Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  He released the autopilot and spun the skimmer down for a landing. But even with his concentration on the flying, in the mirror above his eyes he could see the Four behind him. Armored, loyal to him, and to the primary. Incredible students, absorbing everything he could teach them of armed and unarmed combat.

  And that last thought made him wonder, once again, about the American. Aubry Knight. Knight had slain Shi, childlike Shi, whose visit to the white room had dimmed the light behind his eyes. Knight had killed a child.

  For the thousandth time, Sinichi Tanaka remembered training Shi and his siblings. Watching them grow. Goading them on with curses and candies. Holding their hands when, at maturity, they received their ritual tattoos.

  Shi, gentle Shi, had so loved songs and flowers. For all his massive size and strength, Shi was the least of his clan. Shi was a baby in an adult’s body.

  With savage intensity, Tanaka wished to meet Aubry Knight, who had slain his gentlest student.

  We know you can kill children, Tanaka thought blackly. But how are you against a man?

  3

  SEPTEMBER 4. INDIAN OCEAN.

  Aubry checked the manifest against the computer records of the cargo. He was one of the crew of the Saint John’s, out of Newfoundland, headed to port in North Africa. He had been aboard for the past week, and tomorrow would see the coast. There had been bad weather for the past few days, even worse than the terrible North Atlantic chop. The twin stabilizers had roared and groaned. Every step tested balance. The deck rolled wildly underfoot, and Aubry experienced a wild and foreign hunger.

  For long hours he buried himself in work, suppressing the desire that raged within him. Finally, close to midnight, he climbed the narrow steps up to the main deck, felt the rain and wind lash his face, and grinned ferally.

  What would the crew say if they saw him there near the railing, hammered by the storm, but unyielding? What would they say if they saw him moving slowly through his exercises, disdaining the terrible power of the wind, the sheets of water battering his face?

  He didn’t care.

  Eyes blinking against the pelting rain, Aubry began the Rubber Band. The deck rocked beneath him. Aubry extended his left leg to its farthest reach, grasped his big toe, and felt the simultaneous stretch in the bottom and top of his thigh. He pulled backward with his arm until the leg was almost parallel with his chest, tensed until the entire side of his body was rigid with strain. In the midst of effort, his face was completely placid, disassociated. That was what his father had taught him: Stay calm, be the eye of the hurricane. Be strong.

  If you are, then the winds of chance can blow you, but not harm you. You can tumble, but won’t break, flatten, but not be crushed.

  So Aubry breathed, going into himself. Odd how it seemed somehow easier to do that, here in the midst of the terrible weather, than at Manitou Springs. There, he had felt observed. Even in the privacy of his own room, he had never felt the desire to perform his morning ritual. There were too many eyes in that place, and the Rubber Band was not for public consumption.

  It was … sacred.

  He had never seen waves like this, and had he acknowledged their overwhelming power, the fear would have been nearly paralyzing. He understood cities. They were, in the meat of it, all that he did understand. Cities, and human violence. Even the Ephesus forest fire hadn’t seemed real, not a natural thing at all, because it had been instigated by human beings. It had been an attack.

  And attacks he understood. World as war, life as combat, this he knew as certainly as his own heartbeat.

  The Ephesus commune had been a strange place to him, until he gained the ability to see it as an armed camp. He understood the feminist separatists. The NewMan Nations were different—they felt frighteningly comfortable from the first. He felt so at home there that it terrified him—he didn’t really want to look at that part of himself.

  But this. This weather …

  There was no one to conquer. No human was involved. There was no hope of “winning.” Even a city rat like Aubry understood that no human could defeat a storm by force of will. How then to survive?

  For too long, he had reacted almost passively to circumstance, allowed others to direct and guide him, to send him screaming against targets. But he was a human missile against human targets.

  How to face the storm? He had to be more than he was, more than a human being, and completely willing to accept death. He had found that place within himself before, more easily in the past few years. But now he had to surrender to it absolutely.

