Dream Dancer

by Janet Morris

  Julian’s face worked. Then with an obvious effort, he stilled it, saying: “Of course, I understand,” in a fatalistic murmur that made her know he read her heroism as perfidy.

  Shebat turned the bracelet on her wrist, that Chaeron had given her, seeking composure in the coolness of its stones. It was difficult, more difficult than Softa’s proficiency had ever whispered it might be, to speak and move and think about fleshly affairs while half of her resided in the cruisers’ realm of consciousness. She remembered Marada’s warnings, when she had sat for the first time in a cruiser and prattled to him unknowing of what she did. So it was that she snarled at Julian, hoping to make a quick end to his martyr’s posturing:

  “You understand? I truly doubt it. All you understand is your overriding concern for your own skin. You bravely sigh and say to me, ‘Of course’! Of course I will maroon you in sponge in a helplessly crippled cruiser, you think! Well, I might have, were it only you, or were I a Kerrion in nature as well as name. But I am not: I cannot leave Bucephalus adrift in sponge: Spry’s identity is too completely fused with his cruiser’s.”

  “The trollop with the nerves of steel.”

  “Quiet, catamite. We are going to see if you are good for more than looking pretty and keeping your mother company. As I was saying, I cannot leave Softa, or Bucephalus, lost in sponge.”

  “Lost?” said Julian, his mobile lips taking a blue tinge.

  “Lost. Softa was suited up because he did not dare use magnetic grappling while entering the sponge-way: its effects have never been determined. Then, when Bucephalus malfunctioned, he feared not using it, lest the ships be separated. Now, because of the grapples, not even Marada is sure where we might be. I have to go out there and secure a towline. Then I can control both ships from Marada. Leaving Bucephalus in command when he might any moment initiate irrational action—” her voice lowered, as if the Bucephalus slept some fevered sleep out of which he might abruptly wake, “—is impossible, as is switching him over to manual with half of Softa’s mind fused with him.

  “So you see, I am going to give you a crash course in copilotry and then I am going to suit up and . . .” Shebat found difficulty even speaking those next words, which described an action never undertaken in all the years of sponge-pilotry. . . . “And then I am going to jump over to Marada.”

  Even Julian knew what she was saying. “Through sponge?”

  “If it is possible.”

  “And if it not?”

  “Who knows? I will leave your link with Marada punched up until I have successfully made the crossing. If I do not make it, it is up to you and Marada to bring Spry to space-end.”

  There followed a mutual survey of the exigencies they might face; a hurried construction of contingency plans made over the copilot’s console in the light of scintillant indicator spill; a deep and awkward pause when all things were done and said and a confirmation came to Julian by eye and Shebat by mind that the Marada had matched velocities with the Bucephalus and awaited. . . .

  Press-sealing the final tab on her suit, Shebat sighed. “You know what to do?”

  Julian’s eyes were paler than Chaeron’s, like winter water, so light that from the side they seemed to have no color at all. “Not really. But let us proceed.” He, too, had donned a three-mil suit; its helmet lay beside Softa’s on the deck: one could in no way foresee what Bucephalus might be likely to do. One could only prepare for the worst. So armed, he straightened his shoulders and raised his head high and smiled the smile with which Kerrions had faced the task of surmounting impossible odds for more than two hundred years. “You have my best wishes. May you have also the Jesters’ favor. . . .” He leaned close, as if he might kiss her, noted her barely perceptible flinch, clasped her hand instead. When he released her, she went to Softa, brushed her lips against his forehead, straightened his head against the padding, and turned away.

  In what seemed like an eyeblink, she was in the outer hatch, alone in her suit with a coil of glass-line over her shoulder and her helmet on her head, sensing rather than hearing the air being drawn out of the little cubicle. She had no gravity-sled: its results in sponge could not be foretold. It was the slim glass-line cable which must be her life preserver in this awesome sea. One end of it was clipped to the suit’s utility belt; the other she must secure to Bucephalus before diving into sponge. . . .

  The port slid back, and she faced Marada, sixty meters away, port open welcomingly, and all the sponge between.

