The January Dancer

Goltraí: Ships Passing in the Light

Many an interchange carries more traffic than Jehovah Roads, the scarred man says…

…but none is ever quite so busy.

Here, ships may shift from the Champs Elysées to the Yellow Brick, from the Silk Road to the Grand Trunk, and to and from several lesser roads beside. They slide in from Alabaster and far-off Gatmander, from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from Peacock Junction and New Chennai, from Megranome and Valency, from Abyalon and Die Bold and Old ’Saken. Here grand liners mingle with humble freighters, with peacekeepers and survey ships and pirates, with commercial carriers, and tourist cruisers and private yachts, with savvy Chettinad merchants from the Lesser Hanse.

All this riot of voyagers—high and low, desperate and indifferent, jaded and eager and matter-of-fact—is tossed and juggled by the magbeam “light houses” spotted about the Jehovan system. Drawing their power off the sun, off the wind, off the two superjovians spinning like dynamos in the outer system, and even off the electric currents of the roads themselves, they push outbound ships toward their portals, cushion those emerging, and coordinate the arrivals, departures, and transits in an intricately choreographed opera of words and deeds.

If the League lives anywhere other than in the secret devotions of her Hounds, it is in this bustling interchange.

New Angeles leaped into this kaleidoscope, burning off HOJO just behind a Hadley liner plying the inner circuit and just ahead of a Gladiola terraforming ark outward bound for the Rim. At cutoff, when the legendary god Shree Newton would otherwise have seized New Angeles and whirled her ’round in endless ellipses, HOJO Platform Number Two shook hands with the onboard target array and its beams accelerated the ship steadily toward the coopers.

Old spacehands call this traverse of Newtonian space “the crawl,” and it generally consumes more time than slipstreaming from star to star. It is a slow lazy interval, for most of the grunt work happens portside and most of the skull sweat on the ramp. The crawl passes in boredom and the troubles consequent thereto.

Portside, there is cargo to load, and although the stevedores handle most of that, the ship still wants a deckhand for the orbital transfer, and no damned outsider is going to settle the stowage on a captain’s ship. Little Hugh O’Carroll learned that, in practice, this meant that Maggie told engineering the balance along each axis, Hogan then told Malone to rectify that balance accordingly, and Malone told “Ringbao” to shift containers within the cargo hold. This struck Hugh as rather more chieftains than clansmen, but he had put up with more tedious labors during the Troubles, and so he did the work willingly, if not happily.

Mahmoud Malone, his immediate boss, had been born on Gehpari and proved not a bad sort when there was no work to pass along. In unguarded moments he would revert to a Gehparisian accent, in which stresses showed up tardy and final vowels arose like resurrected saints. He was a man of great depth but of limited breadth, so that while he knew very little, he knew a great deal about it. Women, distilled spirits, distilled spirits applied to women, the laws of probability applied to games of chance, and the mulishness of alfven engines could spark endless conversations. Outside this range, his interests dropped off in inverse squares. The easiest way to shut him up was to change the subject.

“I hand it to yew, Ringbao,” Malone had said, once New Angeles had settled on the hyperbolic trajectory to Electric Avenue, “you air certainly a better workair than that Mgurk. We made the trim of the vessel say bone.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, pressed it to his lips, kissing it. Hugh did not tell him that on several worlds of his acquaintance the circle of thumb and forefinger signified an asshole.

Of course, “we” meant that Malone had given orders and watched while Hugh sweated cargo containers into place with hand truck, crane, and old-fashioned block-and-tackle—by the end of which Hugh had gained a certain sympathy for the storied Johnny Mgurk.

“Good,” he answered. “Then we can relax until we reach New Eireann,” with just the lightest ironic emphasis on the “we.”

Malone’s shrug was eloquent. Who knew what tasks might await the unwary deckhand in his idle moments?

The deck went on watch-in-four, and the Fudir found himself assigned the third watch, sandwiched between Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi. For the first several rotations, Maggie motherhenned the deck after being relieved, and Bill strolled on early, so that Kalim’s shoulder was never entirely unlooked over. He signed the log and the responsibilities were his, but the other officers were not yet comfortable with him.

