The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  Some of the supporting technology from the floats still functioned; besides the radios, some of the sensor equipment, the auxiliary matter/anti-matter based power supplies, several of the molar-circuitry based kitjan, and one of the laser rifles. With the passage of time the Shield stripped most of the weaponry from the floats, all those things that were functional without aid from the massive power units in the floats. The grenade launchers had been removed, and the projectile weapon that spat, at hypersonic speed, slivers of radioactive ceramic. Virtually all the energy weapons, save their handguns and one laser rifle, ran off the float's power, as did the single particle projector; and the particle projector had never been intended for use in atmosphere in the first place.

  The two floats sat facing one another, each in the spot where it had been set down some five thousand years prior. Dvan remembered the very moment they had set down, jets functioning with barely forty percent efficiency, remembered it as clearly as anything from the long eons of their exile; in that terrible moment when they touched down to the sand, he had known--they had all known--that the floats would never again move from that spot. In that moment he had given up any hope of rescue, had reconciled himself to such a life as this distant world of exile could provide.

  At times during the long strange passage of the centuries, Dvan found himself waking from nightmares of his own death. He knew himself sane--the training of his childhood ran deep, and functioned well--but at times he found himself wishing otherwise. The nightmares, the dreams of death, at some level promised release.

  The passion that had driven an infant to declare war upon the Dancers, that had led him to hope that an ancient Keeper might return in some measure his desire for Her; that passion was cold and dead now many thousands of years.

  But the discipline remained, the Dedication of the Shield. With the nightmares, it was all Dvan had left.

  The nightmares were curiously similar; in them Sedon stood cloaked in Dancer red, atop the long bluff that overlooked the unmoving pair of floats. In the dream the Dancer, without moving, seemed to come closer and closer to Dvan, and as he drew nearer Dvan saw that the red cloak was not the flowing scarlet shadow cloak of a Dancer, but the strung-together furs of some animal, still wet with the beasts' blood. Sedon's fierce stare pierced through the gloom between them, weighed heavy upon Dvan. His brown eyes glowed red, and his teeth, visible in an animal smile, were sharp and pointed and bloody.

  The nightmares were curiously similar, and curiously real. Dvan had woken from them, more than once over the course of the millennia, convinced they were real; convinced that Sedon stood atop the overarching bluff, and stared down into their camp, stared down at Dvan, and accused him of betrayal.

  One night at dinner--a crude parody of the civilized common meal of the Shield of the World--as the remaining Shield sat out beneath the glow of the huge moon, the Shield Pasol said quietly, "We saw Indo last summer."

  Dinner consisted of water with the salt leached from it, dead flesh from the salted, roasted corpse of a horned animal, and vegetables boiled to within a hairsbreadth of destruction. One of the stern lessons of the years; never eat anything without cooking it until it fell apart, or nearly. The Shield immune system was strong, but not so strong that many of the Shield had not been poisoned almost to death from local food.

  Several minutes passed before Pasol's comment drew a response from one of the twelve surviving Shield.

  The Sentinel said, "Where?"

  Pasol said, "I must consult the maps. Early summer--Valley 804 or 805. Near the base of Mount 7, Chain 2."

  Several minutes later, Dvan said, "He will have recognized you."

  It was a less obvious point than it might have been; they were dressed in the same animal skins that the primitives wore. But the cut of their clothing was far superior to anything any primitive had ever sewn together.

  Pasol's partner on last summer's trip, the Shield So, nodded after another several minutes. "Yes." He spoke slowly: "It was Indo, though his skin has grown wrinkles, and much of his hair has fallen out. I do recall it."

  Marah spoke almost immediately: "Indo will have left, but perhaps the others will be nearby. Let us seal and leave the floats, and in the morning we will journey to kill them."

  It was clearly a sensible course. Several of the Shield nodded, and returned to their dinner.

