The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  O’Carroll smiled coldly. “Old sage say: ‘What man expect, man see.’ ‘Kalim,’ those artifacts were found by people who’d read Bannister, so they saw what Bannister prepared them to see. You’re on a fool’s errand. And so am I. The difference is: I know it.”

  Kalim was on deck when they finally lost the push from the magbeams, and Malone, back in the power room, engaged the alfvens.

  “Very well,” said Captain January, when Kalim had taken dopplers of the beacons in the cooper belt and the intelligence had verified New Angeles’s vector and position. “We shall go on watch-and-watch. Remember, it’s a ballet out there and the dance is chaos. Bill, go fetch us some sandwiches and drinks. Kalim, go grab some shut-eye. You’ll take the second watch with Maggie.”

  Kalim left the deck with Tirasi. “Remember, it’s a ballet out there,” the acting astrogator muttered as they climbed down the spiral staircase to the wardroom. “Every bleeding time he says the same bleeding thing!” Of course, it was a ballet, and all of the bodies, including the cooper beacons, were in constant motion and ultimately influenced by every other body in the universe—and the equations really were unsolvable. But Kalim did not point that out. It was the iteration that irritated Tirasi, not the fact. “Sleep tight, ye bleeding heathen,” he told Kalim in the wardroom. “You’re up in four—and don’t you bollix my instruments.” With that, he grabbed a basket of sandwiches that Ringbao had prepared, two cups of coffee, and climbed back up to the control deck.

  Four hours later, Kalim relieved Tirasi and, shortly after, Maggie B. relieved January. The captain glanced pointedly at the chronometer, but said nothing. Maggie handed Kalim a cup of coffee and settled herself into the command chair, sipping a second. “Get me a position,” she said when the first watch had gone. “Let’s see how far off true Old Two-face let us drift.”

  Kalim did not react to the gibe. From what he had seen so far, January was a rather competent shiphandler. He checked the log to find what benchmarks Tirasi had shot—Larsen’s Star and the Giblets—and set up the parallax cameras to take fresh images for comparison. He ran the diagnostics, judged the results acceptable, and downloaded them to the stereograph so the intelligence could calculate the parallax, and from that their direction relative to the fixed sky.

  Maggie queried the intelligence, which recommended a slight course correction. “Not too badly off,” she admitted, entering the correction in the astrogator’s log. “Maybe because Annie isn’t here to distract him.”

  Kalim sensed alien ground involving the captain and the two women in the crew. He and Ringbao were aboard for the free—and anonymous—passage to New Eireann, not to take sides in the crew’s internal squabbles.

  “Adds up, y’know,” Maggie told him, perhaps responding to his silence. “The divergence. The least bit off’n true at this point and we’d miss the entrance. Or worse, we’d go in at too dang sharp an angle. It’s gotta be normal to the cross section. Better to miss and come back ’round than to skid going in, an’…” She came to a halting stop, then fiddled unnecessarily with the log. A furrow formed on her brow, a deep fold between her eyes, as if someone had struck her with a chisel.

  “I understand completely, ma’am,” Kalim said.

  “Do you,” Maggie B. said curtly. She shook off the study into which she had fallen. “Get me a Doppler shift on the Eye of Allah—and let’s check our speed.”

  During the last day before entering Electric Avenue, the watch was continuous and the crew took catnaps when they dozed at all. January was always on the deck, although he deferred to Maggie B. for the astrogation. She, for her part, switched from screen to screen on the computer as fast as Kalim and Tirasi could feed her the data. The stellar spectra had blue-shifted as the speed of the ship approached the speed of the medium whereby they measured it. The stars in the forward viewscreen crowded together and actually seemed to recede the faster the ship moved. Visible light slid off the scale, and the sensors shifted to infrared. Ringbao, with no specific duties, ran food and drink to the deck and to the power room, where Hogan and Malone tended the alfvens.

  An hour before entry, Slugger O’Toole appeared, fully rested and sober, and took his place in the pilot’s saddle. “How’s the fookin’ groove?” he asked of no one in particular. “Ringbao, d’ye have any more o’ that tay?”

