by John Meaney
Maggie stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle which caused half the heads in the room to turn.
“Shake a leg, Yoshiko!”
Yoshiko closed her eyes in embarrassment.
“Who's your friend?” Vin was laughing.
“Never seen her before.”
There was a roll of drums, and the sound of lively pipes and strings.
“Yee-hah!” called someone, probably Maggie, and then they were into the dance.
Heel-toe-side-heel-toe…Yoshiko's heart was jumping like the rest of her as she danced in time with the whole line in front of her.
They turned ninety degrees and danced the steps again as the lively jig filled the air and made her very bones dance.
The ground flew past beneath Yoshiko's feet, and she danced as though she were twenty again, no, fifteen, and the sap of youth rose in her veins and she danced and she danced and she danced…
When the music came to an end she was gasping for breath, and the clapping was thunderous as all the onlookers congratulated them and the dancers applauded each other. Yoshiko's blood was singing, and the music still coursed through her brain though the sound system was silent.
Vin hugged her.
“That was marvellous.” Yoshiko hugged her back. “You're wonderful.”
“Glad you enjoyed it. Need a drink?”
“I think so.”
Lori left them to talk to someone, while Vin escorted Yoshiko to the side of the room, where Maggie was waiting with her new escort.
“Down this.” Maggie handed Yoshiko a goblet. “Roberto here assures me it'll do you good.”
“Thanks.” Yoshiko gulped down the drink. “How do you do, Roberto?”
“Hi.” The tall Fulgidus’ voice was very deep.
“I don't suppose,” asked Vin, “anyone knows who shouted ‘Yee-hah!’ just as the dance was starting?”
Maggie and Roberto shook their heads, exaggeratedly innocent expressions on their faces.
“I didn't think so.”
Yoshiko drained the goblet completely. The drink was tart and fruity, quite thick, but something in it was perking her up.
“Thanks, Roberto. This is good.”
Roberto nodded.
“Say, Maggie,” Yoshiko added. “Did you find Xanthia, in the end?”
“Er, no.” Maggie looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I forgot.”
Vin smothered a laugh.
“Gotcha.” Vin smiled, as the colour rose in Maggie's cheeks. “Serves you right.”
Roberto looked puzzled.
“It's a female thing,” Yoshiko explained.
Roberto smiled uncertainly.
“Anyway,” said Maggie hurriedly, “if you're still worried about Xanthia, maybe Vin should do that Skein thing, or one of those tricks.”
“No need.” Vin looked around. “It's almost time for the Sun-Wheel Dance to start. She has to be here for that.”
“Oh, no.” Yoshiko groaned. “I don't think I can manage another dance.”
“Well…actually, you can sit this one out.”
“Oh. OK.”
“Sorry, but it's Luculenti only. You see, everyone opens up a
“She's conducting?” Maggie looked interested. “Or choreographing? Something like that?”
“Kind of,” Vin replied. “She makes up the pattern as she goes along, to suit the individuals she finds. She'll also be in direct interface with the sound system, composing and creating the music, too.”
“Oh. Is that all?”
“Actually—” Yoshiko interrupted. “There's more. Isn't she creating some kind of light show at the same time?”
Vin nodded.
“One dance, and you're an expert, huh?” Maggie shook her head, smiling.
Yoshiko pointed to the big skeletal array suspended in shadows, high up in the ceiling's vault.
“I was here when Xanthia was getting attuned to it, or something. And I've seen Lori use it to sculpt huge blocks of stone.”
“As one does.” Maggie sighed. “Doesn't anyone round here just sit down and watch a holodrama?”
Vin laughed, just as a flight of silver swallows passed by overhead—
“What the hell?” said Maggie.
—and arced up into the darkness of the domed ceiling, where a small moon appeared. The swallows, diminishing in size as though with vast distance, travelled to the far moon, orbited nine times, and dwindled into nothingness.
There was scattered applause, and all eyes turned to the main entrance as the lights grew dimmer, becoming dark as night. Tiny distant sparks of blue. The doorway glowed eerily green.
Tiny lambent blue flames licked across the floor in two parallel lines, forming a pathway. A low, almost subsonic hum, sounded through the floor, dark and threatening.
A lone castrato voice…
Dark figures, standing in the doorway.
The tinkling of bells…
A misty column of silver stars hissed softly upwards in the centre of the room, like a pillar reaching to the heavens. The dark figures marched towards it, between the lines of flickering flames.
The goddess, and her four attendants.
Haunting pipes, and a distant drum, accompanied their journey into light. An eerie chorus sang like insistent ghosts, in languages dead for centuries.
…And Yoshiko felt for a moment as though her youth, her dear Ken, were but a touch, a reaching gesture away…
The blue flames died, while a lonely lyre wept in the night. In a low rustle, the onlookers slowly, quietly, drew back to the edges of the vast room.
Solid shadows, in the darkness.
A hundred figures stood in frozen ranks, a century of spirits haunting the goddess—The goddess who ascended to, climbed into the pillar of silver light…which burst apart in lambent golden flame.