Any crew that has worked long together wraps itself snug into a little society—a culture of shared beliefs, customs, legends, and practices. A newcomer never quite fits in, at least not easily and not right away. There are things that went without saying that now must be said; unspoken accommodations that could no longer be accommodated. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece, the newcomer must turn this way or that until he can nestle comfortably.

So the acting first and the acting astrogator posed problems to this unknown in their midst. They ran him through the gamut of the instrument tech’s art, from magbeam targeting to Doppler readings to parallax imaging. It wasn’t exercise, of course. This was a for-profit voyage, not a bleeding nursery school—as Tirasi pointed out—and the problems Kalim worked were all relevant to New Angeles’s progress. If, over the first week or so, the results were double-checked by others, the Fudir didn’t mind. “They just want to make sure,” he told Little Hugh afterward, “that I am what I say I am.”

“Sure, there’s comfort for you,” O’Carroll replied, well aware that the Fudir was not what he said he was. “I suppose when you counterfeited the certificates, you counterfeited the skills that go with them.”

“The best disguise,” the Fudir told him with a wink, “is yourself.”

Past the orbit of Ashterath, Jehovah Space Traffic Control passed New Angeles on to Platform Number 18 cupped in Ashterath’s L5; then afterward to others, until finally the push was taken over by the platforms feeding off Shreesheeva, a superjovian in the outer reaches of Jehovah Roads. Each time the direction of the push changed, Maggie B. took her astrogator’s cap back from Tirasi and adjusted the ship’s deflection to maintain the flight plan. Artificial intelligences were all well and good, but they weren’t the natural sort, and there was always that one percent that could not be left to thoughtless algorithms.

The intelligence perceived only abstract mathematical objects and theoretical approximations. It believed the data it was fed. But magnetic bottles and steering jets and parallax imaging cameras were real objects made of composites and metals and fields, and subject to all the ills of nature. Models only approximate the physical world, especially at the extremes; and the extremes were precisely where New Angeles was bound.

By the time she passed the orbit of Shreesheeva, she had achieved a sizable fraction of light speed, and was homing for a hole in space. You can’t get much more extreme than that and stay inside the universe.

Which, of course, they would not.

“We call it ‘threading the needle,’” Maggie B. told Ringbao one day in the wardroom when she had come below for a bite before turning in. Ringbao had just finished an overhaul to the portside air-scrubber under Hogan’s profane direction, and he and the engineer had also come to have a supper. O’Toole was present, too, a shwarma pita in one hand, a small beer in the other, and a flatscreen propped on the table before him which he studied intently.

“Course, both the thread and the needle’s eye are fookin’ invisible,” the pilot said without lifting his eyes from the flatscreen.

“He means the ship’s trajectory and the entrance ramp,” Hogan explained to Ringbao.

“Surely, entrance well known,” the deckhand said. He had to take care, especially around O’Toole, not to use an Eireannaughta accent, and consequently had been falling more and more into the rhythms of his childhood.

“Well, now, ’tis and ’tisn’t,” O’Toole told him. “I’m only the pilot. It’s Maggie who has to find the fookin’ hole in space.”

“All them stars,” said the ship’s hole-finder, “are a-movin’ relative to each another, which pulls on the currents connecting them—changes what we call the speed of space—and that means the entrance ramp is movin’, too. So, we have to take dopplers and triangulations during the run-up to pin down the position. You gotta hit the dang thing just under light speed, and at just the right angle.”

“Otherwise, ye skid,” said O’Toole, giving Maggie B. a significant look.

“Skidding isn’t good,” Hogan added helpfully.

“Not if ye don’t have a top pilot t’ compensate, it isn’t.”

“One time,” said Maggie B. “One time!”

“Twice.” O’Toole tapped the flatscreen with his nail. “That’s why Jehovah Traffic is after giving us the current parameters here—electrical potential, plasma direction, flow rate of space. Your boyo, Kalim, takes the readings, Maggie checks with the astrogation program, and the intelligence computes our heading and speed.”

“We’ll be on the alfvens by then,” Hogan interjected, to show that the power room had everything in hand.

“The square-head there”—O’Toole wagged a thumb at Hogan—“thinks he’s flyin’ the ship.”

“Piece of pie,” said Hogan.

