The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  An unstable arrangement, she thought. Complexity upon complexity, and the least wrong move would send it all crashing into chaos from which only the most nimble thinker could pluck victory. White’s prince was castled, refusing to meet the opposing princess.

  After a time in which nothing seemed to happen, White picked up his teacup and sipped. He put it down again. Nothing happened some more.

  Then, with a shrug, he sent a White hound leaping out.

  A mistake! Bridget ban took a swallow of Gray Thoughts, and leaned forward a little to see how Red would respond.

  Red barely noticed. He moved his prince forward one square. “These are bad times,” he commented after a sip from his cup.

  White’s turban—richly green, shot through with ochre threads and golden bands—bobbed side to side in agreement. “The ICC grows bold and arrogant. They strut.”

  It was the custom of the Chettinad traders when in public to speak in allusions. “Three ships of Sèan Company passed through the Junction yesterday,” said Red. “They paid no duties as poor Chettinads must pay. This was said by a customs officer far gone in her cups.”

  “‘Drink makes truth.’”

  “‘Wise is the sober man.’”

  “Would only that such wisdom extended to the movements of princes.” White advanced a second hound on the other side of the field, threatening Red prince.

  “‘Long-lived are the fish that rise not to the bait,’” Red observed, shifting a minion laterally to take a White minion. “Why do our cousins in Sèan Company preen? Strange words have been said. With the aid of sand and iron, they shall make the Ardry himself their minion.” He raised his head from the board and met his companion’s eyes. “Hard words, those; and what did the speaker mean by their saying?”

  White shrugged. “It is not for poor Chettinad traders to know such things. To move excellent goods at fair prices is all they desire. The moods and wants of high kings are nothing to them. But what if their rivals should gain such power over kings?”

  “Then woe to the poor Chettinad, and to his wives and children.”

  Bridget ban placed her cup on its saucer with a tiny click and said, as if to no one in particular, “The Ardry has ears everywhere, but knows not always the meaning of what he hears.”

  White bowed his head, and a small smile played across his lips. “May the wisdom of the Ardry increase—or that of his ‘ears.’” Red grunted in amusement.

  “The Ardry,” said Bridget ban, “is the servant of the League and its Member States.”

  White cupped his chin and studied the board. “The Ardry may be a servant of the League, but he cannot wish to be a servant of Sèan Company.” He moved a councilor down a diagonal.

  Red made the sign of the wheel and touched his chakras. “May the Bood forbid such a thing.”

  Bridget ban returned to her hotel room and prepared for her “assignation” with Pulawayo. She stripped herself of the uniform, and showered the heat away. Afterward, she inspected the clothing she had brought, mentally inventoried that which remained aboard her ship, and sighed with frustration. Pulawayo had asked that she wear the uniform; but did she really care about the wrapping for the confection she desired? (He, she amended the thought. The surgery was done by now.)

  She needn’t worry about dressing seductively. The conclusion was tacitly agreed. So, comfort, convenience, and inconspicuousness were the order of the day. Something she could remove and don with relative ease, and which would not stand out on the street.

  Which was sounding more and more like a topless srong in bright, gaudy colors.

  She went to the ’face that sat on a desk by the wall and accessed the hotel’s system, accepted a nuisance charge to her bill, and slid out into the information slipstream. She screened on the Director’s name, found it moderately common, and fined up the mesh size with job position and hobby.

  Teacup patterns. There! As she had thought, Pulawayo took enormous pride in her…in his hobby—damned genderbending nuisance custom—and had set up an information locus where people could see examples, comment approvingly, and even purchase complete tea sets. Hah. One commentator had written that the designs were insipid.

  Well, there was more than one way to practice seduction. If the body’s surrender was a foregone conclusion, that of the mind was not. And what the Hound wanted from the Director was not the body.

  She downloaded the pattern for the teacup she had seen at the STC tower and extracted the colors from the duck’s feathers. These, she entered into a drawing program and set it for smooth abstract shapes and long sweeping lines.

  The result was a pattern that suggested the duck’s plumage from the teacup without being a mere representation of it. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Pulawayo might not consciously notice, but seduction need not be conscious and no one ever made an enemy of a parent by praising the child’s beauty.

  When the pattern had downloaded, she consulted Benet’s Sumptuary Guide to the Spiral Arm until she found something she could reasonably wear as a top for a srong: a light poncho used by the Kushkans on ’Bandonope. It was short and made of diaphanous cloth. She entered her personal measurements.

  Then she went to a drawer, pulled out two bolts of anycloth she had brought with her, and inserting the data-thread into the port, downloaded the design and the cut into the cloth. The micro-electromechanical weave shimmered and became…a duckwing srong and matching poncho top. The gaudy ensemble would win no kudos in the fashion houses of Hadley Prime, but it would pass for inconspicuous here.

  The Director’s home lay in the Nolapatady, a district of the capital easily reached on the maglev’s Sandpipe line. The house proved an oval building of intricately carved dark wood that encircled a central courtyard open to the sky. In the courtyard, interlocking fishponds were fed by an elaborately decorated terracotta rain-catcher and cistern. Planters, atria, and the artful placement of furniture served in lieu of internal walls, so that from any point around the orbit of the house, one could cross to any other point. Overhanging eaves and runnels in the courtyard prevented rainwater from entering the residence itself.

