The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  The O’Carroll raised a chin. “And if I don’t?”

  “I said I wouldn’t be happy wid it,” Voldemar answered. “Never said I wouldn’t do it.” And with that, he aimed his sweeper directly at the Fudir.

  As a way of not shedding O’Carroll blood, it was ingenious; but the Fudir wished O’Rahilly had picked some other way.

  But Voldemar hesitated and the Fudir realized that Olafsson was now standing directly behind him and one of his weapons was shoved against Voldemar’s spine. “I’d really rather you not damage my goods,” the courier told the faction leader.

  The Fudir saw a cloud of doubt pass across Voldemar’s face and the two of them locked gazes for a moment. Then Voldemar shrugged. “What we got here,” he said, “is what yez’d call a ‘conundrum.’ Ye can kill me, for sure—no boyos, hold off for just a wee bit and we’ll see if we can’t untie this widdout we all get burned, especially me. Ye can kill me, Pup; but ye’ll only do it if I actually do damage to yer goods, so to speak. I gotta shoot first, right? It’s what ye call a ‘code of honor’ or something. Now you wouldn’t like that, and I wouldn’t like that, and for sure old Fudir here wouldn’t like that. So let’s try something we can all like. All I’m askin’ ye to do is take one more passenger. That’s all. I mean, by the gods, man! Think of the mess we’d be after layvin’ here for the maintenance crew!”

  “I won’t have it be said,” Hugh announced, “that I ran out on my people.”

  “Oh, don’t ye worry none about that. When the guard at the gate finally gets hisself untied, he’ll let everyone know it was a shanghai job—by Jack’s Rebels! Man, you’re a legend—and I need that legend—but I don’t need you. Fact is, yez’ve gone soft. Cozyin’ up an’ makin’ dayls wid Handsome Jack an’ all. That ain’t fookin’ right. Yez’re a traitor to the O’Carroll.”

  “To myself, ye mean?” Hugh said bitterly. Then he jerked when he felt Olafsson’s weapon pressed to his side.

  “I am persuaded by the man’s rhetoric,” the courier said. “Also, I have counted his guns; and while there might be a certain philosophical satisfaction in letting things play out, I really do need to take the Fudir back unharmed to Jehovah. If your presence is the price, so be it.”

  Hugh’s shoulders slumped. “If I’d brought my bodyguards with me,” he said.

  “There would have been a bloodbath for sure,” the Fudir said. He had already taken two steps up the stairs. “Count your blessings. And mine.”

  Shoulders slumped, Hugh followed him up the stairs with Olafsson directly behind him. At the head of the stairs, and just before closing the airlock, the courier turned and faced the faction fighters. “I’m not sure how wide the blast circle is for these strap-on boosters, but I’ll be lighting off directly.”

  The Fudir saw Voldemar and his men scrambling for the edge of the field before the lock had fully closed.

  “I’ll be back!” Hugh shouted through the closing crack. “I’ll be back,” he said again, after it had closed. And then, in a piteous voice, he added, “Oh, my poor world! My poor world!”

  An Craic

  “Oh, my poor world,” the scarred man mocks. “And it wasn’t even his own world! He was born on Venishànghai.”

  “But he grew on New Eireann,” the harper says, idly strumming a lament on her instrument. It doesn’t sound quite right and she isn’t sure why. “And where a person grows may matter more than where he sprouted.”

  “How did he ‘grow’ on New Eireann? He came there already a man.”

  “He promised he’d be back, but he didn’t swear this time on his father’s name. That seems like growth to me.”

  The scarred man smiles like a razor. “You noticed that, did you?”

  “I did. I wonder if he did, at the time.” Underneath the lament, she plucks out in a minor off the fourth mode the motif she had begun to think of as The Fudir’s Theme, a twisting melody that never quite resolves. The scarred man surprises her by saying, “Yes. I think you’ve gotten it right.”

  “It must have been a schizophrenic voyage,” the harper suggests. “Olafsson wants to go to Jehovah; the Fudir wants to go to the Hadramoo; and Little Hugh wants to go back to New Eireann. They’re pulling three ways. The mean value is to stand still.”

