The January Dancer

Suantraí: Dispatches from the Edge of Night

Na Fir Li exercised in the old Greek style, though he did not know that he did.

Sweat gleamed on his torso, his brow, his thighs, so that he seemed to embody the glittering blackness of the sky itself. He moved lithely from bars to rings to bags to weights across the gymnasium of Hot Gates in an intricate ballet impossible to remember save that the body had a memory of its own—which is just as well, because his mind was engaged, as always, on three or four other matters.

On the floor mat, Fir Li executed a series of motions that were half dance and half combat; pleasure and threat combined, though it was the dance that threatened. “Pup,” he said at the top of a twirling leap, “would you care to walk on the ceiling with me?”

Greystroke had entered quietly and was standing by the edge of the mat. Fir Li was the only person he knew who could be aware of his unannounced presence. “Aren’t you too old for that?” he mocked. “The swift-boats report a monoship approaching.”

“I can reduce the gravity in here, if you think the ceiling out of your reach.” The Hound whirled to rest in the center of the room and made a gracious bow. “You may strip, too, if you think it would help.”

Greystroke grunted and went to his master’s side in his coveralls. “In what combat do we pause to strip? The blue wall, then?”

“It offers fewer obstructions. Go!”

The two raced across the gymnasium floor toward the chosen wall. As they neared it, they leaped, as nearly simultaneously as made no difference, and landed feetfirst about halfway up. Two more steps up the wall and…the gravity grid won. Both men back-flipped to the floor again, landing on their feet side by side.

“I don’t recall raising that ceiling,” Fir Li complained. “Whence this monoship? Go!”

Another dash at the wall. Two, three, four steps up. Na Fir Li grinned whitely and touched the ceiling with the ball of his left foot before back-flipping once more to the floor. Greystroke did not quite make it and landed a split second later. Fir Li clapped him on the back.

“At least you landed on your feet, Pup. Some don’t. Perhaps when you are as old as I am, you will run higher.”

“It comes from the Galactic East.”

The Hound, who had bent into his cooling off exercises, paused and gave his full attention. “I knew you were saving a surprise for me. Excellent. I was growing bored since the little incident with the Cynthians. Your conclusion?”

“Cu, there is another crossing, farther east. One that has never been mapped.”

“The scientists say the Eastern Rift is too wide for a sustainable road. But never mind. The scientists are always right until they’re wrong.” He resumed his cooling down exercises. “Your reasoning?”

“As yours, Cu. The ULP has no worlds in that region of space and none of our ships have ventured there; so this cannot be one of our vessels returning. Further, I think it unlikely that a lost colony could have reachieved starflight since the Diaspora and yet remained out of touch until now. Radio signatures would foretell them, if nothing else. Of course,” he added slyly, “it could be a ship of the prehumans, hiding out in the wild east and returning now at last.”

The Hound snorted. “Ah, ‘the Great Returning.’ You don’t believe in that, do you?”

“Nor would I look forward to it if I did. Sequels always disappoint.”

“What of another nonhuman race, achieving starflight at last?”

“There is a first time for everything, I suppose. But for a nonhuman race to achieve starflight, one would first need a nonhuman race. There have been only the prehumans and us.”

“It’s a big Spiral Arm.”

“So it is, but it is far more likely that—”

“That there is another Crossing, that the CCW has recently discovered it, and has sent a ship to learn where it leads, which—fortunately for us—is into my lap. Now you see my wisdom in placing drones along that road?”

“A low probability, many thought…”

“There was great amusement in the kennel,” Fir Li said. “The old dog has lost his mind.” His laughter was very like a bark. “But of course it was far better to put the drones out there and never need them.”

Greystroke glanced at the chronometer. “The interceptors will have secured the stranger by now. We start the interview in about three days, after they get down here.”

The Hound smiled grimly, revealing another band of white. “The curse of Newtonian space. We slide across light-years in mere days, but a few million leagues reduce us to a crawl. Learn what you can while he is in transit. Are any competent inquisitors on the interceptor?”

Greystroke shrugged. “Your apprentice, Pak Franswa-ji.”

“So. He will have to do. Perhaps we have plucked only a merchant-adventurer. They talk readily enough, if the price is right.”

“In a monoship? More likely, a Confederate agent.”

Fir Li resumed his exercises. “They can be brought to talk as well. It is only the price that differs.”

