The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  The Memsahb had not turned to look at the speaker, one of those Qing had previously noted as genuinely sympathetic to the Confederacy. Now she said, “Yes. Donovan lives deeply, as I’ve said. His world is tangent to ours at only one point: a petty scrambler. He uses this man to contact us, and we use him. There may be further links in the chain. This man—he calls himself the Fudir—may only know someone who knows someone.” She smiled with a tight horizontal smile. “I understand contact is more secure that way.”

  And indeed it was. One cannot betray a man unknown. Qing shrugged. “If it is a tangle of yarn and Donovan is at the other end, thy duty is to hand me the loose strand that leadeth to him. Where may I find this ‘Fudir’?”

  “That’s the problem,” the Memsahb told him. “He’s gone off-world. A small misunderstanding between him and the Jehovan rectors. He’s ‘in the wind,’ we say, and set no date on his return.”

  “And where might this wind have blown him? Those of Name have little patience. The longer the path to Fudir, the longer the path to Donovan, and the shorter our patience. It is only the end of the skein that matters. Thou art of no account. The Fudir is of no account. Other links are of no account. Thou art nothing; Donovan is everything. The sooner thou sendest me on my way, the sooner I cease to vex thee, and thou may’st return to thy petty thievery and scrambles.”

  “If we are servink Names faithfully,” the dark woman said, “they allow us return to Terra?”

  Qing waited without speaking.

  Finally, the Memsahb bobbed her head. “He’s gone to New Eireann.”

  “A small world,” Qing said, “yet big enough. There is no Corner on New Eireann, but a man in hiding finds no shortage of holes.”

  “He has gone with another, the former Planetary Manager, overthrown by the ICC.”

  Another of the Seven spoke up. “Dey hope to find…”

  But the Memsahb cut him off again. “The Fudir always has his plans, but they do not interest shree Qing, here. But however hard the Fudir may be to find, the return of the O’Carroll of Oriel will surely create a storm, and at the epicenter of that storm, you will find what you seek. O’Carroll will lead you to the Fudir; the Fudir will lead you to Donovan—or to the next link leading to him.”

  The Memsahb seemed to derive some amusement from this. The courier had heard the ancient and obscure Terran phrase—make him jump through hoops—but there was no help for it. A metric week out and another back; but with no firm date for this Fudir’s return, waiting here would take longer. The Fudir must be sought where he had gone.

  Qing decided that the Seven knew no more than they had told him. He rose and bowed over his folded hands, as Terrans were wont to do, though it was a shallow bow to indicate his estimate of their status. “I thank the Memsahb for her assistance in my task and assure her that the Secret Name will learn of her devotion to the Guardians of Terra.”

  “Guardians!” said the first man in a voice of contempt.

  “You are tellink them of our help,” said the second woman, “and our yearnink.”

  Qing said, “The Powerful Name undoubtedly has His reasons for what He does or refrains from doing. Wise men are merely thankful for His wisdom.” He bowed again, this time a sardonic nod of the head, and was out the door.

  When the Seven hurried to the door and threw it open, the colonnade was empty. There was no sign of the courier, neither straight ahead, nor to the left, where the portico turned and ran down a flight of covered stairs to another level. Crisp leaves rattled across the paving in the autumnal breeze. A hand-broom stood propped against the balustrade.

  “Dat makes two,” said Dieter. “How many more messengers have the Names sent?”

  “May he never come again,” said another, who spit on the paving stones.

  “Fool,” the dark-haired woman scolded him. “Cooperation is our only hope of beink allowed to return.”

  The Memsahb shook her head almost imperceptibly. “No, perhaps the Fudir was right about the Twisting Stone. Longer chances have won the game. Come. Back inside. There are still the accounts to review, and it grows chilly out here.”

  Greystroke emerged after they had gone and, brandishing his anycloth, became once again a pilgrim seeking the Mosque of the Third Aspect, to be guided unwittingly out of the Corner by helpful Terrans. As he hurried off down the covered stairs, he wondered what the Memsahb had meant by “the Twisting Stone.” There was something familiar there, a passing phrase, a similar term; but it did not come clear to him.

