The January Dancer
Page 38
“Maybe. What became of them in the end?”
“Those are other stories, and they require other prices.”
“But surely you have some news of them. You told me that they had come here, to the Bar. Much of what you told me, you could only know if they had come back.”
“Perhaps I made those parts up.”
The harper shakes her head, but not in disbelief. “What about Hugh? Did he and Bridget ban not have an adventure together?”
“Did she tell you that? Then, they must have.” He looks at her carefully. His gnarled hand reaches out and takes her by the chin. “And then one day she never came back,” he says, reading the auguries in her face. “That’s your quest, isn’t it?”
“There was another, as well.” She returns his gaze—and he is first to turn away. “And Greystroke?” she asks.
The scarred man shakes himself. “No one has seen him lately.” And he laughs.
“The Fudir, then. Tell me more about him.”
“Donovan, you mean. He continued on into the Confederacy, because he did not know what else to do. His struggle with the Stone had drained his entire will, as if he were a battery completely discharged. The Secret Names questioned him, with their wonted gentleness. Then they did something terrible to his mind. They diced it and sliced it until there was no ‘I’ remaining, only a ‘we.’ Fudir and Donovan and…others.”
The harper sucks in her breath and she looks at the scarred man with pity in her eyes. “That sounds like a terrible story,” she says.
“It is.” He stoops, picks up a smooth, round stone and hurls it out into the waters of Bodhi Creek, whence returns a distant splash. “But it is a story for another day.”
Also by Michael Flynn
In the Country of the Blind*
The Nanotech Chronicles
Fallen Angels (with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle)
Firestar*
The Forest of Time and Other Stories*
Lodestar*
Rogue Star*
Falling Stars*
The Wreck of the River of Stars*
Eifelheim*
The January Dancer*
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE JANUARY DANCER
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Flynn
All rights reserved.
Map by James Sinclair
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flynn, Michael (Michael F.)
The January dancer / Michael Flynn.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1817-6
1. Future life—Fiction. 2. Antiquities, Prehistoric—Fiction. I. Title. PS3556.L89 J36 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008029772
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
*denotes a Tor book
Read on for a preview of
Up Jim River
By Michael Flynn
Available now from Tom Doherty Associates
ISBN 978-0-7653-6282-7
ISBN 978-1-4299-3783-2
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Flynn
THOSE OF NAME
Lucia D. Thompson
d.b.a. Méarana, a harper, daughter of Bridget ban
Donovan (the scarred man)
d.b.a. The Fudir, sometime agent of the CCW
Cerberus
receptionist at the Kennel
Zorba de la Susa
retired Hound, Bridget ban’s mentor
Graceful Bintsaif
journeyman Hound assigned to the Academy
Johnny Barcelona
d.b.a. Resilient Services, emperor of the Morning Dew
Morgan Cheng-li
Grand Secretary of the Morning Dew sheen
The Bwana
Chairman of the Terran Brotherhood on Thistlewaite
Boo Sad mac Sorli and
Enwelumokwu Tottenheim
commercial jawharries on Harpaloon
Greystroke
a Hound
Little Hugh O’Carroll
his Pup, d.b.a. Rinty
Billy Chins
a Terran khitmutgar and actuary on Harpaloon
Shmon van Rwengasira y Gasdro
Director of the Dancing Vrouw Tissue Bank
Dame Teffna bint Howard
a tourista from Angletar
Teodorq Nagarajan
a Wildman
Judge Trayza Dorrajenfer
a prosecuting magistrate on Boldly Go
Cheng-bob Smerdrov
an import-exporter on Gatmander
Debly Jean Sofwari
a science-wallah from Kàuntusulfalúghy
Maggie Barnes
captain of the trade ship Blankets and Beads
Dalapathi Zitharthan ad-Din
“D.Z.,” her first officer
Mart Pepper, “Wild Bill”
Hallahan, et al.
crew of Blankets and Beads
Paulie o’ the Hawks
a second Wildman
Zhawn Sloofy
a translator from Nuxrjes’r
Djamos Tul
a translator from Rajiloor
Bartenders, sliders, Terrans, flunkies, movers, ’Loons, merchant princes, cab drivers, news faces, Amazons, Gats, Residents, Dūqs, sundry wildmen, and the Princess of the Farther Spaces
THE WILD
THE RIM
MAP OF LA FRONTERA DISTRICT
OF THE PERIPHERY
Planar projection of La Frontera District, ULP. View is from Galactic North. Not all intervening worlds are shown along the main roads. Worlds are not all on the same plane.
