The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  He was not certain he believed it--but garish and alien though it was, it seemed to him at times that he could see better in this light.

  The starship squatted at the edge of a sea of gold, a huge sphere that rose up even higher than the trees surrounding the grassy plains. They had landed at the edge of a great expanse of some tall, golden grass, an empty plain that reached out to the far horizon. Occasional patches of forest, green and brown, sprouted in places where water was to be found in abundance.

  Far to the north, tinted blue and made hazy with distance, a range of mountains lifted up from the earth.

  The prison's buildings--the colony's first town, if you were one of the exiles--sprouted about the ship. Doubtless the exiles would have preferred to build further away from the vessel that had transported them into their exile, but they were given no real choice; in the first years after touchdown the exiles had struggled merely to survive. Had it not been for the ship's stores, rationed out to them as they needed it, they would not have survived either of their first two cold seasons. As it was it came a close thing; over three hundred of the four thousand exiles died the first cold season, of starvation, of accidents; in two cases from attacks by carnivores.

  The first child was born that cold season, to one of the spiritless breeders the rebels had been allowed to bring with them. Dvan did not know who had fathered the child, and it hardly mattered; amidst the general starvation, the infant did not long survive. Nonetheless it raised a debate within the Shield, a debate that was finally silenced by the Keeper.

  It was the Shield Gi'Suei'Obodi'Baresst--related within the Sixteen to the Dancer Sedon himself, and therefore more aware of the stain of Sedon's actions than most of the other Shield--who raised the subject, when he learned that one of the women was pregnant. Though they showed themselves among the exiles during the day, both alone and in groups, the Shield retired to the ship at night; in the evenings they took their meals together, sitting cross-legged on the floor of their common room, feeding one another as though they were in a Shield camp on the World.

  An indentation in the deck held a small firepit. Pots of kliam and long strips of babat, the evening's meal, hung near it to be warmed.

  That night while eating, the Shield Baresst said quietly, "I think the child should be Demolished."

  None of the Shield had to ask which child he meant; there was only the one.

  The Sentinel Marah sat with the Shield Rovime, the only Shield aboard who was, Dvan thought, younger than himself. Marah accepted a slice of warm kliam from Rovime, licked the sauce from the younger man's fingers before reaching into his own bowl for a slice to feed Rovime. "I think not."

  They were off duty, in the company of equals; Baresst demanded, as he would not have in front of outsiders, "And why not? Marah, do you really wish to see the numbers of the prisoners expand? They are nearly unmanageable now, rude and insolent as they are lazy."

  Marah shrugged, said laconically, "We have been given no instructions, lad. Presumably the exiles were allowed to take breeders with them for a reason." He wiped his fingers, still damp from Rovime's saliva, on his tunic, and reached with both hands for the huge mug of lon that sat on the floor next to him. He emptied the mug without pause, tilting his head back, and after placing the mug back to the floor wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gestured to Rovime that he would eat no more. "It's a dangerous thing, to act without orders."

  "But, Marah, today we need only deal with eight Dancers, and we Shield, outnumbering them, armed as we are, are well able to do so."

  "I'm glad you think so," said Marah dryly. "You never faced them during the rebellion, did you?"

  Baresst said stiffly, "You know I did not." It was a sore point with him; the rebellion had actually begun at the Temple where he had been Dedicated; but he had been serving duty off-planet when it happened.

  "They are impressive fighters. Apparently the Flame cannot be used in combat, not even by them; be grateful. Had that resource been available to them, they would have beaten us, Baresst, and you, I, the Aneda themselves, would today be imprisoned or dead."

  Baresst nodded, spoke the thought that had crossed the minds of most of the Shield at one time or another. "So, they are dangerous, even now. Among the exiles are none young enough to be trained as Dancers, Marah. But give them children, let them breed to fill this planet, and who knows what the heretics will do? Will you see them train their get as Dancers? In thirty years, or forty, we might find ourselves with not eight heretic Dancers to deal with, but eighty."