  Shebat blinked, and blinked, and blinked again, her suited fingers going to her helmet as if she might brush away the prickling mist beyond it. Sponge’s green was not the green of verdant earth or fecund sea, but that retina-tickling curtain that comes over all things when a sun-bather enters a darkened house after lying long in brightest day.

  Her hand, doing no service scratching at her helmet, went to the clip on the coil of glass-line, fastened there. With the other, she grasped the rungs spaced along the portside, and swung out beyond supergravity’s tenuous field. Dangling amid numinous mists which no star’s light seemed to penetrate, she felt for the recessed socket she sought in Bucephalus’s outer hull.

  Finding it, she clumsily secured the cable. Her left hand, on the port handgrip, was grasping it so tightly she was afraid the ache would turn to numbness and she would find herself dangling at the end of the glass-line like some dinghy in Bucephalus’s wake.

  But the hand did not betray her, the towline proved secure to her tugging. She swung back within the port and stood there, gasping, chest heaving, sweat running into her eyes, stinging them into blurriness. She stayed poised that way until her pulse was calmed, until her thighs ticced in readiness to jump, until she could read every number and letter scribed in Marada’s hull, an unwavering eternity away.

  Then she uncoiled the millimeter-thick glass-line and cast it before her into sponge. With a flat hand at either hatchside, she hesitated a few seconds more, long enough to whisper to the ship behind an uncertain miasmic veil of green: “Hold steady, Marada. Here I come.”

  Then she pushed away with her hands and out with her feet, into it.

  There were colors she had not seen before; there were creatures like winged grotesques out of heraldry, but made of light; there was Marada’s comforting croon. Then there was a moment of horror, when she doubted whether her aim had been true enough, while strange sounds sighed in her ears as if sponge spoke to her just below audibility. She shuddered like a diver sensing sudden shallows ahead. She did not move to coil up the played line behind her: that was a last resort, should her drift take her near the ship’s exhaust.

  Distance waned between her and the Marada’s welcoming, open maw. Her mind began to jibber last-minute disasters, as if the final seconds of her leap were infinitely more dangerous than the first. Something would go wrong, some hand had come out of the numinous expanse of sponge at the last moment to pluck success from her grasp. She would faint; Marada would close his port too soon; all would be lost. Tears inundated her vision so that the hull markings ran together and she could not read them.

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  When she opened them, she had only time to reach out and grab the handhold beside Marada’s port and pull herself aboard.

  Aboard! Supergravity’s tenacious embrace enfolded her, wedding her feet to the bulkhead. Aboard! A god’s name long unuttered passed her lips, a thankful murmur tinged with disbelief: if He had helped her with the crossing. He had turned a deaf ear to her dream danced prayer for Softa. . . . Standing in Marada’s airlock was to have attained salvation, but for herself alone. Superstitious dread flooded her, welling up from her childhood, asking where her gratitude had fled.

  But she answered back savagely that she would raise no paean of thanksgiving to unknowing Fate, who had driven her to the very precipice from which she had fallen. And so she came to meet the Lords of Cosmic Jest while standing in Marada’s open port, staring into the green-blue sheets drifting like fast-blown cirrus th
at was sponge.

  “Damn you, Consortium. And you, Parma, my father.”

  An ear turned, which had no anvil nor stirrup.

  But Shebat was full of the fury that follows upon release from peril, counting her “what-ifs” in dirge tempo while she swung out, secured the glass-line cable in its socket and swung back with no thought to what price clumsiness might now exact; with no tether other than her fingers’ grip to hold her safe from sponge.

  What if they were truly lost in sponge, as she had intimated to Julian, not merely temporarily off course?

  What if Softa’s mind never returned from its communion with Bucephalus? or his body failed? or starved?

  What if Julian could not handle Bucephalus? What if she could not handle Bucephalus—?