“I don’t know why they were telling me all that,” Hugh said to the Fudir later, when relieved by Tirasi, the Terran had come down to the wardroom. The two of them were now alone. “Sure, and I’ll never be astrogatin’ a starship.”

“You were a new pair of ears,” the Fudir said, shoving a readymeal of gosht baoli handi into the cooker. “Each of them was trying to impress you with how skilled he was, and how he had things well in control. There’s a Terran word for it: ‘upsmanship.’”

Hugh sniffed the meal’s aroma and made a face.

“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir said, without even looking up.

“It lacks something. What’s the ‘true coriander’?”

“No one knows for certain. We find it called for in many recipes, but whether a vegetable, a spice, or the flesh of some rare Terran beast, who can say? It was found only on Old Earth and the secret of it has been lost for centuries.” With a distant look, he added, “It is all that we have lost, and all that we hope once more to have.” He nodded toward the spiral stairs. “On Old Earth,” he added, “the intelligence could have handled everything, with no human needed to take bearings or make piloting adjustments.”

“Sure, and it must have been a wonderful age, the age of Old Earth,” said Hugh.

“It was. We had true AI. We had nanotech. A lot was forgotten during the Cleansing.”

“Coriander,” Hugh suggested.

“We had science. Not just engineering, but the real thing. There hasn’t been a new discovery in centuries. Back on Old Earth, we discovered seven impossible things before breakfast.”

“It does make you wonder,” Hugh said, “how the Dao Chettians managed to overthrow it all.”

The Fudir looked disgusted, but the cooker chimed and the Fudir took his lunch to the table and sat across from Hugh. He looked about the wardroom to check that no one else had entered. Then he leaned across and lowered his voice. “January may give us trouble. Upstairs, we were talking about his little adventure. He wants the Twister back.”

“Wants it back…?”

“As in, ‘you don’t get it.’”

O’Carroll bowed, striking his breast. “So unworthy, signore. Ringbao only simple deckhand. Not understand deep thoughts of elder.”

The Fudir looked disgusted, again checked the wardroom, listened for footsteps on the spiral stairs leading up to the control deck. “You know what I mean. If he gets the Twister—the Dancer, he calls it—then there goes your chance to restore the rightful government to New Eireann without another civil war.”

O’Carroll turned thoughtful. “I don’t know. The first one left a few things unsettled.” When the Fudir said nothing, he sat back, very square, and tucked one hand under his other arm, cupping his chin with the latter. “It’s like chemistry. Jumdar stopped the reaction before it had gone to completion. Matters hadn’t fully precipitated. Jack Garrity already sent one man to kill me. Am I supposed to let that go unanswered?”

“Why? Do you take turns?”

“If I restore the rightful government, Jack has to understand that and accept it.” Hugh said “rightful government” without the slight irony that the Fudir usually gave it. Things were always clear in his mind. There was a bright line dividing right from wrong and you were on one side or the other. Yet, as a Terran proverb states, “Ultimate justice is ultimate injury.” Justice is metaphysical, more abstracted from the reality of men and women than even the mathematical objects the ship’s intelligence pondered, and what is bright and clear in that realm may become muddy and approximate in the lower. To the Fudir, that “bright line” was rice flour drizzled in complex patterns, like the kolams that Terrans drew on their doorsteps. It was not always clear just where the other side was, or even if there was one.

“Are you so certain it was Jack who hired the assassin?” he said.

The hand fell from Hugh’s chin. “Who else then?”

The Fudir shrugged. “There’s a Terran proverb: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Sometimes the exiled leader is a better rallying cry than the one who comes back. Prince Charlie was a lot bonnier while he was awa’.”

The younger man leaned forward, so that his face and the Fudir’s were inches from each other. “My Loyalists…!”

“…may have gotten used to your absence. If you come back, someone has to step down.” The Fudir was surprised that the scenario had not occurred to O’Carroll. He sat back and, after a moment, O’Carroll did, too. “Don’t worry,” he said. “With the Twister in your hands, it won’t matter what they or Handsome Jack think.”

“Although it may matter what Jumdar thinks.”

The Fudir spread his hands. “Legally, you are Planetary Manager. Jumdar was confused by the chaos she stumbled on, but she’s had a chance to sort things out by now. If you press a demand for January’s ‘Dancer,’ she may hand it over, even if it’s just to buy you off. The law is on your side, remember. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“That’s your plan? Wait and see? Somehow, I imagined something more…devious.”