  "Lad, we don't even know we'll be here when that happens."

  "Marah, we don't know that we won't." Marah shrugged; it was a true thing. "We're here 'til they recall us. It might be four years, it might be a hundred."

  Marah thought on the problem for a moment, and turned at last to where Dvan and the Shield Els ate together. "Dvan, how do you think?"

  Dvan was widely recognized as the most pious of the Shield, even if very nearly the youngest there; he said merely, "I am unable to know the will of the Aneda."

  The argument ran long into the night; Baresst and Marah, who had started it, were soon reduced to observers, as the other Shield took up both sides of the argument. It came clear, well before the morning, that the general opinion among the Shield was that the child should not be allowed to live.

  First thing in the morning, the Keeper--she had not even been approached with the problem--requested the Sentinel join her, and said briefly, "Inform the Shield that the exiles, and their children, are not to be harmed, unless they offer violence."

  She was within her rights to deliver such an instruction; on the World, in a time of peace, Keeper and Sentinel between them shared spiritual and civic authority--but this was hardly such an occasion. Marah was not certain that the Aneda would accept him, if he wished to join it; but he had known Saliya for a very long time, and if she was not among the Aneda, it was only because she did not wish to be.

  So he said merely, "My lady, as you will."

  The child died anyway; but the argument was not forgotten.

  The light was the worst; but the gravity and air followed a close second and third. The prison was better than thirty percent lighter than the gravity of the World; after a day outside, Dvan found himself made weary simply by returning to the starship, where the gravity ball still kept local gravity of the World. By their second cold season with the exiles, the annoyance had grown particularly acute. Dvan's body, and those of all the Shield who made the daily transition between gravities, began to protest; his joints ached in unfamiliar ways, and his muscles sometimes trembled after exercise within the ship.

  The air was but little better; generally too hot, too cold during the cold season, laden with strange scents that made many of the Shield sneeze. The pressure was slight enough that at the end of the day Dvan's lungs ached from the unaccustomed effort of pushing the thin air in and out.

  At times, returning to the ship in the evenings, Dvan felt not as though he were returning home, but that he were entering a world in its own way as alien as the one he had just left; air cold and thick and dry, light too dim, and gravity unnaturally heavy.

  At such times he found it easy to believe that the Flame People were not native to the World.

  Somewhat to his surprise--it was virtually the only thing that made the duty tolerable--Dvan found he enjoyed his work.

  The exile town was not large, but it gave the impression of largeness, wasting space flagrantly; it sprawled in six separate clusters about the edge of a small forest of some hardwood trees. The trees were among the most familiar of the things with which the exiles were forced to deal; though leafier than the trees of the World, and growing closer together, the prison trees were otherwise similar to those the exiles had known in their prior lives. Wood made the buildings in which the convicts lived, fueled the fires that enabled the convicts to survive the first two cold seasons.

  During the second cold season, when another sixty o
f the exiles died of starvation, Dvan heard rumors that some of the exiles had taken to eating the flesh of the herbivores who freely roamed the wooded areas around the town. Dvan dismissed the vile rumors from his mind, and after the first time would not hear them spoken around him; the exiles were a low lot, and some of them would say anything to curry favor from the Shield. He could not even find it in his heart to be angry at the transparency of their lies; some who might have died, the first cold season and the second, did not only because of the patronage of their jailers. Though it was not required of them, many Shield, Dvan chief among them, labored in the fields alongside the exiles, broke ground with them, fought with them against the all-encroaching weeds of the planet; and aided the exiles in bringing in the crop once ready.

  There was always too much to do.

  The task of preparing the exiles for self-sufficiency was immense. Water seemed no problem at first, given how water literally fell from the sky, but food was, and from nearly the first day. The plants they had brought from the World did not adapt well; the native plants pushed them out, grew alongside them and choked them to death.