  Pulawayo met all of Bridget ban’s fairly low expectations that evening. She—now he—proudly displayed the results of the surgery, and panted and pawed and squeezed and made numerous exclamations of what were apparently intended as signs of masculine appreciation and pleasure. Bridget ban made a few comments herself; but they were planned, and intended to achieve a certain rapport with the Director. She had earlier applied a numbing agent so that she would not be distracted by untoward sensations at crucial moments, but in retrospect she thought that she needn’t have bothered.

  There was a Terran proverb she had heard: Practice makes perfect. But Pulawayo had not spent enough continuous time as either man or woman to get much practice at either.

  She was slightly nettled that the Director had not noticed the effort she had put into her outfit. The deliberation was not supposed to be noticeable, but some comment would have been welcome. Instead, the Director had pouted a bit that she hadn’t worn her uniform, and the Hound wondered if this indicated some need for dominance. So she took the upper role, told him exactly what to do, praised him when he did it right, slapped him when he didn’t. She could not help thinking of how one trained puppies.

  She had worn a crystal pendant—a product of Wofford and Beale on New Eireann—and as she moved rhythmically above him, it swung to and fro, catching the light from the foyer. She murmured to him in a low monotone, at first using standard terms of endearment and pleasure, but after a time shifting to suggestions of sleepiness and fatigue. Are you tired? You can’t be tired already. You can hardly keep your eyes open…

  Soon, aided by the physical release, Pulawayo lay in a drowsy, hypnotic state upon the cushions and silks that ’Cockers used for beds. Bridget ban softly dismounted, pulled a sling chair to the side of the bed, and set to work.

  It did not take long to learn the pass codes and th
e location of the hard key to the STC database. Suspecting that the ’Cocker love of indolence meant a great deal of telefacing from home, she tried the keys and codes on Pulawayo’s home ’face, and was gratified to find her assumption justified.

  She used the data-thread to download the information into her clothing. The database was rather large, and she could leave nothing but the “duckwing” outfit in active memory. That was chancy. One system crash, and she’d be wearing two gray towels around her waist and shoulders.

  When she was finished, she erased all memories and logs from the ’face. She had been wearing fingercaps, so no genetic information was on the keyboard, and for any genetic traces found elsewhere, she had established a reason that any ’Cocker would readily accept.

  A moan escaped from the bed area. Bridget ban frowned, because Pulawayo should not be coming out of the hypnosis on his own. She dashed across the courtyard, around the fishponds, and between two thick pillars carved to resemble tree trunks, coming to the mound of cushions and drapes on which the Director lay.

  Pulawayo was still under, but his mouth opened and closed slackly and his throat, loose in sleep, struggled to form sounds. Talking in his sleep, she thought. He must be dreaming.

  But the ’Cocker dialect was built of lazy lips and throats, and Bridget ban’s implant began to make sense out of the moans, helping her to hear them in Gaelactic.

  “Where did you go?” the Director said. “Why did you leave me?”

  Bridget ban had been leaning over the bed to hear better. Now she stood straight in alarm, thinking furiously. He couldn’t have come out of it. “I needed to use your facilities,” she temporized. “Go back to sleep now.”

  “He is asleep. Why did you ask him about the access codes?”

  Him? It was eerie enough to be conversing with a sleeping man. To hear him speak of himself in such a detached fashion reminded Bridget ban of old Die Bold tales of “spooken” that could take over your body. Each New Year’s Eve, with other Die Bold children, she would dress in terrible and frightening costumes, pretending to be already possessed and trusting to professional courtesy. The practice was taken less seriously than in Settlement Days, but the recollection came on her so suddenly and so completely that for a moment she almost ran in terror from the house. Only her iron control kept her at the bedside long enough to realize what must have happened.

  “He was going to give me that information in the morning,” she said. “Hush. You sleep, too. That was quite a ride we had. You must be tired.”

  “I’m not tired; but, oh, you were so good. And your clothing—that was a nice compliment. I don’t want them to hurt you.”

  “No one’s going to hurt me.”

  “They’ll be waiting outside, on the street to the maglev. He suggested it. He said the secret was worth the risk.”

  “What secret?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll remember when he wakes up, I suppose.”

  Of course. The paraperception. Awake, both halves of the brain would be cross-talking. Right now she was talking to Pulawayo’s emotive-perceptive half, but naturally they gave both hemi spheres access to the speech center.

  Note to self: when interrogating a paraperceptic, be sure to hypnotize both halves.

  Gently, she calmed the frightened half of the brain. Then, speaking into the right ear, she told the other half that he’d had a confused dream, and he would forget it when he awoke. She described their lovemaking as more passionate than it had been, and played to his fantasies by telling him she had worn her Hound’s uniform and they had played dominance games. She told him that she had left an hour before the current clock time. She told him they had kissed at the door.

