Dream Dancer

by Janet Morris

  “I do not believe you. Not Softa,” she cried. When he only regarded her pityingly, humor tucking in the corners of his mouth, she gulped and began again in a subdued tone: “I am not sure I understand . . . more permanent coin . . . ? Is Jebediah all right?”

  “He is dead. The Labayan agents are, too, but there are others. . . . Shebat, this is no place to discuss sensitive matters. Get your things and come with me.” He rose up and stood over her, holding out his hand.

  “No,” she demurred, but he waited, hand outstretched, and at length she was compelled to take it.

  A soft sob escaped her as she gained her feet. “This is your dream for me?”

  “One I have been a long while composing,” he assured her.

  “What is going to happen now?” In the brighter light, the frayed edges and threadbare plush of the upholstery, the junctures of buckling walls and flooring were not masked by the hologram sheets laminated over them. He brushed a curl from her forehead. With a finger under her chin, he lifted her face so that the stormy eyes looked into his.

  “I will do the best I can for you. If you come willingly and repentently, and do as you are told, I think I can turn things aright. If not . . . I cannot read the future. But I will protect you from harm; whether you will do the same for yourself remains in question. Do you understand, Shebat?”

  “No. If I come with you, ‘willingly and repentently,’ I will be hurting Softa. That I will not do; he is the only one who has lifted a finger to help me—”

  “Softa? Oh, Spry, you mean. He is the only one who has helped you? You have a strange concept of help then, and of reciprocity.”

  “I will speak no word against him,” she warned, and from the tilt of her head he knew that it was so.

  “You will not have to,” he said dryly. “His deeds speak for him. It is odd that what Marada did for you, what Parma did, even What these fantasy-mongers you aspire to emulate did, is not worthy of mention; but that the man who managed a fine profit out of abandoning you in seventh-level squalor warrants your protection.”

  “I do not believe you. He sent me—” She pressed her lips together, suspicion flaring nakedly in her gaze. “I should have warded you off. Now it is too late. I will get my things.”

  “Allow me to accompany you,” he said easily, helping her up the steps in a gentlemanly fashion.

  “Are you taking me to Parma?”

  “Not immediately. He is yet in transit.”

  “May I see Spry?”

  “He is yet in transit.”

  Shebat stopped still. “Are you saying that he is free?”

  “For the moment.”

  Her shoulders slumped, her chin fell. “I see. No one knows of all this but you?” she posited.

  “So far,” he agreed complacently, looking down at her with just a touch of a Jester’s smile.

  “And what will be known, or not known is . . . ?”

  “Dependent on a number of considerations, better spoken of elsewhere. Aba Cronin’s dream dance must not be danced anymore: it is too close to elections. She herself will disappear with these others who have seen you. . . .” He touched the tip of her nose. She jerked her head aside. “Now, I have troubled you. . . . I did not mean to.”

  “Did you not? A number have learned that dance.” Shebat thought of Lauren, of Harmony, of the senior dancer. “You expect me to walk out of here without warning them?”

  “It would be prudent. Consider it a choice: you or them.” He shoved her shoulder toward the rear door showing in the gray wall. “Let us go. Things are already set in motion.”

  “I could make you forget.” She shook off his hand.

  “Could you make the intelligencers who will raid and destroy this asp’s burrow at 0600 hours forget?”

  “My box! The circlets . . .” she wailed, hand trailing back toward where they lay.

  “You do not need them.”

  Like one newly wakened from a nightmare, she stumbled sightlessly toward the rear of the cubicle.

  “Were you so sure of me, to order such a thing?”

  Then Chaeron laughed, sharply, briefly. “I was sure to solve the problem of you, one way or the other.”

  When she reached the door, her fingers were too numb to slide the bolt; the consul reached around and did it for her. “Do not look so sad. It just may be that I can instill in you a taste for life stronger than your taste for dreaming. Life, unlike dreaming, bears no repetition. . . .” The door slid aside under his hand.