  The seasons were far more extreme than those of the World; the prison planet's precessional wobble was pronounced. Temperatures, from the cold season to the hot, varied by immense extremes; in the cold season the water often fell from the sky as ice. It meant that crops could be planted only late in the cold season, for harvesting at the height of the hot season. With only one crop every local year, a single crop failure could mean disaster; and the first year, when better than three hundred died, did.

  The second year, two children were born.

  One of them, a girl, survived. The other, a boy, simply ceased breathing one night. Dvan wondered if it had been malnutrition, or if, perhaps, some Shield had visited that home during the night, and held a hand over the infant's face until the baby had ceased struggling; surely the parents would not have dared to stop him.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Dancers would, in time, have male children to teach; but, the thousand dark and light Gods willing, that day would come long after the Shield was gone from this planet of exile.

  By the slowly improving standards of the prison, the heretic Sedon lived in a palace.

  His house was of uncured wood; in that year, all those on the prison were. They were yet two cold seasons away from the discovery that resins, applied to the wood while still fresh from cutting, would help protect the wood from the elements.

  Most of the houses in the town were no more than crude huts, with perhaps a single door. From the outside, Sedon's house, aside from being rather larger, resembled those of his neighbors. But where their houses might hold a dozen apiece, Sedon lived alone; where most of their houses had floors of dirt, and lacked sufficient ventilation for a fireplace, Sedon's floors were paneled with wood scrubbed until it was nearly white, and a firepit had been fashioned for him in the center of his house, with stone grates about it to keep the sparks from spitting out and setting the hangings alight, and an air-trap built above it to guide the smoke upward through the roof.

  It was difficult to see the scrubbed wood floors and walls; rugs and hangings covered nearly every surface, as though Sedon wished to remove all evidence of the rude dwelling in which he lived. To a surprising degree he succeeded; on the odd occasions Dvan visited, he was able, if he chose, to forget his duty on this distant planet, to pretend for a moment that he was back on the World, at home in the city of Kulien.

  During the workday Dvan was approached by one of the exiles, with word that Sedon would be pleased by his company; Dvan came near the fall of night. Sunset that night was a spectacular event; the sky turned a deep shade of blue, and the clouds, scudding by above at a perceptible clip, glowed a vibrant pink, another color that did not even exist on the World.

  Sedon sat talking into his personal corder when Dvan entered; Dvan left the door open behind him. The corders were all the technology the Dancers had been allowed to bring with them, and they had not been given access to even them until well after debarking from the ship.

  The corders were a significant thing; with the information stored in them, on metallurgy, mining, farming, weaving, and a thousand other subjects, they were the margin of survival for the exiles. Much of the information stored was useless, given the lack of tools the exiles had been allowed to bring with them; but physics and chemistry do not change, and everything else is engineering.

  There were better than a hundred engineers among the four thousand exiles.

  Sedon was dressed in a crude semblance of a Dancer's finery, a long scarlet robe tied with a white sash. His feet were bare, and his head. He did not rise at Dvan's entrance, but ceased speaking to the corder and set it to one side. "My friend." He gestured to the cushions before him. "Will you join me for your meal?"

  Dvan declined, seated himself. "Lon, if you have it. Water, if not."

  "We have not learned to brew lon yet, though it cannot be said that the engineers are not trying." Sedon smiled at Dvan. "They have created an alcoholic drink with one of the native plants, but I am told it is near undrinkable." He did not even look at the breeder, standing patiently in the corner of the main room: "Water for my friend."

  The woman placed the mug before Dvan cautiously, clearly more afraid of the huge Shield than of the heretic Dancer she served, and scurried back to her corner quickly.

  Sedon said without preamble, "You have not seen the Dancer Lorien in some while."

  Dvan thought back. "Aye."

  "I sent him away."

  "Ah."

