The January Dancer

Geantraí: Bread and Salt

It began on Jehovah, the scarred man says…

…because this is the place where everything begins or where everything ends, and we are not yet at the end.

The Bar of Jehovah hums like a bagpipe. All those private conversations blend together and couple with some curious resonances due to the architecture of the room. There is a permanence to this sound. Like those eddies that form in flowing water, it persists independently of the men and women who flow in and flow out. It is said that there are conversations still going on, long after their originators have passed away. The hum seldom changes in pitch, though it will rise and fall in volume and even, by random chance, drop into momentary silences.

The Bar is a place where the dispossessed take possession. The skyfaring folk—freighters and liners and survey ships and military vessels—come and go, but there is a substrate beneath these transients, a more permanent population for whom the Bar is less a refuge than a home. Here, old grudges are endlessly rehashed and new plans continually laid. Here, the past is always remembered and the future never comes.

There were five at the table, speaking in that desultory way of chance acquaintances. Drink and smoke and crowding and craft had placed them together. They spoke of ship arrivals and departures; of the quality of the drinks or the inhalations. The weather came in for much debate, not only the electric potential around the Jehovah Interchange and the local speed of space, but also the mundane weather planet-side. It looked like rain.

“I saw a storm once,” Captain January told his companions. “A dust storm. Maybe seven, eight weeks back, it was. It covered half the planet, and the lightning flashed like popcorn.” It was a big Spiral Arm, with a lot of planets, and nothing has ever been seen or heard but that someone else hasn’t seen or heard a bigger. No one disputed January’s bragging rights; but Micmac Anne, sitting beside him, recalled that the storm had covered only a quarter of the southern hemi sphere. How long, she wondered, before raconteurial evolution produced a version that blanketed the entire world?

She could not recall that escape without a shudder. She had seen the lightning spike upward five or six leagues from the cloud bank, to ground in the solar wind itself. It had licked each of the boats like the tongue of an indigo snake. She studied Amos under lowered lids and sought refuge from what-might-have-been in a tankard of beer. He could laugh about it; but he had only lived through it. He hadn’t had to watch.

The man on January’s left had entered a world where none could follow, his face nestled in his arms on the table. From time to time, he roused himself and spoke. “Had me ’n ancestor on Die Bold, praise be,” he announced in a local accent, and the table chuckled. Who did not have an ancestor on the Old Planets? “Lef’ me a legacy,” he went on. “Got a ’ficial notice, an’ all. Lord knows I could use ut.” His hand snaked out and pulled to him the hose from which he sucked the smoke of his own particular fantasy. Air bubbled through the huqa, cooling the smoke, lying to the lungs. He exhaled slowly, contentedly, and the table filter gathered in the brume and it was no more. “There’s this guy there, on Die Bold,” he explained. “He can sennit t’me, God willin’, but he needs two thousan’ ’n Gladjola—’n Glad-i-o-la—Bills t’ file th’ right papers.” The man’s fingers moved restlessly, playing with the hose. “Fren’s ’r helpin’ raise th’ bills.” He paused hopefully, then added, “M’ fren’s can share the ’heritance whennit comes, God willing.”

The others looked to one another and grinned. He had no friends here. Not for so transparent a ruse as that.

Another of the tablemates, a woman as thin as a willow branch, mahogany-dark with blue eyes and bright yellow hair, wondered aloud how many “gladdys” the enterprising Die Bolder had already snared from fools such as this one. “It doos not take mooch,” she assured the others, her Alabaster origin revealed by her accent. “He oonly needs to fool soom o’ the pipple soom o’ the time. Small change, boot he meks it oop in voloome.”

“Someday,” said the fine-featured man who wore a shirt of many colors, “there really will be a legacy discovered, and none of the heirs will believe it.” Lamplight glittered off his jewelry as he waved a dismissive hand.

Their banter was interrupted by a giant. Twenty-one hands tall with shoulders broad to match. Red, shoulder-length tresses entwined with glass balls of various colors. The scar that crossed his face should not by rights have left as much nose behind as it had. This apparition leaned his fists on the table. “I’m looking for a man,” he said without preamble.

“Aren’t we all,” said the mahogany woman to general laughter.

The fine-featured man studied the newcomer with interest. “Any man in particular?” he asked.

The smoke-drunk native began to snore gently.

The giant looked around the room, studied the people at the table, leaned closer, and lowered his voice. “The O’Carroll of New Eireann.”