  There. The memories most easily recalled are the ones that we wish we’d had. If he remembered from his other half that she had left the bed during the night, he would ascribe that to her female needs.

  Then, surrendering to an impulse, she pulled up the right eyelid.

  The eyeball was rolled back in its socket, moving in a slow rhythm.

  She pulled up the left eyelid.

  And it was looking right at her.

  “Good-bye,” she told the left ear. “You were wonderful. I shall never forget you.”

  It was a small lie, and she needed the gratitude and cooperation of that half.

  It was night and the street was shrouded in darkness broken by the pools of light created by the lamps. Most of the houses were dark blocks set into the night. A few, at this late hour, showed pale lamplight behind shades and curtains. A distant hiss marked the Hilliwaddy River where it spilled over the rocks in its descent from Polychrome Mountain. The wind stirred the trees into whispered excitement.

  She had reached the corner and had turned onto Olumakali Street leading to the maglev station when she smelled them.

  Two of them, waiting in the shadows between two of the houses. Under that tree.

  (Is that her) she heard one whisper.

  (She’s a tourista, in’t she?)

  (But they said she’d be wearing some kinky sort of clothing. A “uniform.”)

  She was passing by them now, pretending she couldn’t hear or smell them. She remembered the brawny ’Cockers she had noticed now and then. Peacock was ruled by custom, not laws. They didn’t have policers. They had enforcers.

  She wondered if they knew what a Hound could do? There were only two of them.

  Or were there?

  She continued to listen as she drew away.

  (That wasn’t her.)

  (Wait. She’s passing under the streetlight. We’ll get a better look.)

  (Red hair. That’s her alright. Call Kerinomata and tell them to come up the street. We’ll follow her down.)

  They came out of the shadows with a silence remarkable for their size. She did not turn around to look at them. Four, she supposed. Two behind, two ahead. That made the odds not quite even. But she ought not simply kill them. She had come to Peacock Junction to track the phantom fleet, not to create a diplomatic incident between Peacock and the League. On the other hand, if she let them attack her, every Hound who heard of it would come straight to the Junction, and there would be no stone left atop another.

  (Here comes Kerinomata. We got her…)

  “Hey! Where’d she go!”

  In the lightless interstice between two streetlamps, Bridget ban had leaped aside, leaving a pair of sandals standing in the walkway behind her—as if she had simply evaporated in place. Wooden soles would make noise when running and silence now was worth any price. Fleet as a whippet, she sprinted between two darkened dwellings into a shared greenery behind: trees, a fishpond, several beds of colorful flowers, a stone garden. As she ran, she gathered her srong up and tucked it into her waistband. Now, it was a short skirt, and her legs were free. She bounded over the pond, ran a few steps along a bench, and—up!—over a hedgerow of fat-leafed oily plants.

  And down—in another back garden, again shared by several houses. She crouched, knees bent, fingertips lightly touching the grass like a runner poised for the gun, and listened. A whistle in the distance, on the block she had come from. Was this a world where people pulled the shutters closed when they heard such sounds at night? Or one where they ran to their windows and spied on the dark with comm units clutched in hand?

  Long hours in the training room now returned interest a hundredfold. She sprinted out to the next street, where she paused, sniffed, listened, looked. Nothing. Across the street, and repeat the process over to the next street. Could she run fast enough to put herself outside the radius of what they would consider a reasonable search area? How far to the next maglev station?

  No. Forget that. They’d be watching the maglev stations.

  She paused, panted, looked around the neighborhood.

  A large hulk of a building stood in midblock, like a rock among soap bubbles. The walls were rough, unfinished granite and bore in front a colonnade whose pillars seemed the least bit too wide and short. It appeared more lasting t
han the evanescent homes around it; more serious than anything the frivolous ’Cockers would build. Its stolid facade bespoke an earlier epoch in the planet’s history. If other buildings of this ilk had ever squatted along this street, they had long since been demolished and replaced.

  An official building, then; dark, unlikely to be occupied at this hour. Perhaps it was a library, or a meeting hall. Was it open? Locked? Alarmed?

  By now, her description was abroad. There would be someone waiting in her hotel room. Her ship would be guarded. (She hoped no one was so stupid as to try to break into it. The ship’s intelligence frowned on such mischief.) They would be expanding the search, block by block.

  They had been fools to send only four men to arrest her. She could not count on them remaining fools. If they had woken Pulawayo by now—likely—he would tell them she had left his home an hour earlier, and that she was wearing her Hound’s uniform, as they had expected. This would confuse them for a time. Were they chasing the right person, or another redhead tourista coincidentally in the same neighborhood?

  Either way, they would want to find her.

  She found a back door to the building, where she could work unobserved in the dark. Her night vision was very good, at one with her enhanced smell and hearing. She studied the walls, saw no wires, no receptors. She paid particular attention to the mortared crevices between the great stone blocks. If she were to insert a monitor into the walls, there would be a good location…

  Nothing.

  Remembering the vestibule at the STC tower, she leaped to no conclusion, remained crouched there, pawed a little at the door, snuffled. It was hinged to open inward. A lever latch. She pressed it down.