Dancer's Luck

by Ann Maxwell

  “My fault,” she said ruefully, shaking her hair over the snake. “I should know better than to handle you when you glow.”

  Fssa vanished into her hair, radiating heat as quickly as he could, though he knew her hair would not burn even with a Fssireeme’s hot presence. Shedding the warmth that he so loved was a kind of penance for the way that he had obtained it.'

  She felt heat shimmer through her hair and knew what Fssa was doing. She also guessed why. She could think of no way to console him. Sighing, she looked at her hands, wondering how badly she had burned them.

  As she watched, the last of her blisters shrank and disappeared.

  “What . . . ?” said Kirtn wonderingly, taking her hand. He ran his fingertips over hers and found only whole, healthy skin.

  She bit her lip. If she had had any doubts that the zoolipt had left some of itself inside her, she had none now. “The zoolipt,” she whispered, smiling crookedly at Kirtn. Then she shuddered. “I hope it doesn’t get tired of my taste for a long time.”

  “And mine?” asked Kirtn. “Is it in me?”

  “Yes,” smiling, “but nobody could get tired of your taste.”

  He closed his eyes, trying to sense the alien presence inside his body. All he felt was a pervasive sense of health and a strength he had not known since Deva burned to ash behind their fleeing ship. Thank you, zoolipt, whoever and whatever you are. He thought he felt a distant echo of pleasure but could not be sure.

  In silence, Rheba and Kirtn watched the zoolipt absorb another corpse. The Zaarain construct—plant, animal, machine or all three at once—flowed in tones of blue beneath the ice.

  The Seurs also watched, horrified and fascinated at once. When the ice shroud collapsed and the turquoise-streaked zoolipt moved in their direction, the Seurs moaned and cursed their Luck.

  A disheveled Tric stepped forward, placing himself between the advancing zoolipt and the other Seurs. Visibly shaken, he waited to be devoured.

  “It won’t hurt you,” called Daemen as he came forward to place himself directly in front of the zoolipt. It reared up slightly, fluttered its edges and flowed past The Luck. “See? It’s a recycler. A machine. It won’t hurt anything that’s alive.”

  Tric looked at The Luck doubtfully. “Is this your gift? A new recycler? A recycler that won’t starve or poison us?”

  Daemen’s smile could have lit a sunless world. “Food. A future. My gift to my people,” he said softly. “I’m Good Luck, Uncle-and-Father. Perhaps the best Luck this planet has ever seen.”

  Slowly, the Seurs shuffled away from the wall, stretching their necks for a better look at their future. With a profusion of blues, the zoolipt engulfed the last corpse. The Seurs watched in silent appreciation of its efficiency.

  Kirtn and Rheba looked at each other, remembering Square One, where the greater portion of this zoolipt presided over chaos. Healthy chaos, but chaos all the same. Not only presided, but created. Runners, burrowers, flyers, the zoolipt experimented with the abandon of an idiot—or a God.

  And that same zoolipt was inside them, multiplying, echoes of turquoise pleasure resonating through them.

  Machine? They did not think so.

  God? They most profoundly hoped not.

  The last icy shroud collapsed in a shower of tiny crystal notes. Wordlessly, Kirtn and Rheba advanced on the engorged zoolipt. It was as big as she was now, and far heavier. Its surface danced with every tint of blue.

  Kirtn hesitated, then bent over the zoolipt and began kneading it into a sphere. She hesitated too, then went to work by his side. Neither spoke.

  The Seurs muttered unhappily and advanced. Fssa’s head appeared out of Rheba’s hair. The snake let loose a malevolent hiss. The Seurs stopped. They had seen a Fssireeme in action. They had no desire to become ice sculptures carved by an alien snake. Yet they were not convinced that The Luck was their salvation, either. They stared at the zoolipt with the suspicion bred by years of being victims of a whimsical recycler.

  “What are you doing?” asked Daemen, watching Rheba curiously.

  “Rolling it into the soup,” said Rheba, gesturing with a tendril of hair toward the depleted recycler pool.

  “Oh. Can I help?”