  At Graf Otto’s Stairs, he paused. He was being watched—an odd feeling, one he was unaccustomed to. But the sound of footsteps echoed his own. He bought a kebab from a street vendor, and took the moment to gaze idly about. He did not expect to see anyone, and his expectations were granted.

  The Other Olafsson, he thought. The Seven had mentioned a previous visitor. The second courier’s duty was to monitor the first, and if he failed to carry out his mission, execute him and take his place. The servants of the Dreadful Name were quite as skilled as any Hound, and more so perhaps than even a senior Pup. Interesting, he thought. If the Other knew that he was not in fact Olafsson Qing, he might never reach his ship alive.

  He quickened his pace, and turned an unexpected corner, reconfiguring his anycloth as he did into a different pattern and cut. He wore once again the brocaded kurta of a prosperous dukndar-merchant.

  Shortly after, he heard the footsteps again.

  While Greystroke simultaneously sought one trail while trying to lose another, Little Hugh O’Carroll tried to grasp the Rieving of New Eireann. The physical damage was simple to inventory; the psychic damage, more difficult.

  There is a subtle difference between a world that has been ravaged and a world that has been ruined. There are no physical parameters for it; there is nothing that can be measured or tested. It can be seen not in the manner and extent of the devastation, but in the faces of those devastated. The Eireannaughta had gazed once before on a burnt and gutted Council House; but before it had been with grim determination. Now it was with slumped shoulders, and something seemed to have receded from behind their eyes.

  Unlike the Rebels and the Loyalists, the Cynthian rievers had come neither to change the world nor to preserve its hallowed institutions nor even to suck the teats of its commerce. Even the ICC owned that much interest in the worlds they managed. One of their corporate maxims was: If the people get rich, you can steal more from them. The Cynthians had come only for “pleasure and treasure.” They took as much of both as they could, and not all the ruins they left behind were buildings.

  A surprise attack across Newtonian space has a paradoxical feature: The defenders receive plenty of warning and yet can do little but wait. Once off Electric Avenue, the attackers must brake to co-orbital speeds, and even with the outsized alfvens all warships carry, this requires several days. But the same cruel dictates of Shree Newton limit the defenders’ ability to intercept the incoming fleet. Long before the Cynthians reached New Eireann, Colonel-Manager Jumdar knew there was nothing she could do to stop them.

  Not that she contemplated surrender. Her database assured her that among the pleasures the Cynthians sought was the pleasure of combat. They were a folk for whom adjectives like “brutal” and “ruthless” were accounted compliments; and nothing so outraged them as a foe who would not fight. Those who surrendered were treated more harshly than those who were defeated—which is not to say that either was treated very well.

  Jumdar’s two ships—troop transports for her rump-regiment—were only lightly armed; and no help could be expected from their home base at the Gladiola Depot, or from Hawthorn Rose, where the remainder of the regiment had gone to complete the original contract. Long before help could arrive from either system, the pirates would be done and gone.

  So it would be the Eireannaughta police boats and Jumdar’s two battalions, presently scattered in peacekeeping posts the length of the Vale of Eireann. At her urgent broadcast plea, veteran Lo
yalists and Rebels stepped forward to defend the Vale and were issued arms from the ICC armory. Handsome Jack was brevetted Major, First Battalion of Volunteers, and given charge of this ragtag group. He immediately advised the colonel to strip the Mid-Vale of troops and to concentrate them in Fermoy and New Down Town. There was little to attract loot-hungry rievers outside the two large cities. They hadn’t come to milk the cows in the Ardow.

  “And put your troops under cover,” he added. “These Cynthians will put their own surveillance in orbit and will drop steel rain if they see anything needing it.”

  “We must be,” added Voldemar O’Rahilly, who was senior-most of the Loyalist contingent, “as hard to spot from orbit as was the Ghost of Ardow.”

  To Jumdar’s surprise, Handsome Jack Garrity had nodded and said, “If only he were with us today.” But he and the O’Rahilly were still thinking in the old tropes, in the old fashion of a wild and wonderful donnybrook. They were still thinking of fighting for a cause. They were not prepared for the utter carelessness of the Cynthians.