“We can try devious; but I’d rather not make plans before I know the situation. ‘A plan is blackmail levied on fools by the unforeseen.’ It’s a barn door for absent horses. It’s always based on what you know, and what you know is always out-of-date. The situation on New Eireann when we get there may be very different from when you left. If Jumdar’s discovered the Stone’s power, that’s one thing. But if not…” He reached out and turned the viewer around. “What’ve you been reading? Bannister’s Treasury of Prehuman Legends. Forget it. Bannister’s not reliable. He doesn’t take the stories seriously.”

“I found it in the ship’s library. If we’re going wild goose chasing, I want to know what the goose looks like.” He pointed to a fanciful drawing of a dun-colored crystalline creature brandishing a macelike scepter in its claw.

“The scepter actually looks like a brick,” the Fudir said, “so I don’t suppose the prehumans looked like faceted gems.”

O’Carroll turned the viewer back. “Ah. You mean, legend not true?”

The Fudir nodded to the screen. “Bannister doesn’t have the story of the Twister.”

“I know. So far, have only your word legend even exist, let alone that it true.”

The Fudir spread his hands. “Thus raising the subtle matter of trust.”

O’Carroll logged off the viewer and put it away. “Not really. It doesn’t matter if I trust you or not. Either way, I’ll be back on New Eireann. Look, Fudir, I’m grateful you helped out in the alley back then, but you are living a childhood fantasy. Those legends tell us nothing of prehumans, only what we made up after we started finding artifacts. The stories don’t even fit together. No wonder Bannister doesn’t take them literally.”

“That wasn’t my complaint. I said he didn’t take them seriously. Think about this: Twenty years after Bannister collected those stories, rangers on Bangtop-Burgenland discovered the Grim Chrysalis in a chamber in the Southern Troll Mountains. And a generation later, recreational divers found the Finespun in Lake Mylapore on New Chennai. Half a dozen artifacts described in Bannister’s collection were discovered after publication. Explain that.”

O’Carroll smiled coldly. “Old sage say: ‘What man expect, man see.’ ‘Kalim,’ those artifacts were found by people who’d read Bannister, so they saw what Bannister prepared them to see. You’re on a fool’s errand. And so am I. The difference is: I know it.”

Kalim was on deck when they finally lost the push from the magbeams, and Malone, back in the power room, engaged the alfvens.

“Very well,” said Captain January, when Kalim had taken dopplers of the beacons in the cooper belt and the intelligence had verified New Angeles’s vector and position. “We shall go on watch-and-watch. Remember, it’s a ballet out there and the dance is chaos. Bill, go fetch us some sandwiches and drinks. Kalim, go grab some shut-eye. You’ll take the second watch with Maggie.”

Kalim left the deck with Tirasi. “Remember, it’s a ballet out there,” the acting astrogator muttered as they climbed down the spiral staircase to the wardroom. “Every bleeding time he says the same bleeding thing!” Of course, it was a ballet, and all of the bodies, including the cooper beacons, were in constant motion and ultimately influenced by every other body in the universe—and the equations really were unsolvable. But Kalim did not point that out. It was the iteration that irritated Tirasi, not the fact. “Sleep tight, ye bleeding heathen,” he told Kalim in the wardroom. “You’re up in four—and don’t you bollix my instruments.” With that, he grabbed a basket of sandwiches that Ringbao had prepared, two cups of coffee, and climbed back up to the control deck.

Four hours later, Kalim relieved Tirasi and, shortly after, Maggie B. relieved January. The captain glanced pointedly at the chronometer, but said nothing. Maggie handed Kalim a cup of coffee and settled herself into the command chair, sipping a second. “Get me a position,” she said when the first watch had gone. “Let’s see how far off true Old Two-face let us drift.”

Kalim did not react to the gibe. From what he had seen so far, January was a rather competent shiphandler. He checked the log to find what benchmarks Tirasi had shot—Larsen’s Star and the Giblets—and set up the parallax cameras to take fresh images for comparison. He ran the diagnostics, judged the results acceptable, and downloaded them to the stereograph so the intelligence could calculate the parallax, and from that their direction relative to the fixed sky.

