying ever so slightly while waiting for their questions.

  They were not long in coming.

  McGee left before five minutes were up, long before the dozen Unification officials present had run out of questions that Holtzmann was clearly going to be unable to answer. He took a cab to the airport, and boarded a semiballistic for Capitol City.

  The Ministry had a job waiting for him in Occupied America; a genie hunt--possibly, the Ministry was hinting, one of the infamous Castanaveras twins. McGee was not averse to moving on; he had heard already from more than one source that any further contact with the Val d'Entremont bubble, and whoever or whatever they had taken out of it, would not be wise.

  Aboard the semiballistic to New York McGee spent half an hour updating his journal. When he was done he encrypted the entry and turned his attention to the briefing materials he had been sent for the genie hunt. There was not much there, but enough to get started.

  McGee flipped his handheld shut, closed his eyes, and lay back in his seat. A telepath. That would be interesting.

  He felt a brief flicker of anticipation; and then slept.

  * * *

  9.

  Saturday, March 12, 2072:

  The most powerful individual in the System, United Nations Secretary General Charles Eddore, stood looking out the window at a view, from two kilometers up, of Capitol City, the Unification enclave in the midst of Manhattan; the city from which all of Earth and most of Luna were ruled.

  The window at which Eddore stood was not really a window; that would not have been safe. And Eddore's office was not actually located two kilometers up in a spacescraper; his offices were one and a half kilometers beneath the surface of Earth, protected from anything including a direct strike with thermonuclear weapons.

  He listened with half an ear to the report his webdancer had brought back from Switzerland. That she was present in his office was a sign of the data's sensitivity; Eddore did not dare allow information concerning the "guest" to be sent him via the Player- and AI-corrupted Net.

  Eddore interrupted the webdancer's report midway through. "Holtzmann is serious about this?"

  "Sir, he seems to be. He won't swear about the 'guest,' but he seems quite certain that the slowtime technology involved in the sphere is beyond us, and beyond any of the Belt CityStates as well."

  Eddore stood silently, watching the flickering firefly headlights of the hovercars ghosting through the skies of Capitol City. His thoughts were almost abstract, the swirling creative processes of a man who was, in his own field, every bit as much a genius as Holtzmann in his. Elements that he juggled simultaneously included the Johnny Rebs and the Erisian Claw, the largely American and largely Eurasian terrorist organizations; the situation with Free Luna, which was tense as always; his own growing distrust of the Peace Keeping Force, and theirs of him; and the increasing danger that the SpaceFarers' Collective, or the Belt CityStates, might take a more active interest in internal Unification affairs.

  The last danger was still small, but getting larger with every passing moment; as was the seven-kilometer-long shell of the United Nations Space Force warship Unity, the largest spacecraft ever built. There were those among the Belt CityStates, and even more so among the Collective, who saw in the Unity a plan to extend the Unification of Earth to encompass Free Luna, Mars, the Belt and the Jovian moons. Even without the Unity Space Force was probably capable of conquering the outer planets; with it the contest would be over very nearly before it was begun.

  How all of these factors were affected by the appearance of a human being inside an alien slowtime sphere was a thing that Eddore would have had difficulty explaining. Had he attempted to, which was wildly unlikely, only a few hundred people in the System could have followed his explanation; and most of those were his rivals or political enemies.

  It was 2072, and Charles Eddore faced an election in December, an election for the third and last term in which he would be eligible to serve as Secretary General. He expected to win; that was hardly the problem.

  In Eddore's picture window, a hovercar wobbled momentarily. Only a few seconds later a pair of Peaceforcer AeroSmiths dropped down out of the sky above the traffic lanes, hit the wobbling hovercar with spotlights, and began forcing the car down to a landin
g.

  Eddore watched as the car was forced down. Someone in that car was, most likely, guilty of manual operation of a vehicle. The operator of the vehicle would probably end up in Public Labor, if he was not instead executed as an ideolog. It had been nearly a decade since it was legal to manually operate a vehicle inside a TransContinental Automated Traffic Control cell.

