Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  Along a crushed-stone path leading past the waterfall appeared Kim. The slender Korean wore a white gi with a tattered black belt. He walked along the narrow path as if he had all the time in the world.

  The man was thin. He moved so fluidly he seemed to have no bones. His eyes were as bright as coals. He might have been thirty or sixty. The nails of his hands were yellowish, and looked thick. He wore sandals, with thick cotton socks. Aubry knew he faced a master whose art was complete.

  Kim stood before him. “You were expected at the gymnasium an hour ago.” His voice was strained.

  “It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” Aubry said. Was this the man who hated him so much? Why? What had he done?

  “Why didn’t you come?” He paused, and Aubry could feel that the man was out of balance, and that this lack of equilibrium was far from Kim’s normal state. “You are …” Kim searched for the proper words. “Disrespectful.”

  Aubry watched the water, and from somewhere deep inside him, he seemed to hear another man’s words. Warrick? Perhaps. But had he had to stop crediting a dead man with all that was good in his mind.

  He spoke carefully. “Everyone has worked carefully to bring us together. They say that you hate Nullboxing.”

  “It is whorish,” Kim said, with a flash of anger. “And you have the same contempt for my art. We need not waste time on pleasantries. The only possible reply to your statements is action. Why do you sit? Has fear so paralyzed you?”

  Aubry reached out and plucked a flower from its stem. Its pink and blue petals lay neatly against his palm. “Do you see?”

  Kim’s posture didn’t relax, but his eyes narrowed. “See what?”

  “Either of us can do this,” Aubry said. His hand closed on the bud, and when it opened, it was a smear of red and white. “Either of us can end life. I can’t give it back. I …” He shook his head. “I can’t mend the bones I break. Can’t give sight back to the eyes I’ve taken. I can’t make men breathe again. Can you?”

  Kim looked at him suspiciously. Proudly, he said, “In hwa rang do, acupuncture and a form of chiropractory are requisites for advancement. Why?”

  Aubry smiled sadly. “I envy you.”

  “You … envy me?” For the first time, Kim’s energy seemed to shift. Rather than the focused blowtorch, it was more diffuse now, almost like a halo around the man. He kept his distance—Aubry would have to take steps to reach him—but sat on a bench across from him, watching and evaluating. “This is … not the kind of comment I expected from you. Tell me. What did people say to you, about me?”

  “They said that you wanted to hurt me. That you were my enemy.”

  Kim nodded slowly. “I heard the same of you.” He cupped a flower in his hands, smelled it without plucking it or damaging it. “Did you scent, before you destroyed?”

  Aubry blinked, and again, there was that strange, sad smile. When he spoke, it was a whisper. “I never have,” he said. He looked at the crumpled petals in his hands.

  There was a pause, and into that pause came the sound of water flowing, and a distant insect sound, a soft chirping from the far side of the garden. “Come,” Kim said finally. “This flower is sweet. Give yourself the gift.”

  Aubry hesitated, and then rose. He took a step forward. And then another. And sat. Now each man was within the other’s kill zone. No physical response could stop an attack at such range. Only an intuitive warning, or a preemptive attack, could possibly suffice. Kim’s eyes were dark and cool. Aubry bent, closed his eyes, and smelled the flower.

  Then he sniffed the crushed, dead thing in his own hand. Its petals had released their fragrance fully, but the live flower’s essence was greater still.

  “Which do you prefer?” Kim asked unnecessarily.

  Together, they listened to the garden.

  Then Kim spoke. “If you had come to my class, in front of my students …” A rueful smile creased his mouth.

  “The meekest woman becomes a tiger when protecting her cubs,” Aubry said. A sudden warm smile split his face. “A friend of mine named Jenna told me that.”

  “When two tigers fight,” Kim said, “one dies, and the other is crippled.”

  “Even if I won, I would lose.” Aubry’s big shoulders hunched forward. “Someone knew that.”

