The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  “Or that he trusted him too little. That’s a delicate point, don’t you think? But—and maybe you haven’t noticed this, either—the Fudir had to trust O’Carroll, too. Up to a point. The question is, was it to the same point? But, come, drink!” He raises his uisce bowl on high. “Drink to the quest!”

  The harper disagrees. “The quest itself means nothing. The heart of the matter is Jason—and Medea—not the Fleece. The Argonauts could have sought anything, and their fates would have been the same.”

  The scarred man strikes the tabletop with the flat of his hand, and the bowls and the tableware—and a few nearby drinkers—jump a little. “No! What you seek determines how you fail. Had Jason sought a Tin Whistle or an Aluminum Coffeepot instead of a Golden Fleece, the failure would have run quite differently.”

  “More melodiously in the first case,” the harper allows, “and with greater alertness in the second. But, must it always end in failure?”

  “Always.”

  “Your cynicism extracts a price. You can never know the thing in itself, because you always look past it for a hidden reality. I would think all failures alike. Coffeepot or Golden Fleece, failure means you haven’t obtained what you sought.”

  “No,” the scarred man answers mockingly. “Each failure is inevitably, enormously different from all the others. Each man who seeks does so for a different reason, and so can fail in a different way. Hercules failed in the quest for the Fleece; but his failure was of a different sort than Jason’s.”

  “Jason secured the Fleece,” the harper points out.

  “That was his failure.”

  Goltraí: Ships Passing in the Light

  Many an interchange carries more traffic than Jehovah Roads, the scarred man says…

  …but none is ever quite so busy.

  Here, ships may shift from the Champs Elysées to the Yellow Brick, from the Silk Road to the Grand Trunk, and to and from several lesser roads beside. They slide in from Alabaster and far-off Gatmander, from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from Peacock Junction and New Chennai, from Megranome and Valency, from Abyalon and Die Bold and Old ’Saken. Here grand liners mingle with humble freighters, with peacekeepers and survey ships and pirates, with commercial carriers, and tourist cruisers and private yachts, with savvy Chettinad merchants from the Lesser Hanse.

  All this riot of voyagers—high and low, desperate and indifferent, jaded and eager and matter-of-fact—is tossed and juggled by the magbeam “light houses” spotted about the Jehovan system. Drawing their power off the sun, off the wind, off the two superjovians spinning like dynamos in the outer system, and even off the electric currents of the roads themselves, they push outbound ships toward their portals, cushion those emerging, and coordinate the arrivals, departures, and transits in an intricately choreographed opera of words and deeds.

  If the League lives anywhere other than in the secret devotions of her Hounds, it is in this bustling interchange.

  New Angeles leaped into this kaleidoscope, burning off HOJO just behind a Hadley liner plying the inner circuit and just ahead of a Gladiola terraforming ark outward bound for the Rim. At cutoff, when the legendary god Shree Newton would otherwise have seized New Angeles and whirled her ’round in endless ellipses, HOJO Platform Number Two shook hands with the onboard target array and its beams accelerated the ship steadily toward the coopers.

  Old spacehands call this traverse of Newtonian space “the crawl,” and it generally consumes more time than slipstreaming from star to star. It is a slow lazy interval, for most of the grunt work happens portside and most of the skull sweat on the ramp. The crawl passes in boredom and the troubles consequent thereto.

  Portside, there is cargo to load, and although the stevedores handle most of that, the ship still wants a deckhand for the orbital transfer, and no damned outsider is going to settle the stowage on a captain’s ship. Little Hugh O’Carroll learned that, in practice, this meant that Maggie told engineering the balance along each axis, Hogan then told Malone to rectify that balance accordingly, and Malone told “Ringbao” to shift containers within the cargo hold. This struck Hugh as rather more chieftains than clansmen, but he had put up with more tedious labors during the Troubles, and so he did the work willingly, if not happily.

