The January Dancer

Goltraí: Wearing Out the Green

It began on New Eireann, the scarred man says…

…a world of black volcanic glasses and uplifted basalts. What little green the world owns is in its name and in a narrow winding valley that ends in a small glen just below the summit of Ben Bulben. Like all the worlds, it has been terraformed; but it is too young for such maturity and only this one high valley had been conquered before seed and stock and will gave out. The world was barely weaned from its molten infancy, and still threw tantrums of molten rock and pyroclastic ash, and the Vale remained a great green wound upon the planet’s sullen red-and-black flesh. Little by little, to those who measure these things, the boundaries of the valley contract, as basalt and granite and diorite win back what they had long ago lost.

(“But let them have their moment,” the scarred man sneers. “For now, they live in a green paradise and the black igneous reality lies out of sight, beyond the crest of the Reeks. All the eruptions, all the steam and lava, burst forth in the Barrens below, where the plates are thinner and the core breaks through. So their future doom is yet to come. Unless…”)

…unless one day the Vale of Eireann, too, erupts. The Big Blow, they call it, making it a joke. There are hot springs in the glen below Ben Bulben…

And so it is a world of sad songs (which should please you, harper). When they want to make merry, the Eireannaughta don’t sing. They fight. And that they do often enough to lighten the mood that surrounds them.

They have little enough in the Vale. They can feed themselves and make the most basic things, and they have far more power than they need from thermal stations, but there’s little to do for diversion and their arts are ordinary. Drinking is one (and there they do show considerable talent) and conversation is another (and that they class as a martial art). Orbital factories, built by companies from better-endowed worlds, have come in search of cheap power. New Eireann makes most of its off-world exchange by beaming excess power to them, and a little more by supplying them with fresh food. ICC ships come and go with other supplies for the stations and haul away their products. Very little finds its way to the world below.

The other major source of off-world income is the tourist trade. People have come from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from the Lesser Hanse and Gladiola, from even High Tara itself. They come to climb the Western Reeks and stare at nature raw, at the great geysers and fountains of lava, at the rivers of molten rock and the basalt glaciers. “An’ d’ye be seein’ the wee pyroclastic cloud there? Sure, an’ I hope ’t isn’t blowin’ our way…Ah, mind the drop here, yer honor; wouldn’t want ye t’ fall into yon lava pool.” Oh, they play it up, the Reek Guides do: a great mouthful of the blarney and just enough hint of the danger to make the tourists shiver in delight.

(“An’ shure ’tis only an image,” the scarred man mocks the accent. “They are no more Irish than you or I are Tibetan. Nor any less. Across so many centuries, everyone on Old Earth was our ancestor. It takes more than eponymous settlers or carefully contrived archaisms to resurrect something that long dead. But what can a people do when they have no future, save reconstruct some storied past?)

Then the tourists ride the gondolas back down into the Vale from which the rest of the planet, out of sight behind the Reeks, can seem a bad dream. They stay in Da Derga’s Hostel or in quaint tourist cottages in the Mid-Vale or sample the excitements (such as they are) in New Down Town. They spend some more money and remain until they grow bored (which happens soon) or frightened (which happens sooner). One morning, the tourist throws open the shutters in the terribly cute guest room, and takes a deep breath of the bright green grassy Vale—and the breeze is just a trifle too warm and bears just the tiniest acrid wisp of molten stone. And “terribly cute” seems suddenly more than merely “cute.” So they think, Who in their right minds would ever have settled here? And then they think, Who in their right minds would stay here a moment longer?

So the tourist numbers aren’t very great in the wider scheme of things. Far more people flood Alabaster to see the Cliffside Montage. But enough of the curious come to satisfy a small world like New Eireann. They bring hard currency—the Shanghai ducat, Gladiola Bills of Exchange—and they bring something near as important: news of the great wide world. Messages travel only so fast as the ships on Electric Avenue, and only to where those ships touch orbit, and so news arrives in snatches and batches at irregular intervals and often from unexpected places. The Eireannaughta were tolerably well informed of doings on New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose, and somewhat less so regarding Jehovah or the Jenjen Cluster. But High Tara? The Hatchley Commonwealth? Far Gatmander? Oh, those were magic names and faraway places! At times it was easy to believe that there really was a sprawling United League of the Periphery out there, and itchy youths like Slugger O’Toole might ship out on a passing tramp and go searching for the planet crusted with gold.

