The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  Something in her cyborg eyes twitched. "You're going to boil me alive?"

  Vance shook his head. "No. I requisitioned one of the damaged orbital laser cannon. It was functioning at twelve percent efficiency; Space Force had decided it was not worth repairing, and planned to destroy it. It came downside yesterday. You will be vaporized before you know anything has happened. It should be quick."

  "On holocam."

  "We are not ashamed of what we do, Christine. Even to our own. We can't touch Eddore; he is widely believed to be the man who kept the Unification together, and making public his crimes would tear the Unification apart. But even if the public does not quite understand why you are dying, Christine, the PKF does. And the example will stand."

  Her stiff Elite features bore no trace of her feelings. "How did you manage the cannon?"

  He understood her; relations with Space Force were strained as never before, primarily over his pullout of the Elite during the retaking of the laser cannon. "I paid for it. It's remarkable how honored the Unification's servants are to be bribed by the Elite Commander."

  "I wouldn't know," she said without irony. "I never had occasion to find out." After a pause, she said, "Thank you."

  He spoke with what was, even for him, abruptness. "Why did you do it, Christine?"

  She took a long deep breath. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  Vance's stare did not waver. "I need to know."

  "Simulations showed the Rebs with a chance of winning, Mohammed. Eddore came to me early last year. He showed me a way to get the Rebs and Claw to rise; showed me convincingly that if they rose this summer they could never win, and that, after they rose, we would have the moral justification--and the votes--to wipe the rebels from the face of Earth, to break them for good."

  "Did it never occur to you that the best way to see that they could never win a revolution was to ensure they never had the opportunity to engage in one?"

  She hung her head and spoke in a low voice. "He is a very convincing man."

  "And you gave him another term. And another, and another--do you understand what you've done?" Vance moved in his float chair, great bulk shifting restlessly. "We don't have time for me to list all the sins you've committed; you'll be dead first. But you've done these things:

  "You've given the Rebs a taste of blood. Before this, they were afraid of the Elite. They dreaded us, because we were the nightmares that could not be killed. Now they merely respect us; thousands of them have seen Elite die; twenty-two still at large have killed Elite themselves. We will never regain what we lost on those battlefields, Christine, and ordinary PKF and Elite will die with increasing frequency because of it.

  "You've done worse than that, though. You've given all of us cause to hate. You stood by while fools played with matches in a forest full of dry wood, because you hoped that after the fire we might have gained some advantage. We lost three hundred forty-seven Elite, a hundred and ninety thousand PKF troops. Nearly two million Americans died, most of them innocent, in the retaking of the West Coast. In Japan better than half a million Japanese died. And all those people have friends and loved ones who will dream of vengeance for those they have lost.

  "If all those things were not enough, Christine, the worst thing you have done is this: you have changed the nature of the dialog. Before this year, even in Occupied America, even among those who opposed us, there were limits. The Rebs and Claw have had fifty years to employ nuclear devices against us, fifty years to make every city on Earth, from Capitol City down to the towns in which you and I were raised, a military target; and for fifty years they have refrained. Christine," said Mohammed Vance softly, "this is something we've buried so deeply only six PKF and Eddore himself know it: we recovered twenty-two thermonuclear warheads, stored on semiballistics in San Diego. We don't know if there were others, and we likely will not know until, unless, they are used against us. Those Reb and the Claw left alive have lost nine in ten of their comrades, and they are consumed with hatred. And we will pay for that hatred."

  Christine Mirabeau stared at Vance. "Mohammed, the simulations Eddore showed me suggested that they could win. All they needed was a leader, and if we'd waited for Trent's return we'd have given them a leader to make this Sedon, wherever he came from, look like the rank amateur he was."

  Mohammed Vance rapped on the door to her cell. They both heard the guard returning for him. "I have not seen the simulations you speak of, so I cannot say if they are accurate. But I will tell you this; there are worse things than losing to the likes of Trent, and fighting with allies like Eddore is one of them."

