The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  “They’re digging in the wrong place! The mass densitometer showed the ore closest to the surface here!” His finger stabbed the map projection on the viewer. “Greatest benefit, least work.”

  “The least work,” she reminded him, “was to cannibalize part of the ship. That’s what Hogan recommended.”

  “Cannibalize the ship! Oh, that’s a wonderful idea!” January cried, and for an instant Anne almost believed he meant it, so happy was his countenance. “And after a few rounds of that,” he continued, “there’d be no ship left to repair.”

  Anne thought it might also mean less ship to break down, but she forbore expressing that thought.

  “Someone should put a bug up their asses,” January said. “Hogan can’t spend his whole life playing cards.”

  Anne sighed and turned away. “Alright…I’ll just…” But January stopped her.

  “No, you stay up here, keep on top of things. I’ll have Slugger take me planetside in the gig.”

  His Number One, who had been turning toward the radio and not toward the boat davits, hesitated. Amos had decided that the Personal Touch was needed. This was a mistake, in her opinion. On the radio, his voice, pure and hard, might have transmitted some of his urgency. Delivered in person, it never would.

  Slugger O’Toole grounded the gig near the jolly-boat, and January was out the hatch before the sand beneath had even cooled. It was the sort of planet where skinsuits will do. The air was thin and cold, but could be gathered into breathable quantities by the suit’s intelligence. The breather made talking difficult, and gave the voice a squeaky texture—not a good thing, under the circumstances.

  Striding across the gritty plain, he saw that the work party had moved the backhoe and sieve over into the lea of the low ridge that bordered the sea of sand. Further, having seen the gig land, they had stopped to watch the captain’s approach. This was one more straw on January’s personal dromedary. Did they think they could dally here forever?

  The backhoe had been digging in a drift just below a cleft in the face of the ridge. Atop it, half-turned in her seat, Maggie Barnes waited. The engine hummed in idle. Every now and then, its insolators twitched a little to follow the world’s sun. Maggie—she liked to be called Maggie B.—was a short, thick woman with unwomanly strength in her shoulders. Her skinsuit was a sky-blue, but of a different sky on a far-off and almost forgotten world. Here, the sky was so pale it was almost white.

  Tirasi, the system tech, tall and thin and with the look of a cadaver awaiting its tag, stood by the smelter with his arms crossed. The molecular sieve had already processed the needed silicon—mining sand had been no problem—and awaited now only some heavier metals. Occasionally, he tweaked a knob, as if fearful that the settings would otherwise all run amok. The deckhand Mgurk waited with a shovel planted in the sand, hands draped over the handle tip, and his chin resting upon the hands. His dull red skinsuit nearly matched the oxide sands, and he wore his hood pulled so tight that the goggles and breather mask were all that could be seen.

  The sight of so much work not being done further aggravated January, who greeted them by squeaking, “You were supposed to be digging over there!”—indicating the vast open and featureless expanse of the desert.

  Maggie B. had not known why the captain had dropped planetside. Anne had stayed out of it, and New Angeles was now below the horizon. A variety of possible reasons had suggested themselves, chief among them that Hogan had aroused himself and found another source of metal and, therefore, no further work was needed by the surface party. To be told she was digging in the wrong place was so unexpected that she laughed aloud.

  It must be a joke, right?

  No, it wasn’t. So she threw up her first line of defense. “Over there, it itches!”

  Itches! Yes. The constant winds carried fines of sand, and while the air was too thin to carry much force, the continual spray on the skinsuit tickled.

  “Tickled,” said January, suspecting some trick.

  “Over here, we’re in the cliff’s wind-shadow.”

  “But the ore body is buried deeper here!”

  Now, by this time, it would have meant more work and more time to return to the original site and start over. The hole was by now already half-dug. Maggie snapped at him. “Makes no damned difference where I dig!”

  Now, that may have been the last moment of sanity in the universe, because it should have occurred to all of them that if it made no difference, why had she moved in the first place? In fact, it did make a difference, and a damned one at that. But that came later. In truth, she had simply felt an urge to move the machine.