  Mahmoud Malone, his immediate boss, had been born on Gehpari and proved not a bad sort when there was no work to pass along. In unguarded moments he would revert to a Gehparisian accent, in which stresses showed up tardy and final vowels arose like resurrected saints. He was a man of great depth but of limited breadth, so that while he knew very little, he knew a great deal about it. Women, distilled spirits, distilled spirits applied to women, the laws of probability applied to games of chance, and the mulishness of alfven engines could spark endless conversations. Outside this range, his interests dropped off in inverse squares. The easiest way to shut him up was to change the subject.

  “I hand it to yew, Ringbao,” Malone had said, once New Angeles had settled on the hyperbolic trajectory to Electric Avenue, “you air certainly a better workair than that Mgurk. We made the trim of the vessel say bone.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, pressed it to his lips, kissing it. Hugh did not tell him that on several worlds of his acquaintance the circle of thumb and forefinger signified an asshole.

  Of course, “we” meant that Malone had given orders and watched while Hugh sweated cargo containers into place with hand truck, crane, and old-fashioned block-and-tackle—by the end of which Hugh had gained a certain sympathy for the storied Johnny Mgurk.

  “Good,” he answered. “Then we can relax until we reach New Eireann,” with just the lightest ironic emphasis on the “we.”

  Malone’s shrug was eloquent. Who knew what tasks might await the unwary deckhand in his idle moments?

  The deck went on watch-in-four, and the Fudir found himself assigned the third watch, sandwiched between Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi. For the first several rotations, Maggie motherhenned the deck after being relieved, and Bill strolled on early, so that Kalim’s shoulder was never entirely unlooked over. He signed the log and the responsibilities were his, but the other officers were not yet comfortable with him.

  Any crew that has worked long together wraps itself snug into a little society—a culture of shared beliefs, customs, legends, and practices. A newcomer never quite fits in, at least not easily and not right away. There are things that went without saying that now must be said; unspoken accommodations that could no longer be accommodated. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece, the newcomer must turn this way or that until he can nestle comfortably.

  So the acting first and the acting astrogator posed problems to this unknown in their midst. They ran him through the gamut of the instrument tech’s art, from magbeam targeting to Doppler readings to parallax imaging. It wasn’t exercise, of course. This was a for-profit voyage, not a bleeding nursery school—as Tirasi pointed out—and the problems Kalim worked were all relevant to New Angeles’s progress. If, over the first week or so, the results were double-checked by others, the Fudir didn’t mind. “They just want to make sure,” he told Little Hugh afterward, “that I am what I say I am.”

  “Sure, there’s comfort for you,” O’Carroll replied, well aware that the Fudir was not what he said he was. “I suppose when you counterfeited the certificates, you counterfeited the skills that go with them.”

  “The best disguise,” the Fudir told him with a wink, “is yourself.”

  Past the orbit of Ashterath, Jehovah Space Traffic Control passed New Angeles on to Platform Number 18 cupped in Ashterath’s L5; then afterward to others, until finally the push was taken over by the platforms feeding off Shreesheeva, a superjovian in the outer reaches of Jehovah Roads. Each time the direction of the push changed, Maggie B. took her astrogator’s cap back from Tirasi and adjusted the ship’s deflection to maintain the flight plan. Artificial intelligences were all well and good, but they weren’t the natural sort, and there was always that one percent that could not be left to t
houghtless algorithms.

  The intelligence perceived only abstract mathematical objects and theoretical approximations. It believed the data it was fed. But magnetic bottles and steering jets and parallax imaging cameras were real objects made of composites and metals and fields, and subject to all the ills of nature. Models only approximate the physical world, especially at the extremes; and the extremes were precisely where New Angeles was bound.

  By the time she passed the orbit of Shreesheeva, she had achieved a sizable fraction of light speed, and was homing for a hole in space. You can’t get much more extreme than that and stay inside the universe.

  Which, of course, they would not.

  “We call it ‘threading the needle,’” Maggie B. told Ringbao one day in the wardroom when she had come below for a bite before turning in. Ringbao had just finished an overhaul to the portside air-scrubber under Hogan’s profane direction, and he and the engineer had also come to have a supper. O’Toole was present, too, a shwarma pita in one hand, a small beer in the other, and a flatscreen propped on the table before him which he studied intently.