  “I do not know why you are here,” Kim said. “Some say that you are being prepared for an assignment. Think, please.” He laid his hand on Aubry’s. Kim’s flesh felt like parchment. “Think of the manner in which we were pushed toward each other. Someone wanted to see it. It was a test.” Aubry looked up, and Kim peered directly into his eyes, as if measuring. “I think that someone read some old evaluations of you, and thought you an animal. Perhaps once you were. Now you are a man. I am not certain that even you completely understand this.”

  “You can heal as well as kill,” Aubry whispered, close to awestruck. “You are complete.”

  Kim stared. “There is more than one way to heal, Aubry Knight. I can heal bodies. Perhaps you will heal something greater.” He withdrew his hand, leaving behind a sensation of warmth.

  Aubry stood, gazing at the garden around him, as if astonished and delighted to find it still there. “I think … I will walk in the garden awhile, Master Kim. I would like to smell the flowers.”

  Kim stood. And they bowed simultaneously, sincerely, two tigers who had offered, and received from each other, the gift of life.

  3RD SONG

  FIREDANCE

  The fire spreads from the center

  out, or from the lower centers

  to the higher. Never from the

  higher to the lower. Thus,

  always, the emotions rule, the

  intellect acting only in their

  service. It is a conceit to

  believe that the head can rule

  the heart.

  —Ibandi proverb

  1

  AUGUST 22. EPHESUS.

  “Recommend that he be inserted into target.” Leslie heard herself say the words, but they were remote, the distant, shallow echoes of a waterfall in a cave. She had no conscious awareness of having spoken them. There was only concentration, and escape.

  Her toes dug into the golden path beneath her feet, and she spun back barely in time to avert disaster. A mountainous block of concrete thundered down, smashing through the path, spraying gilt dust and cement chips as it screamed its way into the abyss. Leslie peered over the edge, watched the block tumble endlessly into darkness, watched flames rise up to devour it.

  She stood on a road of glowing golden bricks suspended in utter darkness. If she let any feelings creep past her shields, they manifested as screams of fear and doubt.

  Her breathing steadied. The path began to heal itself, one brick at a time, until it rejoined with the far side. She moved cautiously forward.

  Stop. Sense. She adjusted her mind, and felt what was waiting ahead. She couldn’t see it yet. It smelled like a dragon. She was on the very edge of something, as if she had wandered into the wrong cave. There was a presence ahead, enormous, godlike in its power—and as yet, asleep. It dwarfed her, or anything she had yet encountered on the golden road. The presence metamorphosed from dragon to djinn. And then grew beyond even that fearsome potential. This was Death itself, and the only reason she had not been utterly crushed was that it was …

  Asleep?

  Leslie popped one level of reality out of the kinesthetic/visual analog matrix she had so carefully constructed to penetrate STYX’s computer system. Miles Bloodeagle had provided the key: Gorgon was cleared into select military data banks, and those contacts opened up myriad horizontal branch lines, cousins, related data links, a woven mesh of lines connecting communication, finance, research, and supply. As long as the lines were not completely sealed, there remained a chance that Leslie could wiggle through them.

  Again and again she was challenged, her passwords revoked or annulled, and just as repeatedly she resolved impossibly complex security equations by trans
posing them to the kinesthetic or visual realm, dealing with them the way a basketball player executes a lay-up shot. Once they were solved by her motor cortex, her forebrain converted the equations into numbers, into bits and bytes of data.

  The ripostes and challenges of the computers were a world of dragons, plunging stalactites, trolls, and killer robots to Leslie, and she raced, or squirmed, between them. There was no fighting back. There was only avoidance, evasion, and escape.

  Asleep…?

  Leslie was no longer on the golden path, living the experience. She was watching herself experience it, a half-step removed from total immersion. And something was wrong. She might well risk tiptoeing past a sleeping dragon, or a djinn.

  But did Death ever sleep? She had the oddest sensation that everything she sought was just the other side of this chamber, but …

  Pride is a terminal disease. Jenna had said that a hundred times. Leslie crept back, snuck away, and—

  The path retracted like a slidewalk, rolling away from Death, away from the cave, out of the dark, and—

  Leslie flew upright on her couch, her eyes strained wide and wild. One thin hand clutched at her chest.