  “Yes, standing still is a difficult means of pursuit. Although”—and here his gaze turns intently and discomfortingly on the harper—“there are times when it works.”

  The harper stills her strings and sets the harp aside. The Bartender has brought over two plates of stew, the hearty, plain sort consonant with Jehovah’s austere nature. She recognizes carrots and onions and a stringy meat that suggests pastures rather than vats. Curious, she tastes it and finds it much like artifact meat, only different in texture. The great doors at the front of the Bar open briefly on some arrivals to reveal a night well advanced.

  “Tell me,” she says when she has swallowed. “I don’t understand why the Fudir went through the charade of being ‘arrested.’ Why didn’t he simply leave when Olafsson gave him the chance?”

  The scarred man eats as if filling a pit with a shovel. “Because when history repeats itself,” he says, without swallowing, “the second time must be a farce.”

  “What do you mean, farce? Voldemar’s ambush—Oh.”

  “Yes. The ‘arrangements’ the Fudir made the night before. Considering how things ran out afterward, it was probably the best thing he could have done.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have two theories. The one more favorable to the Fudir’s character is that he had come to like Hugh, and New Eireann, and could not bear to see either ruined by the inevitable three-way struggle with Jack and Voldemar.”

  “You mean, better a two-way struggle?”

  But the scarred man shakes his head and cackles with brief and unpleasant glee. “No,” he says around another spoonful of stew, so that streamers of gravy dribble from the corners of his mouth. “He made more than one set of arrangements that night. Jack’s men ambushed Voldemar as he was leaving the Port and cut the head right off the snake. So things worked out in the end. The Fudir left New Eireann with competent, undivided leadership, and saved Hugh’s face by shanghaiing him. No one could say Hugh had run off.”

  The harper is skeptical. “And those were the Fudir’s motives? They seem rather high for a man so low.”

  The scarred man looks into the darkness of his stew. “Perhaps those were motives he thought of afterward. But we can no longer ask him.”

  “He died then? So we don’t really know what happened.”

  “Ah. The beginnings of wisdom.” He applies himself once more to his meal.

  “What was the second reason? You said there were two.”

  The scarred man shrugs. “He needed someone to watch his back.”

  “That’s a less noble reason,” the harper agrees.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “There’s a third reason.”

  The scarred man raises his face from his stew. He swallows and wipes his lips with his hand. “Is there?”

  “Friendship. They were in the dance together.”

  The scarred man gives that some thought. “Maybe,” he allows. “Sometimes you can triangulate what really happened from the testimonies of those who were there.” His grin reveals ruined teeth. “But you don’t have even that. You’ve only my account of their accounts.”

  “Do you embellish, then?”

  He shrugs. “Even engineers prepare their plans and levels from more than one perspective. It’s late, and you’ve played three times tonight. Four, if you count our conversation. Do you have rooms at the Hostel?”

  “I thought I would stay here. They’ve rooms upstairs, you said.”

  The scarred man nods, but says nothing.

  “Room 3-G, if it’s available.”

  Another grin. “We might be a little snug, you and us.”

  The harper studies him for a long moment, and he simply waits her out. Finally, she says, �
�Another room, then.”

  The scarred man signals to the Bartender, makes a sign, and points to the harper. Shortly, one of the servants comes with a homing key and lays it on the table. “Compliments of the house,” she murmurs, and her eyes caress in turn the harper and her instrument.

  “You may want to consider what I’ve told you so far,” the scarred man says. “It will give you something to sleep on, if not someone to sleep with.”

  “Will Hugh escape once they reach Jehovah and try to return to New Eireann? Will the Fudir slip loose from Olafsson and heigh for the Hadramoo? Will Olafsson find Donovan or will Greystroke catch up with him? And what of…And what of Bridget ban? What has she been doing in the meantime?”

  “That,” the scarred man suggests, “will give you something to wake up for.”

  Geantraí: Face Off

  “Good morning, harper,” the scarred man says with malicious cheer when dawn has drawn a few hardy souls to the Bar. Praisegod is behind the counter—to all appearances, he might never have left his post. So, too, the scarred man, who sits once more in his niche. The room is redolent with the pasty odors of oatmeal and eggs and daal. “I hope you slept well,” he says. “After a time, the crack of the overnight ballistic runs can grow quite restful and the morning cargo drops little more than a cock’s crow.”