  Which, today, covered most of Earth.

  Several minutes after the vehicle and the pursuing Peaceforcer craft had passed from sight, Eddore said, with some measure of genuine reluctance, "If it should prove impossible to revive the guest, it would be just as well."

  The webdancer nodded once and left him alone.

  * * *

  10.

  When the world at last stabilized around him, Sedon knew he was being moved.

  Through the veil of the sedatives Sedon monitored his auditory nerve. Voices were dim, rumbling and distant. Still he made out enough to doubt that the words were spoken in shiata. His thought processes were fuzzy, but still he found this reassuring; if the men and women around him did not speak shiata, then he was, still, among barbarians.

  Though he made nothing of the sounds, he stored them for future reference.

  Hands grasped and lifted him; straps restrained him. There was a momentary gentle acceleration that pressed him down against the surface upon which he lay. Though he tried he could not open his eyes; though he strained he could not move so much as a finger. Sedon struggled to restrain his fear, and failed:

  Nowhere on this entire damn prison of a planet should there be aircraft.

  When the long wash of sedative-masked pain finally subsided, Sedon found himself crippled, in his muscles, in the finer range of his senses.

  These people, whoever they were, knew nothing of the care of a Dancer. The thought flickered at the back of his mind as he catalogued information.

  If the guards standing near the entrance to his room were any indication, he was at least as much prisoner as a patient.

  The guards interested Sedon. There were three of them, and they rotated duty in third-day increments. The guard who watched Sedon at night troubled Sedon for a while. His features were vaguely familiar, but during the long dreamlike time before the drugs wore off he could not place where he might have seen the face before.

  They attempted to interrogate him on two separate occasions. Drugs that stole all control from him were injected into his bloodstream. One made him sleepy and cheerful, while the other made the colors in the room bright and caused him to have hallucinations. Even if they had spoken shiata the attempts would not have worked; as it was, lashing away at him in a variety of tongues of which Sedon knew nothing, his interrogators were completely frustrated. Sedon could hear it in their voices.

  On what he guessed as the eighth day since the flight that had brought him here, Sedon awoke clear-headed and alert. His senses were numbed and he did not think he could Move if his life depended upon it. But his thoughts proceeded in orderly fashion, and his memory, scrambled by the kitjan and again by the drugs employed in interrogating him, began to reintegrate.

  Gi'Suei'Obodi'Sedon's first coherent thought in thirty-seven thousand years was simple. He stared up from his bed at the unnaturally stiff features of Peaceforcer Elite Samuel De Nostri, at the features of the man whom he clearly remembered taking the stasis bubble's key from his hand, breaking his fingers--touching him--and thought, I will kill you slowly.

  The linguist, Maximilian Beauchamp, was a short man who had allowed himself to go bald rather than visit a biosculptor; as he set his handheld up at the side of the patient's bed he smiled at the patient.

  The patient did not smile back. He was an olive-skinned fellow, apparently in his thirties. Beauchamp found it difficult to believe that the man had been near death so recently; he looked like an ad for a very good biosculptor. The patient's eyes were unsettling, brown and steady. They rarely blinked, and moved constantly back and forth between Beauchamp and the PKF Elite standing by the doorway. Little details struck Beauchamp; the man had exquisitely graceful fingers, long enough that, not too many years past, before the advent of medbots, he might have made a fine surgeon. The muscles flowed smoothly beneath the surface of the man's skin, and the skin itself had a fineness of grain that Beauchamp had seen before only in children, or in the aged immediately following regenerative geriatric treatments. His face was as clean of hair as though he had just depilated, and the hair on his forearms was fine and faint.

  Beauchamp seated himself at the edge of the patient's bed. He did not expect it to take long for him to achieve communication with the patient. In his own person he spoke eight languages fluently, and through his inskin had immediate access to every other language known to man. He was somewhat puzzled that he had been instructed to limit his initial conversation to French. Still, it was not a great inconvenience, if the subject cooperated.