  "You weren't there," Christine Mirabeau said. Tears stood out brilliantly against the glittering black Elite eyes. "You can't know."

  The door opened behind Mohammed Vance. He sat there for just a moment, resplendent in the black and silver dress uniform of the Elite Commander.

  "No," he said. "I can't."

  He turned his floatchair about and left.

  They executed her six hours later. The cannon vaporized her and melted the wall of the Detention Center against which she had been stood.

  * * *

  77.

  "Hello, McGee."

  McGee peered through the darkness, was abruptly aware he'd come downstairs without a weapon. "How did you get in here? The restaurant is clo--" McGee stopped. "Hello, Denice." He glanced around at the darkened room of empty tables; all the staff was gone. "I was just going up to the office. Have a beer and total the receipts. Join me?"

  "Sure."

  Upstairs the old man said, "I'm surprised to see you."

  "I heard they took your hotel away. For back taxes."

  McGee nodded. "It's true. The Fringe doesn't support a hotel of that caliber, not for real. And I can't prop them up any longer, I don't have the outside income."

  "I'm thinking of buying some property in the Fringe."

  He smiled. "I hear you can afford it."

  "I need to establish residence so that I can vote for you when you run for the Unification Council."

  McGee said gently, "Dear, there is no Unification Councilor for the Fringe. We lack representation, we always have."

  Denice Castanaveras said, "That's going to change. The Barrier is going to come down, and I'd like you to start looking at property for me to buy." She reached into her coat and withdrew an infochip. "This is an authorization for transfer of funds. One hundred thousand C.U. drawn against the Bank of America."

  He left the chip laying on his desktop. "For what?"

  "You're the most respected man in the Fringe, McGee. You're tough in an area where they admire that. I need your help."

  "I need to ask you a question, then."

  "Yes?"

  McGee's gaze was very steady. "The Reb leader, did you kill him? Did you kill Obodi?"

  "When it came right down to it, McGee, I tried very hard to save his life."

  McGee nodded thoughtfully. "Okay. You want me to run for the Unification Council? Why not you?"

  "I can't stand the publicity, McGee. Right now I'm well known-- infamous--but for what I've done, not for what people are afraid I'm going to do. If I ran--" Denice shook her head. "Between the Troubles, and then Trent's help, it wouldn't be easy to prove I'm Denice Castanaveras. But if I stay in the public eye, eventually someone's going to manage it. I've survived one trip into the lights, McGee. I can't stay there."

  "What exactly do you have in mind?"

  Denice was a long moment answering him. "A lot of things. One at a time. Get Public Labor's budget cut, make it possible for the Labor clients to get out into society again. Bring PKF numbers in the O.A. back to pre-rebellion levels. Try and improve relations with the CityStates and the Collective. Stop the use of the copy-protection birth control viruses and make the Ministry of Population Control stop sterilizing women and instead make sure that contraceptives and early abortions are always available." She paused, said softly, "I could go on. I've been thinking recently, a lot. There's
never going to be a successful revolution on Earth, I know that now. If we're going to change things, we're going to have to do it from the inside out."

  "People have been trying to change the Unification from the inside out for fifty years, Denice."

  "They weren't me."

  The old man smiled, just a quirk of the lips. "No, they sure as hell weren't." He picked up the chip, slid open a desk drawer, and held it above the drawer. "The Barrier is going to come down?"

  "Yes."

  He dropped the chip inside.

  "I need one last thing." She reached across his desk and Touched him. You will never speak of me to anyone.

  "Hello, Jodi Jodi."

  Jodi Jodi had watched her enter the hotel, watched her walk through the lobby to the registration desk. "Hi. What can I do for you?"

  Denice reached across the desk, Touched her. You will never speak of me to anyone.

  Jodi Jodi stared at Denice when she removed the hand. "You know what?"

  "What?"

  "You're the most conceited person I ever met in my life."

