The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  “Hardly a companion, lady. Chance-met drinkers in a bar.”

  “No, his quarters were thoroughly searched. His movements were carefully backtracked. There is no hiding hole; no safe-deposit box. He must have had the Twisting Stone on his person; and you took it from him when he was executed.”

  Hugh did not think “executed” was the proper word. The assassins had also tried to kill him; but he did not bring it up. “And how do you know that this…Gronvius, you said? How do you know that Gronvius had your artifact?”

  “Bakhtiyar Commodore Saukkonen was in command of the squadron. He escaped the mutiny and told us what had happened.”

  “Ah,” said Greystroke, his head bobbing. “Yes. Certain matters now become clear. Ringbao, you were less than forthcoming with me about that odd little brick, and you’ve put me in an embarrassing position respecting our hostess; perhaps even damaging the compact we recently entered into. We’ll speak about this tonight. ’Spozhá,” he added, “you have but to name a fair price and we will bring the artifact to you tomorrow. I will accept a draught for the finder’s fee in Gladiola Bills or in Krinthic ‘owls.’ If your people could have that ready by seven tomorrow, I will provide you with an affidavit showing provenance, sworn and notarized. And the unsavory business on Die Bold should only add to its allure.”

  “Yes,” said Lady Cargo distantly, “art loves a scandal.”

  In their ground car, after leaving the estate, Hugh took a deep breath. “I hadn’t expected that.”

  “That Radha doesn’t have the Dancer, after all?”

  “That, too. I meant that we would leave the estate alive.”

  “Ah. Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. It was easier for them to let us fetch the Dancer than to torture its location out of us.”

  “As long as it was easier…”

  “By the way, just so you know. I have a little appliance here that neutralizes listening devices like the one they planted behind the sun-shield.”

  Hugh blinked, turned down the sun-shield, and saw a small scorch mark the size of a pinpoint. He flipped it back up. “Neutralized, alright. They’ll probably follow us.”

  Greystroke looked in his mirror. “Yes, I expect so. Old habits. They think we’ll lead them to the Dancer and save them the cost of a finder’s fee. Not worth the effort. Once she has the Dancer in her hands, she can simply tell us we’ve already been paid—or that no payment was promised—and we’d believe her. But there’s the slight chance that we may abscond with the statue. She doesn’t think we know what it is; but she’s certain we can get a better deal from any other collector in the Spiral Arm. Greed and power make people stupid.”

  “I’ll try to remember that, if and when.”

  The Pup snorted. “Yes. She should have offered us payment enough that we’d be sure to bring it. Well, when we check the car back into the agency, it shouldn’t be beyond the skills of the Ghost of Ardow to blend into the crowds and disappear. Buy a disposable handy, call the others, and tell them to abandon our rooms, and fall back on the secondary reservations. Lady Cargo knows the names we rented under, and it doesn’t take much for the ICC to call in a favor or two from the government of ’Saken. You know the code word?”

  “The Fudir told me it was ‘skedaddle.’”

  Greystroke shook his head. “Terrans.”

  “You know, Pup, unless Todor was lying in the Mild Beast…”

  “Yes. This Commodore Saukkonen must have the Dancer. Once the officers in the fleet learned what it was, the temptation proved too great. Why turn it over to the chairman when you can keep it for yourself?”

  “Some tried to stop him.”

  “The ones who had no chance of gaining it for themselves, excuse my cynicism. But it no longer matters one way or the other. Saukkonen knows logistics, and has probably been making preparations for his coup. But I noticed something interesting in the tangle of the tale. The Dancer’s powers have limits…”

  “…Or else Lady Cargo wouldn’t still be so eager to obtain it. I saw that. Saukkonen could have told her to forget the whole thing—stone, legend, everything. I wonder if she does remember the Stone’s powers, or only that she wanted desperately to obtain it.”

  “In either case, there are some things—deep desires, perhaps—that the Dancer cannot edit.”

  “There’s your answer, then.”

  Greystroke turned a questioning look on him.

  “We have to make sure that recovering the Dancer is our deepest desire.”