The fancy man and the mahogany woman shook their heads. January scowled and Anne, who had picked up some notion of Eireannaughta politics in their brief stopover there, said, “Who wants to know?” She had it from Colonel-Manager Jumdar that this O’Carroll had been an assassin and a rebel whose death was sought by many.

“Sweeney. He’ll know the name—aye, an’ the nose. Should ye be runnin’ into him here…” And the giant again scanned the Bar. “If ye be sayin’ him, tell him the clans o’ th’ Southern Vale wait his retarn an’ th’ overthrow o’ the ICC tyranny. Those wards, exactly.”

As Sweeney straightened, January muttered, “I’d overthrow the ICC myself, if I could.”

The giant cocked his head. “And what foight is it o’ yers?”

“They took something of mine. A dancing stone. They’ll sell it for me, they said. I’d get a finder’s fee, they said. I’ve got a paper signed by Jumdar. But I don’t trust them.”

Micmac Anne laid her hand on his arm. “Hush, Amos. They fixed our ship.”

“They do have a way,” the giant said, “of coming into things that don’t belong t’ them.” And so saying, he departed to inquire at the next table.

The fancy man watched the departure. “He’s not going about his quest very discreetly. Or is a loud whisper what passes for stealth on his simple world?”

“The Eireannaughta,” said Anne, “are rather a straightforward lot.”

The mahogany woman raised her brows. “A dancing stoon? What iss this tell?” The others clamored to hear the story and January recounted, with relatively little embellishment, his discovery in Spider Alley. “And I signed it over to Jumdar,” he concluded. His ruddy face beamed as if happy that he had done so. “I don’t know what came over me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it sits in the ICC vaults on New Eireann.”

“Or it’s oon Gladioola by now,” said the Alabastrine.

January shook his head. “No, they’ll send it all the way to Old ’Saken. I hear Lady Cargo is a collector of antiquities. Gladiola’s in the wrong direction, and there hasn’t been time yet for a message to reach ’Saken and a courier ship arrive.”

“Woodn’t this Joomdar send it right oof?”

“I don’t think she could spare a ship. She’d already sent two troop carriers on to Hawthorn Rose just before we got there, and needed the other two to keep order on the planet.”

The man in the colorful shirt asked, “Do you plan to go back for those other…What’d you call them? Immovable Objects?”

January turned to him. “If I could, they wouldn’t be bloody well immovable, now would they?” His vehemence surprised the others. He finished his ale and set the pot down with emphasis. “I shouldn’t have made that deal,” he said again. “I’ve good mind to go there and demand the Dancer back. Damned thieves, that’s what the ICC is.” He said that a little too loudly, for several men in ICC uniforms at nearby tables frowned in his direction.

“I think we’re well shut of it,” said Micmac Anne, but she wouldn’t say why.

“Maybe with better equipment,” said the fancy man thoughtfully, “they’d not be so immovable.”

“They’re guarded by the Irresistible Force,” January reminded him.

The fancy man shrugged, as if to say that irresistible forces were a ducat the dozen and he dealt with them handily every day.

“A friend oov mine from Friesing’s World,” said the mahogany woman, “he mentioned a stoory from Oold ’Saken aboot a Twisting Stoon. I wonder if that’s the same oobject.”

Anne asked how the story went, but the woman didn’t know. “It was joost in passing. I think he said it was a scepter, maybe.”

“The scepter of King Stonewall?” Anne named the prehuman king that Johnny Mgurk had mentioned.

The other woman shook her head. “He never sayd.”

“What difference,” grumbled January, still intent on his own grievances. “It’s all fantasy anyway.”

And yet the stone had moved and turned and twisted. That much was no fantasy.

Evening had gotten on and the streets outside the Bar had dissolved into patterns of darkness broken only intermittently by streetlamps or the cyclopean headlights of auto-rickshaws shuttling between the Bar, the Hostel, and other, less comfortably named places.

The Corner of Jehovah was a ramshackle collection of buildings sprawled behind the Bar and permeated by a circulatory system of narrow and twisted alleys. It was here that the First Ships had landed and ecofast dwellings had been built for each of the crew on half-acre lots. There had been a river running through it at the time; but it was an underground sewer now, and acted the part. The original crew housing had been modified over the generations with additions and extensions and sublets as the population grew. Each addition was more slapdash than its predecessor, and it seemed as if a building were a growing thing anxious to maximize the area into which it would one day collapse. It was said that every building in the Corner was in the process of going up or coming down, and the only way to tell which was by the degree of entropy in the construction materials piled beside it. The Corner was a warren now, a topological network of unknown connectivity. The original lots were buried beneath the jumble. Boards and runways coupled rooftops; tunnels linked basements—and not always the ones expected. Occasional flyovers leaped across street or gulli from the mid-story of one building to a mid-story of another. To enter one edifice in the Corner was to enter all.