  So Aubry narrowed his eyes against the driving wind and the lightning, and ran through the Rubber Band’s litany:

  Contract the anal sphincter. Contract the abdominals. Spine extended, and usually straight. Exhale on twists and contractions. Inhale on expansions. The Rubber Band was not a series of combat movements. It developed the potential for movement—strength, balance, concentration, flexibility, endurance.

  In the midst of the rain, sweat poured from his body as his arms and legs extended and wove. He slipped, and tucked into a roll, slamming into the steel deck, grunting. He gasped, mouth widening with pain and fear. Slapped out of his trance state by the elements, stripped of city, stripped of family, the child within Aubry Knight wanted to scream in anguish, but when he went inward, and saw the child … the child that he had been …

  Leslie was there, beside him.

  The fear tried to find another place to run. You are weak and feminine, it whispered to him evilly. And it attacked his feminine side, disappearing into the darkness in Aubry’s heart.

  Then, during an instant when the wind seemed to die just a fraction, he heard a voice. Promise’s voice.

  “Aubry,” she said. “We are family. If we can’t be together, I can accept that. But you are the father of my child, and will always be in my heart. If my strength its needed, it is yours.”

  He reached out to her, finding nothing because he searched in the wrong place.

  He cried, until he felt a comforting touch within his chest, a comforting ssshhh …

  She was there. Promise was beside him, above him, within him. He could not see her, but could hear her, and feel her. And he could see Leslie.

  And Leslie smiled.

  The ship yawed and pitched. The crewmen huddled in their stations. And Aubry came back upright, and finished the exercises that he had begun.

  4

  The steward approached Aubry as he checked the manifest again. It was simple work, taking time but not too much thought, visually identifying crates in their storage racks, scanning their ID numbers into the clipboard linked to the Saint John’s central computer.

  The steward was African, as dark as Aubry, two inches shorter and probably fifty pounds lighter. He spoke thick-tongued Swahili.

  “Hey, boy,” he said. “Seen you dancing out on the deck. Thought I’d seen something like that before, but can’t say where.”

  Aubry’s mind took a little jolt. He heard the words, and they were strange to him, but also tamped down in some way. Simultaneously, he felt himself slide sideways, as if another part of his head were taking over, and he heard himself answer in the same tongue.

  “Nothing special,” he lied. “Just something that I picked up.” He heard his voice, and marveled at the overlay of Brazilian on the Swahili.

  “You speak our language well. My name is Abedi, and I am from the Republic.” He lit a cigarette, and offered one to Aubry. Aubry declined, but watched the smoke drift up in the confined space, curling around the bulkhead.

  Aubry’s interest was piqued. “You must have been born just about the time that the Republic was created—so you don’t remember much. But maybe your parents…?”

  Abedi laughed bitterly. “Yes. My parents. Whoever they are, and whatever became of them.”

  He inhaled again, and then exhaled a long, thin stream. “They were landowners before that communist bastard Swarna. His soldiers came, and took their land, and drove them off to the c
amps.”

  “His soldiers? I thought that he was just an advisor to the rulers of Kenya.”

  Abedi leaned his head back. His dark, thick nostrils flared. “Yes. That is the way it was described, wasn’t it? Don’t kid yourself. He was in charge from the beginning.” He leaned closer. “Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions died. The Westerners have never really understood. Or cared.”

  Aubry nodded. “Why do you go back?”

  “Oh, it’s not bad right now—and I have nowhere to go, and nothing to go to. I have a good job. And that bastard only seems to be immortal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How old is he? How old does he have to be? Near a hundred? More? The pressure must be insane. The Japanese…?” Abedi examined him craftily. “Well, you’ll find out. What do you call that dance?”

  “Capoeira,” Aubry lied. “It is from Brazil. My father taught it to me, long ago.”