  After they had left, Jumdar sat at her desk, stroking the Dancer and calling orders to her two battalions—one to gather in Fermoy, the other in New Down Town. Her staff identified map coordinates where each company could take cover, parking garages and groves of trees under which armored cars could hide. (The heavies had gone to Hawthorn Rose.) Units were placed close enough together for mutual support, but not so close that their mobilization would be evident to overhead surveillance. Compliance was swift and unquestioned.

  Then, all there was to do was to wait for their doom.

  “And so it went,” Tomaltaigh O’Mulloy explained to Little Hugh as they stood before the smoldering skeleton of Council House. Around them clustered the leaders of the Loyalist underground, the remaining Rebel leaders, and Major Chaurasia of the 2nd Battalion, 33rd ICC. The fires had cooled, though there was still a residuum of heat from somewhere deep within the ruined structure that revealed itself in streamers of dull gray smoke. An evil smell shrouded the place, a heavy body of bad air composed in equal parts of metal, wood, plastic, and human flesh.

  “I’ve never seen the like,” the ICC major said. “I’ve never seen the like.” He had said this several times already, and Little Hugh wished he would shut up, say something useful, or at least something different. The wind shifted and the thin, foul smoke wound around them. Kerchiefs emerged to cover nose and mouth. Men and women coughed, backed away.

  “If only ye’d come back sooner,” O’Mulloy said. He was an old Oriel supervisor who had taken Eireannaughta citizenship before the coup.

  Little Hugh didn’t know what possible difference that would have made; but he did not rebuke the man. He did notice that Voldemar O’Rahilly stood a little to the side with his beefy arms crossed over his chest and his golden hair flowing past his shoulders. He had been remarkably cool to the sudden reappearance of the Ghost of Ardow, and Little Hugh remembered what the Fudir had said on Jehovah before their departure.

  “Sure,” said Handsome Jack, who stood to Little Hugh’s left. “He waited until it was all over, and now he comes in to pick up the pieces.”

  “Here, now,” said the ICC major. “We’ll have none of that.” But the threat was spiritless and he no longer had two hale battalions with which to enforce it. Eventually, that would occur to both Eireannaughta factions.

  “The only thing,” Handsome Jack growled at the ICC major. “The only thing you were supposed to be good for was protecting my world—and look what you’ve let happen!” The injustice of the charge showed in the major’s basset-hound gaze, and Hugh quite suddenly desired to take him in his arms for comfort.

  “Not quite the triumphal homecoming,” said Voldemar, as if speaking directly to the ruins, as if Hugh were not standing beside him. Hugh remembered how he and Voldemar and Sweeney the Red had spent a long, rainy night in a tumbledown ecologist’s station on the Crooken Moor, where basaltic granite thrust up through the terraforming bogs, and a Rebel death squad had combed the countryside for them. It hadn’t seemed possible then that three men could grow closer than they had that night. Sweeney moaned softly on a cot, his head wrapped in bandages where a sword cut had lopped off half his nose. Voldemar stood by the hut’s door, glaring out over the trackless black waste. They had not dared strike a fire. We’ll make it, Voldemar had said then with fierce conviction. The Glen’s just past the end o’ these bogs.

  And so they had. But now…What had happened? Have ye grown too fond o’ the leadership, brother Voldemar? Or had the Fudir’s cynicism wriggled like a worm into his own heart, so that he saw treachery now where there was only anger and despair.

  “They split her chest open,” Major Chaurasia said, again speaking as if to ghosts. “Down the breastbone with a cutting laser, and then they pried the rib cage apart and spread the lungs out over them. They looked…I saw her later, after. They looked like wings…”

  Two in the knot of people around Little Hugh covered their mouths and ducked quickly aside to retch.

  “Called the Blood Eagle,” said the Fudir, who had not been present a moment ago. He had gone off to the field hospital on some purpose of his own. Now he was back.

  The ICC major looked at him. “Blood Eagle,” he repeated witlessly. “It’s an art form among the Cynthians. They even have special instruments to perform it.”

  “Art.” The idea was incomprehensible. The major shook his head. “Why punish her for defending the world as best she could?”