  The harper spares him a blurred look and asks Praisegod for a cup of something more lively than she is. She carries the coffee to the table by the niche and slowly puts herself outside of it. The scarred man’s plate is heavy with daal and baked beans, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon, with sautéed mushrooms. She spares this feast no more than a horrified glance and notes that he seems in a good humor.

  “Every day is a promise,” he replies. “Compared to the night mare, we have an easy ride.”

  “And what nightmares visit your sleep?” It is an idle question—she is not yet fully awake—but the silence of his answer draws her from her drug. He dips a piece of naan into the daal and shoves it in his mouth. The sauces drip and pool in the upturned cleft of his chin. “None that you would care to ride,” he says just before he swallows.

  Silence then draws on toward the point of discomfort. But it is from a point of greater discomfort to one of lesser. The scarred man begrudges her: “Yet there are dreams that come during the day. Sometimes I think you are not quite real, and I am speaking only to another part of my own mind. I’m not sure.”

  “Do you not know your own mind, then?”

  A facetious question, meant for humor, the words push the scarred man deeper into his niche. “No,” he whispers. “I do not.”

  Now the discomfort is real and the harper hurriedly excuses herself to visit the buffet table. Few are the guests who stay at the Bar, fewer still those who breakfast there; and so, few were the choices presented to her. She stares at the unsavory dishes. The bacon is cold and more fat than meat. The eggs have congealed into something resembling rubber. She settles finally on a bowl of oatmeal and some naan, a small glass of muskmelon juice. With these she returns to the niche and is only a little surprised to find the scarred man still there, and still gazing silently at his meal.

  “When we parted last night,” she prompts, “Hugh and the Fudir were sliding toward Jehovah with the ’Federal courier.”

  The scarred man says nothing and the harper fears she has stopped up the well with her remarks. Then he looks up and fixes her with his gaze. “What is your story? Perhaps you should be the one here telling tales.”

  “Every man, every woman, has a story. But some are less interesting than others. I’ve come to learn of the Dancer. My own tale is far less than that.” She does not ask about his personal story, although she suspects there may be a goltraí in it. She is not sure she would want to hear it; yet the question lingers unspoken in the air between them.

  Eventually, the scarred man sighs and begins the dance anew.

  “Bridget ban,” the scarred man says, “arrived at Peacock Junction…

  …a world of lush colors and bubbling waters, and of careless men and women. There, the tropics run from pole to pole and the ocean currents are delightfully warm and languid. It is a world on which not much happens, and what does happen happens slowly. They have a Seanaid of sorts: garrulous old men and women who meet in an open amphitheater during the dry season, and not at all during the rains. Someday they may pass a law, but there is no hurry.

  The universe is in motion: planets and stars spinning, galaxies swirling, starships sliding from star to star along superluminal channels in the fabric of space. There is no reason why any world in such a universe should be so much at rest as Peacock Junction.

  But while Peacock has very few laws, she is rich in customs; and customs have the greater force. A law may be appealed; but from custom there is no recourse. When Billy Kisilwando killed his partner in a drunken fit, he was given one hundred days’ grace. He set off into the Malawayo Wilderness with a rucksack, a hiking staff, and a small, but faithful terrier. He emerged after ninety-nine days, minus dog and staff, and reported to the District Head, confessed his sin, and prayed forgiveness from his partner’s manu; and ever afterward he repeated his confession in the Hall of Remonstration to all who came to see him. Such is the cruelty of custom.

  Compared to the great roundabout of luminal highways that converge on the worlds of Jehovah, Peacock barely deserves the name of junction. Route 66 splits off from the Silk Road and heighs off toward Foreganger and Valency, but that is all. In the early days of settlement, it was thought that proximity to the blue giant at Sapphire Point would endow Peacock with a great many roads; and much effort was spent on the survey of its approaches, but the tenor of scientific thought now runs in the other direction. And a good thing, too; for nothing tempts the highwaymen of the Spiral Arm more than a sun with plentiful roads.

