Dream Dancer

by Janet Morris

  Here Shebat stopped him, disbelievingly asking: “But it is not alive, this suit of skin?” while plucking with smoky fingertips at the shadow-gilded back of her other hand.

  “Most exactly, it is alive. The mil-suit is—” She saw, as she had seen too often, him searching an explanation simple enough for her to understand. “—alive, an organic, living being, although designed by man. Its name comes from a measurement of thickness, its purpose is one of enclosing whatever is within, impervious to attempts by foreign objects to penetrate it . . . like a cell wall.” He stopped, seeing her eyes go sideward, as they did when she did not understand. “It is just exactly like your skin, but tougher. It was meant to keep a man’s blood in his body should all the air be drawn out of the ship in an accident, and to protect him from the crushing pressures beneath planetary seas in olden times, and from excessive acceleration in these days—”

  She was looking at her feet, newly imprisoned in obsidian enchanter’s boots.

  Despairingly, he gave up trying to make her comprehend. “As you have seen, a rock or two can defeat its protection, but none throw rocks who abide the platforms.”

  Head still bowed, she murmured: “Is it this that keeps the dust from settling on enchanters’ boots?”

  He laughed, and her head raised sharply, somber eyes resentful at being infinitely the butt of his joke. He apologized, and said that indeed such was the case, inasmuch as the boots themselves had a similar coating of mil.

  Shebat resolved to learn all there was to know, so that none could laugh at her for not knowing.

  She could not see herself, so she could not see the hot iron glowing in her glare like a dagger taking temper in a forge. But Marada saw it, and added that moment to the load of disquieting events he was carrying, that slowed his progress and made his feet sink searching purchase in quaggy ground at every step. He looked around for the salesperson, who folded and refolded a clear mil-suit nearby in shameless eavesdropping, and motioned the portly man near, saying he also needed a mil-hood. The man’s hirsute eyebrows raised, that a child of this age had never taken the hooding or so early had worn it through, but a Kerrion was a Kerrion, and though the Stump was a protectorate of the Orrefors bond, it would not do to question. And the price, of course, demanded a particular courteousness. Quickly the jobber calculated what the hooding of a fifteen-year-old might be worth, and went humming off to prepare an order, which would have to be executed, he assured Marada Seleucus Arbiter Kerrion, after the midday meal.

  Which suited Marada, who needed at least that long to prepare the girl for the moment of choking panic, of smothering in unyielding dark in a hum-filled coffin, while the hood was fitted to not only the outer face and form, but to the inner cavities of her body.

  “We are only started,” he assured her as her glance followed the bustle of the corpulent proprietor, “making you into a Lady of the Consortium. Now comes the part you will like the best, if you are anything at all like the other ladies of my acquaintance: shopping. Then we will go to the finest restaurant in the Stump and shall feast the feast we have well earned, and then come back here to make sure that your head, your eyes, mouth, throat and lungs will be as well protected as the rest of you is now.”

  Shebat smiled, not because she was pleased, but because she wanted to please Marada. So she made no sign that the one-piece flight satins bound her in the crotch and about the arms, but copied Marada, unsnapping them at the wrist and bending the cuffs back. About the bite of the beautiful boots, she said not one word, but stumbled along determinedly after him, as he led her hither and thither, collecting additional subtle tortures to be worn about the waist or at the throat, where the mil-suit’s butterfly-delicate pressure ceased.

  When she thought back, at the end of the ten-day journey, it was the moment of the fitting of the mil-hood that caused her the most regret: in that moment she had lost all resolution and behaved like the barbarian Marada was with quiet desperation coaching her no longer to be, screaming (though he could not hear), gagging (though he could not know), pounding and kicking at the close enclosure that sizzled with noises like swarming bees (though he could not see). By the time the sarcophaguslike enclosure was reopened, she was leaning back, unmoving, breathing regularly. But the stink of fearful sweat preceded her out of the body chamber and on the sterile air rode straight to their noses: the proprietor’s wrinkled distastefully; even Marada’s nostrils flickered, pulling together briefly. Though his words were free of any notice, Shebat knew instantly that there was no place in the Stump for the pungent harvest of fear to hide. That he knew her fear shamed her, that he took her with discreet haste to their quarters forthwith riled her belly; that she cared so much what opinion he held of her took all the pleasure from her high-glossed finery of Kerrion red and black: even her bossed boots such as an enchantress might wear no longer pleased her.

  It was that same evening when in the dark which whined and crackled and spat she could not sleep, she snuck in an age-long procession of stealthy steps out of her bedroom and into his bed.

  He did not wake. Or he pretended not to wake. If he did, she was sure as she stood over his bed and drew the covers back and up, he would shoo her back to her own pallet. So she worked a deeper sleep onto him with her utmost skill, one hand drawing arcane figures in the air over his tousled head while the other held the blankets high. And the trails her finger, writing in the air, left were etched in blue, hovering a short while after above his head, illuminating his face in a soft glow, so that she knew the spell was well cast and strong.