  The Pup shook his head. “I don’t think it works that way.”

  Hugh had purchased new clothing, discarded his identifications, and was walking through a narrow alley between two warehouses on his way to their fallback hotel in a run-down part of the City when he sensed another man walking close behind him. He began to consider his options. He hadn’t been such a fool as to take a weapon to the Dalhousie Estate, and that meant the only weapons he now had were those he could improvise from the materials in the alley. Of course, the Glens of Ardow had taught him improvisation.

  “Rest easy, friend,” he heard a voice say. “I followed you because no one can follow him.”

  Hugh danced a few paces ahead and spun around. The man who had accosted him was unshaven and wore stinking rags. His fingernails were black with dirt and grime. But most of all, he was large. Hugh, not a small man, came only to his shoulder. He looked up.

  “Hello, Grimpen.”

  When he reached the hotel, the others were already waiting. Hugh stepped inside, leading Grimpen. He looked at Bridget ban. “He followed me home. Can we keep him?”

  “I cannot tell you,” Grimpen said later, “how much a hot bath and a change of clothes mean to me. There is no greater pleasure in life. Well, perhaps one.” He had but lately emerged from Bridget ban’s refreshing room, now groomed, shaven, cleaned, and wearing a nondescript “shiki” favored by residents of the Fourteenth District. He stretched, and the space he occupied doubled. Then he looked about the dayroom of the apartment.

  “You, I know,” he said to Bridget ban. And to Greystroke, “You, I know of. And you—Hugh, is it?—have been traveling with Greystroke; but I don’t know you and I don’t know your friend.”

  “Och, Large-hound,” said Bridget ban, “is there no end to the catalogue of what you don’t know?”

  “You,” Grimpen said to the Fudir, “are a Terran, or I miss my guess.”

  “Is that important?” the Fudir asked him.

  “To you, I suppose.” He looked at his colleagues. “Is he alright? A Terry? Confederate ties?”

  “Enough Confederate ties to make a fancy bow,” said Greystroke, “but he works for himself.”

  “He’s the one,” said Hugh, “who got us on the trail of the Dancer in the first place.”

  “Dancer?”

  “Oh. You’d know it as the Twisting Stone.”

  “Oh, that. What’s your interest in that?”

  The others looked at Grimpen in astonishment until Bridget ban spoke. “Why hae ye come here, then, if nae for the Dancer?”

  Now it was Grimpen’s turn to look astonished. He pointed to Greystroke and Bridget ban, in turn. “You, Fir Li sent to track down Donovan. You went off after the phantom fleet. I went to learn how the ICC knew so much so soon. Yet, here we are, all together. It’s enough to make me think there really is a purpose to the universe. Or at least a punch line. Why don’t we take turns explaining how we all wound up here in this cockroach heaven?”

  The briefing took them into the night. Grimpen listened carefully, took notes, asked penetrating questions. He was merciless in undermining their assumptions, pointing out alternative explanations for each of their conclusions. But in the end, he had to admit that the legend of the Twisting Stone seemed to have some substance to it. “Though I’d be wary of putting too much faith in the details.”

  “Then why did you consult the Book of Legends in the Archive?” Hugh asked.

  “I lost a day and a half on that,”
Grimpen complained. “My ship’s intelligence had trouble translating it…”

  The Fudir told him it was because the refugee camps in this region had been settled by a mix of people called Brits and Rooskies and the language was an amalgam of their two tongues. Grimpen smiled and said, “That’s nice. But what I didn’t know was what I was looking for in that manuscript.”

  “Then how,” said the Fudir, “did you know when you found it?”

  Grimpen smiled and pointed a finger at the Terran. “I like you. You’re funny. No, I knew the kind of thing I was looking for.”

  “Which was…?” Greystroke said.