Not that entering was a good idea.

From the rooftops, the lights of Port Jehovah and of the capital itself seemed a distant galaxy. The man who called himself the Fudir danced along the skyway of planks and rickety bridges with a squirrel’s cunning, tracking the figures stumbling through the moonlit alleys below. “Big dikh,” he muttered to himself, “but the man’s my key.”

Sweeney the Red had stopped at the alleyway’s entrance and, pushing his charge deeper into the narrow street, turned to face the way they had come.

“Murkh,” the watching man said. “Fool. That’s Amir Naith’s Gulli. A dead end.” And it would be a dead end, too, he saw. The red giant pulled a long knife from his belt. “I wonder if that was the least conspicuous man they could have sent.”

Or had he been sent with his conspicuousness in mind? There were layers here.

The Fudir scurried to the corner of the meat-dukān that overlooked the intersection, and from it he studied their back-trail. Yes. There was the third man, minus now his colorful shirt and flashy jewelry, moving easily from shadow to shadow past the shuttered shops and kiosks that lined Menstrit. This late in the evening, there was little traffic, only an occasional auto-rickshaw to momentarily spot-light the hunt. At each cross street and gulli, the pursuer paused and looked briefly into the deeper shadows of the narrow lanes.

The watcher considered the red-haired giant. “If you don’t want him to know which gulli you’ve gone down,” he whispered, “don’t stand in the mouth of it like a hotel doorman.”

The pursuer came finally to Amir Naith’s Gulli. He and the giant made eye contact, and the giant gestured into the alleyway with a toss of his head.

“So, it’s like that,” the Fudir decided as Sweeney stepped aside. “I hope you were well paid for the treachery.”

The fine-featured man turned a little as he passed Sweeney, and the redhead jerked three times and slumped to the ground.

“And paid quickly, too,” the watcher muttered, not without some satisfaction. Sweeney had been a fool to expect any other coin. The Fudir pulled a whistle from his cloak and gave three short blasts. Then, throwing his hood up, he clambered down a ladder affixed to the side of Stefan Matsumoto’s pawn-dukān. As he descended he began to sing.

Hunter and prey had frozen alike at the sound of the whistle. Now, seeing a drunk stagger out of the dim end of the alley, the latter retreated into a darkened archway, while the former resumed his stalk. Dropping the song, the Fudir closed with him, one clawlike hand outstretched. “Bhik, bhik,” he pleaded. “A few coppers, tide me over?”

“Off with you,” the man snarled. “I’ve a debt to pay.” Then he took a closer look. “What, your inheritance hasn’t come yet?” He laughed.

The Fudir affected to notice the teaser in the man’s fist. “Ayee!” he cried. “Cor! Thief! You bad man. No gelt b’long me. Very poor, me. Very poor. No shoot, please!”

There are several ways to deal with an armed man. One is to drop heavy objects on him from a great height. Another is to disarm him, and there is more than one way to be disarming.

“I’ve no interest in you, you filthy beggar.” The man reached out with his left to brush the Fudir aside, and in doing so, he lowered his teaser.

As fast as a black mamba striking, the Fudir seized the assassin’s right wrist and gave it a sudden turn. The man howled and the teaser dropped from nerveless fingers, to be kicked quickly into the shadows. There, a smaller shadow detached itself, swooped upon the gun, and ran toward the gulli-mouth.

“You broke my arm!” the assassin shouted and hauled back to punch the Fudir with his left.

A brick splashed into the mud beside him. Looking up, he saw along the rooftops on either side, silhouetted by the city-lit skies, men and women standing in unnerving silence, brandishing bricks and other objects. His gaze sought the gulli-mouth. Too far. However fast he ran, he could never escape the gulli before that deadly rain of brickbat struck. He’d chance a teaser or even a needle gun, he’d laugh at a pellet gun; but stoning was another matter.

“Not nice, call names,” the Fudir said mildly, drawing the assassin’s now-uncertain attention back to him. “No filthy, me,” the Fudir said. “No gandā. This place no b’long you-fella. You go now. Jehovah police come. Punish sinners. Swift retribution. You budmash fella. You kill man. We see. We tell him, police-fella. Lucky I no break arm, you. Only numb. Go! Jāo-jāo!”

Another brick splashed into the mud to punctuate the command.

“Who are you people? What is this place?”

The Fudir laughed. “This ‘die Ecke,’ the Corner of Jehovah. No one lives here but Terrans or by Terran permission. Go, now, while you yet live.”