A number of years earlier the Eireannaughta had hired the Clan na Oriel to manage their government contract and the Clan sent in an honest administrator, who took the office-name of Padraig O’Carroll, though his real name was Ludovic Achmed Okpalaugo. By all accounts he ran a clean and honest administration, though at first the Eireannaughta didn’t realize that because they didn’t know what one looked like. When they did, they revolted, because an administration that won’t take bribes generally won’t hand out favors, either.

There are appetites that ought not be fed, for they grow on their feeding. As an extra inducement to potential renters, New Eireann had invited the Interstellar Cargo Company to service those orbiting factories. ICC ships ranged throughout the ULP, “from Gatmander to the Lesser Hanse,” as their slogan had it. And they had the magic touch: uncannily anticipating where each good would demand the best price. It worked well for everyone: customers received goods they wanted, producers found greater profit, and the ICC pocketed a handsome fee. So the ICC pretty much owned the traffic for everything in New Eireann space.

Except the tourist trade.

There was a nice cash flow in that pipeline. Not much compared to what the ICC already had; but consuming all that wealth had only made them hungrier. And when a fat man feasts, there are always those who gather the crumbs. Oriel wouldn’t kick back or fix contracts, but the ICC was more flexible in that regard. They did not consider buqshish to be wrong. They were not bound by the moralities of ancient religions and made no secret of it. They believed in sharing the wealth, too, so long as they had the larger share.

Neither did they lack for corporate ethics. When you take a bribe, you give good value in return. If you kick something back, you make sure of performance. One time on Agadar, the ICC let a contract to build a road along the Inkling Ocean. The contractor skimped on the materials and the road washed out in the first monsoon. So the ICC factor called up his house militia and they found the contractor and put him to work on the repair gang, out in the hot sun with a tar-brush in his hands and a terai-hat on his head. And they gave the repair contract to his biggest competitor. There’s something charming about such an honest corruption. The kidnapping and forced labor weren’t legal, not until afterward when they had bought the Assembly; but it was poetic. You can’t argue that.

So when Certain Persons approached the ICC factor on New Eireann and suggested that a change of administration might be to the benefit of all, the factor—whose name was Vandermere Nunruddin—replied that while he could not condone such a thing, he saw no reason why the ICC could not do business with whatever administration held Council House. He may even have suggested a few management corporations that might bid on the job, one of which was, in the spirit of open competition, not an actual subsidiary of the ICC.

No one expected what happened.

Nunruddin probably anticipated a quiet coup, with Clan na Oriel offered a golden parachute and an ICC subsidiary brought in. Cynics often think that everyone else is just waiting to cut a deal, and that even saints are selfish. The Certain Persons who dined with him probably thought the People were behind them. But if an honest administration that gives no special favors and taxes at a reasonable rate for matters palpably in the public good engenders a certain loathing in the hearts of some, it evokes genuine fondness in the hearts of others. Most of the Eireannaughta would likely not have minded dipping their snouts in a government trough, but most of them didn’t believe that Certain Persons would ever let them anywhere near that trough. So if it surprised the cabal and the ICC factor when so many people rose up against the coup, it surprised everyone else how many backed it.

A war is always ugly, and a civil war the ugliest of all. An invader may be expelled and sent back to where he came from, but a neighbor remains a neighbor after the fighting is over.

New Eireann had no army. The Vale was too narrow and too rugged to support contending states. The nearest other state was the Maharaj of New Chennai, three days hard streaming down the Grand Trunk Road; and New Chennai had no interest in nor even much awareness of the Vale of New Eireann.