  “The Cynthians knew too much, too soon. When they came through Sapphire Point the first time, they said they’d tortured the factor on Cynthia over some slight of etiquette and he warned them that the ICC had the Twisting Stone. They came back later—you’d already gone by then, Grey One—and they’d gone to New Eireann to get the thing. But, d’ye see, they left the Hadramoo before the word could have reached them. It’s six or seven metric weeks from New Eireann to the Hadramoo. As near as I could tell, they’d set out to seize the stone no more than a week after the ICC laid hands on it in the first place. And that meant…”

  “The ICC has some way of sending messages faster than courier ships.” That was the Fudir. “Well, it makes sense, now that the Big Fella here has pointed it out. They always seem to know where the prices were best and what was selling well on which planets.”

  Hugh began to curse. “Then Jumdar didn’t come to New Eireann by chance, either. I’ll bet a shiny ducat that Nunruddin called for troops as soon as the coup went bad. And when the Cynthians came, she had plenty of time to warn her superiors so they could intercept the rievers at Peacock Junction.”

  Grimpen nodded. “If the Dark-hound had spent as much time analyzing ICC activities as he did Rift crossings, one of us would have tumbled to this years ago. I suspected they had something; but I didn’t know what. A swifter swiftie? A secret shortcut, like you found at Peacock? I was reasonably sure it wasn’t a new invention—‘There’s nothing new under the suns,’ right? But maybe, just maybe, a prehuman technology that they had stumbled on. So I translated the titles of the old legends in the archive, looking for anything relating to communication. I found five that were suggestive. One was the Tale of the Calling Ring.”

  Hugh remembered the chair facing the Ourobouros Circuit, remembered too a similar arrangement in the ruined vault on New Eireann, and suddenly he knew. “The Ourobouros Circuit! It’s a communicator.”

  Grimpen growled. “The sketch in the manuscript looked like a torus—a ring, not a wreath.”

  “A case for the Circuit,” Greystroke suggested. “Now lost.”

  The large Hound’s brow knit. “As might could be,” he said, “or I’d’ve realized sooner. I scouted the ICC facilities, here in the City and out in the Hills for some sign where the communicator might be. Kidnapped one of their security guards out at the estate, and babble-juiced him. He didn’t know anything, but he thought there was secret stuff going on with the Trade Desk. So I snatched a trader out of a bar in the City, ran the usual roster, and hit pay dirt. Sent a swiftie to Fir Li. But somehow they got wind of me and I had to go to ground.” He looked at Greystroke and smiled. “Not as easy for me to hide as you. I had to find a bigger tree to duck behind.” His laugh was like a fault line splitting under the earth.

  Greystroke nodded. “The Circuit was warm when I got near it; so I knew it had been doing something, but I thought it might have been, oh, a quantum computer or some other magical instrument. Something they used to project the markets with such uncanny accuracy.”

  “I’m thinking,” said Hugh, “that they stumbled onto the secret when they were building a duplicate. Once there were two of them, that ‘infinite depth’ illusion turned into a channel. I’ll bet that it bores a Krasnikov tube somehow between two wreaths.”

  “And now we know, meegos,” the Fudir said, “why Lady Cargo was so anxious to have the Dancer. I never saw the sense of it, myself. With it, she could control a single system—one that she already effectively controls—and maybe dominate systems close by. For this, she sends a flotilla to tangle with Cynthian pirates? But the Dancer and the Circuit, ah, that’s another kettle of soup entirely. Her voice could be heard on every inhabited world, as near to simultaneous as matters.”

  “Except, it’s the commodore, not the chairman, we have to worry about now,” Hugh said. “And it occurs to me that a naval base might be tougher to enter than Dalhousie Estate.”

  When the Fudir awoke in the middle of the night, he saw Bridget ban sitting in a soft chair across the room. The night lighting from the baseboards gave an odd sort of blue-white insubstantiality to her upper body. The shadows were cast upward, like spirits freed of the body.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  He could see the head shake briefly, but her face was in shadows and he could not make out her expression. “How could I have missed it?”

  “The same way we all did,” he told her. “We see the world through our assumptions; and when we don’t know what those assumptions are, they can trap us. Sometimes, it’s only possible to see the truth in the right moment of time. In the ancient legends, the god Darwin prophesied in a world in which tradesmen struggled in competition. The god Newton appeared in a world that had discovered machinery; the god Einstein in an age when…”

  “Awa’ wi’ ye and yer gods. I don’t think they were gods at all, but only Terrans that the One God gifted with wisdom.”

