The January Dancer (22 page)

“Good morning, harper,” the scarred man says with malicious cheer when dawn has drawn a few hardy souls to the Bar. Praisegod is behind the counter—to all appearances, he might never have left his post. So, too, the scarred man, who sits once more in his niche. The room is redolent with the pasty odors of oatmeal and eggs and daal. “I hope you slept well,” he says. “After a time, the crack of the overnight ballistic runs can grow quite restful and the morning cargo drops little more than a cock’s crow.”

The harper spares him a blurred look and asks Praisegod for a cup of something more lively than she is. She carries the coffee to the table by the niche and slowly puts herself outside of it. The scarred man’s plate is heavy with daal and baked beans, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon, with sautéed mushrooms. She spares this feast no more than a horrified glance and notes that he seems in a good humor.

“Every day is a promise,” he replies. “Compared to the night mare, we have an easy ride.”

“And what nightmares visit your sleep?” It is an idle question—she is not yet fully awake—but the silence of his answer draws her from her drug. He dips a piece of naan into the daal and shoves it in his mouth. The sauces drip and pool in the upturned cleft of his chin. “None that you would care to ride,” he says just before he swallows.

Silence then draws on toward the point of discomfort. But it is from a point of greater discomfort to one of lesser. The scarred man begrudges her: “Yet there are dreams that come during the day. Sometimes I think you are not quite real, and I am speaking only to another part of my own mind. I’m not sure.”

“Do you not know your own mind, then?”

A facetious question, meant for humor, the words push the scarred man deeper into his niche. “No,” he whispers. “I do not.”

Now the discomfort is real and the harper hurriedly excuses herself to visit the buffet table. Few are the guests who stay at the Bar, fewer still those who breakfast there; and so, few were the choices presented to her. She stares at the unsavory dishes. The bacon is cold and more fat than meat. The eggs have congealed into something resembling rubber. She settles finally on a bowl of oatmeal and some naan, a small glass of muskmelon juice. With these she returns to the niche and is only a little surprised to find the scarred man still there, and still gazing silently at his meal.

“When we parted last night,” she prompts, “Hugh and the Fudir were sliding toward Jehovah with the ’Federal courier.”

The scarred man says nothing and the harper fears she has stopped up the well with her remarks. Then he looks up and fixes her with his gaze. “What is
your
story? Perhaps you should be the one here telling tales.”

“Every man, every woman, has a story. But some are less interesting than others. I’ve come to learn of the Dancer. My own tale is far less than that.” She does not ask about
his
personal story, although she suspects there may be a goltraí in it. She is not sure she would want to hear it; yet the question lingers unspoken in the air between them.

Eventually, the scarred man sighs and begins the dance anew.

“Bridget ban,” the scarred man says, “arrived at Peacock Junction…

…a world of lush colors and bubbling waters, and of careless men and women. There, the tropics run from pole to pole and the ocean currents are delightfully warm and languid. It is a world on which not much happens, and what does happen happens slowly. They have a Seanaid of sorts: garrulous old men and women who meet in an open amphitheater during the dry season, and not at all during the rains. Someday they may pass a law, but there is no hurry.

The universe is in motion: planets and stars spinning, galaxies swirling, starships sliding from star to star along superluminal channels in the fabric of space. There is no reason why any world in such a universe should be so much at rest as Peacock Junction.

But while Peacock has very few laws, she is rich in customs; and customs have the greater force. A law may be appealed; but from custom there is no recourse. When Billy Kisilwando killed his partner in a drunken fit, he was given one hundred days’ grace. He set off into the Malawayo Wilderness with a rucksack, a hiking staff, and a small, but faithful terrier. He emerged after ninety-nine days, minus dog and staff, and reported to the District Head, confessed his sin, and prayed forgiveness from his partner’s
manu;
and ever afterward he repeated his confession in the Hall of Remonstration to all who came to see him. Such is the cruelty of custom.