Bones can be broken, whips and screws applied, and a man may wear such scars with honor, because he will know he bore the pain, and can brag, even if he broke on the other side of it, that he had endured as much as he had. But there is another sort of breaking and other sorts of scars, and they reduce a man only to an object of pity, because he cannot even recall what courage he showed before courage found its limit.

Greystroke reported at the Squadron staff meeting, attended not only by Fir Li’s kennel, but also by the naval officers and department heads. And so amid reports on stores, on fuel consumption, on disciplinary hearings, on traffic and customs, was one on a pithed man. The department supervisors looked away and the naval officers threw their heads back in a gesture of distaste. They knew such measures were used, but they liked to pretend they were not necessary.

“He was sent to contact an agent of theirs on Jehovah,” Greystroke said.

Fir Li was reading three other reports and discussing with the commodore ship dispositions for the coming metric week. “What name was he told to find?”

“‘Donovan.’ His contact is via the Terran Brotherhood.”

“Yes. Well, all Terrans are Confederate spies. Are the ship dispositions satisfactory, Leif?”

The commodore bowed his head, and suggested two changes. “Because Shree Anuja will leave the Squadron as soon as Victory arrives.”

“Positioning them for a quicker departure? Surely, the Anujas are not bored with this duty?” Several men and women around the table laughed. “Pup! What message was he carrying to this ‘Agent D’?”

Greystroke paused for effect. That na Fir Li was paraperceptic and could handle multiple information streams simultaneously was known to all. Why keep the eyes from reading, the Hound had once complained, simply because the ears are hearing? His interlocutors made a certain allowance for his seeming deficit of attention; but at the moment Greystroke wanted the whole thing.

His pause could have been measured in microbeats, but achieved its intent. Fir Li held a palm out to silence the commodore and the traffic control director (who had his other ear) pushed the reports forward, and balled his hands on the tabletop. “Am I going to like this or not?” he asked Greystroke.

“It could go either way, Cu. What do you call it when you pierce a mystery only to find an enigma behind it?”

“A delaying tactic by a subordinate. What was the man’s message?”

“That Those of Name wish Donavan to report on the detention of CCW merchant ships by ULP forces.”

The silence spread to the whispered side conversations around the table. Leif Commodore Echeverria blinked his large, owlish eyes. “But we aren’t…” The Hound hushed him.

“They have been detaining and impounding our ships,” Fir Li said.

“Cu, the fact is only that some ships have entered the Rift and there is no record of their return. The reason for this has yet to attain the lofty stature of ‘fact.’ It may be no more than faulty record-keeping; but now we learn that the enemy has the same concern. We never thought to ask how many of their ships disappear.”

“Or we learn that They wish us to believe they have the same concern,” said the Hound. “Couriers have been used before to spread disinformation.”

“Cu, which of the two evident paths should I follow?”

“Oh, the second, of course. You are not weaned for the first. For that task, I will call to Hounds.”

The other Pups smiled, and the commodore threw up his hands, looking for support among the rest of the management team. “Oh, that was clear!”

“Perhaps as clear as need be for one rotating out on the next duty cycle.” Fir Li had gathered the reports to him and his eyes, ears, and mouth parted company once more. “But, to humor you, Leif. My journeyman wishes a journey. We know that ships enter the Rift and do not return. The obvious explanation is that Those of Name have seized them. But as my Pup has pointed out, we do not yet know if they actually reach the other side. There may be some unknown hazard in the Rift itself. One way to learn that is to dispatch a man into the Confederacy. Greystroke-ji believes he is ready for that. He is wrong, but the confidence does him credit. The second way is to complete the courier’s mission for him. You do have his passwords, Pup.”

“Of course, Cu. And the encrypted bubble. I assume it contains the names of the missing Confederate ships and that Donovan possesses the dongle to decrypt it.”

“And that being the shorter journey,” Fir Li continued to the commodore, “and the one more likely to bear fruit, I have instructed him to pursue it.”

“But…” interjected Traffic Control, “but you told him to take the ‘second’ course before you knew which one he meant!”

Fir Li grinned and turned full face to Greystroke. “I knew. One who’d not dare that journey first is no Pup of mine.”

When Greystroke had reached the door to the boardroom, Fir Li stopped him with a word. “Pup?”

“Aye, Cu?”

“They send them out in pairs, so that if one is caught, the other might get through.”

Greystroke nodded. “Of the second courier, we learned nothing.”

“See that you do,” the Hound said as he read the report on sick call, “before he learns of you.”