  The subject cooperated with a vengeance until 3:30 p.m., and Beauchamp grew angrier and angrier.

  He left at 3:30, shaking with a mixture of fear and indignation.

  The room in which Sedon returned to full awareness was large, stark, and nearly empty. It held the bed upon which Sedon lay; a small fixture upon which Sedon was intended to sit when eliminating; a doorway, and a ceiling that glowed with light intended to imitate this system's sun. It was not a bad imitation, though not so bright as the true sun. A man--a guard--stood just inside the door at all times, watching Sedon. The guard's presence enraged Sedon at a level so deep that Sedon barely allowed himself the awareness of it.

  He had spent far too much of his life imprisoned.

  Being guarded.

  The small round person they sent to speak to him was tedious and predictable. He wished to teach Sedon his tongue, and to learn Sedon's. In aid of this he used a device that recorded words spoken by Sedon, and paired them with words from his own tongue for Sedon to learn. The device projected images in midair to aid them in assigning words to various pictures and actions. The parts of the human body came first, followed by images of both a man and woman performing various functions. Sitting, running, picking up, dropping. Eating, drinking--the small person's indecision was almost comically obvious--eliminating.

  So they were not very civilized, then, if they still had taboos relating to natural body functions.

  Some of the pictures Sedon could make no sense of. One, for example, showed a man and woman with their lips pressed together; followed by two women engaged in a similar activity, and then by two men. It was clear that the small person attached some significance to these images; he watched Sedon more closely than usual as they were displayed.

  Erotic activity, perhaps.

  They went on to clothing, and then furniture of various sorts. Aside from "chair" and "table," most of the items of furniture Sedon could not put a name to, though it was plain from the way the people and other items were arrayed upon them that they were furniture of various sorts. In those instances he accepted the word offered, but gave none of his own. "Bed" he found a word for, though he knew only one word for the several different types of things these people sat upon. The same for most of the vehicles he was shown; several different sorts of winged flying craft like the one that had brought him here; smaller, stubbier craft whose primary purpose was clearly ground transportation. A vehicle which sat upon four wheels, and another which had two and was propped up with the help of a small metal bar at its side.

  At 3:30 Sedon was shown a vehicle whose shape he could not immediately make out. The thing tugged at a far, far distant memory. It looked as though a thin needle had been placed in the exact center of a thick, fat ring of some silver metal; a brilliant gold flame of light extruded from one end of the needle, dispersed far to the vehicle's side.

  Sedon recognized it with a sick shock.

  A fusion flame.

  Against a background of stars.

  Stars.

  The panic he had been suppressing so well until that moment came flooding back. Sedon
clenched his eyes shut until prickles of light appeared against his eyelids, kept them shut, and concentrated on his breathing. The breathing was ragged, shamefully so, and his hands trembled, and he hated the Continuing Time and everyone in it for seeing him in such weakness.

  By all the dark gods, these barbarians had space travel.

  He was a heretic who had forsaken his gods, whose gods had forsaken him. So it was that when he lifted his head toward the sky and screamed his pain, screamed the words in shiata until the sound reverberated against the walls of the prison hospital room, Gi'Suei'Obodi'Sedon received no answer, and had expected none.

  "Rho Haristi! How long was I inside?"

  "This language doesn't exist." Beauchamp's cheeks flamed red and his hands quivered as though looking for something to do with themselves. He spoke rapidly. "It's made up. Completely made up. Vata means face except it also means cold. Rho means hello except it also means look. It's intended to confuse. The words have no common basis with any human language in use today. The language is cleverly put together, with a certain consistency to it, but it's a hoax, Commissionaire Vance. It is not a variation or a descendant or an ancestor of any language spoken by humans for at least a thousand years. There's about a five percent word overlap with an obsolete dialect of Telugu, a Dravidian language spoken today only by some people in southern India--which only means that whoever made up this language did a bit of research to make it seem slightly plausible. There is no way a language as intricate and well developed as this one could be unknown in this day and age. None."