Dream Dancer

by Janet Morris

  Otherwise, the Hassid’s cargo was no different than that of any of the other cruisers readying to assault Shechem on Danae’s command, if one were to discount the differences between Marada and other men.

  Chaeron was not discounting that difference, though he tried valiantly to manage that very thing, out of duty and a knowledge that any word from him would be taken as evidence of the extent of his own bias and bulwark the legend of the brothers’ rivalry.

  Still, he could not pierce the shadow of madness that he had marked in Marada’s remote squint.

  Also, still, the damnable arbiter’s cube rode along with them into battle, if battle there was to be over Shechem, filled with plant and beast and all manner of flying things.

  If Lorelie was fabled, Shechem was enfamed. It would be a pity and a waste to destroy an abode of beauty elsewhere extinct. Shechem was a repository of uniqueness, her denizens preserved nowhere else in the Consortium. Or such was the Labayas’ boast.

  Chaeron’s determination was to acquire without damage the Labayas’ home platform, all its gardens undisturbed. To that end, he had a plan.

  Actually, he had a modification of his father’s orders. Should he fail, Parma would not be long noticing the deviation. Its effects would be too far-reaching.

  Chaeron Kerrion muttered to himself and stirred on his acceleration couch in Danae’s control room. He was not alone, even there. He felt the invasion of his privacy, a dull throbbing, like a tooth with an exposed nerve. Danae had been refitted, like the three other cruisers pacing her. It had been done in the two days necessary to repair Hassid’s damages, and it had not been done well. Luxury cruiser to troop carrier was an alchemy impossible: bunks had been secured in each of her three cabins; four men were billeted in each. Valery was sleeping at his console. Chaeron had preferred the acceleration couch beside his pilot, and the silence necessarily imposed by sponge, to the camaraderie of the idle pilots or the intense, slippery-eyed gaming of the intelligencers.

  But even Valery’s familiar company was wearing, so long, so close. Chaeron longed to lock himself in the cargo bay, stretch out on the bulkhead in warm darkness, and think on all the things recently occurred, occurring, and about to occur; to punch “pause” in the procession of time, not simply alter its rate of passage. Pushed more deeply into his separate flesh by the constant company of his fellows, locked unrelievedly within his own mind by the removal of his person from range of his consulting data pools, he was discomforted in small but unrelenting ways which conjured up an irritation that increasingly plagued him.

  He could find no way to scratch his subliminal itch or to ease his dull ache. He waxed acerbic, then abrupt, then sullen in the two days it took them to reach Marada’s discovery, the Hassidic Corridor. As his brother had promised, the corridor was brief: a three-week trip shortened to one day five hours from sponge-hole to sponge-hole.

  They had been two additional days crawling toward Shechem at less than half the speed of light. The paradoxical nature of spacetime’s variable rates made it faster for them to travel slowly: if they had come in at the speed Marada’s Hassid had torn out of Shechem, to those on the habitational sphere it would have appeared that they were traveling much more slowly, thus the Labayans would have had even longer to prepare than they might if all subterfuge failed utterly and Shechem Authority was monitoring their approach as what it was—the approach of four cruisers; instead of what it looked—the approach of a not improbably large cloud of cosmic debris.

  Cloaked in sprays of magnetically shepherded “chaff,” they would by now be appearing on Shechem Authority’s sensors. The sensors would read the multitude of mixed-metal particles shrouding the ships, but the ships might escape identification, or be misidentified as part of a natural phenomenon. Or not: there was no way to be sure.

  If there were ships in their immediate vicinity, or Shechem sent some out to check, what would be seen by eye would vary greatly from the electronics’ readings.

  So Chaeron watched the wide range scanners for signs of Labayan cruisers, though Valery beside him needed no help, was in fact, by the displays on his instrumentation, doing that very thing himself.

  Chaeron touched his copilot’s console, flipping the monitor off.

  Valery, taking note, stretched hugely in Danae’s dark master’s couch. “Hungry? If we can’t see ‘em now, we won’t see ‘em for a while.” He unfolded himself from the couch, then looked back inquiringly when Chaeron made no move to follow. “Chaeron?”