  “You’re wasting my time, Captain,” she snapped, and as if to prove this point, she put the backhoe into gear.

  One more scoop and the claw tips of the bucket made a peculiar, almost musical screech that set their teeth on edge. Even Mgurk roused himself, lifted his chin, and peered into the pit.

  Something dull and metallic lay beneath the sand.

  “The ore body,” said Maggie in quiet satisfaction, and gave January a triumphant look.

  “Must be a meteorite,” said Tirasi. But January knew immediately that was not right. This close to the surface? With no sign of an impact crater?

  “Who cares?” Maggie said, and drew the backhoe for another scoop. Again, that singing note called out. Mgurk cocked his head as if listening.

  “It’s smooth,” said January when more of the body had been revealed.

  “It’s bloody machined,” said Tirasi, who had abandoned the smelter to kneel at the pit’s edge. Maggie Barnes hopped off the backhoe and joined him.

  “Nonsense,” January said. “Rivers will smooth a stone the same way.”

  Tirasi swung his arm wide. “See any rivers nearby?” he demanded. “Water ain’t flowed here in millions of years. Nah, this here’s a made thing.” He pulled pliers from his tool belt and tapped the object. It rang, dull and hollow, and the echoes went on longer than they should have.

  January squeaked, “Johnny! Bring that shovel over and clear this out a bit. Johnny? Johnny!” He looked up, but Mgurk was nowhere in sight. “Where has that lazy lout gone now?”

  It was a fair question, given that for many leagues in any direction lay nothing but gritty, open desert. Johnny had an aversion to hard labor and showed wonderful imagination in its avoidance; but where in all those miles could he have hidden himself? January used the all-hands channel on his radio. “Johnny, get your lazy carcass over here and help us dig!”

  He heard static on the bounceback—a burst of noise that might have had a voice in the center of it. It seemed on the very edge of forming words.

  O’Toole answered from the gig. The sudden excitement of the group at the site had attracted his attention. “Johnny’s after wandering off t’ the cleft,” he told them. “What’s going on?”

  Maggie Barnes told him. “We found us a prehuman artifact!”

  What else could it be, a machined object, buried under the sand on a forgotten world? The works of man are wondrously diverse and widely spread, but where you find them you generally find men as well; and none had ever ventured here. “Let’s not count chickens,” January chided them. But for once his Santa Claus countenance did not lie. There might be riches here, and he knew it as well as they did. Yet caution led him to say, “Not every prehuman artifact—”

  But he was talking to the wind. O’Toole was already clambering down the ladder from the gig, and Tirasi had leaped into the pit to brush sand away from the buried object. “Big,” the system tech muttered. “Big.”

  Too big, January noted of the portion thus far revealed. The boats would never lift it, not all of them combined. “Not every prehuman artifact,” January tried again, “has made money for its finders. House of Chan had the Ourobouros Circuit for most of a lifetime and could never make it do anything. After Chan Mirslaf died, they sold it as a curio for half what they spent experimenting on it.”

  “Hey,” said Tirasi. “This thin
g’s translucent!”

  “And the Cliffside Montage on Alabaster sits in the middle of a plain, visible for leagues, so the Planetary Council can’t even fence it off and charge an admission fee.” January sighed and crossed his arms.

  “Well, Cap’n,” said Maggie B., proving someone had been listening, “we won’t know till we know what it is, will we?”

  O’Toole arrived from the gig and paced round the circumference of the pit, whistling and exclaiming. A big, blocky, thick-fingered man, he always moved with unexpected grace and dexterity, even when—or especially when—he had hoisted a few pots of beer.

  “So let’s not get our hopes up before we know what we have,” January said. “How many prehuman discoveries have been nothing more than empty chambers or the shells of buildings?”

  “There was an entire city on Megranome,” Maggie recalled. “And near as we could figger, it was formed as a single structure, with no seams or joints. We used to go over there when I was a kid and play in the ruins, pertending the prehumans was still there, hidin’ ’round the next corner.” She laughed, then turned suddenly, as if startled, and her gaze swept the open desert. “Wonder where they all went to. The prehumans, I mean.”