Consequently, there were no tanks or warplanes or artillery on the planet. But New Eireann had a police force—the gardy—and the gardy was armed because there are plug-uglies in the slums of any world and even a small world has its share. When the cabal rushed the Council House to seize Padraig O’Carroll and his ministers, half the gardy and a third of their commanders raised the Oriel banner atop the Hotel Wicklow in New Down Town. At this signal, the Spacedockers Union defied their own bosses, stormed Union Hall, and announced a general strike in support of The O’Carroll. The revolutionary cabal was utterly stunned by all this.

The farmers out in County Meath, in Mid-Vale, went the other way. They had always grumbled about the “off-world managers” from Oriel. So they formed up a militia, burnt out a few neighbors who wouldn’t go along with them, and sent a company’s worth of eager youth to the City to support the “Revolution.”

When the Loyalist gardies tried to retake Council House, some of the Oriel household troops took heart and fought back against their shocked and distracted captors. A fire was started—by accident, everyone says—and The O’Carroll and three of his ministers died of smoke inhalation. Terrance Sorely, who was a Certain Person, became a little less certain after that. He hadn’t expected deaths. He told the others he wanted out, and they told him it was too late, “the die was cast,” and all that, and he said he was out anyway, and so Handsome Jack Garrity shot him dead right there at the boardroom table, and he got his wish.

A war is always ugly, and never more so than this one. Planes and tanks and precision munitions at least keep things sanitary, and most everyone you kill is out of sight. But pistols, rifles, gelignite—they called it “jolly good-night”—are up close and personal. You can make a peace with someone you’ve fought at a distance; but it’s harder to do that with someone whose stinking breath is in your face and his knife an inch from your throat.

And it did get down to knives and swords and pikes. New Eireann had not much of a munitions industry. Just enough to keep the gardy better armed than the plug-uglies. There was no hunting because there was no wild game in the Vale; and target shooters used harmless infrared “beamers.” It didn’t take long after the Burning of Council House to use up the stocks, and whatever might have been in production at Reardon and Harrigan’s munitions factory was denied to both sides by the partners, who set fire to the Works, created a crater of impressive dimensions on the outskirts of Galway Town, then shook hands and went their separate ways, Reardon to join the Revolution, Harrigan to the Loyalists. There was something admirable about that small gesture, something even gentlemanly. They limited the magnitude of the war, even at the expense of their profits and everything they had ever owned. That aura of self-sacrifice made Reardon a poor fit in the cadre of the Revolution. The other Persons distrusted him just the smallest bit.

A few people made “jezail” rifles and “zip” guns, but these were regarded as the weapons of barbarous folk, and the Eireannaughta much preferred the cutlass, the dirk, and the two-handed claymore sword. Why send a high velocity slug of lead ripping through someone’s organs when you could cleave him from collarbone to groin with a well-aimed stroke? You can shoot a man by accident, but you need real commitment to lop his head off.

War is always ugly. It is guts streaming from opened abdomens. It is a head trying to speak its last few words as it stares in astonishment at the body it once topped. It is learning the ghastly meaning of the term “human remains” in the ruins of Da Derga’s Hostel, after some boyo has used up the last of a dwindling supply of jolly good-night.

So there had better be a damned good reason for it, because even if it is good, it is still damned. Yet, better to fight over liberty and loyalty than over tuppence difference in the tariff on lace. Bigger wars have been fought for a great deal less. And if a man will not fight to keep his liberties, he is a slave to the first tyrant who would kill to take them. That doesn’t make things less ugly, but it might mean that in later years, when a man wakes in the dead of night in a cold, shivering sweat, he can, at length, go back to sleep.

Now the Revolution did not set out to be tyrants. They only wanted to dip their beak in the tax money flowing through Council House. But events, once unleashed, consume their makers. Certain steps became “necessary.” After two weeks’ fighting, none of the original cabal were still alive, except Handsome Jack, who, though crippled, still directed things from the Broadcast Center. Even the ICC factor was dead. The rumor had gone out that he had instigated the coup, and the Loyalists bid Nunruddin a jolly good-night in his ground car one spectacular evening.