  It had been two weeks since she had last been by the dojo.

  Robert was not there; she had given up expecting to see him again. If he were alive, she thought he would have returned by now. She walked through the empty dojo, went upstairs and worked for a while on Robert's garden. He would not have recognized it had he returned today; Denice had forgotten to put up the greenhouse walls, and the first snow had killed many of the more delicate plants. She'd put the walls up then, and the transparent plastic sheeting across them to keep the snow off the plants; but the damage was done.

  She didn't have time to work on the garden as it required, and did not think Robert would have appreciated having anyone but her do it.

  She spent much of the morning at it, feeding the plants, making sure they had sufficient water, checking the radiators to verify that the garden got sufficient heat. She weeded, pruned dead branches and leaves, trimmed those very few plants that were growing sufficiently well to require it.

  After a bit, she sat back on her heels and examined her work. Good. Good enough.

  At the noise, she turned her head slightly to the right, into the sunshine--

  --the basketball came skipping along across the damp grass, and the old gardener got his hand up to knock it down; at the last moment the ball took a bad hop and bounced up in a beautiful arc, and the gardener lowered his hand and watched the ball go up over his head, come crashing down in the middle of his bonsai.

  The garden lay against the wall of a complex of buildings surrounded by tall fences, with barbed wire across the tops of the fences.

  Above one of the buildings a holo said, Public Labor Barracks for Children, Chino.

  The eight-year old boy chasing the ball, Daniel November, came to a stumbling halt in front of the gardener.

  The gardener into whose garden the ball had intruded looked at the ball, turned slightly and looked at November. He was an old Asian fellow, chewing gum, wearing a hat against the bright California sun. He looked at November from under the brim of the floppy sun hat, with eyes that held no particular expression. Finally the boy said, "Can I have my ball back?"

  The gardener lifted himself up from the small cart he sat on, reached into the delicate arrangement of stones and plants upon which the basketball had crashed down, and retrieved it. In the process November saw that both of the old man's legs were missing, chopped off just above where his knees should have been.

  He tossed the basketball to November. Holding the ball with both hands, the boy said, "Thanks. Thanks a lot. What happened to your legs?"

  "A building fell on me," the old man said.

  The boy was half willing to believe it: "It did not."

  "Truly. The top eight stories of a skyscraper. Fell right down on me."

  "That would have killed you," the boy said scornfully.

  The gardener sat chewing his gum. "Probably. But a Peaceforcer Elite fell on top of me, and saved me from the worst of it."

  "Did it kill the Peaceforcer?" the boy asked hopefully.

  "No," said the gardener. "They are very hard to kill."

  "Too bad," the boy said, but he knew it was true. "Do your legs still hurt?"

  "No. It happened almost thirty years ago."

  November considered it. "Maybe I believe you."

  The old man straightened on his cart, a slight movement, but for the very briefest shiver of a moment November had the feeling that he was talking not to an old cripple, but to a very deadly thing.

  "Daniel November," said the gardener, "I will never lie to you."

  The boy shook himself slightly, grinned at the old man. "All right." It did not occur to him to wonder how the old man had known his name. He turned and ran back toward the basketball court where his friends were waiting for the ball, turned again and yelled, while running backward, "Hey! What's your name?"

  The old man called back, "Tommy. Tommy Ho!"

  "Bye, Tommy!" He turned again, ran back toward his waiting playmates.

  The gardener shook his head and returned to his garden, set about repairing the damage the ball had caused.

  --and Denice Castanaveras blinked as the warm sunlight faded; the old man and his garden vanished, and left her alone atop a cold dim rooftop in New York City, in the year 2076, in the dying days of the TriCentennial.

  * * *

  78.

  On Tuesday, December 22, 2076, Denice used the Erika Muller identity to purchase a semiballistic ticket to Las Vegas. In Vegas she walked from the downport to the Tropicana hotel. It was an hour walk, but she did not hurry; she had never been to Vegas before, and it was impressive, if somewhat dehumanized.