Perhaps it was the sudden shift into Standard Gaelactic that finally broke the man’s nerve. He stared at the Fudir a moment longer, then bolted, splashing through the dank puddles and kicking empty cans and bottles and the foul detritus of rotting food from the stinking raddī-piles. Fudir watched his flight, contented. The Jehovah rectors used no sirens. They would be waiting at the mouth of Amir Naith’s Gulli with the body of Sweeney the Red and the gun that Harimanan the street urchin had delivered up to them. The Fudir did not like loose ends.

He turned and, strolling casually toward the back end of the gulli, called sweetly in a singsong voice, “Oh, Little Hugh! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

The Ghost of Ardow had managed many a hair’s-breadth escape during the end-game of the New Eireann coup. He was a master of disguise and a knower of byways. But the byways he knew were light-years distant, and the disguises had depended heavily on the willingness of a great many people not to pierce them. He had, however, already pried partway open the grate in the archway and was himself halfway squeezed through the narrow crack thus wrested when the Fudir found him.

It was a bad position from which to make a fight. Like a fish caught in a weir, he must accept capture and await the proper moment to wriggle. All he needed was a nearby stream. He might be Little Hugh O’Carroll, but he was also Ringbao della Costa, and the slum-boys of New Shanghai did not grow up stupid, when they grew up at all.

The Fudir studied this unlikely catch, wondering how to play him. He finally decided on the approach direct, and said without the patois, “The assassin is caught. The Jehovan rectors have him.”

Little Hugh had not secured a senior executive position with Clan na Oriel—nor for that matter survived Venishànghai slums or Handsome Jack’s ambushes—without the ability to gauge people. Hugh sensed that the man spoke the truth; but that was all he sensed.

“And Red Sweeney?” he asked.

“Dead. The assassin burned him with a teaser. That was to be your fate as well.”

“Dead.” O’Carroll repeated the statement slowly as if the repetition itself were the confirmation. “Aye, there went a true friend, to give his life for The O’Carroll.”

It had not exactly gone down that way, but the Fudir did not hesitate. “Aye, he did that.” And in a way, the treacher had saved the fugitive by his death. Had the assassin not paused, the Fudir might not have intercepted him quite in time; at least not without enough “Terran confetti” from the rooftops as to prick the interest of the Jehovan rectors, an interest every entrepreneur in the Corner was anxious to avoid.

The Fudir helped extricate the younger man from the grating in which he had gotten trapped. “Sweeney had a word for you,” he said. “I suppose he must have told you. He said that the southern clans in the Vale await the return of The O’Carroll.”

The Ghost gave him a sharp look. “And ye know this, how?”

“I was in the Bar when he came looking for you.” He tossed his head. “And so was the assassin.”

O’Carroll nodded. “Was he? Sweeney was careless. The assassin must have found my trail by following him.”

Which would not have been the most difficult of feats. But the Fudir wondered if he gave the red giant too little credit. The fox-faced man may indeed have gotten the scent through Sweeney’s less than subtle inquiries, and may indeed have offered the thirty pieces of silver. But Sweeney may have decided that the assassin you know is better than the one you don’t, and taken the bribe as a ruse. In the mouth of the gulli, he had stepped aside; but who can say but that he meant to strike as the killer strode confidently past? It seemed an obvious enough maneuver, as was most every maneuver Sweeney had made, and the assassin was not thick. A man whose basic tool is treachery will see it wherever he looks.

It had made no difference in the end, least of all to Sweeney. What corpse remembers how nobly or ill it perished?

“And yourself,” said The O’Carroll. “I saw you climb down from the rooftops, so I know you are no drunk and this was no chance encounter. Why should you be taking sides ’tween me and Handsome Jack?”

“Two things,” the Fudir replied. “We Terrans hold a monopoly inside the Corner. Your assassin did not have our leave to ply his trade on our home ground.”

“And second?”

The Fudir looked around at the ramshackle buildings, at the stinking midden heaps, at the shuttered and barred shops across Menstrit, visible through the mouth of the gulli. “Second? You are my ticket out of here.”

The Fudir led him inside the warren of buildings and Hugh found himself quickly disoriented. Down these stairs; through that tunnel; take this branch; up this ramp. Doors opened to special knocks. Even on the flyovers, where he could at least glance through the windows at the streets below, he could get no bearings. In the dark, those fitfully lighted lanes seemed all alike, and he suspected that even daylight would make no difference. He wondered at the sudden impulse that had joined him to this stranger, for he had not missed the significance of his rescuer’s name.