  Maggie B. told him that the trajectory was within five degrees of normal to the entrance. O’Toole nodded and placed an induction cap on his head. Ringbao handed him the cup and he took a long swig of the hot liquid. “I’ll see yez when I see yez,” he announced, then inserted his earphones and pulled down a pair of black goggles. Ringbao, who had always traveled as a passenger before and had never seen an entrance actually being made, stood in the rear and watched everything with fascination.

  Tirasi took a final set of parallax views of the weirdly distorted sky. The intelligence computed the ship’s bearings and Maggie ordered a final course correction. Her hand hovered over the red slap-button, ready to snatch the last string in the fabric of space and yank the ship over the threshold should the intelligence fail to act.

  The chronometer clicked, Ringbao glanced up at the sound, and—he missed the transition. When he looked again at the forward screen he saw nothing but a blur of xanthic light. January called out, “Status?”

  “In the groove,” said Maggie.

  “Alfvens spinning sweet,” reported Hogan from the power room.

  O’Toole, cocooned in his headgear and in rapport with the ship, said, “Minor skidding. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  And as slick as that, they were sliding down the Grand Trunk Road.

  Now, Shree Einstein once said that nothing in the universe could move faster than light; but like many gods, he spoke in oracles. On one hand, nothing could be seen to travel faster than light; for such an object was moving faster than the medium by which it was seen, and an ancient superstition holds that “out of sight is out of mind.”

  On the other hand, if the universe is composed of all those parts that can be perceived, a superluminal ship is no longer in the universe. Instead, it voyages in those blank regions of the map in which men once wrote “Here there be dragons.”

  So just as a world includes parts unseen as well as seen, the universe is more manifold than subluminal instruments reveal. Yet, the limits still apply. In the superluminal creases, the ship did not move faster than light, relative to local space. It was space itself that was moving. After all, space is not itself a material body, and so not subject to the limits placed on matter. Not even Shree Einstein could tell Shree Ricci to hold still.

  January hosted a dinner in the wardroom to celebrate their entry onto the Grand Trunk Road. “Here’s to a successful slide!” he announced, holding aloft a glass of Gladiola Black Saffron, otherwise known as Old Thunderhead, because it delivered maximum impact at minimum cost.

  “An’ the end o’ th’ fookin’ crawl,” O’Toole seconded him.

  Tirasi twirled the stem of his wineglass between thumb and forefinger. “How smart is it to leave the bleeding control deck unwatched?” he asked. By the roll of the eyes around the table, Ringbao judged this was not the first time he had raised such an objection. He wondered if anyone on this crew ever said anything that the others had not heard unnumbered times before.

  O’Toole favored the Queensworlder with one eye. “We’re in the fookin’ groove, boyo. Dead nuts center in the tube. Won’t need a tweak for another tin watches, by th’ drift.”

  Tirasi sighed elaborately. “We have to trust your judgment then…”

  O’Toole reddened. “My judgment and the intelligence’s!” Too late, he saw the trap. The words were flown!

  All innocence, Tirasi turned to January and said, “As long as an intelligence concurs.”

  January snapped, “Enough of that!” And Tirasi sat back, puzzled and hurt; for in spite of many years in which he might have learned better, he had thought the captain smiling at the joke.

  Neither
Ringbao nor Kalim had joined in the laughter at Tirasi’s trick. Little Hugh thought there was too much malice in it, and he preferred to save malice for when it was genuinely needed. The Fudir, for his part, preferred no distractions from his quest, and becoming embroiled in these petty squabbles was no part of his plan. But Tirasi had heard the two newcomers’ silence, and since he could not chide his own captain, turned to the deckhand. Kalim was sitting between Tirasi and Ringbao, so Tirasi had to lean past him to address Ringbao.

  “You disapprove, Ring-o?”

  “So sorry,” the deckhand answered. “Queensworld humor so subtle.”

  Tirasi made a fist. “Do you know why they call me ‘Fighting Bill’?”