  “Have any cuts or scrapes?” she asked, grunting as she caught a slippery fold of zoolipt and tucked it into place.

  Daemen looked at his hands and feet. As usual, he had come through the worst of it with little more than a few scratches. “One or two. Why?”

  “Apparently, when we took a piece of this zoolipt we gave it an idea; it can live separately from the central mass. Then it had another idea. Living in us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kirtn looked up from his work. “It’s in us. Both of us.” The zoolipt quivered under his hands like blue marmalade. “It came in through our wounds. Maybe it just liked our alien flavors too much to leave after it healed us. Or maybe it will use any broken skin as an excuse to take up residence. You’re The Luck. Take your choice.”

  Kirtn bent over the dense, quivering mass and heaved. The zoolipt rolled eccentrically. Rheba deflected it toward the pool. In doing so, her hands sank up to her wrists in zoolipt.

  Daemen looked at his modestly abraded palms and decided that just this once he would not push his Luck. When the zoolipt wobbled in his direction, he leaped back out of its way.

  As Rheba, Kirtn and the lopsided zoolipt slopped toward the recycler pool, the Seurs’ muttering increased. Their recycler was not much, but without it they would surely die.

  “It’s all right,” said Daemen soothingly. He smiled his charming smile for Tric. “Really. The zoolipt kept Square One alive after their grid went eccentric. Our grid is intact. Imagine what the zoolipt will be able to do for us.”

  Rheba and Kirtn exchanged a long look. They were imagining, all right, and none of it was particularly comforting. “Be ready to run after we kick it into the soup,” whistled the Bre’n sourly.

  Fssa translated for the J/taals and illusionist, carefully avoiding any language the Seurs might understand. The J/taals withdrew into a protective formation. Fssa lifted his head out of Rheba’s hair and focused his sensors on the restless Seurs.

  The zoolipt quivered at the edge of the recycler pool. The contrast between the pale, almost invisible turquoise of the pool and the zoolipt’s robust blues was startling. It did not seem possible that the two forms of quasi-life had any relation at all to each other.

  Kirtn hesitated and looked at Daemen. “You’re sure this is what you want?”

  Daemen laughed. “Of course!”

  Kirtn shrugged. “It’s your planet.”

  He kicked the zoolipt into the soup.

  Rheba held her breath, waiting for a repeat of the disaster that had occurred when Rainbow was tossed into Centrins” core. Kirtn’s hand closed over her wrist, ready to yank her back if anything happened. The zoolipt rolled to the bottom of the pool. And sat there.

  The lights stayed on.

  Rheba began to breathe again. Kirtn’s grip relaxed.

  The zoolipt exploded through the soup in a soundless blue shockwave. Tints and tones of blue, shades of blue, impossible variations on the theme of blue, all of them at once, shimmering, quivering, alive. And then the greens came, wistful and luminous, subtle and magnificent. The bottom of the pool vanished in emerald turmoil. When it was still again, the pool was a blue-green, translucent sea where emerald lights glimmered restlessly on turquoise currents.

  Kirtn whistled a soft tribute to the zoolipt’s uncanny beauty. The Seurs sighed and looked at their Luck with awe.

  The lights went out.

  Kirtn swore.

  An incredible sunrise swept through Centrins, banishing its habitual twilight. Every Zaarain surface scintillated, throwing off light like enormous jewels. Sound condensed between the colors, a song so beautiful that it made Fssa tremble with joy. For an instant everyone lived in the center of perfection, suspended in uncanny brilliance.

  C
olors swirled across one wall, then cleared to reveal the rest of the installation. Like a ship’s downside sensors, the wall enlarged one detail after the next, giving those inside an intimate view of what was happening in the city. Beneath the debris of time and ignorance, Zaarain pavements glowed, hinting at marvels just beyond reach.

  The feeding stations came alive, singing of scents and flavors unmatched in Seur history. Skeletal crowds milled from one station to the next, gorging themselves on food that went instantly throughout their systems, visibly healing and rebuilding starved bodies. Stupefied, they stretched out on pavement that sensed their need and became a bed. Smiling, they slept the sleep of the newly born.