Maggie queried the intelligence, which recommended a slight course correction. “Not too badly off,” she admitted, entering the correction in the astrogator’s log. “Maybe because Annie isn’t here to distract him.”

Kalim sensed alien ground involving the captain and the two women in the crew. He and Ringbao were aboard for the free—and anonymous—passage to New Eireann, not to take sides in the crew’s internal squabbles.

“Adds up, y’know,” Maggie told him, perhaps responding to his silence. “The divergence. The least bit off’n true at this point and we’d miss the entrance. Or worse, we’d go in at too dang sharp an angle. It’s gotta be normal to the cross section. Better to miss and come back ’round than to skid going in, an’…” She came to a halting stop, then fiddled unnecessarily with the log. A furrow formed on her brow, a deep fold between her eyes, as if someone had struck her with a chisel.

“I understand completely, ma’am,” Kalim said.

“Do you,” Maggie B. said curtly. She shook off the study into which she had fallen. “Get me a Doppler shift on the Eye of Allah—and let’s check our speed.”

During the last day before entering Electric Avenue, the watch was continuous and the crew took catnaps when they dozed at all. January was always on the deck, although he deferred to Maggie B. for the astrogation. She, for her part, switched from screen to screen on the computer as fast as Kalim and Tirasi could feed her the data. The stellar spectra had blue-shifted as the speed of the ship approached the speed of the medium whereby they measured it. The stars in the forward viewscreen crowded together and actually seemed to recede the faster the ship moved. Visible light slid off the scale, and the sensors shifted to infrared. Ringbao, with no specific duties, ran food and drink to the deck and to the power room, where Hogan and Malone tended the alfvens.

An hour before entry, Slugger O’Toole appeared, fully rested and sober, and took his place in the pilot’s saddle. “How’s the fookin’ groove?” he asked of no one in particular. “Ringbao, d’ye have any more o’ that tay?”

Maggie B. told him that the trajectory was within five degrees of normal to the entrance. O’Toole nodded and placed an induction cap on his head. Ringbao handed him the cup and he took a long swig of the hot liquid. “I’ll see yez when I see yez,” he announced, then inserted his earphones and pulled down a pair of black goggles. Ringbao, who had always traveled as a passenger before and had never seen an entrance actually being made, stood in the rear and watched everything with fascination.

Tirasi took a final set of parallax views of the weirdly distorted sky. The intelligence computed the ship’s bearings and Maggie ordered a final course correction. Her hand hovered over the red slap-button, ready to snatch the last string in the fabric of space and yank the ship over the threshold should the intelligence fail to act.

The chronometer clicked, Ringbao glanced up at the sound, and—he missed the transition. When he looked again at the forward screen he saw nothing but a blur of xanthic light. January called out, “Status?”

“In the groove,” said Maggie.

“Alfvens spinning sweet,” reported Hogan from the power room.

O’Toole, cocooned in his headgear and in rapport with the ship, said, “Minor skidding. Nothing I can’t handle.”

And as slick as that, they were sliding down the Grand Trunk Road.

Now, Shree Einstein once said that nothing in the universe could move faster than light; but like many gods, he spoke in oracles. On one hand, nothing could be seen to travel faster than light; for such an object was moving faster than the medium by which it was seen, and an ancient superstition holds that “out of sight is out of mind.”

On the other hand, if the universe is composed of all those parts that can be perceived, a superluminal ship is no longer in the universe. Instead, it voyages in those blank regions of the map in which men once wrote “Here there be dragons.”

So just as a world includes parts unseen as well as seen, the universe is more manifold than subluminal instruments reveal. Yet, the limits still apply. In the superluminal creases, the ship did not move faster than light, relative to local space. It was space itself that was moving. After all, space is not itself a material body, and so not subject to the limits placed on matter. Not even Shree Einstein could tell Shree Ricci to hold still.

January hosted a dinner in the wardroom to celebrate their entry onto the Grand Trunk Road. “Here’s to a successful slide!” he announced, holding aloft a glass of Gladiola Black Saffron, otherwise known as Old Thunderhead, because it delivered maximum impact at minimum cost.

“An’ the end o’ th’ fookin’ crawl,” O’Toole seconded him.