  In beside the sleeping man she slid, greatly comforted, her skin cold against his heat, her hip and thigh touching his. Twelve coils binding, she had put upon him earlier, to keep him safe, thus she had no fear that something might come upon him during the night, though he slept the sleep from which no man might return unbidden.

  So it was that he slept with her and did not know, slept until she herself woke at a shamefully late hour, betook herself to her own bedroom, less malevolent now that the “day” was come, and from there recalled the soft cocoon in which Marada snored far from the sounds and sights of life.

  He had never slept better, he said to her over a meal he had sent to their suite, and he had not been sleeping well of late. But he had slept so long that they must hurry: the ship had been readied for departure long since, and his sudden somnolence would be ill-received by those who controlled traffic to and from the platforms.

  As she chewed the exotic foodstuffs doggedly, she listened to the apologies, to the cajolery, finally to the sharp hiss of anger that draped Marada’s threats as he spoke to a series of noncorporeal voices and ranks. At last he seemed to have prevailed against the disembodied speakers: they had been granted a new hour at which to depart.

  There was a great hurrying, a stuffing of her new clothing into an equally new container of shimmering mil-like substance, and a porter come to carry all to the ship.

  But the ship, when she saw it in its cradle of lights, was not the little pearly, spiky mantis of a ship she had gotten into on Earth and out of at this place of endless wonders.

  This was a grand, deep-water fish, roughly scaled, opaline, striolate, polychrome lights binding it round. By a commodious port the crimson eagle blazed. Beneath it numbers danced: beside the numbers was the word “Hassid.” The ship was of awesome size, Shebat thought, though Marada called it small. It was possessed of salons and three cabins more elegant than the fine suite that had held them overnight in the consular house of Orrefors. But each cabin held more than opulence: the personal effects and tastes of three very different personalities therein had their say: they whispered to Shebat louder than the three padded couches in the control room of the ship; they spoke more clearly than the two refrigerated corpses in gilded coffins draped with hastily fabricated Kerrion blazons in the cargo bay. They spoke to Marada, and he spent a time alone in each cabin in turn, leaving Shebat to her own devices, emerging at last with arms full of items and eyes full
of grief.

  His mouth, that day, seemed empty of words, or of tongue to speak them. He contented himself with a gesture when giving her the soft, pearly room that had surely been his lady’s. When at dinner she bantered briefly, his scowl quickly seared all her own words to ash.

  During the taking of space by the craft, there came no voice speaking from the air, after a monosyllabic exchange with the disembodied dispatcher of the Stump. And there was no sensation to prove to her that the marvelous Leviathan was truly embarked, no blinking of lights or flipping of toggles, though lights abounded and toggles bristled the control room’s waist like quills on a porcupine. Shebat sat in a soft, canted couch to Marada’s right. Sometimes he reached over her and brought a panel into view, livened it with a touch, but no more.

  When it occurred to her that were she the woman who had sat here previously—for the couch was smaller than that on his left and was doubtless the enchantress’s own, as the cabin was her own and Marada, too, was hers seemingly as much in death as in life—that woman, were she in Shebat’s place, would have known what to do, would have been, in fact was accustomed to, bringing quiescent panels into rainbow excitation: flying the ship! Shebat’s excitement overcame her kindness, her envy drove her empathy away, and she demanded: “Teach me to fly it!”

  “No!”

  “But she flew it.”

  He sighed, leaned back, staring straight ahead. “She and I were betrothed, so the ship and she needed to make acquaintance. I have returned all sensitivity to the master panel: if something happened to me during our flight, it would do you no good to have your keyboard sensitized. It was not a practical matter, in any case, but Iltani’s whim and my pleasure to please her. These ships, unlike the little bird who came at my call in the forest, are tuned to the minds of their operators; one ship, one mind, though the possibility of sharing the navigation does exist. In this case, if I should drop dead this moment, the Hassid would still bear you without incident to my family’s welcoming arms.” He said it with a pride like a parent’s in an exceptional child: like such a parent, he was boasting. Why this was so she did not understand, but neither did she doubt her assessment.

  She remembered the moment on horseback when she had seen him touch a bracelet, heard it sing, then fall quiet. He had not worn it since they had arrived at the Stump, but she had thought nothing of that. Still, another thing concerned her more: “Die? Why would you die? Are you sick? No man dies of grief!”

  “How old did you say you were?” he retorted, but she made no answer.

  “Normally, passengers do not talk to a pilot while he is navigating. It is not so easy, being with the ship and with you, both at once. I have heard that in the olden days, men died from it, from losing themselves between the stars, from not concentrating on what they are doing.”

  “But you are not doing anything!” Shebat cried defensively.