  In Valley 804 they found the tribe that had sheltered Indo. Indo himself was gone, doubtless within the day after Pasol and So had passed among them. The Shield spent some time interrogating the locals, most of two days, but though they shrieked and screamed and cried as though they were people, none of them spoke, not shiata nor any of the degenerate dialects which had descended from shiata, regardless of the torture to which they were subjected.

  When they were done they piled the remains of the animals up on a pyre and surrounded them with wood both dry and green. A tedious task, but neater than leaving them to decompose where they and their limbs had fallen. Dvan drew the duty; with the Shields So and Temsel he cut and dragged wood until his muscles were weary. He had not counted exactly, but there had been better than two hundred of the animals. Dvan might have let them rot where they lay; some thousands of years prior, the Sentinel Marah had corrected him in the matter. "No. So long as we are Shield, we shall behave as Shield; for what we kill, animal or not, we are responsible. Besides, Dvan, think on the Dancers. After we have gone, and they come across one of our kills, what will they think to see bodies scattered randomly, as though one barbarian tribe had slaughtered another? They are proud creatures; what respect they have left for the Shield will be all but lost."

  "Would that be such a bad thing? If they respected us less, they might take chances--"

  Marah had simply gazed at Dvan blankly, the words clearly not penetrating, and then turned away. "We burn them. Always."

  In the lengthening shadows of afternoon, Dvan played their sole functioning laser rifle, beam at wide dispersion, across the pyre, and stepped back as the wood caught, and thick white smoke, tainted with the smell of burnt meat, rose from the small clearing where the animal tribe had lived.

  Down at the edge of the river, Marah sat with the sensors, scanning through the small valley. Searching for metal, or the radar signature of a slowtime bubble.

  It was a difficult job at the best of times; there was ore everywhere on this planet, the world was laden with it. It made the deep radar scans less useful than they might have been. As the small tribe burned behind them, the twelve Shield assembled and waited well into the night before Marah announced that the sensors were inconclusive. If there were refined metal artifacts around them, the sensors could not make them out against the general background of unrefined ore.

  In the morning, the Sentinel said, they would move the sensors and try again.

  In the last hour of darkness the Dancers attacked.

  Dvan awoke to silence. He lay curled up beneath a tree, back to the trunk, holding the Shield So for warmth; for a brief, groggy moment he was not certain what had awakened him. Then he realized; complete silence; and abruptly came fully awake. The birds whose song normally filled the hour before dawn had fallen silent; even the chirping of the small amphibians and insects had ceased. Dvan raised his head to peer into the dark, felt with one hand for the kitjan, tied with a thong to his upper thigh. The moon had set and only the stars gave any light to speak of. A couple of dim, distant IR sources were visible; wolves, likely, or the horned grazers. Slowly, as silently as he was able, Dvan loosed the thong, slipped the kitjan free.

  Where are the sentries?

  Tmariu, and, who was it, Addil--Dvan strained for their forms; there a motionless figure, down toward the stream, that might be a sentry, but his unnatural motionlessness was--

  He drew breath to shout warning, and the whistling sound of arrows filled the night air. One seemed to sprout from nowhere, the thin shaft simply appearing in the neck of the Shield So. So stiffened in Dvan's arms, let out a long, bubbly scream,
dying even as he awakened. Dvan wasted no time attempting to acquire a target; he fired a dozen shots at random into the forest, was rewarded with the high-pitched shriek of a Dancer touched by the kitjan, came to his feet and leapt, near two meters straight up, into the lower branches of the tree beneath which he and So had slept. He climbed free of the tree, and into the tree beside it; and from there into the tree beside it. He moved silently through the dark roof of the nighttime forest, calculating. One Dancer down, possibly; three Shield dead, at least, both of the sentries and So. The shriek of the Dancer might have been a ruse, or a true hit. If a hit it was nine to four; if not, nine to five.

  A beep that even Dvan barely heard announced a call. His radio, sewn into the breast of his tunic, was simply the fragment of a collar from an original Shield tunic. He ceased his movement through the treetops, lifted the fragment of the collar to his lips, and whispered, "Dvan." He held the stiff piece of cloth to his ear in time to hear Marah's voice.