The Fudir. The Stranger; the outlander. Obviously an office-name.

My ticket out of here, the old man had said, in as affectless a voice as if he had merely commented on the weather. On New Eireann, folk said “on the run.” Perhaps it was that tenuous bond, and not simple gratitude, that accounted for his agreement to follow the Terran’s lead. The older man was, after all, Hugh’s “ticket out of here,” as well.

He was not so naïve as to suppose that everyone who did him good was a friend; but at least for now his interests and this “Fudir’s” ran in parallel. Little Hugh did not believe that today’s assassin would be the last that Handsome Jack would send. “An arrow must be stopped at the bow,” ran an old Shanghai proverb and from time to time he remembered wisdom he had learned on the streets there.

Like rats in a maze, they scurried through the Corner. When they paused in the lobby of a long-vacant building, the Fudir broke silence. “There may be a way to restore the rightful government to New Eireann,” he hinted, “without more bloodshed.”

Hugh, wondering why a Terran should care who managed the Vale, made no answer. Who could say if words poured in this man’s ear might spill from his mouth? He thought the promise was meant as an enticement to return to New Eireann rather than report to Oriel headquarters on Far Havn. But Oriel would probably cut its losses, sell the contract to the ICC, and reassign Ringbao to another project. Neither they nor this Fudir could know that he had sworn by his father’s name that he would return. He needed no enticement, bloodless or otherwise.

The Committee of Seven were five in number, one of its members having been apprehended by the rectors and another being by direct consequence “in the wind.” The chairman was a hard-looking woman, thin of face, white of hair, pallid of hue. Her eyes were a bitter hazel. Those flanking her, two on either side, sat in shadows, as befit those who, though sought so much, were seen so little. They had regarded Hugh with brief indifference before demanding of his guide by what right he had brought a stranger into their presence. There was something in their question that caused Hugh to dread the answer; for should that answer prove unsatisfactory, both he and the Fudir might suffer. Yet, the Fudir’s response, when it came, surprised and puzzled the erstwhile tainiste of New Eireann.

“I can give us back the Earth.”

Delivered with confidence, that statement was the only one Hugh had yet heard the man utter that was accompanied by any depth of emotion. Almost as one, the Committee turned to a hologram painting that hung on one of the walls of the small, dark audience room. It portrayed a large, white, domed building with towers at its four corners, sitting behind a long reflecting pool.

The chairman, who alone had not turned, continued to study the Fudir with steady gaze.

“Can you now?” she said.

“Do you know the story of the Twisting Stone?”

That drew the attention of the other committeemen, one of whom expressed his opinion in a snort. “We are layink now hope on altar of fable?”

“What means this fable?” another asked, but the chairman put her hand on his forearm.

“I tell you later, Dieter. Explain, Fudir. I know you have always a great mouthful of words, but this should be one of your better efforts. I was not happy that you called us out tonight. What should the rectors have taken alarm?”

The Fudir pressed his palms together and bowed over them. “Nandi, Memsahb. Certain things have I learned…”

But again one of the committeemen interrupted. “No pukkah, bukkin’ Standard,” he said, pointing at Hugh. “That fellah no fanty, him.” At that, all of them descended into the patois, words running too thick and fast for Hugh to follow. They began to shout at one another, all talking at once, gesturing, voices rising in pitch as well as volume. Hugh studied the room and its exits, thinking that he might need one soon.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the commotion died. Everyone was bobbing their head side to side and smiling. “Very well,” the chairman said. “We are agreed. New Eireann lies but two weeks down the Grand Trunk. The proposal may be a fantasy, but so is our Hope. If the one may win the other, it is worth the shot. And should it prove to be nothing, the cost is minimal. Sahb the Fudir, you will have your certificates at this time tomorrow. See Cheng-fu at the seal-maker’s dukān. You know the man. We will secure you the vacancies you require. The rest is up to you.”

“Mgurk is one of us,” the Fudir told them. “He will do as we ask. The other, let it be the woman, Micmac Anne. She is at the edge of knowledge, and might guess too much too soon. We can be thankful that January did not know what he had; we can only hope that Colonel-Manager Jumdar has not yet discovered it.”

The chairman struck the table with her knuckles. “Bread and salt,” she called out. The Fudir bowed over his folded hands as a servant scuttled in bearing on a silver tray a plate of naan and papad. Then, when small cups of thick, creamy tea had been served out, they all rose but Little Hugh and faced the picture and, bowing over their hands, chanted in a rough unison, “Next year, the hajj upon Terra.”