  Squads of PKF stood duty at every major intersection, armed with both laser rifles and needlers. Three times during her hour-long walk Denice was required to present her handheld for identification. Identification checks took longer these days; the PKF were far more thorough, checking ID against bank accounts, passports, criminal records, credit records, all the paraphernalia that went with an established identity. Denice had occasion to be grateful that Trent had been so thorough in establishing the identities, and that Ralf had kept them up for her.

  She could not imagine someone without her resources passing false ID to the PKF today.

  At the Tropicana she hesitated briefly, then went inside. The scanners did not catch the hideaway at her wrist, or else they got enough people wearing them that they were not going to do anything about it except watch her.

  Business was more than good; people trying to take their minds off events in the world outside. In the United States, Ripper had taken eighty-four percent of the vote despite his well-known association with the traitor Daimara; Eddore's re-election had sent most of the country into a depression, and people were dealing with it in their own ways.

  She was early; the woman was not off duty yet. At the change machine she touched her handheld to the payment slot, purchased a hundred Credits worth of tokens. She took a chair at a table where a bored older man with bad hair dealt twenty-one on a two-Credit limit.

  She played carefully, out of curiosity, and lost slowly. She did not cheat until she had lost most of her hundred Credits. Once she started looking at the dealer's cards she won steadily; within half an hour markers totaling a thousand Credits sat on the surface of the green felt table. She realized with surprise that people were simply standing, watching her play, and made herself stop winning; in the next five minutes she had a disastrous run of luck and lost back all but about two hundred Credits. People wandered away as her luck changed, and she cashed out and went looking for Laurie Slepan.

  Five minutes later they were seated across from one another at a private table in the darkened casino bar. Slepan was an older woman by casino standards, perhaps forty; but she still presented a petite, cheerful, friendly appearance. Her hair was carefully coifed, her makeup impeccably done--an original design, Denice suspected. Denice could see what it was tha
t David had found attractive. "I'm looking for John Albright. How long did you date him?"

  The woman shook her head. "I don't know who you mean."

  Answer me.

  Slepan hesitated, then smiled at Denice. "Gee, not long. I mean, he was here a couple of weeks I guess."

  "Where did he go?"

  "He--" The woman closed her mouth abruptly. "He--"

  Denice closed her eyes and--

  Late at night, cuddling together in David's hotel room. She'd learned about the wire just the other night, her fingers catching on the socket in his skull during sex, stroking his hair, and didn't know what to make of it; he didn't act like any juice junkie she'd ever met. When he wasn't on it, and she'd never seen him on the juice, he seemed, though withdrawn, pleasant enough, and completely in control of himself. That night he'd talked for the first time about leaving; unsurprised, she asked when he would leave, and he said, "Soon. I'd have been out of here by now except that I couldn't win too quickly, it would have drawn attention. I can't go back to where I was. Too many people know that Zanini was with Obodi. If I went back they'd arrest and execute me." He laughed at that; really amused, Laurie thought. "For being Zanini. I'd feel very foolish dying for that, they have much better reasons to kill me." After a long silence, he said drowsily, "Soon. I think I'll go to Mexico. I keep thinking of that sunset. I'd like to see more sunsets like that one. California's not a very fun place right now. Maybe I'll go to Baja." He rolled over on his side, met her eyes, and said, "You can't ever talk about me to anyone."

  Denice shook herself, rose from the table. So that's what it feels like on the receiving end.

  Laurie Slepan said, "Miss? Could you tell him I said hello? If you find him?"

  She had time; while Ralf searched Baja California, she took the bus to Flagstaff, Arizona.

  It was an old vehicle with one fan slightly out of alignment; the fan's whine cycled up and down in a predictable pattern, and if the bearings were not replaced soon it was going to break down.

  The fan was up to the front; she sat in the rear of the bus, the very last row of seats.