  “Course, both the thread and the needle’s eye are fookin’ invisible,” the pilot said without lifting his eyes from the flatscreen.

  “He means the ship’s trajectory and the entrance ramp,” Hogan explained to Ringbao.

  “Surely, entrance well known,” the deckhand said. He had to take care, especially around O’Toole, not to use an Eireannaughta accent, and consequently had been falling more and more into the rhythms of his childhood.

  “Well, now, ’tis and ’tisn’t,” O’Toole told him. “I’m only the pilot. It’s Maggie who has to find the fookin’ hole in space.”

  “All them stars,” said the ship’s hole-finder, “are a-movin’ relative to each another, which pulls on the currents connecting them—changes what we call the speed of space—and that means the entrance ramp is movin’, too. So, we have to take dopplers and triangulations during the run-up to pin down the position. You gotta hit the dang thing just under light speed, and at just the right angle.”

  “Otherwise, ye skid,” said O’Toole, giving Maggie B. a significant look.

  “Skidding isn’t good,” Hogan added helpfully.

  “Not if ye don’t have a top pilot t’ compensate, it isn’t.”

  “One time,” said Maggie B. “One time!”

  “Twice.” O’Toole tapped the flatscreen with his nail. “That’s why Jehovah Traffic is after giving us the current parameters here—electrical potential, plasma direction, flow rate of space. Your boyo, Kalim, takes the readings, Maggie checks with the astrogation program, and the intelligence computes our heading and speed.”

  “We’ll be on the alfvens by then,” Hogan interjected, to show that the power room had everything in hand.

  “The square-head there”—O’Toole wagged a thumb at Hogan—“thinks he’s flyin’ the ship.”

  “Piece of pie,” said Hogan.

  “I don’t know why they were telling me all that,” Hugh said to the Fudir later, when relieved by Tirasi, the Terran had come down to the wardroom. The two of them were now alone. “Sure, and I’ll never be astrogatin’ a starship.”

  “You were a new pair of ears,” the Fudir said, shoving a readymeal of gosht baoli handi into the cooker. “Each of them was trying to impress you with how skilled he was, and how he had things well in control. There’s a Terran word for it: ‘upsmanship.’”

  Hugh sniffed the meal’s aroma and made a face.

  “It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir said, without even looking up.

  “It lacks something. What’s the ‘true coriander’?”

  “No one knows for certain. We find it called for in many recipes, but whether a vegetable, a spice, or the flesh of some rare Terran beast, who can say? It was found only on Old Earth and the secret of it has been lost for centuries.” With a distant look, he added, “It is all that we have lost, and all that we hope once more to have.” He nodded toward the spiral stairs. “On Old Earth,” he added, “the intelligence could have handled everything, with no human needed to take bearings or make piloting adjustments.”

  “Sure, and it must have been a wonderful age, the age of Old Earth,” said Hugh.

  “It was. We had true AI. We had nanotech. A lot was forgotten during the Cleansing.”

  “Coriander,” Hugh suggested.

  “We had science. Not just engineering, but the real thing. There hasn’t been a new discovery in centuries. Back on Old Earth, we discovered seven impossible things before breakfast.”

  “It does make you wonder,” Hugh said, “how the Dao Chettians managed to overthrow it all.”

  The Fudir looked disgusted, but the cooker chimed and the Fudir took his lunch to the table and sat across from Hugh. He looked about the wardroom to check that no one else had entered. Then he leaned across and lowered his voice. “January may give us trouble. Upstairs, we were talking about his little adventure. He wants the Twister back.”

  “Wants it back…?”

  “As in, ‘you don’t get it.’”

  O’Carroll bowed, striking his breast. “So unworthy, signore. Ringbao only simple deckhand. Not understand deep thoughts of elder.”

  The Fudir looked disgusted, again checked the wardroom, listened for footsteps on the spiral stairs leading up to the control deck. “You know what I mean. If he gets the Twister—the Dancer, he calls it—then there goes your chance to restore the rightful government to New Eireann without another civil war.”