  Shalmandaro Spaceport was the primary STC repository for Peacock Roads, and so it was to this gracile orangestone tower that Bridget ban came on the trail of the phantom fleet. The tower was inlaid with gold and decorated with pastel murals of Peacock scenery and of those few ’Cockers who had ever faced anything requiring heroism. On the building’s western facade, a bulbous extrusion eyed distant Polychrome Mountain and the tea plantations that tiled her slopes. There, trace elements in the soils and the artifice of bioneering gave the tea fields sundry colors and the mountain its name.

  Despite the building’s importance, there was no security screen at the entrance. Bridget ban was not surprised. It was of a piece with this lackadaisical world. But after she had passed through and was standing before the lift tubes in the great, multistoried atrium, she gave the matter a second thought. Indolent need not mean stupid. Indeed, indolence often required considerable ingenuity. So she returned to the vestibule and studied its walls with greater care, and discovered amid the wild swirls and colors with which the ’Cockers embellished any flat surface the lenticels and digitizers of various sensors. She nodded her approval at one camera eye, her opinion of the ’Cockers rising by a notch.

  Konmi Pulawayo was not in the Director’s office when, thanks to typically vague directions from staff, Bridget ban had finally located it. The room did not strike her as very official. Offices ought to appear functional: with desks, storage drives, comm units, hard-copy files, and the like. They ought, in fact, to have walls. They ought not have a whispering waterfall and a glade guarded by colorful parrots and sweet larks. A parrot is not a receptionist; and a hammock is not an office chair.

  “So where,” she asked one green-and-yellow bird, “is your master?”

  The parrot shuffled a bit on its perch, cocked its head, and squawked. “Whaddaview! Lookaddaview!”

  Bridget ban snorted, turned away, then wondered if there was something more serious under this frivolous facade. The ’Cockers were famous across the Spiral Arm for their bioneering. Perhaps the parrot was a receptionist, after all. Yet there was nothing about the bird that suggested it was anything more than a bird. The sku
ll was not of an encouraging volume; its attention span fleeting. It glanced at the intruder repeatedly, but that would be expected of any half-wild beast. Its exclamation was probably no more than a trained reflex.

  But why train a bird to make that response to that question? Answer: the Director took his breaks in the viewing room she had noticed from the outside. She glanced at her watch. It was early for a break—unless, as she suspected, ’Cockers inverted the times devoted to work and leisure.

  A passing technician, frail and featureless as an elf, bare-chested and wearing a tool belt over his “srong,” told her the lounge was at the end of Redfruit Lane, and pointed to a bush growing along the side of the “corridor.” Bridget ban thanked him and he nodded vaguely, plucking a “redfruit” to eat as he sauntered off. She wondered if he was on his way to repair something and how long that repair would await his arrival.

  The redfruits wound through the seventeenth floor, intersecting at times with other winding paths marked by other bushes. There were no walls, but occasionally there were lines of shrubs or trees, or rivulets crossed by short footbridges, each evidently intended to mark the boundary of a “room.” Not one was straight. There might not be a right angle in the entire building. She did see individuals working at screens and chatting casually to hologram images. It could not all be personal activity, could it? Somehow, cross-stellar and in-system traffic in the Junction was choreographed; somehow lighters and bumboats were lifted and landed. Someone out there must be working!

  Eventually, curiosity—or surrender—overcame her and she plucked a redfruit for herself. Its skin was soft and plump and the texture, when she had bitten into it, crispy. The taste was succulent and sweet, suggesting both apple and cherry in its ancestry. She had to remind herself that she was inside a large building and the groves through which she wound were only clever artifacts.

  The lounge was entirely transparent; even the floors and furniture. In effect, one seemed to be walking in midair, and Bridget ban could see past her boots the traffic far below. Only the people and a few other objects—brightly patterned cushions and the like—were stubbornly opaque. Directly ahead, Polychrome Mountain had been artfully framed between two other high towers so that it appeared larger and closer than it actually was. She wondered if the ’Cockers had erected those two buildings precisely to achieve that effect.