Compared to the great roundabout of luminal highways that converge on the worlds of Jehovah, Peacock barely deserves the name of junction. Route 66 splits off from the Silk Road and heighs off toward Foreganger and Valency, but that is all. In the early days of settlement, it was thought that proximity to the blue giant at Sapphire Point would endow Peacock with a great many roads; and much effort was spent on the survey of its approaches, but the tenor of scientific thought now runs in the other direction. And a good thing, too; for nothing tempts the highwaymen of the Spiral Arm more than a sun with plentiful roads.

Shalmandaro Spaceport was the primary STC repository for Peacock Roads, and so it was to this gracile orangestone tower that Bridget ban came on the trail of the phantom fleet. The tower was inlaid with gold and decorated with pastel murals of Peacock scenery and of those few ’Cockers who had ever faced anything requiring heroism. On the building’s western facade, a bulbous extrusion eyed distant Polychrome Mountain and the tea plantations that tiled her slopes. There, trace elements in the soils and the artifice of bioneering gave the tea fields sundry colors and the mountain its name.

Despite the building’s importance, there was no security screen at the entrance. Bridget ban was not surprised. It was of a piece with this lackadaisical world. But after she had passed through and was standing before the lift tubes in the great, multistoried atrium, she gave the matter a second thought. Indolent need not mean stupid. Indeed, indolence often required considerable ingenuity. So she returned to the vestibule and studied its walls with greater care, and discovered amid the wild swirls and colors with which the ’Cockers embellished any flat surface the lenticels and digitizers of various sensors. She nodded her approval at one camera eye, her opinion of the ’Cockers rising by a notch.

Konmi Pulawayo was not in the Director’s office when, thanks to typically vague directions from staff, Bridget ban had finally located it. The room did not strike her as very official. Offices ought to appear functional: with desks, storage drives, comm units, hard-copy files, and the like. They ought, in fact, to have walls. They ought not have a whispering waterfall and a glade guarded by colorful parrots and sweet larks. A parrot is not a receptionist; and a hammock is not an office chair.

“So where,” she asked one green-and-yellow bird, “is your master?”

The parrot shuffled a bit on its perch, cocked its head, and squawked. “Whaddaview! Lookaddaview!”

Bridget ban snorted, turned away, then wondered if there was something more serious under this frivolous facade. The ’Cockers were famous across the Spiral Arm for their bioneering. Perhaps the parrot was a receptionist, after all. Yet there was nothing about the bird that suggested it was anything more than a bird. The skull was not of an encouraging volume; its attention span fleeting. It glanced at the intruder repeatedly, but that would be expected of any half-wild beast. Its exclamation was probably no more than a trained reflex.

But why train a bird to make
that
response to
that
question? Answer: the Director took his breaks in the viewing room she had noticed from the outside. She glanced at her watch. It was early for a break—unless, as she suspected, ’Cockers inverted the times devoted to work and leisure.

A passing technician, frail and featureless as an elf, bare-chested and wearing a tool belt over his “srong,” told her the lounge was at the end of Redfruit Lane, and pointed to a bush growing along the side of the “corridor.” Bridget ban thanked him and he nodded vaguely, plucking a “redfruit” to eat as he sauntered off. She wondered if he was on his way to repair something and how long that repair would await his arrival.

The redfruits wound through the seventeenth floor, intersecting at times with other winding paths marked by other bushes. There were no walls, but occasionally there were lines of shrubs or trees, or rivulets crossed by short footbridges, each evidently intended to mark the boundary of a “room.” Not one was straight. There might not be a right angle in the entire building. She did see individuals working at screens and chatting casually to hologram images. It could not
all
be personal activity, could it? Somehow, cross-stellar and in-system traffic in the Junction was choreographed; somehow lighters and bumboats were lifted and landed.
Someone
out there must be working!

Eventually, curiosity—or surrender—overcame her and she plucked a redfruit for herself. Its skin was soft and plump and the texture, when she had bitten into it, crispy. The taste was succulent and sweet, suggesting both apple and cherry in its ancestry. She had to remind herself that she was inside a large building and the groves through which she wound were only clever artifacts.