  O’Carroll turned thoughtful. “I don’t know. The first one left a few things unsettled.” When the Fudir said nothing, he sat back, very square, and tucked one hand under his other arm, cupping his chin with the latter. “It’s like chemistry. Jumdar stopped the reaction before it had gone to completion. Matters hadn’t fully precipitated. Jack Garrity already sent one man to kill me. Am I supposed to let that go unanswered?”

  “Why? Do you take turns?”

  “If I restore the rightful government, Jack has to understand that and accept it.” Hugh said “rightful government” without the slight irony that the Fudir usually gave it. Things were always clear in his mind. There was a bright line dividing right from wrong and you were on one side or the other. Yet, as a Terran proverb states, “Ultimate justice is ultimate injury.” Justice is metaphysical, more abstracted from the reality of men and women than even the mathematical objects the ship’s intelligence pondered, and what is bright and clear in that realm may become muddy and approximate in the lower. To the Fudir, that “bright line” was rice flour drizzled in complex patterns, like the kolams that Terrans drew on their doorsteps. It was not always clear just where the other side was, or even if there was one.

  “Are you so certain it was Jack who hired the assassin?” he said.

  The hand fell from Hugh’s chin. “Who else then?”

  The Fudir shrugged. “There’s a Terran proverb: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Sometimes the exiled leader is a better rallying cry than the one who comes back. Prince Charlie was a lot bonnier while he was awa’.”

  The younger man leaned forward, so that his face and the Fudir’s were inches from each other. “My Loyalists…!”

  “…may have gotten used to your absence. If you come back, someone has to step down.” The Fudir was surprised that the scenario had not occurred to O’Carroll. He sat back and, after a moment, O’Carroll did, too. “Don’t worry,” he said. “With the Twister in your hands, it won’t matter what they or Handsome Jack think.”

  “Although it may matter what Jumdar thinks.”

  The Fudir spread his hands. “Legally, you are Planetary Manager. Jumdar was confused by the chaos she stumbled on, but she’s had a chance to sort things out by now. If you press a demand for January’s ‘Dancer,’ she may hand it over, even if it’s just to buy you off. The law is on your side, remember. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “That’s your plan? Wait and see? Somehow, I i
magined something more…devious.”

  “We can try devious; but I’d rather not make plans before I know the situation. ‘A plan is blackmail levied on fools by the unforeseen.’ It’s a barn door for absent horses. It’s always based on what you know, and what you know is always out-of-date. The situation on New Eireann when we get there may be very different from when you left. If Jumdar’s discovered the Stone’s power, that’s one thing. But if not…” He reached out and turned the viewer around. “What’ve you been reading? Bannister’s Treasury of Prehuman Legends. Forget it. Bannister’s not reliable. He doesn’t take the stories seriously.”

  “I found it in the ship’s library. If we’re going wild goose chasing, I want to know what the goose looks like.” He pointed to a fanciful drawing of a dun-colored crystalline creature brandishing a macelike scepter in its claw.

  “The scepter actually looks like a brick,” the Fudir said, “so I don’t suppose the prehumans looked like faceted gems.”

  O’Carroll turned the viewer back. “Ah. You mean, legend not true?”

  The Fudir nodded to the screen. “Bannister doesn’t have the story of the Twister.”

  “I know. So far, have only your word legend even exist, let alone that it true.”

  The Fudir spread his hands. “Thus raising the subtle matter of trust.”

  O’Carroll logged off the viewer and put it away. “Not really. It doesn’t matter if I trust you or not. Either way, I’ll be back on New Eireann. Look, Fudir, I’m grateful you helped out in the alley back then, but you are living a childhood fantasy. Those legends tell us nothing of prehumans, only what we made up after we started finding artifacts. The stories don’t even fit together. No wonder Bannister doesn’t take them literally.”

  “That wasn’t my complaint. I said he didn’t take them seriously. Think about this: Twenty years after Bannister collected those stories, rangers on Bangtop-Burgenland discovered the Grim Chrysalis in a chamber in the Southern Troll Mountains. And a generation later, recreational divers found the Finespun in Lake Mylapore on New Chennai. Half a dozen artifacts described in Bannister’s collection were discovered after publication. Explain that.”