  “I foresee no difficulty in that regard,” interjected Marada’s voice in her inner ear, even as the hatch closed soundlessly. She could feel the kiss of air gushing around her. Red light flooded the chamber, counseling her to wait. Without Shebat doing more than raising a hand toward her brow, the emergency panel by the port’s lock announced that the towline was activated: the two ships were bonded together now as one. To cement her comfort, the red pressure warnings went green, then turned amber; all of these before Shebat regained the power of speech.

  Marada the cruiser’s voice, in every inflection and in its very timber, had become exactly the same as Marada the man’s.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When it became clear to Chaeron and Marada that Julian was aboard Bucephalus, and that Bucephalus had headed into sponge with Marada close behind, they called Valery up to the consul’s turret.

  Or rather, Chaeron did. Manada merely pushed his food perplexedly around his plate, watching Chaeron out of hooded eyes.

  Chaeron, stroking one of the silver stallions who held leathern books proud upon his desk, muttered, “That little snot,” in a tone that was a mixture of delight and disbelief.

  “Surely you do not think Julian would do any such thing willingly?” Marada had to ask.

  Chaeron’s Ashera-eyes assessed Marada, found him amusing. His smile flared out. “Brother, your lack of guile is not a fable, then? No, I suppose not. Well, then, tell me this is no formal inquiry, and I will give you my opinion. Otherwise, I think I will have to ask you to leave while I conduct my inquiry.”

  “In other words, you do think he would. . . .”

  “Yes, I do. Are you staying, or leaving?”

  “I will stay,” drawled Marada, a disdainful boon to one unworthy, “and abide by your conditions. Poor Parma . . .” he shook his head. “The Jesters assigned him a rotten lot.”

  “Speak for yourself,” snapped Chaeron. His hand closed around one silver bookend, hefted it imperceptibly for a long instant while temptation assailed him. The dour countenance of his brother, ever seeking after Truth and Righteousness when not even Order could be found in the five eternities, made him want to strike out. Nothing less would change that face, it seemed. But he could not do that. So he said:

  “Why should it surprise you, if I am right and Julian has fled to become a pilot? You would have, if Parma had not given in to your demands. He would not be so kind to Julian, who is out of my mother’s womb. He does not hide his feelings about our mother, or yours. It is our taint—you are exempt from it. As you are exempt from all other considerations of wrongdoing.”

  Marada’s chin jutted behind his beard. He half rose, then sat back again. “We will see what Valery has to say.” The groove between his eyebrows grew deep, spawned a twin.

  But when Valery came up, it was clear to both brothers that he had not known that Julian was missing. It was obvious, both by the blanching of his hatchet face and the boneless way he sank down among the sofa’s chocolate cushions, that he had not been involved.

  What was also obvious was the depth of Valery’s concern.

  Seeing the slowness with which color returned to the countenance of the second bitch of Kerrion space, Marada learned more than he wished to know about the relationship between the pilot and his little brother. A decade separated him from Julian, but it was not the years, rather it was what Chaeron had said—that thing which none of them had ever mentioned, which all recognized as unmentionable—that had made the gap unbreachable.

  Marada looked at Valery Stang, trying to remind himself that the man was very probably up to his cruiser-rings in this whole execrable affair. But he could not summon the detachment which befitted an arbiter in such a moment. His palms felt hot and his neck also. He wanted to berate Chaeron for allowing a relationship to develop between the boy and a man easily Marada’s age. But he could not even do that.

  Outwardly, at least, he must maintain his objectivity. He must be alert for clues as to the actual nature of these shrouded events, for the first ray of light to illumine the horizon beyond which they lurked.

  Yes, outwardly, he must maintain himself impeccably neutral. Though he was attached by Parma’s command to Chaeron under a mandate of marshal law, though sooner than might have been dreamed in the worst of nightmares, he would be shipping out to wreak havoc upon another habitational sphere, he must be unimpeachable. He chuckled, so that Valery raised his head, staring up from under his lank hair.

  Marada looked away. Already, he could find occasion to fault himself. He must find no more. He had done damage not only to his wife’s family, but his own—and even to a stranger: Shebat. A surge of compassion overswept him, bringing him to the verge of tears, where everything seemed magnified and distorted before his eyes, and he found need to excuse himself, to seek the evanescent comfort of solitude in the consul’s bathroom.