  “After you,” he suggested. Shebat ducked under his arm into a narrow passage, dimly lit with one naked bulb. “I took the liberty of having all three of your intelligence codes suspended, so do not waste energy trying to warn your dancer friends. I will be very displeased if there are no fish in my net. . . .”

  Shebat, in the dim passage, made a face Chaeron, behind her, could not see. In the dancers’ cubicle, all was surveillance-proof. In the hall, she should have been able to raise the house computer. Even so close, she could not. She took a silent turn, and another, and pushed on a graffiti’d wall that proclaimed: Ban Infrared Slavery!

  The door slid back, revealing her bare gray room with its single cot and over-full closet and chipped metal desk. Overhead, an ancient lighting tube flickered senescently. “All things are one,” she muttered, as he followed her within and the door slid shut and he leaned on it with crossed arms, a sardonic, inward smile on him that was very different from his obligatory Kerrion grin. “Do you hear?” She came close to him, fists balled impotently at her sides, glaring up in fury.

  “You are wrong, Shebat. You are a casualty of your own delusion.” His hands flashed out and grasped her by the shoulders, squeezing painfully. Holding her at arm’s length, he hissed, “This is here, now! Feel it? Feel the difference?” Beryl eyes, luminous like the flicker that came to sheath her fingers as she traced the air between them, demanded a response.

  “You are wrong, stepbrother,” she retorted, spelling, with her fingers so close to his chest that a ghost glow was reflected there in the shimmer of his uniform. “This is here, now!” she whispered, while between her fingers the spell grew bright and bold.

  He let go of her shoulders, giving them a little push backward, and grabbed for her hands so quickly that it was done before she realized what he had in mind.

  “Do not do that,” he grated, his fingers closing around hers. Then he gave a spasmodic shiver. There was a snapping sound, the smell of ozone. A spark flew from their joined hands. He slumped back against the door, looking at her through half-closed eyes.

  Her palm flew to cover her mouth. What had she done? The spell, conceived for no reason but to impress him, he had aborted. She watched the blue nimbus flashing up his arms. Through the phosphenes she struggled to make him out. She saw his flaring, white cheekbones slowly regaining color, saw his eyes focus, saw his mouth close, then open: “You will not mind if I do not leave while you change, I trust. After all, I have seen you quite completely.” It was a hoarse whisper, unsteady.

  She hurried to her closet, rooted in the pile of clothing on its floor. Her back to him, she stripped off the spangled net, crouching down, then sitting to slip her feet into a plain, gray apprentice’s coverall.

  “You blush to your butt,” he observed, and let out a long, slow breath. “Now all I have to do is get you out of here.”

  Shebat dragged boots from the bottom of the pile, slipped them on before she turned. “You sound frightened.”

  “A harsh assessment, but true enough. Would I have come down here in this ridiculous uniform, otherwise?”

  Then she did turn, on her knees, saying, “I think you look rather distinguished,” while running the zipper up between her breasts with icy fingers that demanded more attention than she would have liked. Leaving off the zipping at mid-breast, she held her palms out before her: they were frosted with pale dust like snow. She wiped them together, and the dead mil wafted off in a shower that eddied to the floor.

  “N
ot to mention fearsome? Let us hope it is enough.” He pushed away from the door. “You lived here?” He shook his head in mock disbelief at the squalor. “I have ordered a lorry. We are going out the front door. Show the same prudent good taste that caused you to refrain from having your ship’s name appliquéd on your coveralls. All you can do is hurt those who have helped you, by trying to aid them.”

  He crossed to her, took her by the elbow, maneuvered her out the door. They walked through the dream dancers’ hall toward the cloakroom, enclosed on every side by artful, peeling palimpsests layered in smudgy tones.

  The tattered doorkeeper spied them, waved, went running for Chaeron’s cloak. On their left and right were the doors to the dancers’ sleeping quarters. The last one, to their left, opened as they came abreast of it. Harmony waddled forth, piebald and lugubrious in a plunging gown of gray chiffon. Her gaze snapped back to them like a slingshot once the stone is cast, cheeks shivering. Behind her, the tattered doorkeeper awaited, the consul’s cloak draped carefully over one arm.