  “It wasn’t punishment,” the Fudir explained. “It was tactical, to take the will out of their enemies.” Looking around at the Eireannaughta, he added, “I’d say it worked.” Then, in a lowered voice, he whispered to Hugh, “I found what she did with the Dancer.”

  “They used it more than once,” Handsome Jack murmured. “That…Blood Eagle.” He was a one-eyed man, now, as well as a one-armed one. “Not only on Jumdar…”

  Little Hugh turned away from Council House and looked down the slope of Council Hill to the smoldering ruins of New Down Town.

  “They set fires,” said O’Mulloy. “Sometimes, they didn’t even loot a house first. They simply torched it. For no reason.”

  “They had a reason,” the Fudir told him. “It was fun.”

  “But,” said the major, “what profit was there? To come, what, fifty days’ travel from the Hadramoo? And for what?”

  “They didn’t come for profit,” the Fudir told him. “They came for honor and glory.”

  The major drew himself up. “Honor…” But then he seemed to deflate. “There’s no profit here anymore. That’s a certain thing. The orbitals the Cynthians didn’t smash and loot are being abandoned. O’Carroll, would you take some of the factory personnel back to Jehovah on your ship? I’ve sent a swift-boat to Hawthorn Rose to call back the rest of the regiment, but…”

  “It’s not my ship,” O’Carroll told him. “Ask January.” But that sounded too callous, so he added more kindly, “I’m sure he’ll take as many as he has room for.”

  Later, Hugh met privately with Handsome Jack. No one was quite sure who held the management contract anymore. The ICC was going to break it—both men had read that in the major’s eyes. There’s no profit here anymore. But did that mean automatic reversion to House Oriel? Or was the contract, as some said, “up for grabs”?

  They sat across from one another at a broad table in the old ICC factor’s residence. Cargo House had been looted along with most everything else in the capital. Pale outlines on the walls marked where paintings, watercolors, and digitals had once hung, and Hugh thought he remembered, from an earlier visit in another era, a chemical sculpture in which substances of changing hues and various densities had writhed snakelike in a tank in the corner. But the ICC building had not, withal, been burned, as so many others had. And there were even a few chairs that had not been reduced to splinters and scraps of fabric. The table had once been polished to mirror-finish—it was red gristwood from Nokham’s World—but t
oo many boots had scuffed it in the looting and a twisted, puckered scar ran where a laser had burned a vulgar word in the chief language of the Hadramoo.

  This had been the factor’s dining hall, Hugh remembered. Imported Gatmander salmon on plates of Abyalon crystal. Candlelight and sandalwood, and in that corner, a blind Terran pandit had played an evening rag on a santur. There had been no factions then. Or at least the factions had not yet made themselves known.

  Earlier that morning, a larger meeting had sat around this table. The United Front for the Restoration of the Vale—a grand name, but no one had wanted to defer to another, and so it had been less full of decisions than of discussions. Hugh had kept silent throughout most of the proceedings. On-planet only a few days, he did not know enough about the current state to say anything useful. That had not impressed the Loyalists at the table, who had expected that their legendary leader would sweep away all problems with a few wise words. And on those few occasions when he did speak up, the Rebel faction had expressed their utter lack of confidence. Major Chaurasia had tried to impose order, but lacked the will to do so effectively.

  “One thing I’ll say for the old bitch, Jumdar,” Handsome Jack Garrity said, now that the others had left. “She could lead. People hopped to when she spoke, not from servility, but because she inspired.” He ran his hand through barley-brown hair. “Chaurasia knows how to carry out orders, but damn me if he knows how to give them.”

  Little Hugh steepled his fingers. “It will take me a while to get ‘up to speed,’ but…”

  “We don’t have the time for your fookin’ learning curve, lad. People are hurting now.”

  “I know that! We need to get a clear picture of the As-Is state and a vision of the Should-Be state and imagine the change-path that will get us there. Jack, we heard a report today on milk and grain from County Meath—but how accurate was it? Will there be enough to feed New Down Town? How will we get it here? Has anyone worked out the logistics, mobilized lorries and floaters, set up an Action Plan?”