  Little Hugh studied the fist, looked in the acting astrogator’s eye. “Because you cannot control temper?”

  O’Toole burst into laughter. Hogan and Malone traded smirks. Captain January smacked the table. “I said, Enough!”

  “Do you want a piece of me, mate?”

  Little Hugh shook his head. “Too many pieces remain when done. Not able to choose.”

  Both O’Toole and Malone went blank, but Maggie B. understood right off. So did Tirasi himself, who clenched his teeth and glared at Ringbao. But he hesitated. Perhaps he saw something in the deckhand’s face. Perhaps he saw the Ghost of Ardow, for there is a gulf between those who brawl and those who kill, and the Ghost waited on the far side of it. Tirasi backed off, glancing at Kalim, who had been calmly eating his stew the while. “Aren’t you going to help your mate?” he asked with belligerency false in his voice.

  The Fudir blinked and looked up as if in surprise. “Why? Does he need help?” There were little knots of anger at the corners of his jaw, and a certain unexpected hardness had crept into his voice. The others at the table fell quiet.

  And January, in particular, regarded his two new hands more thoughtfully.

  Later, the Fudir visited Little Hugh in his cabin, and shutting the door on them both, he grabbed the younger man by the front of his coverall. “Don’t ever do that again!” he said in a whisper more terrible than a shout. “Don’t ever let them see anything more than a simple deckhand!”

  O’Carroll pried the Terran’s fingers loose. “I didn’t like the way Tirasi was picking a fight with Slugger.”

  “You didn’t like it?” The Fudir shook his head. “You didn’t like it? Did anyone ask that you should? The only one who had to like it was O’Toole, and in case you didn’t notice, he did! He and Tirasi have gone round on round since the cows came home. It’s a ritual with them. Malone takes bets, and everyone clucks in disapproval. So you keep your nose out of their business.”

  Little Hugh shook his head. “No, there was a meanness to it. You’re making it out less than what it was.”

  The Fudir shoved him on the chest. “This from a man ready to throw an entire world back into civil war because he lost his job in a hostile takeover.”

  Little Hugh seized the Fudir’s wrist. “Careful, old man, or I’ll break you in two.”

  But the Fudir only relaxed and said mildly, “We shouldn’t quarrel with each other.” The words were meek enough, but they sounded oddly like Do you really think you could?

  Now there was a new and sudden thought! Little Hugh released the Terran. “You’re not as old as you look,” he said in wonder.

  The Fudir grunted and turned to the door. “Don’t get in any fights with Tirasi. January may have sensed something. Try to be a bit more invisible. That was your specialty wasn’t it? Didn’t they call you the Ghost?”

  “I know disguises.”

  But Hugh’s response was ambiguous and the two parted company, and each considered what the other had revealed.

  Electric Avenue lay along the geodesics, and so was straight as a rule. It was the rule that was warped and twisted. In the groove, everything was always dead ahead. O’Toole checked the ship’s centering at intervals, but the only exciting moment came a week and a half out, when Cerenkov turbulence signaled the bow wave of a vessel sliding down the road in the opposite direction.

  Since a ship on the Avenue was, in a certain sense, nowhere in the universe, no two ships could ever occupy the same place. There was thus no danger of superluminal collisions, only a slight buffeting by ships passing in the light. Now and then, O’Toole corrected for the slight deviations these caused. “But this time,” he swore, “it musta been a fookin’ fleet.” The wake had slewed the ship to the side of the channel, close to the subluminal mud.

  Nothing he couldn’t handle, however. O’Toole dismissed the turbulence off handedly, although Little Hugh found him afterward in the wardroom with a strong drink in his hand and a disinclination to conversation. Even January appeared almost concerned, his perpetual smile flattened nearly to horizontal, and something long and extremely angry had been entered in the ship’s log.

  “They ain’t supposed to enter the Avenue so close together,” Maggie B. explained when Ringbao had asked her. “Creates a passel of problems for the oncoming traffic.” But when he pressed her on how close things had gotten, she only smiled and told him not to worry. That worried him.