The Loyalists had never had a leadership, as such. The counterrevolution had been spontaneous, and The O’Carroll and most of his henchmen had perished in the Council House fire and in the fighting that followed. But by the end of the second week, The O’Carroll’s tainiste, his assistant manager, emerged from hiding in the Glens of Ardow, where he had been conducting public hearings over the school curriculum when the fighting started—an activity that sounds so sweetly normal that a man might weep for the innocence of it. He and his bodyguard took to the hills when the trouble broke. The Revolution had not known he was out of town when they sprang their coup—they might have waited another week if they had—so they failed to sweep the Southern Vale to capture him. By the time they thought of anything beyond taking Council House and the Broadcast Center, the tainiste was nowhere to be found—and everyone in the County Ardow had blank, innocent looks.

He spent the two weeks gathering intelligence and assembling forces. He had only his personal guard at first; but he located and mobilized other Oriel troops scattered about the Southern Vale, pockets of native Loyalists, and natives who had bid into the Clan na Oriel. He even used, though with some reluctance, the Magruder Gang. For a price they were willing to stool and that gave the tainiste his intelligence arm.

The tainiste’s office-name was Little Hugh O’Carroll, though he had been born Ringbao della Costa on Venishànghai in the Jenjen Cluster. What Little Hugh discovered was the value of a legend and a hitherto unsuspected capacity in himself for mayhem. Little Hugh became the “Ghost of Ardow.” No leader of the Revolution was safe from his death squads. His people struck quickly and silently and, after some experience, fearlessly and competently. The Magruders had ears in every city and knew people who knew people. They could always finger the target, could always find or bribe an entry. In contrast, the Ghost always eluded Handsome Jack’s men, and many were the storied adventures and hair’s breadth escapes.

Some Loyalists, especially the remaining gardies, objected to his methods. It was dishonorable to strike from ambush, to backstab, to bushwhack. A man should meet his enemies face-to-face. Little Hugh told them to meet the enemy face-to-face—and keep them distracted while he picked off their leaders. After a while, as the Revolution became more and more disorganized, the Loyalists began to see the logic of it, although they never did learn to like it.

The Revolution was on its second or third round of leaders by then and finding it hard to recruit a fourth. The only one that Little Hugh ever failed to hit was Handsome Jack himself, who had turned the Broadcast Center into an impregnable fortress. Three teams tried to penetrate, two succeeded, one reached Handsome Jack’s office. His guards dispatched two of the assassins and Handsome Jack himself took out the other, which was not bad for a man with one arm.

This was the stuff of legend. Handsome Jack and the Ghost of Ardow locked in a titanic twilight struggle. Men began to sing songs—and the war was four weeks old.

There were missteps. One time, a death squad “took out” Krispin Dall, the Revolution’s District Leader in Coyne Village, while he was in bed with his mistress, and the mistress was taken out, too. That was bad, because there was an unspoken rule about noncombatants. Another time, Handsome Jack lost the whole of County Meath when his men wiped out the last of the gardy in a well-planned ambush. The Meath farmers had had a genuine affection for the old peacekeepers and the end of it was a dash of cold water in their faces. They looked at their bloody swords, at each other, and wondered what had come over them. They set out as a body for the Mid-Vale and Handsome Jack’s forces tried to stop them. That compounded the mistake, because first of all, everyone knew that the Meathmen had had a stomachful and only wanted to go home; and second, they were going home with their swords in hand, and four weeks of fighting had taught them how to get the use of them.

The Revolution had been driven back to New Down Town Center, Fermoy Village, and a few other pockets when two ships entered orbit carrying a rump regiment of ICC house troops. With guns. And helicopters. And satellite surveillance capabilities.