ALAP (VILAMBIT)
This is her song, but she will not sing it, and so that task must fall to lesser lips.
There is a river on Dangchao Waypoint, a small world appertaining to Die Bold. It is a longish river as such things go, with a multitude of bayous and rapids and waterfalls, and it runs through many a strange and hostile country. Going up it, you can lose everything. Going up it, you can find anything.
A truism in the less-than-United League of the Periphery holds that every story begins on Jehovah or ends on Jehovah. This is one of those that begin there. It is a story of love and loss and finding—and other such curses.
What makes the saying a truism is that Jehovah’s sun—the Eye of Allah—is a major nexus on Electric Avenue, that great network of super-luminal highways that binds the stars together. More roads converge there than anywhere else in the South Central sector, and so the probabilities favor—or the Fates pronounce—that sooner or later everyone passes through.
And when they do, they come to the Bar of Jehovah, for unless your pleasures run to such wildness as hymn-singing—and what can be so wild as that?—there is no other place on the planet so congenial. The hymn-singing is good and surprisingly affective, but many of those who wash up on Jehovah seek to anesthetize the memory of the past, and not to anticipate the glories of the future. For many of the patrons, there is no future, and there is not even the memory that there may once have been one.
In a Spiral Arm where “the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” Jehovah is the pearl without price, she whose worth is measured in rubies; for she is too valuable a prize to be taken. “A hundred hands desire it,” the saying runs, “and ninety-nine will keep the one from
seizing it.” And so it is a refuge of sorts for many, and a cash cow for the Elders. And if cash cows remind one of golden calves, that can be overlooked at round-up time.
And so colorful and cryptic Chettinad merchants rub shoulders with their rivals from the Greater Hanse; the crews of tramp freighters with Interstellar Cargo; with Gladiola seed ships, and League marshals and colonists and trekkers; with touristas, too: those starsliders who come in on the great Hadley liners for their quick blick and then off again! to stars worth longer visits.
And so also, with the detritus of the Spiral Arm: those who tramp from star to star, one step ahead of a creditor or a spouse or a League marshal; those whose lives and dreams have become to dream their lives away.
One of these is the scarred man. He has a name, or he has many names, but that one will do for now. It is no longer clear, even to him, which of his names are real, or if any of them are. He has sat so long in his niche that he is very nearly a fixture of the Bar, an ornament like the great gilt-worked chandelier mobile that casts an uncertain and ever-changing light upon a patronage equally changing and uncertain. He has become, for a small and self-selected group of connoisseurs, something of a tourist attraction himself. He has come because his past is too heavy to bear, and here he may slide down his load and rest. Recently, certain elements of that past have come to press upon him…
…But this is not his story; or it is not quite his story.
And lastly—and these are most rare—come those who are not driven by their past, but drawn by their future. It might seem odd that the path to the future would pass through the Bar of Jehovah; but the path to heaven is said to wind through purgatory.
As, too, the path to hell.
I DOG GONE
And so the story begins, if it did not begin elsewhere and at another time. The scarred man sits in his accustomed place in the Bar, robed in shadows in a niche cut into the wall. The other niche-seats are favored by lovers seeking shadows—but there is no love here. Or love only of the most abrasive sort.
The early morning is a somber and introspective time, and the scarred man’s visage is nothing if not somber and introspective. He owns a gaunt and hollow look, as if he has been suctioned out, and not even a soul remains. He is all skin and skull, and his mouth sags across the saddle of his hooked chin. He has been known to smile, but not very often and never is it comforting to see. He is weathered, his skin almost translucent. His hair is snow-white, but not the white of purity, for that has been a long time lost. A checkerboard of scars breaks the hair into tufts like a woodland violated by streets and winding roads. Those scars and a sad story have kept him fed and reasonably drunk for a long time. He has changed the story from time to time just to keep it fresh; but his eyes are never still and the true story may have never been told.
Although it was early morning, the Bar was full. There are those for whom the night is day, and these have slipped in one by one to escape the unconcealing sun, discuss their nocturnal ramblings, and divide the take. Longshoremen have trudged up Greaseline Street from the Spaceport Yards to celebrate the end of their shift. There were sliders and touristas, too, since liners and freighters tocked to shipboard times and it was only by wildest chance that these ever coincided with the Bar’s own meridian. Sliders were as likely to come weary with the dawn as bright-eyed with the eve.