Two days out along the Silk Road, near the approaches to Last Chance, Greystroke realized the full depth of his master’s humor. He had entered the pantry to make a cup of his favorite blend—a tea from the slopes of Polychrome Mountain on Peacock Junction, where the variegated soils and the judicious splicing of selected fruit genes had achieved the nirvana of teas. There, he paused and reflected.

One who’d not dare that journey first is no Pup of mine.

Indeed. Had Greystroke’s mind numbered the two choices otherwise, his master’s orders would have sent him across the Rift into the CCW, in cold likelihood to his doom.

And, so, no longer a Pup of Fir Li.

He completed the preparations and secured the tea canister in the cabinet. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

Greystroke’s mobile field office, Skyfarer, was a comfortable vessel, streamlined for atmospheric flight, and as gray a ship as he was a man. Her name was unremarkable; her appearance, ordinary. A hundred thousand other private yachts possessed the same lines, the same colorings; some, indeed, the same registration number on the hull. And yet, beneath her ordinary exterior lay an extraordinary ship. Her sensors were of surpassing fineness; her Newtonian engines of matchless power. Her intelligence was more supple than that of many of the passengers—and prisoners—she had carried. Her alfvens could brake her unaided by any ground-based decelerators. She contained facilities for exercise and recreation, storage rooms, a refectory and library, a bay for the dũbuggi, another for the collapsible flitter—but all of it so cunningly laid out that no interior volume was wasted.

More extraordinary still—and despite or because of this utilitarianism—her furnishings were richly decorated. No comfort had been neglected; nothing plain had been permitted. Art filled odd spaces; color emblazoned panels. The decor extended from the visual to the audible to the other senses. Intricate ragas and concertos played subtly over speakers. Incense burned; the larder bulged with the most savory of faux-creatures. Nor were the inner senses neglected: the library, both physical and virtual, was of unsurpassed variety. The most ordinary of fittings had been milled and chamfered and routed into elaborate vines and grotesques. Control knobs bore the heads of beasts. The ship’s interior was as ornate as its owner was not, as if every bit of ostentation that had been squeezed from his person had been applied to his vessel.

In this comfort, Greystroke spent the twenty-two metric days from Sapphire Point to Jehovah Interchange. He planned a brief respite at Peacock Junction to secure more of his preferred tea, but otherwise he settled into his shipboard routine. He read from Còstello and other favorite philosophers; he enjoyed—and sometimes participated in—simulations of great battles or great fictions; he sparred with the onboard intelligence in games of thought. He sparred, too, in his gym, which, while smaller and less well appointed than Fir Li’s, provided ample scope to hone his skills.

He researched the various costumes of the Terran Corner in Benet’s Sumptuary Guide to the Spiral Arm, and programmed his anycloth to emulate them. A flick of the wrist, and the plain, gray bolt became a tartan mantle that he draped around his shoulders. A shrug, and the microfibers shivered into a knee-length kurta with embroidered borders; a tug at the collar and it opened into a dhoti, which he tugged down to his waist. A whispered command and the colors faded and the edges grew ragged. Satisfied, he pinched the seam and it opened up once more into a simple bolt of gray fabric.

From time to time he scanned the yellow-white blur that marked the shoulders of the Silk Road, and tried to tease out the images of long-gone ships from the subluminal mud. The walls of a Krasnikov tube consisted of lamina whose “speed of space” decreased steadily from the channel itself outward toward the Newtonian flats. Where the lamina were thin and “packed close,” the shoulders were said to be “steep” or “tight,” and no ship could pass through them without some portion of her structure crossing a contour line faster than the speed of space on the other side. The resulting Cerenkov “blink” could rip the vessel asunder or destroy it completely. Even at rest in the channel, a ship might be traveling many times faster than Newtonian c. Elsewhere, usually at certain resonance distances from suns, gravity broadened the lamina into “ramps” more easily negotiated. The Silk Road was well charted, but Greystroke and the ship’s intelligence kept a wary eye out when the shoulders grew tight by sounding them at intervals with a molecule or two.

But one curious consequence of the lamination was that the images of passing ships were trapped, for they moved always at the speed of light and so the deeper into the shoulder one peered, the older and slower those images were. There were ships that had passed by centuries before whose fossil images were only now reaching this point. With luck and skill and with instruments of exquisite fineness, one could sometimes tease these images from the blur of countless others. It had become something of a hobby with Greystroke. He had secured a picture of City of Chewdad Roy just as it was breaking up along Sweet Love Road to New Tien-ai. He had captured another of the Great Fleet that the Second Tyrant of Gladiola had launched against Ramage. Once, but only once, and this was years before, he thought he had seen a prehuman ship, an odd, misshapen vessel unlike any other he had ever seen. But those images, thousands of years old, were like pictures left too long in the sun, bleached and faded and indistinct. They had had millennia to sink through the shoulders of the road and now wafted pale and ghostlike across the Newtonian flats.