  "It's bad, Dvan. We've for sure lost Tmariu and Addil and Baresst." Brief silence, and Marah's voice again, struggling with the words. "And Els. I tasted his skin, and it smelled of the Dancer Lorien."

  Mai'Arad'Els, dead; so far as any of them knew, Marah's last living kin in the Continuing Time. Dvan had no comfort for the man; four Tbad had died aboard the ship, and in all the millennia since then Dvan had had no one to call kin; there were neither Gi'Tbad nor even Ea'Tbad among the surviving Shield.

  The Dancer Lorien was Gi'Tbad, and Dvan was sworn to kill him.

  After a bit, Marah's voice resumed, near-silence in near-total darkness. "I killed the Dancer Elemir myself, took his head from his body; I think your shots brushed Trega, I saw him being carried away."

  If true, it meant there were three left alive; Sedon and Lorien and Indo. Dvan brought the patch of ancient collar back down to his lips, whispered, "And ours?"

  Another long hesitation, and then Marah said, "Dvan, you're the only one who responded when I called."

  Dvan did not even think about it: he raised his head to the sky, and screamed until his lungs were empty of air.

  "Sedon! I'm coming to kill you!"

  The scream echoed in his head long after it had faded into the forest around them.

  They took the time to scout the forest immediately around them; found their ten dead, and the Dancer Elemir where Marah had left him lay; they found Trega a ways further on, motionless and already so frigidly cold that Dvan knew the Dancers must have cooled themselves to the temperature of the forest around them before attacking. Sensible, in a way; it had made them nearly invisible in the darkness, as cold and dark as the trees around them. Foolish in another way; had the blood been pumping through Trega's veins as it was intended to, he might have survived a brush with the kitjan.

  They cut Trega's head from his body and tore his heart from his chest, in case the Dancer had simply stopped his heart and stilled his breathing to fool them into believing him dead; and then set out after the remaining three.

  They trailed the Dancers for four days, as the mountains grew larger and larger, raised up to cover much of the sky before them. Between them they carried the grenade launcher, the laser rifle; each of them had a kitjan.

  Everything else they had destroyed and left behind.

  It seemed to Dvan that his life was drawing visibly to a close. The loss of the colony, the loss of the ship; the loss in this one day of ten of his mates.

  As they ran together, through the overarching forests, Dvan tried to forget the image of So, dying with a primitive arrow in his throat; to forget the feeling of the man going rigid in his arms, the image itself some barbaric remnant from the Splinter Wars. In the steady pounding of the earth against his feet, in the deadly serious business of drawing sufficient air into his lungs, he found some measure of forgetfulness. With the passage of the days--three days, and then four, running virtually without stop through the endless brown and green forests of Ice Age Earth--Dvan found further cause for forgetfulness. Red exhaustion crept up on him, stole the strength from his limbs. It became a supreme act of will to simply keep moving, to keep the spoor of the retreating Dancers fresh. Stops for rest, brief, brief stops for sleep, so brief there was no time to even make a fire; they slept in the freezing cold, in the wind off the mountains, holding one another for warmth; and then up again, and moving on.

  It must surely have been harder for Marah than for the longer-legged Dvan; but the short, squat form of the Sentinel, a few paces behind Dvan, never wavered, never faltered in its steady pace.

  They were never more than an hour or so behind the Dancers; the broken twigs, crushed leaves, bent branches, were clearly visible. No group of three, moving at the speed the Dancers must, could have hidden the evidence of their passage from either Dvan or Marah. The Shield who once had no idea how to follow a trail from Second Town down to the riverside were now the finest trackers on the planet; thirteen thousand years of practice will do that to you.

  In late morning, the fourth day of the chase, they entered a long, open field, an open space between two stretches of forest. They stopped at the edge of the field, scanned the space between it. In the long grass, they could clearly see the path the Dancers had taken, the bent and broken stalks marking their way as clearly as though guide lights had been set.