  Feeding stations became shaval fountains. Drifts of fragrant gold began to form, tenderly engulfing the sleeping bodies.

  The wall changed, becoming a symphony of colors once more. Rheba blinked and awakened from Zaarain enchantment. She turned to ask the Seurs if they were satisfied with their Luck.

  The Seurs were gone.

  “I thought that last group looked familiar,” said Kirtn. He turned hopefully to his left, but The Luck was not gone. The Bre’n sighed. “Still here?”

  Daemen smiled shyly. “I wanted to say thank you.”

  “You’re The Luck, not us.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Kirtn could not argue with that. “You’re welcome.” He turned to Rheba. “Ready?”

  “Wait,” said Daemen quickly. “You saved my people from extinction. Let me do the same for you.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Rheba.

  “You’re looking for more of you—and of him.” He pointed at Kirtn.

  “Yes.” Her voice was tight, as it always was when she thought about the odds against finding more Bre’ns, more Senyasi, another world to build another akhenet culture. “Do you know where some of our people are?”

  “No. But I’m The Luck. Take me along.” Daemen touched her arm and smiled. “Let me help you. Please.”

  Kirtn looked at the young man whose smile was as beautiful and complex as a Zaarain construct. The Bre’n wanted to grab his fire dancer and run, but the Choice was hers, not his. He stepped aside, waiting and feeling cold. Daemen could not have made a more compelling offer if he had used all of eternity to think of one.

  “But what about your own people?” asked Rheba.

  “The machine will take care of them. They don’t need me anymore.”

  She thought of Square One and wondered. Despite Daemen’s assurances, she knew the zoolipt was not a machine. It was alive, and intelligent after its own fashion. Now it had its hands—or whatevers—on the most sophisticated technology known in all the Cycles of man. What happened next was very much a matter of Luck. His Luck. If she took him, used him to find her own people and in doing so caused the extinction of his . . . ? That was too high a price to pay for akhenet survival.

  And in the back of her mind there was always Satin’s voice screaming, Space him!

  Not that she agreed with Satin. Daemen was not bad luck. Not quite. But in his company she had been beaten, drugged, shunted off to die in a tunnel, fed to a voracious zoolipt; and worst by far, she had felt her Bre’n die beneath her hands. It had all turned out all right, of course. She was alive, and he was, both of them carrying their little cargo of God. . . .

  She did not know how much more of The Luck she could survive.

  “You belong to your people,” she said slowly. “They bred you. They deserve your Luck.” She kissed his cheek. “But thanks anyway.”

  Daemen let her hair slip between his fingers and tried to smile. “Good Luck, beautiful dancer. If you change your mind, I’ll be here.” He took off Rainbow and handed it to Kirtn. “I won’t need this, now.”

  They left The Luck standing by a pool brimming with improbable life, trying to smile.

  Silently, J/taals and clepts scouted through the transformed city. There were no threats, no dangers, nothing but shaval drifting fragrantly on the wind.

  Rheba was silent, looking neither right nor left as her Bre’n guided her toward the spaceship. When they were in the Devalon’s shadow, they could see power shimmering around the ship. The core drain was off. The Devalon would be ready to lift as soon as they were aboard.

  Kirtn whistled an intricate Bre’n command. Shaval floated up as the ship extruded a ramp.

  “Sorry you didn’t take him?” asked Kirtn as he mounted the ramp, unable to stand her pensive silence any longer.

  “What?” asked Rheba.

  “The Luck. Are you sorry you left him behind?”

  Her hair seethed quietly. “I don’t think so. But I was just thinking—”

  The ship opened, revealing an interior packed with former slaves impatient to be on their way. Rheba stopped, amazed all over again at the variety of beings she had promised to take home.

  “You were thinking–?” prompted Kirtn gently.

  “Look at them.”

  Kirtn looked. “And?”

  “The Luck was just one. What will it take to get the others home?”

  Kirtn smiled whimsically. “A fire dancer, a Bre’n and a Fssireeme—what else?”

  The answer came in tiny echoes of zoolipt laughter.