The ancient god, shree Einstein, the scarred man says, has not forbidden that two things might happen at the same time; but he has clouded men’s minds in such a way that they can never know that they have. There is no universal time, nor even absolute space. Even if one clocks off the revolution of the galaxy, as men once clocked off the revolution of Old Earth, that motion seems different from different parts of the Spiral Arm. The Constant Clock on Friesing’s World is no more than an agreement and ships and worlds synchronize with it through complex incantations prayed to Lorenz and Fitzgerald and Rudolf.

So if synchronicity has any meaning on worlds so far apart, Greystroke left the Rift at about the same time that the Fudir rescued Little Hugh in the back alleys of the Corner, and was still en route when the Brotherhood arranged to smuggle the pair off-planet. A cargo was booked on New Angeles for delivery on New Eireann, realistic certificates of competency were provided to Hugh and the Fudir, Mgurk dropped from sight in the Corner, and a debilitating substance was introduced into the mulligatawny consumed by Micmac Anne in the Restaurant Chola. The stomach cramps might not have prevented her from shipping out with the others, but the frequent and odious diarrhea proved too great an obstacle for her shipmates.

So it was that January was two hands short with departure imminent. Maggie B. could move up to Number One and Tirasi was qualified to sign the articles as astrogator; but that still left a hole for an instrument tech. There were worlds from which he could have departed shorthanded—January thought that Maggie and Bill between them could cover all three berths, and Malone could double up on the scut work—but Jehovah was a stickler for the literal interpretation of texts, legal texts no less than others.

What joy then, when two properly certificated individuals presented themselves and signed the articles! Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi interviewed the one—his cert named him Kalim DeMorsey—and judged his skills acceptable for system tech. Nagaraj Hogan examined the second man—one Ringbao della Costa—but this consisted mostly of verifying that he could lift or move objects of the required mass. Little more was required of a deckhand, and it gave his mate, Malone, someone to look down on.

“The berths are only for this one transit,” January warned the two with his cherubic smile. “But good work, Ringbao, can earn you the berth regular. Be here—awake—at oh three hundred Sixday morning, or else.”

Or else New Angeles could not depart on time; but January judged that such a threat would have little leverage over either man, and so he left the consequences ominously unspoken.

Once outside the hiring hall, Little Hugh spoke up. “So it’s a common laborer, I’m to be?”

“Deckhand,” the Fudir told him. “Or do you hide skills under your bushel?”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“Wonderful. Wide scope for that on a tramp freighter.”

“And I do a fair job at running a guerilla campaign.”

“Same objection. What’s your complaint? This will sneak you back to New Eireann without fanfare.”

“No complaint. I’ve done scut before. But I noticed you wound up as a deck officer.”

The Fudir shrugged. “I prayed to Shree Ganesha and was answered.”

Hugh snorted in derision. They turned their steps down Greaseline Street along the Spaceport’s boundary fence. At the far end of the Port, nearly to the horizon, a heavy lifter was pushed skyward on a pillar of light. Nearer by, a crew in dark green coveralls and straw terai-hats struggled over a balky tug pulling a ballistic commuter flight toward the passenger terminal. “Put a little more prayer into it!” the crew chief exhorted them. “Line it up, line it up. Insert the pin…Oh, God bless it! Back it up and let’s try it again, my brothers…”

The Bar stood at the corner of Greaseline and Chalk. From the outside, the black building was broad, featureless, and multistoried (in both senses of the word). Behind it, the Terran Corner lay like construction debris left over from the Bar’s erection. Dwelling upon dwelling filled the low land and jostled up the slope of Mount Tabor—despite its name, a steep but unimpressive ridge. “I never knew that about Terrans,” Little Hugh said, pointing to the hodgepodge of buildings. “That they lived in such wretched conditions.”

The Fudir grunted. “Oh, you didn’t.”

“No. There was no Corner on New Eireann…”

“Even we aren’t crazy enough to want to live there.”