  The paths had split, one moving straight off to the north, the other off toward the west. They followed the path out to where it branched, examined the grass and earth around it. "Two this way," said Marah quietly, "one that." He paused. "Indo's the lightest of the lot; that's his mark, there, the others would have crushed that leaf."

  Indo had gone north.

  "Sedon will have gone with Indo," said Dvan quietly.

  "Aye. Which means that Lorien--"

  Dvan nodded. "Lorien's Gi'Tbad; kill him slow, if you have the opportunity."

  Marah nodded also, turned slightly away from Dvan, squinting off already along the westward path the Dancer Lorien had taken. "Aye."

  "But kill him."

  "Aye."

  Dvan stood motionless beneath the warm sun, watching Marah, and said finally, "If I survive, I'll meet you back at the floats."

  "If we survive." Marah turned suddenly, embraced Dvan with the savage strength of one who did not expect to see him again. Dvan returned the embrace, then released the Sentinel; the Shield turned away from one another, and moved on to their destinies, without once looking back.

  Dvan had expected it; it made it no less frustrating when it happened.

  The path split again.

  At first he did not catch it; the split took place deep in the thick of the forest. He backtracked, moved back to the last place he was certain he had been following not one Dancer, but two. From there he moved outward in a slow circle, found the second path off some sixty meters to his right; one of the Dancers had taken to the trees, come back down again far enough away that, had he been less careful, Dvan would have lost the track.

  The original track had veered off toward the northeast; the second track, the one coming down out of the trees, had continued north.

  Toward a valley, leading up gradually into the mountains.

  Dvan stood motionless, breathing deeply and rapidly, thinking it through. He felt his eyes closing, allowed them to shut. In the quiet darkness he tried to perform analytical thought for the first time in perhaps a millennium. If the young Shield he had once been could have seen how his thought processes had atrophied, it would have horrified him to the point of seeking his own death; but Dvan had no standards to judge against except his mates among the Shield, whose ability to reason had in most instances atrophied far worse than his own.

  Moving north. Sedon's party, and Sedon himself the leader; if they are moving north together at first, it is because Sedon has made the decision, because Sedon has determined their destination.

  Sedon will not turn aside, not as a ruse, not out of fear of the Shield who followed him, no matter who the Shield might be.

&nbs
p; North ran toward a small valley at the foot of the mountains, a natural path upward into the mountains. The original trail, veering now northeast, led almost straight upward, toward the foothills of the mountain, into an area so steep that it was as much a climb as a run.

  I will go north. Dvan opened his eyes--

  The wolf sat watching him from the shadows; a huge beast, seventy or eighty kilos. Red eyes and a russet coat, and a muzzle with blood fresh upon it. Dvan took a step toward it, and the beast turned tail instantly, fled northeast into the steep foothills.

  Dvan followed it without thinking.

  He followed the wolf all morning, into afternoon. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that it was not a wolf that he followed, but a spirit, sent down into the world by the Nameless One as a tool to help Dvan punish the heretic.

  In late afternoon the wolf vanished, and shortly thereafter Dvan saw the Dancer, saw him in the flesh, for the first time in thirteen thousand years.

  Sedon.

  Visible just a second; far ahead of him, moving upward through the thinning forest, up toward the place where the trees ceased altogether. Dvan got a shot off with the kitjan, knew he had missed, and put on another burst of speed. Another thick cluster of trees, and then the trees thinned out, the thick needle-bearing trees giving way to trees with small, waxy white leaves. Another glimpse of the Dancer now, closer, perhaps only a klick away, and Dvan fired again. Nothing, no cry such as any Dancer would give when struck by the full force of the kitjan; Dvan gave the effort everything that was left in him, threw himself forward so quickly he barely had time to negotiate the spaces between the thinning trees. Branches scratched at him, tugged at him like clutching fingers. It was a place where his bulk gave him the advantage; in places where the Dancer must negotiate a passage, Dvan forced his way through, up now to the very edge of the tree line--