  Her hands shook. She felt at her mouth, touched something tender, and glanced at her fingers. They bore a smear of blood. Only then did she focus on the white-tiled walls of Ephesus’s virtual-communications complex, in the science building.

  Jenna’s hand gripped her shoulder, eyes narrowed fiercely. “Leslie? Are you all right?” Jenna held a blood-dappled handkerchief in her left hand, and daubed at Leslie’s lip.

  Leslie held up the bloodied fingers. “When?” she asked weakly.

  “About a half an hour ago. You bit your lip, and were muttering something about inversions.”

  Leslie thought for a moment and then said, “Inversions. They were testing Father with one of the standard muscle-memory confusion programs, switching input under stress during a flying exercise. Gorgon technique. I pulled it out of a low-priority medical file.”

  “How did he do?”

  She waved dismissively. “Fine.” A sudden darkness fluttered across her face. Fear perhaps. Or shame. Her eyes locked with Jenna’s as if seeking absolution. “I had to end the session. There was a major, big-time trap set up, and I almost fell into it. Catch me, and they catch Uncle Miles. Catch Uncle Miles, and they’ll trace it all the way to Ephesus.”

  Jenna daubed at Leslie’s torn mouth. “Shh. You did fine, darling.”

  The child was still reorienting herself, but began to smile shyly. “Daddy aced their training. They’re going to use him.” Leslie frowned. “But they don’t expect him to survive.”

  Leslie steadied herself, breathing carefully, her chocolate brown eyes vast and unfocused. “He’s disposable,” she said coldly. “Swarna probably knows that he exists—after all, a PanAfrican kill team came after him, right? The army didn’t want to send Daddy in, but the White House forced their hand. So STYX’s attitude is: no real backup.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All of the emphasis is on getting him in. The route out isn’t half as secure. Extraction of a kill team, setting up decoys and diversions—that’s half of a successful assassination. Check the computer—Kennedy, ’63. Textbook case. By the time they unraveled the false trails in ’97, all the primaries were safely dead. Daddy doesn’t realize how delicate an extraction is, and STYX doesn’t care at all. He’ll die if we don’t help him.”

  Jenna sat staring at the blood on her handkerchief. “I trust your instincts. What can you say about the insertion point?”

  Leslie’s brow furrowed and a holographic globe popped into view next to her head. It was garishly colored, not at all the usual staid world globe, with bright peppermint pinks and frosted greens. It twirled on its axis, and Leslie zoomed in on the northwest section of the African continent. “Somewhere here, in North Africa. I know he’s supposed to rendezvous with a contact in a little town here, called Ma’habre. September fifth.”

  Jenna’s hand stretched out, and she stroked the point on the globe. Ma’habre. She could believe that. Ma’habre was far enough from the border of New Nippon, from the PanAfrican Republic, to avoid the kind of direct and total surveillance found to the south. And yet, it would also be close enough to ancient trade routes. Land, sea, or air routes, a day’s travel at most, would take Aubry across a stretch of border too vast to be patrolled effectively.

  Ma’habre …

  Jenna tousled her niece’s hair. “Thanks, sweetheart. I’ll take it from here.”

  “You … and Uncle Miles?”

  “You think I need him?”

  Leslie nodded soberly. “Aunt Jenna, you’ve hardly ever been beyond Ephesus. You don’t know the PanAfricans. Uncle Miles has worked against them. Gorgon’s most consistent mission was sabotage and terrorism against PanAfrica.”

  “Which makes it more of a risk for him. They’ll have files on him.”

  “That won’t stop him. He owes Daddy. Twice. Please, Aunt Jenna.” Leslie’s slender fingers were on her wrist, small and firm and cool. “Pride is a terminal disease.”

  “Sometimes I hate you. All right. I’ll talk to your Uncle Miles. But this is our secret, right?”

  Leslie’s face was a child’s. It was unlined, and firm-cheeked, glowing with health, and beautiful. And hadn’t aged a day in four years. But if Jenna looked more deeply, beyond the bright brown cheeks and dark brown hair, to the eyes …

  The eyes were furnace-hot, and frighteningly intelligent, and as old as God. And for the first time in Jenna’s memory, just a bit afraid.