Tirasi twirled the stem of his wineglass between thumb and forefinger. “How smart is it to leave the bleeding control deck unwatched?” he asked. By the roll of the eyes around the table, Ringbao judged this was not the first time he had raised such an objection. He wondered if anyone on this crew ever said anything that the others had not heard unnumbered times before.

O’Toole favored the Queensworlder with one eye. “We’re in the fookin’ groove, boyo. Dead nuts center in the tube. Won’t need a tweak for another tin watches, by th’ drift.”

Tirasi sighed elaborately. “We have to trust your judgment then…”

O’Toole reddened. “My judgment and the intelligence’s!” Too late, he saw the trap. The words were flown!

All innocence, Tirasi turned to January and said, “As long as an intelligence concurs.”

January snapped, “Enough of that!” And Tirasi sat back, puzzled and hurt; for in spite of many years in which he might have learned better, he had thought the captain smiling at the joke.

Neither Ringbao nor Kalim had joined in the laughter at Tirasi’s trick. Little Hugh thought there was too much malice in it, and he preferred to save malice for when it was genuinely needed. The Fudir, for his part, preferred no distractions from his quest, and becoming embroiled in these petty squabbles was no part of his plan. But Tirasi had heard the two newcomers’ silence, and since he could not chide his own captain, turned to the deckhand. Kalim was sitting between Tirasi and Ringbao, so Tirasi had to lean past him to address Ringbao.

“You disapprove, Ring-o?”

“So sorry,” the deckhand answered. “Queensworld humor so subtle.”

Tirasi made a fist. “Do you know why they call me ‘Fighting Bill’?”

Little Hugh studied the fist, looked in the acting astrogator’s eye. “Because you cannot control temper?”

O’Toole burst into laughter. Hogan and Malone traded smirks. Captain January smacked the table. “I said, Enough!”

“Do you want a piece of me, mate?”

Little Hugh shook his head. “Too many pieces remain when done. Not able to choose.”

Both O’Toole and Malone went blank, but Maggie B. understood right off. So did Tirasi himself, who clenched his teeth and glared at Ringbao. But he hesitated. Perhaps he saw something in the deckhand’s face. Perhaps he saw the Ghost of Ardow, for there is a gulf between those who brawl and those who kill, and the Ghost waited on the far side of it. Tirasi backed off, glancing at Kalim, who had been calmly eating his stew the while. “Aren’t you going to help your mate?” he asked with belligerency false in his voice.

The Fudir blinked and looked up as if in surprise. “Why? Does he need help?” There were little knots of anger at the corners of his jaw, and a certain unexpected hardness had crept into his voice. The others at the table fell quiet.

And January, in particular, regarded his two new hands more thoughtfully.

Later, the Fudir visited Little Hugh in his cabin, and shutting the door on them both, he grabbed the younger man by the front of his coverall. “Don’t ever do that again!” he said in a whisper more terrible than a shout. “Don’t ever let them see anything more than a simple deckhand!”

O’Carroll pried the Terran’s fingers loose. “I didn’t like the way Tirasi was picking a fight with Slugger.”

“You didn’t like it?” The Fudir shook his head. “You didn’t like it? Did anyone ask that you should? The only one who had to like it was O’Toole, and in case you didn’t notice, he did! He and Tirasi have gone round on round since the cows came home. It’s a ritual with them. Malone takes bets, and everyone clucks in disapproval. So you keep your nose out of their business.”

Little Hugh shook his head. “No, there was a meanness to it. You’re making it out less than what it was.”

The Fudir shoved him on the chest. “This from a man ready to throw an entire world back into civil war because he lost his job in a hostile takeover.”

Little Hugh seized the Fudir’s wrist. “Careful, old man, or I’ll break you in two.”

But the Fudir only relaxed and said mildly, “We shouldn’t quarrel with each other.” The words were meek enough, but they sounded oddly like Do you really think you could?

Now there was a new and sudden thought! Little Hugh released the Terran. “You’re not as old as you look,” he said in wonder.

The Fudir grunted and turned to the door. “Don’t get in any fights with Tirasi. January may have sensed something. Try to be a bit more invisible. That was your specialty wasn’t it? Didn’t they call you the Ghost?”

“I know disguises.”