  “Where do you think they are?” the consul murmured, staring at the blank screen.

  “On their way to Draconis, probably. Which is all the better for us, since they can’t get there before we get back. Let’s eat. You have to feed a brain for it to work right.”

  “I do not like this one bit.”

  “You don’t like it? It’s your engagement. . . . You act like I thought it up myself!”

  “Easy, Valery. It’s not my engagement and I don’t like it, but I’m not blaming you.”

  Valery’s rings tinkled as he shook his head. “Better not,” he growled. “Ever since that damn party of yours, something’s been eating at you.”

  “It’s not every man that becomes a husband and then a deserted husband in less than a week . . . it’s not easy on my self-esteem,” Chaeron fenced, trying to assure Valery once more that he saw no blame for his pilot in what had passed. “Bring me something back. I’m going to stay here and revel in the fact that for the first time in much too long I won’t be able to hear anyone else breathing.”

  “Umn,” grunted Valery, and stalked out.

  “Thou protesteth too much,” murmured Chaeron to the doors hissing shut in Valery’s wake.

  The man was seriously abrading Chaeron’s nerves. It was not the first time Chaeron had heard conjecture expressed as fact from Valery; he was one of that group of pilots who insisted that the cruisers and the data pools and the smallest wrist communicator had something in common, some shared awareness which made them all privy to one another despite space and sponge. Chaeron, well grounded in the physical sciences, knew that position to be indefensible, that theory to be without substantive evidence. Maybe the Shechem fleet had been dispatched to Draconis on a mission like unto his own, maybe not. There was no way of knowing. Not unless one was privy to Labayan intelligence, which Chaeron had satisfied himself long ago that Valery was not.

  If Selim Labaya had had the audacity to dispatch ships in strength to Draconis, they would meet with a score of his father’s cruisers, waiting at the sponge-hole customarily traveled when Draconis-bound from Shechem.

  Customarily: i.e., before Marada. Chaeron flipped the switch that activated a com-line between Danae and Hassid.

  “Yes?” came a clipped, irritated response up through the console’s speakers; the monitor stayed blank, noncommittal.

  “Just called to say hello,” Chaeron said, laying his head back and closing his eyes, trying to visualize Marada’s face and match it to what the voice revealed.

  “Hello.” The voice revealed nothing.

  “Valery thinks Selim Labaya’s sent a force out to Draconis.”

  “Maybe.”

  Chaeron took a deep breath, expelled it while counting slowly. “You think not?”

  “Do you think I’m psychic?”

  “Just curious as to your opinion.”

  “I’ll try to contain my astonishment. Lords, Chaeron, do you want something? You cannot be lonely, with a full complement of your favorite goons aboard. I am busy, if you are not. As for whether Labaya sent ships after me, that is Parma’s problem.”

  “I do want something, Marada. I want to change some of the details of the upcoming engagement, and I want you not to interfere.”

  “Slate,” said Marada, dryly. “I should not have to remind you that I’m running a cube; only the presentation of its results are deferred. I have to register an objection, obviously.”

  “Before you’ve heard what I’m going to do?”
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  “Even so.”

  “Then object. But I am in command here and you will take my orders and obey them exactly, or I will consider you in mutiny and take immediate action. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, that is quite clear. Anything else?”

  Chaeron could not resist the temptation of being first to break the circuit.

  When he turned from the console, he saw Valery leaning back against the control room’s doors with a wistful smile on his sharp face so that he looked like a warship’s grinning prow. “I wish I could do that,” Valery teased. “But it was almost as good, watching you.”

  “You shouldn’t have been listening.”

  Valery handed Chaeron a meal packet. Chaeron hefted it and put its squishy warmth on the console.

  “When are you going to give your ‘corrections’?”

  Chaeron found himself chuckling, so delicately had Valery stressed that last word: corrections. And in his flood of good feelings he answered Valery that he could not do so until he was sure beyond a doubt that no aggressive action would be forthcoming from Shechem.