The lounge was entirely transparent; even the floors and furniture. In effect, one seemed to be walking in midair, and Bridget ban could see past her boots the traffic far below. Only the people and a few other objects—brightly patterned cushions and the like—were stubbornly opaque. Directly ahead, Polychrome Mountain had been artfully framed between two other high towers so that it appeared larger and closer than it actually was. She wondered if the ’Cockers had erected those two buildings precisely to achieve that effect.

Bridget ban wore a green-and-gold coverall with the blue facings and collar pips of “The Particular Service.” Above her left breast were discreetly pinned two of the twelve decorations to which she was entitled: the Grand Star and the Badge of Night. The Kennel called it “undress uniform,” but she thought herself the most completely dressed person in the lounge, perhaps in the entire building. Some ’Cockers she saw carried casualness of dress to its logical, and ultimate, conclusion.

A few inquiries eventually led her finally to the Director. She had wondered from the name whether Konmi Pulawayo was male or female and, after having been introduced, continued to wonder. Most of the human race was bimodally distributed, but the bioneers of Peacock had achieved the bell-shaped curve, with most inhabitants clustered around a sort of genderless mean and rather fewer out near masculine or feminine extremes. Pulawayo might have been a fine-featured man or a boyish woman. Large, liquid eyes set in an androgynous face gave no clue. There was one way to be certain—and, judging by what she had seen so far, not a way entirely out of the question—but she was struck by the disturbing notion that lifting the Director’s srong would not lift the uncertainty.

Tentatively, she designated Pulawayo as “she,” and firmly fixed that pronoun in mind.

The Director called for tea. On Peacock, that was a foregone conclusion. The variegated flavors and fragrances unique to Polychrome Mountain constituted the planet’s primary export, and drinking it was an act of patriotism.

Pulawayo had preceded her tea order by a slight cough, by which Bridget ban concluded that she was “headwired” and the cough was how she activated the link. While they waited, the elf regarded the Hound with a smile bordering on amusement and studied her with palpable interest.

“Zo,” she said through near-motionless lips, “wuzzahoundooneer?”

The Peacock dialect ran words together and softened its consonants. Indeed, a common joke in the League was that on Peacock, the use of a consonant was subject to a heavy fine. Lazy speech for lazy lips, thought Bridget ban. Her implant sharpened the phonemes to Gaelactic Standard.
So. What’s a Hound doing here?
the Director had asked.

In answer, she produced her credentials—by ancient tradition, a golden badge of metallo-ceramic that glowed when held by its rightful bearer. “I’m investigating the battle that took place here recently.” It was more than that, of course. The phantom fleet had taken something from the pirates—a prehuman artifact of great value and possibly greater power. But such secrets were best held close, lest they pique greed and ambition.

The Director barely glanced at the badge. “Oh, that,” she said. “No battle. Battle needs two sides. Ambushers caltroped the exit ramp and swissed whichever ships came out next. Good luck, they caught a pirate fleet with top booty and their shields down. Nuisance.”

“Aye. Such lawlessness…”

But the Director had not been concerned about lawlessness. “Clean up the mess,” she complained. “Sweepers
still
out there. Sent swifties down the Silk Road with warnings. Placed marker buoys.
Duchess of Dragomar
took damage coming off next day. Didn’t want more ships running into shards. Bad for tourism.”

As she spoke, she muttered under her breath, annoying the Hound. Bridget ban tried to make out what she was saying, but the subvocalization was too slight. Irritated, she said, “And have ye identified the combatants?”

“Pirates were from Cynthia, barbarians coming back heavy from somewhere—”

“From New Eireann. We know about them. The survivors reached Sapphire Point while I was there.”

“Zo. Heavy with loot from this New Eireann place. Lost their vanguard on the caltrops. Other ships jittered. Two skated off on hyperbolic. One braked into elliptical. Saw Cerenkov flashes, so some ships reached the high-c’s but missed the channel and grounded in the mud.”

And those who escaped down the Silk Road had been destroyed by Fir Li’s border squadron.
“And what about the ambushing fleet?”