They had been bound for Hawthorn Rose, where the ICC expected to win a bid to provide border protection for the small but wealthy state of Falaise. They had departed Gladiola Depot, three weeks up the Grand Trunk Road, anticipating R&R at New Eireann, and found themselves a civil war instead of a rest stop. Sophia colonel Jumdar, commanding the two companies, thought civil wars bad for business—power beams to the orbitals had grown intermittent—and downright fatal to the tourist industry that ICC had hoped to acquire. The Guild of Power Engineers and the Reek Guides Association, who had stood by appalled while they watched their livelihoods destroyed, begged her to intervene before the factories refused to stay and the tourists refused to come.

The final straw was the news that the Loyalists had killed the ICC factor—in her view, an innocent bystander.

Such terrorism must not stand. She ordered her two companies to prep and drop and sent a swift-boat back to the Regimental Depot with the news of what had happened and with a call-up of the other two companies. “I will end this rebellion in a week,” she swore, perhaps forgetting that the Loyalists were not the ones who had rebelled.

So, she did.

What can you expect? The colonel had brought a gun to a knife fight. Her satellite recon could spot even small groups infiltrating through the Glens of Ardow and either orchestrate their capture or drop something on them from orbit. The latter, she did once, for demonstration, and never had to do it again. Afterward, something remarkable began to happen. People began to inform on the Ghost of Ardow.

And that set up the last act of the tragedy. Little Hugh had men and women about him now who loved him more than they loved the Vale, more than they had loved the old administration; men who would die for him, if only he would live and carry with him their hopes for “the Return of the O’Carrolls.” Red Sweeney. Maeve the Knife. Voldemar O’Rahilly. Names uttered with only a little less awe than that of Little Hugh Himself.

And die they did. Rear guard after rear guard perished to ensure his escape. Hugh moved like a fish through the water. Once as a tinker, another time as a priest, a third time as a woman. In the latter incident, he was exposed when an ICC corporal lifted his skirts with another objective entirely and received a great, and final, surprise. colonel Jumdar almost caught him in Fermoy Village, where he was disguised as a common laborer rebuilding Da Derga’s Hostel, but he slipped the net and vanished. There was a fight in the Mid-Vale where, remarkably, he was organizing the reconstruction of the burned-out farmhouses of the recalcitrant neighbors. He was using an assumed name, but it wasn’t much of an assumption, and the people he was organizing had fought long and hard for the Revolution until the Massacre of the Gardies had shocked them out of it. When the ICC squad swooped in by jet-copter, a trio of hardened Meathmen rushed them with swinging claymores and in the time it took the squad to shoot them down, the Ghost had disappeared. colonel Jumdar wondered what sort of man could command loyalty even from his enemies. When she asked Handsome Jack Garrity, the one-armed man thought for a long moment before he finally shook his head and told her, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Nor did she. Tips on Little Hugh’s whereabouts began to slow and, as often as not, began to prove false, running her squads up and down the length of New Eireann and once even to the tiny glade at the very head of the Vale below the crest of Ben Bulben.

Finally, after several days of hide-and-seek, union dockworkers at the spaceport packed Little Hugh into a crate equipped with amenities sufficient for nine weeks, addressed it and labeled it fragile, and sent it up by lighter to the transshipment station in High Orbit. There, it would await the next interstellar freighter passing through. They got all teary-eyed just before Little Hugh stepped into the crate and there were many embraces and kisses on the cheek and Sweeney the Red said, “Will ye no come back again?” And the Ghost of Ardow did something he should not have done. He swore on his father’s name that he would come back one day and redress the treachery that had been done New Eireann.

A week passed at Upabove Station and those who knew held their breath, wondering if the ruse would be discovered, and let it out only when a passing tramp freighter took the crate (and Little Hugh with it) on consignment.

Colonel Jumdar watched New Angeles depart with mixed feelings. She was not one to entertain romantic thoughts of revenge, and she had secured something of inestimable value from the hapless freighter crew for little more than an ICC promise to remit the proceeds later. Perhaps she was feeling good about that when she ordered the watch to stand down. Her mission was to restore order, and she thought Little Hugh’s escape would achieve that more effectively than his capture. Legends cause problems, but martyrs cause more. Without the Ghost of Ardow to lead them, the last Loyalists were gathered up almost as an afterthought.