  With a quizzical look, the pilot tore open his packet with sharp teeth and, holding it high, squeezed the contents into his mouth until only an empty, greenish sack was left. That he crumpled and tossed into the narrow refuse chute.

  “How long until you’re sure? We’re within strike range. They surely would have done something by now . . . you want to wait until you’re in there?”

  “Don’t push it, Valery. It is certainly odd that we are so close and they have not even queried us, let alone sent out a welcoming committee. It is too odd.”

  “You think it’s a trap?”

  “I did not say that. Perhaps they are all asleep. Or very stupid. I do not know. . . . I am concerned that if something untoward happens, that it cannot be said that we were all asleep, or very stupid.”

  Valery muttered something, eased into the pilot’s couch with an automatic swiveling of his head that circuited every display monitor festooning the Danae’s circular waist.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” murmured the pilot, reminding himself once more how testy Danae’s owner had become, wishing he could call back the grumble of exasperation that had escaped his lips, drawing Chaeron’s attention. That was the last thing he needed, more acidic scrutiny when he must be as unremarkable as X-rays to the naked eye. He held his breath, pulse pounding, in the silent space after his disclaimer, a space which could turn barbed and baleful in a moment, whose phantom thorns even now pricked his nerves. . . .

  “Sorry,” Chaeron sighed, and lay back against the couch’s headrest so that his pulse ticked visibly in his throat.

  Amazing, was Chaeron. At all times impenetrable; at any time incendiary beneath his smile. That eternal grin was the worst of it, supremely appealing, embraceable, elusive as sponge. Not like Julian, whose face was a window into his soul. Julian. . . . Valery squirmed in his seat, adrift on the sea of alternatives under a featureless sky showing no hint of north. Julian was with Softa, whatever that could be construed to mean; and with Shebat. What was Spry doing? More to the point, what was he, Valery, doing?

  Looking for a break in the clouds, was what: a parting of the mists that would let him chart a course. Damn Baldy, with contingency plans bristling out from him like a power station’s solar collectors; and Chaeron, who had not the grace to be detestable, but must fascinate and obsess where other men need simply breathe. . . . The knowledge of what the consul was about did not protect Valery from it, or even attenuate Chaeron’s effect. It was an attribute of his presence, a thing as much a part of him as his ruddy mane or his sleek manliness which seemed devalued rather than cultivated, saving him from prettiness and pretentiousness both.

  Valery checked his thought, opened his eyes, and turned his head toward Chaeron: “Sorry, I didn’t hear.”

  “I said, be sure to keep monitoring my brother, alert for any deviation from course. We cannot be sure of him.” This was said with a mere turning of head, so that his cheek lay against the headrest, one eyebrow slightly raised in emphasis.

  “Yes, sir.” Valery had intended to do so, would have done so. He awaited only an opening, a moment to act for the guild, to whom Marada the pilot and the memory of his Hassid posed almost as great a threat as the missing cruiser who bore the Kerrion prodigal’s name. Or so the second bitch of Kerrion space insisted on proclaiming, both to himself and to Baldy, who was half-convinced that any further struggles were useless in the face of what had already been revealed. Parma, Baldy had wagered, merely awaited a convenient moment to arrest them all.

  Whether or not that was true, Valery had argued, a cruiser was a cruiser and in the war of emancipation to come (whether sooner or later), the more cruisers they had, the better. To that end he labored, as he had for a decade. He had a multitude of schemes, each bearing diverse fruit. The best was the acquisition of not only Danae and Hassid, but the cruisers flanking them, also.

  “Here’s what I want to do . . .” Chaeron began, wiping everything but incredulity from his pilot’s mind.

  In Hassid, Marada found Chaeron’s “corrections” no less astounding.

  He spoke them over the arbitrational cube, and its flush deepened.

  Chaeron’s stem demand for the capitulation of Shechem rang out through each Kerrion cruiser and through space toward the Labayan family sphere just ahead of a negative hydrogen ion particle beam which in a tenth of a second disrupted every electronic device in its path.