And they talked, all of them. They told tales, aired grievances, warbled songs. They muttered darkly, and whispered intrigues as intricate and Byzantine as their states of intoxication allowed. It all merged into a hum that rose and fell with numbers and furtiveness but which never ceased entirely. It was a joke among the regular patrons that there were conversations still ongoing long after the originators had died; and what jest is ever purely a lie? There are documented cases of ship captains returning after long absences and resuming the self-same discussion.
The scarred man sat to his breakfast and his breakfast was one of daal, and baked beans and sautéed mushrooms, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon. He ate in a silence punctuated by occasional mumbles and subvocalizations, as if he himself embodied in small the chattering crowd around him. Some thought him a little mad because of this, although they were wrong, for there was nothing little about his madness.
Above, a door closed, and the scarred man’s eyes flicked upward for just a moment before he dipped his daal into the beans and lifted the dripping mass to his mouth. Footsteps followed on the wooden staircase, and still the scarred man did not move. Then she was with him, pulling out a seat opposite, and directing a sneer at his noisome breakfast. She herself had only a cup of black coffee—or something that had coffee in its ancestry. (The human diaspora was millennia old, and genes had been tinkered with on this planet or that. The bean went by many names—caff, chick, moke, joe—but even when it bore the same name, it was never quite the same drink.)
“She” was the harper, and that name, too, will serve for now. She had come to him a metric week ago and pricked from his teeth the tale of January’s Dancer, in the process unearthing in him old and hurtful memories. And he saw in the backlit dawn of the thrown-wide shutters that she intended to hurt him further. For she had walked with purpose in her stride, and purpose meant motion, and, as an ancient sage had once said, “With the motion of creatures, time began to run its course.” And time was the one thing the scarred man had not measured for all these many years.
Her eyes were the hard, sharp glass-green of flint, and her hair was a great flame of red, but her skin was dark gold. The bhisti science-wallahs who had touched the genes of coffee had not forborne to touch the genes of men, and what they had done had wrought wonders and horrors; and it was just as well that their art had been forgotten, for the world can bear only so much wonder.
The harper waited in silence. It was a talent she had, as great a talent as her harping; for silence is a vacuum that sucks words from the throats of men. She lifted the coffee to her lips; set it upon the table; adjusted the cup slightly.
Minutes died.
But the scarred man, too, knew the art of silence, and had had many more years of practice.
Finally, she looked up, halting for a moment his restless eyes. “I’ll be leaving today,” she announced, but in an uncertain voice that indicated an unsettled purpose.
The scarred man smiled—because he had won a small victory in the art of waiting. A part of him wished to bid her adieu, but another part wished her to stay. “Where away?” he said, serving a neutral response.
“To find my mother.”
The scarred man nodded slowly. He could see the mother in the child; should have seen it earlier; should have seen it in the moment the harper had first strode through the Bar like the Queen of High Tara. The harper was not quite so striking, not quite so wild in her look as had been Bridget ban; but neither was she quite so hardened. For Bridget ban had practiced the art of seduction, and nothing quite so coarsens the soul as to use too roughly a tool so soft. The harper preserved something deep within herself that in her mother had grown rigid and worn.
“Your mother was a witch,” he said. “A harlot queen. She is best left unsought.”
He had hoped for some reaction from the harper, but the young woman only dipped her head. “I understand your hurt. You loved her once and lost her; but I knew a different woman.”
“Don’t be so sure you did,” the scarred man responded. “A leopard does not change her spots. It was not my idea to love her, but hers. It is not in any man to resist her if she but chooses that he not. She played me like you play your harp, until I sang her tune. What chance does a child have against such snares as she could lay?”
“I think you are too bitter. You made your own choices. It was you who left her.”
“I escaped.” The scarred man remembered an early morning in the slums of Chel’veckistad, on Old’ Saken: stealing from the bed of Bridget ban, cold-cocking Hugh, and heading off to secure the Dancer for himself.
Of all the hard things he h
ad done in his life, those three had been the hardest.
“How long has she been gone?” he asked grudgingly. A part of him wanted to know. A part of him was curious.
“Three years. She left when I was sixteen metric.”
“And only now you’ve come looking?”
“Don’t think you were easy to find. I followed clues, rumors. They led here.”
“They shouldn’t have. No slip of a girl should have tracked me down.”
“Mother is a Hound. She taught me things.”
The Hounds of the Ardry were resourceful agents—skilled in arts politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could be many things, and any thing: messenger, scout, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, savior, planetary manager. Child-rearing was not beyond the multitudinous talents of Bridget ban.