In the end, no one achieved what they sought. The Loyalists did not get the old administration back. An ICC subsidiary quietly bought the management contract from the Clan na Oriel, which accepted a payment of wergild to square the accounts; and colonel Jumdar generously allowed O’Carroll employees to leave the planet at ICC expense. But neither did those Certain Persons who had started the whole thing gain the power they had sought. They had died to a man, save only Handsome Jack. And even Handsome Jack found himself marginalized. His side had won, but Jumdar did not trust him and the prize was hers, not his. She suspected, too, that he had taken a hand in the Escape of Little Hugh, and she could not understand a man who would do that.

People went back to their lives under the wary eyes of the 33rd Guard Regiment of ICC’s peace enforcement corporation. They looked at one another with horror and with pity and at the wreckage they had created and bit by bit they began to build things back up again. That suited Jumdar, who assumed the Civil Office of Planetary Manager in addition to her colonelcy, because until order was restored and the tourist trade recovered and power broadcasts returned to normal, “Sèan Company” would see no profit from this contract—and profit they desired above all else.

What she never did understand was when erstwhile Loyalists and Rebels began to meet in pubs. That they joined hands in public to encourage rebuilding efforts was expected. She herself, as Governor-pro-tem, had pleaded with them to do so in live broadcasts and personal speeches down the length of the Vale. Also, they knew that, in case of disturbance, the 33rd was instructed to “step in the middle and shoot both ways.” But that they gathered privately in pubs in the evenings to retell stories of the Burning of Da Derga’s Hostel or the Massacre of the Gardies and sing mournful songs of the Storming of Council House or the March of the Meathmen, impartially celebrating the feats of each side…this eluded her entirely. When her lieutenant-colonel told her of one song—“Little Hugh Has Gone Away”—in which one verse revealed her own last-minute forbearance and ascribed it to a secret admiration for the Ghost, she thought for a moment of suppressing it. But Handsome Jack advised otherwise. “We sing and dance at wakes out here,” he explained. And later she heard him humming the selfsame tune at his desk in the Trade Office.

All of which convinced her that the Eireannaughta were mad.

Meanwhile, she had this clever little prehuman statue. A stone that somehow danced. She would stare at it for hours, trying to catch it in the act of changing, only to realize after some time had passed that it had changed. She knew she would have to surrender it to the Central Office on Old ’Saken, because there would be no profit from it until it went on auction, but in the meantime it was hers. She had January’s sworn affidavit of provenance, chopped by his crew as well, and embellished by a clever little story, undoubtedly fabricated to frighten off would-be claim-jumpers. To this, she added her own affidavit to attest to the chain-of-custody.

And all this in exchange for a chit for maintenance-and-repair at the ICC Depot on Gladiola plus the promise of a share in the eventual auction proceeds. It was a fair percentage for a finder’s fee; but January had not even asked whether Jumdar had the authority to offer it. Privately, she hoped the Board would honor her promise. The ICC could be generous when it didn’t cost much; and January would get a ship almost like new; so he had no complaints coming.

The sandstone fit so comfortably in her hand that she took to carrying it with her. Like a scepter, some pardoned Loyalists in New Council House grumbled, and their Rebel coworkers agreed, for they hadn’t fought to make a Queen.

Yet, the proclamations she issued seemed reasonable, even inspired, and the people who heard her threw themselves into the Reconstruction with a fervor equal to their previous fury. There was even talk in some quarters, admittedly brief, that having a Queen was not so bad an idea. Jumdar seemed to get things done, and although some of the Guides in their remote Reek-side cabins grumbled about the “kiss-ass” of their fellow citizens regarding ICC dictates, everyone agreed that the dictates made good sense in the wake of what had gone before.

The wake of what came later was a different matter.