  The original plan had called for the deployment of Kerrion cruisers so as to immobilize the whole of Shechem, two cruisers to a hemisphere. Chaeron had altered not only Parma’s strategy in execution, but in feasibility: he kept the other cruisers in tight formation, not encircling Shechem. Likewise, the disruption was not complete, but selectively circumscribed. The meaning of this must be as clear to Selim Labaya as it seemed to Marada: his brother Chaeron would grant no second chance, simply overpowering Shechem’s computerized defenses. No, he would not. Instead, he would increase the power flowing to the cruisers’ brace of turrets, destroying the verdant sphere as offhandedly as he might a migrant asteroid headed into heavily trafficked space.

  Marada was incensed. The cube on his console reflected his ire that no clemency shrouded this potent aggression.

  But Shechem itself was still. No word came up from the leaves and glens, no silvery spacefish darted out to inspect them or obstruct them.

  Shechem did not even quiver.

  A hard-fingered hand closed on Marada’s heart, a dreadful thumping began somewhere in his inner ear. Trepidation jumped for his throat, closed its teeth there. He saw Madel’s swollen-lidded eyes, reddened with weeping, her purpled mouth stretched fat in its efforts to hold in grief. He saw Selim Labaya’s grizzled head bowed and shaking. And he saw his son, who neither kicked nor flailed, but lay unmoving, swaddled in some different reality only he could discern.

  Marada shook his head savagely, and growled, so that Hassid offered a systems check: all was well. She displayed beauteous Shechem, like a carbochon sapphire twirling to catch the light, pendant on some invisible string. Marada was not eased. She displayed a multitude of views not discernible to the naked eye, showing that life, that of machine and man both, still thrived within its beryl shell. She detailed its damaged electronics, and what areas were yet uninterrupted. Marada’s distress, instead of being eased, became more pronounced.

  A magnetic aiming device, which guided the beams from each ship in concert, flickered: ready, Marada, reluctant, would not eye the targeting screen, but looked at his hands, gone white and red and greenish-yellow, sparkling with moisture. On the padded console, they trembled.

  A static burst rustled on the com-line; then a voice came up from the habitational sphere. It was a faint voice, a thick voice, a voice whose owner was barely in control of his tongue, so that Marada in Hassid and Chaeron and Valery in Danae and every man in every cabin in the four Kerrion cruisers leaned forward,
staying breath and motion, to make out what the voice of Shechem authority had to say:

  “Kerrion Five, this is Shechem Authority, or at least it was, . . . Come on in, we’re not in any shape to stop you . . . it’s rather a relief . . . after everything else . . . we . . . (static)-struct you, (Static)-render. Entry-coordinates as you like ‘em, we can’t do anything much with what you’ve left us, just open the door. . . . Shechem Authority out. . . (Static).”

  “What in the womb of Chance is going on?” breathed Marada, whose flat palms pressed gently over his eyes, as if in the darkness so constructed he could find shelter.

  “We are queuing up for docking procedures,” replied Hassid, gently, to make him smile.

  Failing in that, the cruiser growled subliminally as cruisers do when their outboards malfunction, growled so softly that only another cruiser might hear.

  Danae heard; she was in touch with each subordinated cruiser, alerted by her pilot to be especially cognizant of what was going on in Hassid. She did not relay that information to her outboard, however, for Valery himself was acting as strangely as Hassid’s pilot. Instead, she sent a trill of condolence to her sister cruiser, and by that means felt better herself.

  It was an ugly business, attacking helpless data pools, unarmed communications nets, life-support systems and quiescent defenses that were in no way threatening. These would not have waxed threatening, no matter what the outboards controlling the cruisers’ death-spitting turrets had done. But Danae could not object—she could volunteer no such information to her pilot: Valery kept strictly to business with his ship. There was little affection offered by her outboard, little enough of anything . . . it was like having half an outboard, or so the others said. Valery, though an outboard of high repute, was cold, distant, unwilling or unable to enter fully into communion as did Marada with Hassid. Yet, Danae lived to please him, to shiver under his touch, to surge and sport on the tundra between the stars. Perhaps Valery was right, to keep so distant. At least, it was that distance that allowed Danae to offer condolences to Hassid, who suffered her outboard’s every distress.