  January shrugged. “Who cares? No matter.”

  “We usta call ’em ‘the folk of sand and iron.’ Nobody knew why. Makes our reason fer stoppin’ here a little weird, don’t ya think?”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” said January. “They were gone long before humans went to space.”

  O’Toole had finished his circuit of the pit and had returned to where they stood. “Don’t ye believe it, Cap’n,” he said. “They tell stories. On Die Bold, on Friesing’s World, specially on Old ’Saken. Hell, half the Old Planets have stories o’ th’ prehumans.”

  Maggie B. nodded vigorously. “Some of them old legends are so old they been forgot.”

  January snorted. “Myths, you mean. Legends, fables. I’ve heard them. If any two of them describe the same creatures—if any two stories even fit together logically—they’d be the first two. We don’t know when the prehumans were around, or for how long. We don’t know if they ruled this quarter of the galaxy or only roamed through it. There’s probably a tall tale to cover every possibility. People can’t tolerate the inexplicable. So they tell a story or sing a song. All we’ve ever found were their artifacts. No human ever saw them in life.”

  “They mayn’t been even life as we know it,” said Maggie B. “Mebbe, they was fluorine life or silicon life or somethin’ we ain’t never figgered on.”

  “Silicon, eh?” said O’Toole. “Now, I’m not after hearin’ that one. Hey, maybe they nivver disappeared. Maybe, they just crumbled into sand and”—he waved his arm over the surrounding desert—“and maybe that’s all what’s left o’ th’ fookin’ lot uv ’em.” The quickening wind stirred the sand, lifting and tumbling granules as if they were dancing.

  “And maybe,” said Tirasi from the pit, “you can jump down here, Slug, and help me dig the bloody thing out!”

  Tirasi always managed to slip under O’Toole’s skin, not least of all by abbreviating the man’s nickname. Physically opposite, they were much alike in spirit, and so repelled each other, as a man spying himself in a fun-house mirror might step backward in alarm. From time to time, they debated whether “Slugger” or “Fighting Bill” were the weightier epithet, with the question still undetermined. Slugger was a bull; Fighting Bill a terrier. The pilot leapt into the pit with the system tech, and they both dug and brushed the sand off the artifact using their hands.

  January shook his head. “And Mgurk has the shovel, and he’s not about. Maggie, you dig some more around that thing. See how big it is and—maybe—you’ll find that ore body while you’re at it.” This last was intended sarcastically, to remind them why they were beached on this forsaken world in the first place. The artifact wasn’t going anywhere, and if they didn’t complete the repairs, New Angeles wasn’t either.

  Maggie moved the backhoe a little farther off and began to probe for the edge of the artifact. Her digger came down too hard into the sand and struck a still-buried portion of it. It rang like a great bass bell, a little muffled, but loud enough that the two men in the pit clapped their hands to their ears. January, who had been searching for some sign of Mgurk’s dull red skinsuit, noticed the sand vibrate into ridges and waves half a league away.

  About where the mass detector had located the “ore-body’s” closest approach to the surface.

  January had a sudden vision of the artifact as a buried city, all of one piece, honeycombing the entire planet, and that Tirasi and O’Toole would grub about it forever, brushing the sand from it, inch by inch.

  “We ought to go look for Johnny,” he began uneasily, and then stopped with his words in his throat, for three dull clangs reverberated from within the buried shell. Tirasi and O’Toole started and scrambled back from it. Maggie made the sign of the wheel across her body and muttered, “The Bood preserve us!” After a few moments, the clangs were repeated. “Ye turned it on somehow,” O’Toole told the system tech.

  “Or you did,” Tirasi answered. He began to brush furiously at the sand that covered the thing, clearing a space. Then, shading his eyes with his hands, he pressed his face to the translucent surface. “I can see inside, a little. There are shapes, shadows. Irregular, ugly. Can’t quite make them…Aah!” He scrambled back in alarm. “One of ’em moved! It’s them! This is where they all went to! Holy Alfven help me!” He began to clamber out of the pit, but O’Toole grabbed his arm. “You were right about the ‘ugly,’” he said, pointing.