O’Carroll said nothing until they reached the doors of the Bar. There was no sign to mark it. The Elders reasoned that for those who knew, no signs were needed; while for those who did not, the lack might save them from falling into evil ways. “Are all Terrans like you?” O’Carroll asked as he grasped the door handle.

“Kalim DeMorsey is from Bellefontaine on Redmount Araby. We eat Terrans for breakfast there.”

“No, I’m meaning in truth…”

The Fudir gripped him by the arm and his hand was like a vise. The other door swung open and a skinny, pale-faced man in green spiked hair staggered out, glanced at them incuriously, and went his way. “When you wear a mask, boy,” the Fudir said when they were alone, “that is the truth. And ditch that flannel-mouthed accent of yours for the duration.”

Little Hugh pried the Fudir’s fingers off his arm. He bowed from the shoulders. “So sorry, signor.” And he brushed his chin with his fingertips.

Inside the Bar, talk still raged over the unknown fleet that had passed through Jehovah Interchange a few days earlier. As in all such cases, the very lack of information manured the conversations (in both senses), and the number of origins, destinations, and purposes of the fleet had increased until it exceeded the number of speculators. The Fudir approached the Bartender, who bore the unlikely name of Praisegod Barebones, and passed him a Shanghai ducat. “Greet God, friend ’Bones. Private room 2-B?”

“God bless you,” the Bartender replied. “Not 2-B; it’s taken. You can have 3-G.” He glanced at Little Hugh. “So. Changing anatomical preferences?”

“It’s not like that—and you never met me before today.” Another ducat appeared by magic, and disappeared the same way.

“Would that I never had.”

“We need a wake-up call for an oh three hundred departure.”

“So. Is the Transient Hostel filled?” ’Bones passed him the key to the room. “At least, you leave Jehovah’s World a better place than you found it.”

That puzzled the Fudir and he paused before leaving. “How’s that?”

“Why, by leaving it, God willing, you improve it.”

The Fudir laughed and gave the Bartender another ducat “for the widows and orphans.”

He led Hugh to a small room on the fourth floor of the building. “This isn’t a hotel, strictly speaking,” he told him. “But public drunkenness is a crime—they call it a ‘sin,’ but it amounts to the same thing—and they provide rooms to ‘comfort the afflicted.’ They think of it as a sort of hospice.”

The corridor was dimly lit; the doors anonymous save for the number inscribed on each. From behind one door, they heard a woman’s voice crying, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Don’t stop!”

“She must be praying,” Little Hugh suggested.

Room 3-G was small, containing only a bed, a small stool, and a table. They threw their carryalls on the bed, which complained at the sudden weight. The floor was swept, however, and the walls were clean and brightly colored and decorated with tranquil scenes depicting sundry Jehovan provinces. Little Hugh looked around. “Not what I expected.”

“Why?”

O’Carroll did not answer. He pulled the curtain aside from the window. “Ah so. Lovely view of the Corner,” he remarked. “So picturesque.” He studied the slum for a moment longer. “And have those people no pride in themselves?”

“No, sahb,” the Fudir answered, sitting on the bed and then leaning back with his hands locked behind his head. “We very lazy fella. You much buddhimān to see so.”

Little Hugh let the curtain drop. “You can turn that blather on and off whenever you want. Why can’t they?”

“Don’t make assumptions to suit your conclusions.”

The younger man returned no comment, but explored the room. As the room was only two double-paces each way, and most of that was occupied by the bed and the writing table, this was accomplished by no more than turning his head. He sat on the stool and opened the drawer. Inside he found a tablet with letterhead embossed with a hologram of the building and reading, Greetings from the Peripherally Famous Bar of Jehovah! A rather grim illo for such a cheery salutation. “So who gets the bed; or do we take turns?” He found an envelope of condoms underneath the tablet.

“These rooms weren’t planned with double occupancy in mind,” the Fudir said.

Hugh held up the condoms. “Weren’t they? What hypocrites.”

“You’re letting your assumptions outrun your conclusions again. What do you know of Jehovan doctrines? As it happens, they celebrate beauty as the greatest good, and hold the human body as beautiful. God is Love, they say. It’s irresponsible procreation they regard as a sin.”

Hugh dropped the envelope into the drawer and shoved it shut. “So.” He folded his arms and stretched his legs out, and this was sufficient to nearly touch the door. “Tell me how this Twister will help me reestablish the legitimate government in the Vale.”

“You want reassurance? You’ve been willing enough to come this far without it.”