  “Well.” Abedi flicked his cigarette toward the rail. It wheeled into the darkness, leaving a trail of sparks on its way to the sea. “Keep practicing. Maybe you’ll get good one day.”

  5

  SEPTEMBER 5. GULF OF ADEN.

  The Saint John’s docked at Ma’habre at 11:42, local time.

  Jumping ship was much easier than Aubry would have expected: the customs agents met him at the bottom of the gangplank, and gave his papers only a cursory examination. Afterward he simply shouldered his rucksack, walked into the crowd thronging the pier, and disappeared.

  His first impression of Ma’habre utterly destroyed his mental picture of Africa. Near the docks, low buildings of steel and concrete shimmered in the awesome heat. Farther into the city international conglomerates were creating a corporate forest: office towers sprouted toward the sky like beanstalks of silvered ice. Black and brown and white men and women in native garb or Western business suits bustled about, obsessed by the same daily business prerogatives as their cousins in New York, or London, or Moscow.

  The Scavenger part of his mind immediately began to study the building techniques, wondering whether he could do the job better, or as well, or cheaper.

  Rucksack over his shoulder, he closed his eyes for a moment.

  A series of hypnotically implanted images, hologram-sharp, flashed against the darkness. He opened his eyes, and began to follow the implanted map.

  The tang of fresh fruit and roasting meat led him to a native marketplace reminiscent of the Maze’s Free Market. His inoculation record was current, and his digestive system adjusted to cope with the local viruses, but there were dangerous local parasites—so don’t eat anything that you can’t cook. Much of the fruit was fertilized with human waste.

  Treated waste, certainly—that was part of Swarna’s land-reclamation program, a program successful enough to migrate north. But there were always problems—if no one was watching, how could they be sure that the compost/cesspools were properly treated?

  So, bacterial and parasitic levels in the fruit stands were regulated in a series of spot checks. The results were not always appetizing.

  A red and black flag hung suspended from a pole at one of the buildings. It immediately clicked with his mental image. Contact point.

  It was dark and a little close inside the building, perhaps ten degrees cooler than the street. Men and women moved quietly, as if striving to conserve their strength and body fluids in the incredible heat.

  They drank coffee from small cups, and talked in low voices, mouths mere inches away from each other, as if a breath away from passion.

  Aubry sat back, trying to shrink. A dozen different languages burbled in the air. The combination of microprocessor and hypnotic implantations translated them into two dozen different conversations. His lips moved clumsily. His words sounded like English to him, but his lips twisted to construct alien combinations of consonants and vowels.

  At length a stranger sat at the table opposite him. The man wore a light half-burnoose, belted at the waist, over American-style denims. He was dark-skinned and Semitic, and stood perhaps five and a half feet tall. His left index finger tapped the table, three times. “I am Hafid. You seek?”

  “Food,” Aubry said, remembering the identification sequence. “I have had influenza.”

  “You should boil your water.”

  “I heard the water was good.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.” The flicker of a smile crossed the man’s face. “Come to my home,” he said. “I think that the selection will be more to your liking.”

  And, it was unspoken, there will be greater privacy.

  Aubry shouldered his rucksack and followed the little man out into the street, past the hawkers and the myriad craftsmen, past the sailors of a dozen nations, and deeper into the heart of an alien land.

  6

  The streets reminded Aubry of the early days of the Maze. Not only the Maze—but Death Valley Maximum Security Penitentiary.

  After he had counted three dozen eye patches, or staring, cheap, obviously plastic eyes, he began to feel sick. The crowd was marked with scars, and limps, fingerless hands, and artificial limbs, and faces flensed of skin.

  “Hafid,” he said at last. “What am I seeing, and why am I seeing so much of it?”

  “It is the free market. Swarna, he has been … kind to my people. He has provided health-care services across the continent. You will find that the level of sickness has dropped … precipitously. The infant-mortality statistics have become negligible. On the other hand …” And here he appeared to choose his words more carefully.