  There, he exhaled a shaky breath. If he had craved the company of his own kind, he would never have become a pilot. If he understood them, he never would have become an arbiter. Being both, he was as alienated among them as Shebat Kerrion must be, and more tortured by his isolation.

  He lay his head against the mirror that backed the door, so that he could see nothing but the mist his breath made on the glass. War. Betrayal. Destruction. Somehow, when he went out again to face his brother of the flesh and his brother of the guild, he must have resigned himself to what was to come, so that no one could see his distress.

  He peered a long time into the mist, like anemic sponge upon the mirror’s glass, before he found a way to resolve his problem. Then, saying a subvocal farewell to the Hassid and all those cruisers behind her in whose company he had found his resolution, if not his solution, he went out to the men much calmed, his eyes like deep caves and his settling final as a landslide.

  Both the consul and the dark pilot noted the change in him; neither divined its source.

  Valery, who was by Marada’s recommendation in a position to work against Kerrion interests, recalled that fact.

  Chaeron, who knew Marada better, saw a confrontation brewing, greater than the wholesale destruction of the entire complement of Labayan habitational spheres. With a long, slow breath blown out through his nose, he gestured to the desk on which now sat a decanter and three glasses, and suggested a toast.

  “To what?”

  “To Kerrion space,” the consul answered his brother.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Valery acceded heartily.

  Though they toasted, no one’s glass touched any other, a function, Chaeron found need to assume, of Chance, or her stewards, the Lords of Cosmic Jest.

  That evening still haunted Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion’s thoughts five days later as he led his force toward an unsuspecting Shechem. He had been over it more times than he had crossed the threshold to his cabin, more times than he had eaten. More hours had gone into pondering it than the entire battle plan in which he was about to engage. But his cogitation had borne no fruit, unless it was that Marada was mad, which was no news to Chaeron.

  The other incident he could not help recall was that moment when Marada had averred that the ships would never fire on one another, and Parma had caught Chaeron’s eye, and shaken his head, and gritte
d his teeth.

  Well, they were going to find out whether or not the ships were as crazy as his brother—no, that was not fair. The only security measures he could take were two contingency plans to remove Marada’s cruiser from the engagement, should he demonstrate the slightest irrationality. So far, the arbiter had stayed within acceptable limits of Kerrion behavior. As long as he continued to do so, Chaeron would continue to stretch his forbearance.

  He was not unaware that he was anticipating the chance to slap Marada in a nice, soft, restraining suit . . . it made him even more careful not to do so prematurely.

  Chaeron did not believe that the ships would not fire on one another, although before they left Draconis, Valery had confided to him that there was a possibility of such a thing happening. But Valery had also pointed out that Shechem Authority was not a cruiser; that Shechem Authority had fired on Hassid; and that it was more likely that the pilots would hesitate over their orders than that the cruisers would.

  Before that, he had not credited the possibility Marada had voiced as more than proof of his brother’s imbalance.

  Upon hearing it, he had gone to Parma, who had squinted, pulled his hand down over his lips, and reminded him that all pilots were mad.

  There was one benefit: those two days before debarkation had brought him closer to his father than he had thought possible. Then he had boarded his own cruiser, Danae, nodded to Valery, and in less time than it took to walk around Draconis’s level two hundred, he was cast into the void.

  In his wake, behind Danae, were three other cruisers. One of them was Hassid.

  At Hassid’s helm sat Marada, piloting two of his guildbrothers and ten Kerrion intelligencers through Labayan space. Patched in to Hassid’s console, the arbiter’s cube queried and colored, its investigation uninterrupted by decree of martial law or by distance intervening. Neither space nor sponge could contravene its search. Ineluctable as the blue-shifting of stars before a racing cruiser, inevitable as the long-tailed red-shifting behind, the cube considered. It considered on its own; it considered in concert with the entirety of cruiser-consciousness; it considered with a multitude of data pools, wherever they touched cruiser-awareness.