And the goddess, Xanthia, danced with a stirring sway of her powerful hips between two ornate steel pillars—real, not holo—which burned in showers of gleaming sparks. The air shimmered, where lasers from above cut through the darkness, igniting the metal.
Xanthia's four attendants, yellow-robed Luculenta girls with garlanded hair, knelt before her.
“My God,” said Maggie.
Sea-green light, mistlike, rose from the floor.
Among the rows of Luculenti, movement. Scattered at first: at a corner of the pattern, a man danced three paces, and stopped. A woman danced an ellipse, grew still. At opposite edges, two groups leaped in awe-inspiring unison, clicked their heels, and stamped.
Violet swarmed through the sea of green.
Everyone danced forward one thunderous step, advancing like one giant fearsome organism, then burst into swirling dance.
Life and death, courage and despair, balanced on uncertainty's edge.
Haunting, haunting, the plaintive flute, dispersing the mist.
Joyous, joyous, the dancing drums and strings, drawing a silver grid upon the darkness.
They danced.
Ordered synchrony broke apart into athletic turbulence. Sparks rose from their feet, while infinity fell away below.
They formed a cross, dancing clockwise, while swallows flew in counterpoint.
Faster and faster, they spun.
Maggie whooped as golden suns fell through the air and the dancers whirled impossibly fast and the music climaxed, boom-boom-boom, and was still.
Stunned silence.
Thunderous applause.
A tide of sound washed through the room, wave after wave of it, and Yoshiko was clapping hard enough to hurt, and tears were stinging in her eyes.
Such love. The goddess: such impossible, unreachable, magnificent beauty.
Rafael's chest was swelling, and pure hot emotion such as he had never known swept over him.
I
t was her moment of greatest triumph. Xanthia, Xanthia, Xanthia—can you imagine the sweet fulfilment of literal godhead?
Be mine, be mine, be mine.
The applauding onlookers were forgotten as he focussed upon her, the object of his desire, the pinnacle of his love.
Her sweetness was an elixir he had to drink. Her brilliance, a star which must become part of his constellation, his galaxy. Her warmth, her soul's core, cried out to be subsumed in the volcanic furnace of his desire.
Now, my love.
Our moment comes.
Now.
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Go.
Rafael loosed his infiltration code.
His mouth drew back in a rictus of sheer lust as his vampire modules thrust through the fast-comm link that was his and Xanthia's alone, and penetrated LuxPrime protocols, and entered her.
He drank her soul, as deep scanware plunged through her thoughts, her memories, her most intimate desires, and heisenberged them into oblivion even as it sent back the info in wave after wave of pulsing code, filling his cache, dumping her mind and experience into him, ready for integration.
A mad desire rose in him to go all the way, actually to open up his cache and merge Xanthia's soul into his right here, before two hundred witnesses, but that was utter madness.
Whimpering with frustration, he fought that desire down.
Control.
Ah, control.
Yes, Xanthia. Yes, my love.
You're mine.
Xanthia screamed.
A thousand banshees wailed, screeching all the way into ultrasonics, as the goddess's fear and terror screeched through the sound system and everyone in the room clapped hands to ears.
A man dropped in front of Yoshiko, hands clamped over his head, blood trickling between his fingers.
“What's happening?” Maggie shouted. Blood was running from her nose.
“NO! NO! NO!”
Xanthia yelled as streamers of lethal red shot in all directions through a chaos of purple light and jagged lightning.
“Some kind of seiz—Look out.” Yoshiko pulled Maggie aside as a Luculenta fell, eyes turned up inside her head, showing pure white.
“We've got to stop her.”
Blazing light. The room disappeared in a psychedelic hell, spinning sickeningly round and round, crawling with bloody pulsing colours. Torture, instantiated in light.
Yoshiko shut her eyes, moving by touch, and grabbed hold of Maggie.
“I've got you. Can you see?”
“No—”
Darkness.
Silver moons fell crazily through the air.
“Maggie. Get out of here.”
“It's only light.” Maggie, standing unsteadily, rubbed her eyes.
“Move. I'll get Xanthia.”
Pale white light bled through the ballroom.
“But—”
“Those lasers can burn steel and carve granite.”
Even in the eldritch milky light, Yoshiko could see Maggie's face grow pale.
“My God.”
“No! No!” Xanthia's body was clenched like a fist.
Half a dozen Luculenti dancers, recovering from the onslaught of light and sound, staggered towards her.
Streamers of light spat from her body, impaling them on crimson beams.
They fell, smoke rising from their roasting corpses.
“Help me!”
Discordant waves of noise crashed upon the room. A fearful white-robed Luculenta, standing at a node of constructive interference, shook dreadfully, eyes clouding into milky opacity, as ultrasound cooked her in a second.
“Neliptha!” Yoshiko shouted, but it was too late.
Spinning jagged discs of light, flung in all directions, spread across the room.
As Neliptha turned, a disc sliced through her slender elegant neck, and her eyes grew wide. For a moment, she froze, then an impossibly powerful spurt of bright arterial blood signalled her decapitation, and her mouth opened, and dreadful awareness grew in her eyes, as her fine head fell to the marble floor.