  “The One God?” The Fudir had always imagined the gods as beings much like men, but with powers beyond those even of the Hounds, and with an ability to act unseen greater even than that of Greystroke. As Newton controlled the motion of stars and planets, Maxwell and his demons shaped and moved whole galaxies and the electric roads that entwined them. And the quarrel between them could not be resolved even by the god Einstein, who sought a rune that would join them. The idea that there might be only one god astonished him.

  “Och, list’ tae me loshing. I said there’d be nae religious arguments, and here I am starting one myself.”

  “I never argue about the gods,” the Fudir said. “It leads nowhere, and can only irritate them.”

  Bridget ban laughed at that, and they spoke a little more of inconsequentials. “Och, yer a comfort, Fudir,” she said just before falling asleep. “There’s nae denying it.”

  “Am I?” the Fudir asked the night when she was breathing softly.

  In the morning, when Bridget ban awoke, the Fudir was gone.

  An Craic

  “And so you see him,” says the scarred man, “for the treacherous bastard that he was, and why this quest of yours was always a waste of your time.”

  The harper says nothing but toys with her now-empty plate. She looks around for Mamacita, but the wide woman is gone. Darkness has fallen outside the shed and only the string of decorative lights provides an island of illumination. The busier sounds of the City seem distant, and the lamps along Greaseline Street and the Bourse are like the suns on the far side of the Rift, blurred and indistinct. The harper wipes at the corners of her eyes and hates the scarred man for the mocking grin above which he watches her.

  “Let’s finish this,” she says harshly.

  “We’ll warn you. The finish is no better.”

  “But there must be an end of it. You said so yourself.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to everything we say. He’s been known to lie.”

  She stands and slings her harp over her shoulder like a carbine. “Will you at least escort me back to the Hostel?”

  “Why not?” says the scarred man. “I’m in a hostile mood.” He grins at his own pun. “I hate them all. The pompous Grimpen. The priggish Greystroke. The cocky Hugh O’Carroll. The ice-cold witch-woman.”

  “Men are more than adjectives. I find that I have come to love them all. What of the Fudir?”

  “Him, I hate the most,
for he betrayed all the others.”

  Geantraí: This Too is a Home

  It was not easy to surprise the Fudir, the scarred man says, but Little Hugh O’Carroll managed it now and then. In that early hour of the morning, he managed it for the last time.

  Hugh was sitting on the stoop just outside the ragged hotel tossing nuts to the equally ragged birds. The Fudir froze at the sight of him. Hugh looked up.

  “Ready?” he said.

  The Fudir pointed to the nuts. “You give them those things and they’ll come to expect it. They’ll circle the doorway waiting and shit on the people going in and out.”

  Hugh looked along the street. “And that would be different?”

  “You sit out here alone and you’re bait for every thief in the Fourteenth District.”

  “It’s too early for thieves. They like to sleep in. How do you plan to get into Watkins Naval Yard?”

  The Fudir ran his hand along the fringed anycloth he wore, took a tassel between his fingers, wondering what to do about this latest complication. “What were you waiting for out here?”

  “You. I know you haven’t given up on liberating Terra. But now the Kennel folks have a new reason to give the Dancer to the Ardry.”

  “By me, a new reason to keep it from him. I like his reign; I wouldn’t like his rule.”

  Hugh nodded. “And that means you have to go in without the others.”

  “‘Others.’ That would include you. But I don’t think you’ve given up on your own plans.”

  Hugh shook his head. “I’m not going back to New Eireann.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Hugh stood and brushed at the knees and seat of his trousers. “Let’s go and save the galaxy. Unless you want to eat breakfast first.”

  “You’ve grown a bit since we first met.”

  “I’d hate to think otherwise. Only the dead never grow. You and me, Fudir, we’ve been through a lot since Amir Naith’s Gulli. We were in this together almost from the beginning. It’s only right that we’re together at the end. Just you and me.”