  “Good evening. Aba,” grated Harmony, positioning herself so that she blocked their way. “Surprising to see you so early in the evening. Or is this your marathon client? Well, speak up, girl. You know dancers aren’t supposed to fraternize with the customers. No answers. Aba? Then go back to your room and wait there.” Harmony’s broad hands rode expansive hips; a round blotch marked her ample, quivering breasts: black centered in a field of dead white encircled with a corona of red, as if someone had painted a bull’s-eye over her heart.

  “Madam, you exceed your authority. Stand aside,” said Chaeron, whose arm went about Shebat protectively.

  “Just who are you, sonny? That Kerrion fright-suit doesn’t intimidate me one bit.”

  “That is ill-considered, but still your option. As for who I am, you do not want to know even as much as you already suspect. Now get out of my way, while you still have a choice. I am taking my betrothed out of here. You need not wait up for her: she will not be back. Boy!”

  The youth with the cloak inched forward, hovered uncertainly behind Harmony’s bulk.

  “I’ll take that,” Harmony spat and, with such speed that her flab swung flapping, grabbed the cloak from the doorkeeper, who backed away with alacrity.

  Harmony made a show of examining the scarlet eagle bating above seven appliquéd stars. “My, my, my . . . I suppose I should be honored. Consul.” Abruptly, she cast the cloak at Chaeron’s head. He deflected it; with a practiced motion, he let it wrap around his forearm.

  “Madam, you try my patience.” Without loosing his hold on Shebat, he bore down on Harmony, who retreated until her back was against the half-open door out of which she had come. “Tell Lauren that she, too, is invited to my party. Here are her passes.” Without taking his eyes from Harmony, he searched with his cloak-wrapped arm under his jacket. The envelope he found there he stuffed between Harmony’s variegated breasts. She turned her eyes away. They slid over Shebat, unseeing. Her mouth worked, her gelatinous breasts rose and fell: nothing more.

  “That is better,” said Chaeron in a stiletto whisper, that made the woman shrink back from him. “Now, disappear!”

  Then Harmony’s eyes closed altogether. She fumbled behind her with the door, even as Chaeron’s hand gripped a cruel hold on Shebat’s flank and he propelled her toward the steps leading upward to the street.

  At the top of them, he halted long enough to unwind his cloak from his arm, throw it about Shebat’s flight satins, and toss a coin which bounced down the stairs toward the ragged youth, who scrabbled to catch it. Harmony, Shebat saw, had been obedient to her consul’s demand: even the door to her room was closed.

  He hustled her up the stairs and through the door and up again to the street blinking citrine and cinnabar. The sounds of level seven surrounded her: a half-perceptible trembling snore that went on forever, punctuated with garbled shrieks and shouts, lorry mutter, sirens singing distantly, the pounding of racing feet on pavement.

  “Left,” he said. Then: “Right.” His grip relaxed, rode up to her waist. The cloak slipped off her shoulder and he paused to fasten it for her on the intersection’s corner. From the parallel alley whines and a gagging sound emanated. When next the citrine flashed, she made out a crawling figure dragging itself toward the light.

  “Chaeron—”

  “There is the lorry,” he said softly. Though his eyes had followed hers, seen the mewling thing struggling streetward, his palm in the small of her back urged her away, toward the drop-shaft suddenly baleful with the glow of the Kerrion lorry’s red flasher. The black, hovering insect with its amber eyes had seen them: it turned its bright lights on them and rolled their way, sleekly streamlined like a miniature cruiser. The high-security lorry disdained traffic regulations, rolling down the middle of the street, flasher whirling on its roof. Two drunks caught in its spill sat up blinking, blearily tumbled from its path. It was enclosed, with dark one-way glass making a sinister, ambiguous hump behind its pointed snout. Quiet fell in its path, so that all that could be heard were their slapping feet quickening pace and its motor humming a contented powerful tune.