  Sedon seemed mildly irritated by Dvan's paucity of response. "He is searching for a good location for a new town. In time, as children are born to us, we will need to relocate to a better location, one better suited to farming, better suited to industry. He went south."

  "I take it he is endeavoring to live off the native plants?"

  Sedon said carefully, "In part."

  "Surely he could not carry any great amount of food with him?"

  Sedon shook his head. "No. Look, Dvan, I would speak plainly with you, as we used to."

  Dvan sipped from the mug, let the flat water sit in his mouth a moment before swallowing. "I have missed the conversations, to be sure. They were a distraction, but an interesting one."

  "When the ship is recalled, you will leave with it."

  Dvan blinked. At first he simply did not understand the point Sedon was trying to make. "Aye. Of course we do not know when--" His voice trailed off. "Aye," he said again after a moment. "I shall."

  "Why?"

  The blunt question threw Dvan, as it was clearly intended to. He fell back on the obvious answer. "It is my duty."

  "What awaits you on the World, Dvan? Perhaps in a century or two you might receive a posting as Shield Sentinel. You will serve aboard warships whose purpose is to avoid combat as they ferry men and equipment to and from--mostly from--colonies we intend to abandon. If you are fortunate you will be one of the Shield to die in combat with the sleem, to make some slight gesture toward fulfilling the destiny for which you were made. If not, then in time you will work on the Sphere project; perhaps you will even see it completed within the life allotted you, and then find yourself trapped inside one small planetary system for all eternity, or until you wear away, as the Aneda hide themselves, and you, from the Continuing Time which they so fear. You will play at romance with Shield as bored of life as yourself." Sedon leaned forward slightly. "Dvan, you love it here. In your life you have never had work that mattered in any real sense; here you do. Here you can step on with work that matters, building a civilization in a new system. This planet is so far from the haunts of the sleem, it will be twenty or thirty thousand years before we have any danger of encounter with them. In that time we can prepare, and when the sleem reach this planet, as they will, they will find not a single planetary system, or two, or three, arrayed against them, but an entire corner of the galaxy."

  The vision Sedon drew, of a humanity
prepared to do battle with the sleem, struck Dvan with real force. It was a great frustration of the Shield, that the Aneda had not allowed them to take the battle to the sleem, but had rather insisted that the warships of the Flame People avoid conflict, flee when possible, or, when combat did occur, scuttle themselves at the first sign that the sleem were gaining the upper hand.

  Sedon continued. "Have you a partner waiting your return?"

  Dvan shook his head slowly. "Not to speak of; one who was a boy with me, but...I did not hesitate when offered this duty."

  "I will tell you plainly, Dvan, the gene pool we have been granted to work with here is not of the best. Our best, engineers and breeders alike, were Demolished for no other reason than that they were our best. Among our breeders is no woman with a Keeper in her lineage, going back to the Eight; and only a few among them at the Sixteen. Shield and Dancers are scattered among their ancestors, but in smaller proportion than I like. We can make use of you, Dvan, of a man capable of breeding one of our women, with a lineage as good as that of any Dancer, or any Keeper."

  Dvan was not offended by Sedon's assumption that he would be bred if he stayed; it was one of the ways in which the Shield were used. Dancers were sometimes bred when very young, before being Consecrated to the mystery of the Dance; but once Consecrated, never. Heretic though he was, Sedon remained a Dancer; it did not even occur to Dvan to question Sedon's assumptions regarding which actions were proper for Dancers, and which for Shield; they were his assumptions too.

  "Have you never wondered," said Sedon, "about the assumptions the Flame People make about themselves, about what behavior is normal for humans?"

  "I am not certain what you mean."

  "Did you know that among the Zaradin, breeders were not intelligent?"

  "I did not. So?"

  "Has it ever struck you that we treat our own breeders, intelligent though they undeniably are, as the Zaradin treated theirs?"

  "Are you saying," said Dvan slowly, "that they are treated badly?"