  Marada’s laugh was not kind, and at last he looked at her. “Go to your cabin, if after this you cannot keep silent. You will learn about the sponge between the worlds of space, soon enough. The ship and I speak silently, there is no need to touch more than the alarm to wake her. All this—” He waved around at the panels. “—is for a passenger’s safety, should the pilot be incapacitated; or for the pilot’s safety, should the ship’s brain be incapacitated. But if either were to happen, that safety is not, by any of this, assured. We travel awesome distances, the only temporal binder being the insistent chronology of the human mind. In accelerating to the speed at which punching through the fabric of space is practical, elapsed ship time and planetary, platform, or calendar time are at variance. In a sojourn behind the surface of temporality, human time readjusts this variance, biological time being adamant and unchanging. The amenable nature of sponge—this reality behind the curtain of space—reverses any loss, until when one emerges, the time that one thinks has passed is indeed the time that has passed for those in the worlds of spacetime. Without the human part of the circuit, such travel would be impractical if not impossible. Do you see?”

  “I see that you have told me not to talk and yet give a lecture. No, I do not see, but I suppose when I have learned to become such a pilot then I will.”

  He regarded her evenly. “Do not settle on that as an occupation. It is a thing that women can seldom do.”

  “But Iltani did it.”

  It seemed then when he winced that she might also have shuddered; casting the bolt was as hard for her as for him receiving it. She had spoken the dead enchantress’s name.

  He cast her out from the room where the ship’s mind lived, telling her to content herself with the pearly cabin like rose-touched marble, to whose walls she might speak to her heart’s content.

  And content for a time she was with that, with the purring voice that answered endless questions without ever tiring, or rebuking, or making light of what might be asked. So content did she become in the company of Hassid’s womanly speech and the quality of the enlightenment she was granted by its aegis, that soon she forgot her anger at Marada, forgot even that she had entered the room with head hanging and neck aprickle, as she had walked often to the dung house to sleep when Bolen sought to impress upon her dull wit this lesson or that. She forgot, in a fashion, that she spoke to a disembodiment, a magic, or—how to conceive it?—to the mind of the great metal hull. She remembered, instead, a mellifluous voice from a gently blurred face hovering over a comforting form robed like the old goddess’s statue hidden between the rocks a half-day’s walk from Bolen’s inn. She would lie on that bed softer than the down of fifty geese with her arm crooked over her eyes, and speak endless questions. And Hassid would answer untiringly, with never a hint of impatience. When Marada would call Shebat out to dinner, his voice flying to her ear instead of Hassid’s murmur, or her own—then she was always surprised that the room was empty, but for herself and the decorative tastes of the dead enchantress—and irritable, like one rousted out of bed before the sun to serve a horde of hard-trekking nomads—and blinking, like a cat caught in sudden torchlight.

  But on the morning of the tenth day of their journey, all her contentment was washed away. Marada sluiced it from her with a quiet reminder that this was the day of debarking, that she should pack her things. Even his offer to let her sit again in the couch to his right while he brought the Hassid into her cradle did not ease the shock rolling over Shebat like frigid water.

  She got wordlessly up and went into the pearly cabin and gathered her things, blinking often and fiercely. But the water flooding her eyes would not be banished so easily. Should she speak tender farewells to her invisible tutor? Could she, without dissolving her courage under a cascade of salty tears? She muttered hallowed formulae in her own tongue, her diction rough and uneasy after so long speaking Consulese. When she was ready all but for her heart, she went to the door, whose obverse gave back a reflection of who stood there, examining herself as she had not since she had spent so long there the day she had discovered it, trying to catch some hint of the mil-hood’s presence between skin and air.

  But like the voice of Hassid, the mil-hood’s comfort was as invisible as a summer breeze. Shebat ran fingers through jet, wavy hair that suffered no tangle or speck of dust to mar its sheen. This, at least, was an improvement that promised not to be temporary. Once around Shebat pirouetted slowly. The stranger in sable flight satins wore them familiarly, open at the throat, tucked into gleaming boots. Shebat shivered at the girl whose gaze met hers. Then, with a lilting song she had sung from babyhood to summon up courage and dam back the tide of fear, she took wordless leave of the opalescent cabin whose student she had most willingly become, pausing only once in her song’s rhythm: to kiss softly the door jamb before she crossed its portal.

  “Goodbye, Hassid, I will not forget what you have taught me.”

  But the room was silent. Marada had called its attention elsewhere.

  Crystalline Lorelie lay bedizened in the brilliant heavens of Centralia, a testimony to Kerrion wealt
h, Kerrion style and Kerrion largess. Taste, had said grizzled Selim Labaya sourly as he traversed this same route thirty-six hours before Marada, had been no part of Kerrion concern when the platform had been conceived.

  And the leather-jowled Labaya had not been wrong: Lorelie sat like the central jewel in a monarch’s fillet, the ringed giant about which she spun regardless of the difficulties in such a placement only pointing up the excellence of Kerrion skill. The choice of such a turgid planet (made more extravagant by the wealth of frozen oxygen, ammonia, and hydrogen that ringed her, unplundered, a mere decoration for the Lorelien sky) whispered of pride beyond conscionable limits and discernment refined so as to approach amorality. With the ability to stabilize a geosynchronous orbit around such a world should have come not one monumental temple of a platform, but a man-made ring of mining docks, shipping platforms; the busy glint of cargo ships like happy workers around a sweet hive.

  And a specially sweet hive was the anchor of Lorelie’s midsummer dream vista, Alexandria.