  “For centuries, the people of Africa have been seen as raw material. Our continent has been raw material. ‘White man’s burden’—do you remember that? It was applied to the people of India, of Africa, of the Arab nations. We were to be taken care of. It gave the Europeans the moral justification to come in and take whatever they wanted. They took goods, or services, or freedom, or our life itself and gave us the holy gift of Western education and Christianity. We lost our own souls, in exchange for the white man’s god.”

  He spat into the dust.

  “Now, thanks to Swarna, we are raw material once again, but in a new and more degrading sense. When an American, Japanese, or Brazilian needs a kidney, a gonad … if a woman needs a new uterus … the medical banks of the PanAfrican Republic are immediately accessed. A tissue match is found, and a price is quoted.”

  Aubry felt a chill. “And if the person with the desired organ isn’t willing to sell?”

  “There is always someone willing to sell,” Hafid said. “Always. Examine the contracts signed, in order to buy food on credit from Swarna’s grain storehouses, or to borrow money to buy land. The debt can be called due at any time, due to ‘emergency.’

  “It is a clause which has been invoked many, many times. One case at a time. The borrower has a choice—to lose everything he has worked a lifetime to earn, or to donate an organ.” They had reached a two-storied white clay building at the end of a twisting, narrow street. Hafid unlocked the door and stepped aside for Aubry.

  The room was furnished simply with wooden chairs, and rugs upon walls and floor. Hafid smiled crookedly and threw a rug back from the floor, revealing a trapdoor. He pulled it up, revealing a flight of stairs, leading downward into the earth.

  The stairs were hewn in stone, and purpled by a wavering overhead light. A faint buzzing filled Aubry’s head, but he had the feeling that the buzzing wasn’t external sound—something was happening to his electronics.

  “You may notice a little discomfort here,” Hafid said. “An unfortunate necessity—our null-field suppresses electronics. It has the dampening effect of a thousand feet of rock. Only a combination deep scan and seismological study could detect this safe house. Your friends were very relieved.”

  “My friends?”

  The stairs opened out into a larger chamber, also of stone. A simple refrigerator and stove sat in one corner. On a desk next to them were a small stack of books and a gaslight.

>   “My friends?”

  Aubry’s emotional alarm bells began to chime. Something was wrong. Hafid was hiding something. And in the background of the room, he caught a scent—there were other human beings here. A man …

  The rug suspended from the far wall was swept back, and a huge sunburned man strode out, followed by a lithe woman with short brown hair.

  Aubry was speechless. His carefully programmed Arabic malfunctioned, and he could barely find the English words. “Bloodeagle! Jenna!”

  Halfway around the world, Aubry Knight had found Home again. The three of them embraced. Hard.

  7

  The map was of soiled yellow paper, spread across a rude table and lit by the gas lantern.

  “How in the hell did you get here?” Aubry was still dazed, and confused. And very grateful.

  “You can thank Leslie for that,” Jenna said. She examined his new nose. “Aubry, that face! You look like someone flattened it out with a hammer! All that scar tissue …”

  “It’s the real you,” Bloodeagle said blandly. “We don’t have much time—listen to me. Some of the details of this operation are simply not available—STYX is using isolated data systems, with no reference to the outside, no linkages at all. And others have security which was simply too tight, even for Leslie. But we knew you were coming into Ma’habre, and we had a list of probable contacts from a four-year-old Gorgon operation. Hafid was on the list—we got lucky.”

  Jenna leaned forward. “Tomorrow, you disappear down the pipeline, in a truck caravan carrying workers out to a bauxite mine. We’ll be with you. We break away. A sand skimmer will be waiting for us. We cross the border here—” Her finger touched the map lightly, very close to Aubry’s hand. “And then we’re on our own. Intelligence suggests that Swarna will make an appearance at Swarnaville, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the PanAfrican Republic.”

  “Anniversary of the defeat of the United Nations forces?”