  Aubry and Promise, together, were Leslie’s lifeline from hell. Together, they were the closest thing to a normal family’s dynamics that Leslie could ever know. The memories of what she was, had been trained for, had done … of the lethal potentials and calculating, murderous intellect wired into that little mind, were corrosive.

  A race car wants to race. A swimmer wants to swim. And a murder machine wants to murder.

  What did it take to keep those impulses in check? To allow Leslie to function as anything even close to a normal child? Goddess …

  Jenna sensed the unspoken challenge, the mortal promise in Leslie’s eyes. It crackled there, dusty and electric as a summer storm.

  Find my father, it said. Go, and help him to come back. Or I will go myself. It will destroy my mother, but I will have to go.

  Jenna took Leslie’s hand. There were two creatures within her niece—the death machine, and a child about to lose the only human being who could ever function as father.

  “I can’t make you any promises, Leslie,” Jenna whispered.

  “Find him. Save him. Or …”

  The animal was there again, a thing she had seen in Leslie, a thing she had seen in Aubry, and she felt a chill.

  “Find him. Bring him home.”

  And all Jenna could do was nod.

  2

  AUGUST 30. NORTHERN PANAFRICA.

  “The primary has made his decision,” Sinichi Tanaka said. “If he failed to appear at the opening of Swarnaville Spaceport, it would be seen as cowardice.” His hands were light on the skimmer controls. At his command, it hovered two hundred feet above the carnival grounds. He set the panel to automatic and spun in his seat, facing the Four.

  All wore silver-blue shock armor, reflective faceplates in place. All four were huge, calm, alert, and at ease.

  Ni, San, Go, Roku. The Four. Once there had been six, Tanaka thought sadly. Ichi was sacrificed in the white medical room beneath the Citadel. Shi died in America, on a pointless mission of vengeance.

  “Tanaka-san,” San said politely. She was the female. Almost as strong as the others, and with greater endurance, she was the best marksman among them. “Have you decided upon our positions?”

  “I will have regular security forces throughout the carnival,” he said. “The primary will be covered at all times. We will have a disruption field functioning, of course. I want to hold yo
u and your brothers in reserve in case of emergency.”

  Ni inclined his head. “Whatever you wish, Sensei.”

  Sinichi Tanaka allowed himself a tiny smile. “I am proud of you,” he said. “I know that you will make me prouder still.”

  “Yes, Sensei,” Go said. Go cleared his throat, and then spoke again. “This is our first opportunity to speak freely in many weeks,” he said. “We know that you disapprove of the way we handled the American.”

  Tanaka sighed. “You disobeyed orders. Instead of executing your target, you challenged him.”

  “You have never criticized us,” Roku said.

  “I have access to classified reports,” Tanaka said. “I disapproved of the mission, but I knew of it. I know of your origins. I know who the American is. I know what happens in the white room.”

  San’s voice was almost as deep as her brothers’, a catlike purr. “We have no mother. We have no father. You are the only one who cares about us, and even you, Sensei Tanaka, are not of our flesh.”

  “I love this land,” he said. “It is in my blood.” He looked out over the carnival site. Two square kilometers of bazaars, games, eateries, entertainments. From all over PanAfrica they would come, awaiting the launching of PanAfrica’s first shuttle. This land was alive, and vital. Part of him. But the Four were right. He had no home but PanAfrica, and PanAfrica was not his home.

  “You understand us, don’t you?” San said, sympathetically. “It explains why you have treated us as human beings. Not merely as weapons.”

  “You are human,” Tanaka said. “But you are also bound by your obligations. As are we all.” He could see the little people down below him, laboring at their tasks. Thousands of them, building, and clearing and preparing. Most of them would never even see the man they labored to serve. One or two might meet him.

  And none would ever know him, as Sinichi Tanaka knew him.

  He shook his head, clearing out the dark thoughts. “We will take a walking tour of the area now,” he announced, spinning back to the controls. “I am receptive to your security suggestions.”