  “Why?” the Fudir asked when O’Carroll brought the matter up. “‘A miss is as good as a mile.’ Always a lot of traffic on the Grand Trunk and sometimes it just bunches up. No point worrying over it. January will file a squawk with STC New Eireann.”

  But when they exited the slipstream and yanked themselves into Newtonian space, they found STC New Eireann off-line, and the magbeam cushions failed to catch them.

  Hogan swore mighty oaths and shifted the alfvens into reverse, braking the ship by snatching at the strings of space as they fell inbound from the exit ramp. The whine rose to a teeth-rattling pitch that filled the ship and put everyone on edge. Despite the refit at Gladiola, waste heat made the power room nearly unbearable and Hogan and Malone could take only an hour inside before emerging, sweat-soaked, to pant in the corridor outside and worry whether the containment field would take the strain.

  “How bad is it?” Ringbao asked Maggie B. as she headed for the control deck to relieve January.

  “Not now, Ringbao,” she answered him.

  New Angeles had braked without magbeams before, but this time they hadn’t been expecting it and hadn’t been prepared for it and could ye get out o’ th’ fookin’ way, Ringbao!

  It was hours before the tension eased, a little; and days before anyone relaxed. By then, Kalim had harvested enough off the radio to understand what had happened to the world they were approaching. A fleet of rievers had overwhelmed Jumdar’s planetary police, pillaged New Down Town, and looted everything they could break open.

  “Aye, that’s bad cases, that,” January said, but his mind was on the difficulties of shedding velocity without the magbeam cushions. Lacking the ephemeris from New Eireann STC, Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi and Kalim extrapolated from the ship’s previous visit to identify the markers on which to take their bearings. They cursed the rievers for their troubles. Several days passed in this manner, during which time a few magbeam platforms did come back online. But the world toward which they fell was too busy binding up its wounds to worry much over an inbound tramp. Passing below the orbit of the Dagda, New Angeles secured her first long-distance visuals and they could see orbital factories tumbling like children’s toys broken and flung aside.

  O’Toole fretted, for he had been “bread-and-buttered” in the Vale, and though he had gone and flown, the places in his memory did not lie quiet. “There was a girl there,” he said to Ringbao over a brooding bowl of uiscebaugh. “In Fermoy, it was, and I fancied her some; and I wud av married her but that she didn’t ’prove me dhrinkin’ av the creature. Ah, ’tis the wimmin an’ not the alfvens what drive a man to space. An’ now Kalim sez Fermoy’s been…” He did not finish the thought, but took a drink while Little Hugh O’Carroll fought to stay within the shell of Ringbao della Costa. He laid a hand on the pilot’s forearm.

  “Maybe girlfriend okay,” he forced his p
ersona to say, his words wrung out of any hint of how deeply he himself felt about the world he had once helped manage.

  O’Toole shook his head. “That was years ago…She’s long forgotten me. I thought I’d long forgotten her.”

  An Craic

  The harper frowns in dissatisfaction. “And what is the point of that tale? That to journey hopefully is better than to arrive? I hadn’t thought you capable of such banality.”

  It is difficult to know when the scarred man smiles. His lips hang down the curve of his chin like an old sock thrown across a chair-back. “Why do you think anyone has arrived, or that they have journeyed with any hope?” He laughs. “But let them have their moment.”

  The harper says nothing, but her mouth hardens. “Your humor is too cruel,” she says at last. “I think it has poisoned the story.” She stands to go, but the scarred man’s words, projected somehow by the geometry of the alcove, seem to whisper by her very ear.

  “Where can you go to get the story, poisoned or not? Those who were in it are scattered, gone, or dead. It’s our version you’ll hear, or none at all.”

  She picks up her harp case and slings it across her back. “Don’t be so sure, old man. I did not come here unschooled. Your lips are not the only ones that tell this tale.”

  The scarred man lifts a clawed hand, as if begging. “Don’t go,” he says. It might have been a plea had it been said with more feeling; but there is little of feeling left in him and so it sounds more like a command. “Stay a while longer, for our loneliness.”