  “Sheba?” someone called from a barroom’s doorway. “Sheba?”

  But the lorry’s door was opening. As they came up on it, Chaeron pushed her roughly within. She tumbled onto a padded seat blinking in sudden light, then darkness as he climbed in beside her and shut the door.

  It was as if all life without had ceased: no sound came through the lorry’s padded protection. She was alone with her breathing, and his. Through the windows, all the seventh level seemed two-dimensional, its edges preternaturally sharp, flickering.

  A speaker crackled: “Good to see you, sir. Where to?” Only then did she realize that beyond the smoky partition the lorry had a human driver. Not until Chaeron gave the consulate as their destination did she think to look at him. He was slumped down amid the padding, his head back against its slope, eyes staring unseeingly upward. The pulse in his throat thumped visibly, limned by soft courtesy lights set high into either door. He took rapid breaths; his chiseled lips were parted. The lorry swung in a circle and headed for the shaft. He stirred slightly, touched something on his far side.

  As the lorry entered the up-side traffic, its vibrations quickened, tickling her stomach. From the partition before them a mechanized bar slid obediently forward with its buttons lit and two beaded tumblers filled and iced. Shebat squirmed away from the service bar, so that her back was to the corner where the padded bench met the lorry’s door. All was black within, all white without as the levels sped by.

  Without moving his head, he took one glass and turned it tinkling in his hands.

  “What do you want me for, Chaeron? Why could you not just have left me alone?”

  He rolled his head toward her, as if he were too exhausted to raise it. His beryl eyes caught the soft courtesy light and glowed like the sky on Earth before a summer dawn. “Drink your drink,” he ordered quietly, between greedy breaths that flared his delicate nostrils. Obediently, she put it to her lips, tasted, coughed, made a face.

  “Why, dream dancer? Because it pleases me to have you. Parma feints in the arena with Labaya. He needs a second. He is old and not so sharp as once he was. But the entry fee is very high. You are mine. Now, do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I would have it no other way.” Sliding down even further in his seat, he raised the drink and sipped it. Like worked iron thrust into ice for quenching, a hiss came out of him. She half-expected steam to issue from his mouth, but it was the supercilious Kerrion humor that came to rest on his face. Antinous as Osiris: she recalled the title of the one among Parma’s ancient artworks which Chaeron so much resembled.

  “But why me? Why will Parma not let you help him?”

  His head turned away from her and back, like a man tossing in a bad dream on his pillow. He made a growling sound. Staring up at the button-tucked roof of the lorry, he said in a voice sad while mea
nt to be cold, husky while meant to be flippant: “I have never asked him. It seems to follow that the man best suited to perform a task should be given it. In my family, that rule does not hold true.”

  “Parma does not care what happens to me, that much must be clear to you.”

  He gave her a scathing look. She shifted under it.

  “Why did you say that to Harmony?” she asked, to change his face.

  “Harmony? Oh, the spotted woman . . . that was all improvisational, really. . . . I did not expect her to be so bold. That is odd, when I think of it. But which thing do you mean?”

  “You said,” replied Shebat in measured cadence, “that I was your betrothed.”

  “Ah, so that is what has you huddled up in the corner. Do not trouble yourself further on that account. After your dream dance, I am sufficiently sated. What could your embrace be but a sorry echo of the woman you wish that you were?”

  He saw her chin come up, the challenge glitter back to him from her eyes and push out her lips into a pout. “You must learn not to sulk so obviously, dear. I told you, I was merely improvising with your piebald friend. My taste is not to unwilling women, when it is to women at all. And you are not even a woman yet, but still a child.”

  “I am seventeen,” she blurted. “Almost, anyway.”

  He shrugged, smothered a chuckle, downed his drink. “Yes, you are almost seventeen.” He laid the tumbler in its circular repository. “Let us concentrate on keeping you alive long enough to become absolutely seventeen.”