But Hugh’s response was ambiguous and the two parted company, and each considered what the other had revealed.

Electric Avenue lay along the geodesics, and so was straight as a rule. It was the rule that was warped and twisted. In the groove, everything was always dead ahead. O’Toole checked the ship’s centering at intervals, but the only exciting moment came a week and a half out, when Cerenkov turbulence signaled the bow wave of a vessel sliding down the road in the opposite direction.

Since a ship on the Avenue was, in a certain sense, nowhere in the universe, no two ships could ever occupy the same place. There was thus no danger of superluminal collisions, only a slight buffeting by ships passing in the light. Now and then, O’Toole corrected for the slight deviations these caused. “But this time,” he swore, “it musta been a fookin’ fleet.” The wake had slewed the ship to the side of the channel, close to the subluminal mud.

Nothing he couldn’t handle, however. O’Toole dismissed the turbulence off handedly, although Little Hugh found him afterward in the wardroom with a strong drink in his hand and a disinclination to conversation. Even January appeared almost concerned, his perpetual smile flattened nearly to horizontal, and something long and extremely angry had been entered in the ship’s log.

“They ain’t supposed to enter the Avenue so close together,” Maggie B. explained when Ringbao had asked her. “Creates a passel of problems for the oncoming traffic.” But when he pressed her on how close things had gotten, she only smiled and told him not to worry. That worried him.

“Why?” the Fudir asked when O’Carroll brought the matter up. “‘A miss is as good as a mile.’ Always a lot of traffic on the Grand Trunk and sometimes it just bunches up. No point worrying over it. January will file a squawk with STC New Eireann.”

But when they exited the slipstream and yanked themselves into Newtonian space, they found STC New Eireann off-line, and the magbeam cushions failed to catch them.

Hogan swore mighty oaths and shifted the alfvens into reverse, braking the ship by snatching at the strings of space as they fell inbound from the exit ramp. The whine rose to a teeth-rattling pitch that filled the ship and put everyone on edge. Despite the refit at Gladiola, waste heat made the power room nearly unbearable and Hogan and Malone could take only an hour inside before emerging, sweat-soaked, to pant in the corridor outside and worry whether the containment field would take the strain.

“How bad is it?” Ringbao asked Maggie B. as she headed for the control deck to relieve January.

“Not now, Ringbao,” she answered him.

New Angeles had braked without magbeams before, but this time they hadn’t been expecting it and hadn’t been prepared for it and could ye get out o’ th’ fookin’ way, Ringbao!

It was hours before the tension eased, a little; and days before anyone relaxed. By then, Kalim had harvested enough off the radio to understand what had happened to the world they were approaching. A fleet of rievers had overwhelmed Jumdar’s planetary police, pillaged New Down Town, and looted everything they could break open.

“Aye, that’s bad cases, that,” January said, but his mind was on the difficulties of shedding velocity without the magbeam cushions. Lacking the ephemeris from New Eireann STC, Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi and Kalim extrapolated from the ship’s previous visit to identify the markers on which to take their bearings. They cursed the rievers for their troubles. Several days passed in this manner, during which time a few magbeam platforms did come back online. But the world toward which they fell was too busy binding up its wounds to worry much over an inbound tramp. Passing below the orbit of the Dagda, New Angeles secured her first long-distance visuals and they could see orbital factories tumbling like children’s toys broken and flung aside.

O’Toole fretted, for he had been “bread-and-buttered” in the Vale, and though he had gone and flown, the places in his memory did not lie quiet. “There was a girl there,” he said to Ringbao over a brooding bowl of uiscebaugh. “In Fermoy, it was, and I fancied her some; and I wud av married her but that she didn’t ’prove me dhrinkin’ av the creature. Ah, ’tis the wimmin an’ not the alfvens what drive a man to space. An’ now Kalim sez Fermoy’s been…” He did not finish the thought, but took a drink while Little Hugh O’Carroll fought to stay within the shell of Ringbao della Costa. He laid a hand on the pilot’s forearm.

“Maybe girlfriend okay,” he forced his persona to say, his words wrung out of any hint of how deeply he himself felt about the world he had once helped manage.

O’Toole shook his head. “That was years ago…She’s long forgotten me. I thought I’d long forgotten her.”