  And there, with his face pressed to the inner surface of the shell, was Johnny Mgurk and the shovel with which he had been beating the walls.

  The entrance was in the cleft, of course, obscured by the shadows in a fault in the southern face—a darker opening in the darkness.

  New Angeles had come back over the horizon by then, and January informed Micmac Anne what had happened, cautioning her not to tell Hogan and Malone lest, transfixed by visions of easy wealth, they abandon ship and drop planetside in the lighter.

  January thought at least one of his crew should stand guard outside the entrance. In case. In case of what, he couldn’t say, which did nothing to win their assent. The others thought he wanted to cut them out of a share in the treasure, which by now had in their minds achieved Midas-like proportions. All was decided when Mgurk appeared in the entry and said, in his execrable Terran argot, “Hey, alla come-come, you. Jildy, sahbs. Dekker alla cargo, here. We rich, us.” And so they all hurried after him.

  January was the last to enter, and the clambering footsteps of the others had faded before he reached the point where the cave became a tunnel with a flattened footpath. He passed an enormous white stripe on the wall, three man-lengths high and a double arm’s-length wide. January had barely registered the peculiar dimensions when it struck him that it was the edge of a sliding door nestled into a slot in the rock. Yes, there was the matching slot on the other side of the passage. Pulled out, the door would seal off the entrance. January was impressed. That was one thick door.

  And made of marshmallow.

  No, not marshmallow, he decided, pressing it experimentally, but some highly resilient material. He pushed, it yielded. He released, and it sprang back. Elastic deformation. He pushed as hard as he could, and his arm sank into the door up to his elbow. It would submit to a chisel or a drill bit in exactly the same way, he decided. A jujitsu material, strong because it yielded.

  As soon as he relaxed, the material snapped back, ejecting his arm with all the stored energy with which he had pushed and nearly dislocating his shoulder. Jujitsu material, indeed, he thought, rubbing his shoulder. Best not try chisels, drills, lasers, or explosives. It would absorb all the energy, and then give it back. His curiosity ran high; but not that high.

  Whatever had required such a barrier must be of inestimable value. He rubbed his hands in anticipation of the wealth waiting below
.

  Yet, one thing troubled his mind. A door so thick had been meant to bar entry against the most determined explorer. He could not imagine that little Johnny Mgurk had simply rolled it aside. Perhaps the lock had failed over the eons and the system had been designed to fail open.

  But why design a “fail open” mode into an impassable barrier?

  As he continued deeper inside, the rough rock walls smoothed out into an off-white ceramic. Faint veins of pale yellow ran through it, though whether decorative or functional, he couldn’t say. Here artistically sinuous, there fiercely rectangular, they could be either, or both. But if decorative, he thought, prehuman eyes had been attuned to finer color contrasts than humans.

  Or they’d had lousy interior decorators.

  The passage wound down a spiral ramp and some freak of geometry cut off the sounds of the crew’s voices, leaving a radio silence within which a persistent static hiss rose and fell irregularly, like a snake trying to speak. The dry air, the constant, sandy wind…the planet must be an enormous ball of static electricity.

  He came at last to the chamber that the backhoe had uncovered. Through the translucent ceiling drifted the light of the pale sun. It was an oval room of gray sea-green accented with undulating curves of slightly darker shade. The walls seemed to swirl about in unending stillness. Had the effect been meant for beauty, January wondered, or just to make people dizzy? But if prehuman technology was unknowable, their aesthetics were unfathomable.

  Arranged irregularly about the room, eleven pedestals emerged seamlessly from the floor. All but one were faerie-thin, and all but four were empty. In a separate chamber, entered as through the languid petals of a fleshy white lotus, a twelfth pedestal, also empty, swept in a graceful exponential arc from the floor. Amid this peculiar cornfield his crew darted with great exclamation.

  At the farther end of the room, but off set from the tip of the oval, another white, spongy door sat half-open. Through this opening, January could make out a long, dim corridor receding into the blackness.