The younger man managed to shrug without changing his posture. “Let me see…Assassin in the alleyway. Check. Terran criminal gang. Check. Lost in a tangled warren of hallways and tunnels. Check. Committee of Seven, with power of life and death. Check. Up to now, Fudir, I don’t see where my being willing has mattered very much.”

The Fudir closed his eyes. “If you don’t want to go back, you can stay here. I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“Fudir,” said Little Hugh, “if I thought you were doing me a favor, I’d be out that door.”

The Terran opened his eyes and looked slantwise at the other. “Aren’t you too young to be so cynical?”

“You’re using me to get off-planet. That’s fine. You’re probably only a step or two ahead of the rectors—”

“Five steps. What am I, an amateur?”

“—so I can see what’s in it for you. Me, I vowed to return to the Vale, so I’ve got it to do. But I’d like to know if that will mean anything more than another hopeless go-round with Jumdar. Set me down in the Southern Vale and I’ll have the guerilla up and running in a metric week—and Jumdar’s spy satellites and air-cav will shut it down in another. I’m as willing as the next man to make a heroic but doomed gesture—the New Eireann influence, I suppose—but you promised me something a cut above hopeless.”

“Fair enough,” the Fudir said. “Have you ever heard the story of the Wish of the Twisting Stone?”

“No. A bedtime story? Really?”

“They tell it on Old ’Saken and a slightly different version on Friesing’s World, and other variants circulate on Die Bold and Abyalon. All in and around the Old Planets, you see. Once…”

“…upon a time…”

“…there was a prehuman king whose scientists presented him with the Twisting Stone, saying it would grant him one wish. ‘Cutting to the chase,’ as we Terrans say, the king brandished it like a scepter and said that he wished only to be obeyed.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be three wishes?” Little Hugh suggested.

The Fudir propped himself up on his elbows. “Once the wish for obedience is fulfilled, what other wish can matter? In most versions, two prehuman kings struggle to possess it. ‘Stonewall,’ ‘Hillside,’ ‘Cliff’…The names of the kings vary from one world to another, so maybe there were more than two; but that doesn’t matter. Whichever finally gains possession finds himself obeyed without question. So if we gain you the possession of it…”

“I’ll find myself obeyed on New Eireann. Charming. You know what I think?”

The Fudir hesitated. “What?”

“That prehuman fathers chastised their children by hitting them with bricks, and that’s how the story of a stone conferring the power of obedience got started.”

The Fudir lay back down again. “Maybe it’s the wildest of fables. But isn’t it worth a two-week trip to find out? Did you have something better to do with your time?”

“How do you know what January found was this Twisting Stone?”

“In the stories, the stone is never the same shape twice. January said that the artifact he found changed its shape imperceptibly, like a very slow dance.”

“I’d think that a folk that could make stones twist could also make them dance without them being the same stone.”

“And as long as he had it, his crew followed his instructions. When he gave it away, they reverted to their normal squabbling.”

O’Carroll snorted. “You mean the crew we’re shipping out with? Wonderful. Why’d he give it away, then?”

“Because he didn’t know what he had. He thought the crew had finally pulled together because of the common danger they had faced on the world of the Vault, and they’ve now fallen back into old habits. He doesn’t connect it with having the stone and not having it. And you won’t tell him any different.”

“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t dream of telling him anything like that. Who has it now?”

“Jumdar. She promised January that the ICC would auction it off and January would get a percentage of the profit.”

“Ah! So, Jumdar possess sigil of absolute obedience, and you and I go overthrow her. Everything now clear…”

“Don’t give me that Venishànghai crap. She doesn’t know, either. Or at least we hope she hasn’t learned in the meantime. She and January both think it’s an art object, potentially valuable because it’s prehuman; but that’s all. Any further questions?”

“No, a quixotic quest for a magic token seems about the right way to end the day. One thing does occur to me, though.”

The Fudir raised an eyebrow to the question. “What’s that?”

“If this gadget, or whatever it is, gives its owner such power, then why are you helping to gain it for me?”

The Fudir snorted. “There go your assumptions outracing your conclusions again. Not everyone yearns for power. Some of us yearn for justice. You were ill-used; and the ICC are crooks. That’s enough for me. Come on, there’s room on this bed for two even without intimacy.”

“No thanks,” O’Carroll said. “Harder beds than this floor greeted my back when I was on the run.”

“Have it your way,” the Fudir said, turning his face to the wall. “Just remember you’ll be stowing cargo most of the morning, starting at oh three hundred.”