Yoshiko looked around wildly. Rafael was held in an attitude of pain; God knew what he was enduring. Vin—
Where was Vin?
Gathering their wits, people were stumbling towards the exits.
Scarlet lightning arced and spat across the room, as the flow of people became a yelling mob, a panicking riot of desperate people trying to save themselves.
An unselfish act amid the maelstrom: Yoshiko saw a young Luculentus try to pick up an older woman, attempting to hold back the tide, but the mass movement was too much for him and he fell, and both were trampled beneath the rush of running feet.
A man pushed at Yoshiko; she grabbed his wrist and spun, and he whirled through the air and smashed to the ground.
She punched a woman in the throat, and swept her feet from under her.
She had to reach Xanthia.
Yoshiko plunged forwards. There was a knot of panicking people she could not get around, so she held her fists in front of her and pushed straight through.
Something smashed into the side of her head, a wildly flung elbow perhaps, and she staggered, shaking her head dizzily, fighting to keep her balance.
Someone knocked into her, and she fell to one knee. Pain shot up through her leg.
Damn it.
Xanthia!
She forced herself to her feet, ignoring the injury, and pulled aside a weeping woman.
Xanthia lay writhing at the ballroom's centre, and faceless demons and chaotic swirls of light played all around her.
Good God. What was happening to her?
Yoshiko knocked a sobbing man aside.
Swathes of cutting light burst forth again, as a dark shape passed Yoshiko at a sprint, hurdled fallen bodies, and ran straight for Xanthia.
It was Federico.
She had never seen anyone run so fast.
“Hurry, Federico!”
There was someone pushing her way in from one side, heading towards Xanthia, and for a moment a flailing arm obscured the figure from view. Yoshiko sidestepped.
Vin.
Yoshiko saved her breath, and ran straight for her. This was too dangerous: she had to get Vin out of here.
Did Maggie get away? She wasn't certain.
Everything else was forgotten as she focussed on Vin's sweat- and tear-streaked features, and ran harder than she ever had, heart thumping wildly in her chest.
No, don't forget Xanthia.
Xanthia was staggering to her feet. Then one great wave of agony shook her and she flung her arms up wide—
“No!”
—and white light shot upwards, arrowed into darkness, and tore apart the ceiling.
Yoshiko was halfway to Vin when Federico cannoned into Xanthia, lifting her straight up onto his shoulder while knocking the breath out of her, but he was not fast enough.
Vin, plunging onwards, could not see the danger, and Yoshiko had neither breath to shout nor speed to reach her in time.
Above, the great dome exploded.
Amid a shower of dust, great chunks of masonry plunged downwards. One jagged fragment dropped towards Vin's head.
Yoshiko dug deep, running harder than her ageing body should allow, and smashed into Vin, knocking her aside, and for a moment she thought she had made it, catching Vin before she fell, but then she saw the messy red ruin—shards of bone and lumps of rippled brain soaked in scarlet—that had been Vin's temple, and knew she was a lifetime too late.
A hand on her shoulder.
> Maggie, wiping blood from her own face, crouched down beside her.
A distant part of Yoshiko noted the silver video-globe floating above Maggie's shoulder. Professional reflex.
“Is she—?”
“There's no pulse.” Yoshiko's voice seemed disembodied, as though spoken by another.
Maggie glanced upwards.
“We've got to get out of here. The whole damned thing's about to come down.”
“No—I'm not leaving her.”
“Of course not.”
They reached under Vin's still body, linked arms to form a cradle, and, with difficulty, stood upright.
Vin's head lolled against Yoshiko's cheek.
“That way,” said Yoshiko, and spat out hot blood that was not her own.
Stumbling past weeping, shocked injury victims, they avoided a heap of rubble, blinked as they passed through clouds of settling dust, and carried Vin out into a corridor.
People milled aimlessly around.
The dead, the wounded, the merely terrified, were propped, moaning, everywhere.
“My room,” said Yoshiko through gritted teeth. “Down here.”
They headed down a relatively deserted hallway. Cracks spidered the walls.
“Too far,” gasped Maggie.
“Do it.” Yoshiko had no breath to explain: with the building damaged, they should get away from the centre of the house. “Hurry.”
The doorway to Yoshiko's room was a gaping hole, the membrane having dissolved. Gently as they could, they lay Vin upon the bed, then Yoshiko ran to a wall cupboard, beat on it with her fist as the membrane only slowly softened, and tore out the small autodoc it contained.
Hurry…
She tore the cover off, and placed the fibrous treatment pad across the gaping head-wound. Maggie ripped away Vin's once-elegant gown, while Yoshiko attached tubes and fibres to vital points and arteries.
Vin.
Breathe, for God's sake. Just—
“Is there a pulse yet?” The video-globe got in Maggie's way, and she knocked it aside.
A hissing and a smell of burning announced the cauterizing of split blood vessels in Vin's brain. Clear gel oozed as the autodoc sealed up her wrecked skull.
“No.” Yoshiko checked the display. “God damn it.”
