The January Dancer

Suantraí: Breaking on the Peripheral Shore

It began near the Rift, the scarred man says…

…a region where despair has become a feature of the sky. A place where some ancient god had drawn a knife across the galaxy’s throat and left a black gaping flow of blood. In this void there are no suns—or no living suns, an emptiness made all the less bearable by the surrounding shores of light.

On the farther shore of this hole in the sky gleam distant suns with magic names—Dao Chetty, Tsol, the Century Suns—stars whose worlds are storied in antiquity: strange worlds, ancient worlds, decadent worlds, worlds of peculiar and exotic customs. From the hither shore, they appear as they once had been: antique light hundreds of years on the journey, the lamps of the Old Commonwealth before it crumbled. A telescope subtle enough might still glimpse those halcyon days in the tardy images just now breaking on the Peripheral shore.

A happier time, the stories said; a time before the Great Cleansing. Now the Confederacy of Central Worlds—tightly ruled, patiently waiting, watching the Periphery with hungry eyes—squats upon that distant shore across the gap of stars.

Thankfully few roads cross the Rift, for the electric currents that crease space into superluminal folds depend on the plasmas of roaring suns, and there are no suns in the Rift. Those that do cross are as tenuous as rope suspension bridges across a gaping canyon, their end points snubbed to stubborn blue giants. The crossing points have been carefully mapped by the fleets of High Tara, the Greater Hanse, and the Hatchley Commonwealth. Their survey ships have pricked each on their charts and noted the speed of space—the local-c—and other such qualities of space-time; and by each such crossing they have positioned a squadron of cruisers and swift-boats. These check the bona fides of the trade ships that venture out and of those that venture in; and await the day when Confederate corsairs pour across the Rift in a wave of conquest. Then they will die—for what is a squadron against a fleet?—but the swift-boats will stream out and spread posthumous warnings to all the nearby suns.

The High Taran squadron commanded by the Cu na Fir Li guards the crossing known as St. Gothard’s Pass. This current curls in from a frontier province of the Confederacy and, on the Peripheral side of the Rift, entangles a blue giant called the Sapphire Point Interchange. From there, short Newtonian crawls reach the Palisades Parkway, which skirts the edge of the Rift toward the Old Planets, and the Silk Road, which winds its way around two dozen stars before reaching the great interchange at Jehovah, whence to Gladiola, and Ugly Man; to New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose; to Alabaster, and far Gatmander. A third current flies off from Sapphire Point to the Galactic East, whose worlds are as yet unsettled and unexplored.

It was, in the reckoning of Fir Li, the obvious invasion point. No other crossing offered such ready access to so extensive a volume of the ULP. He had said so, and often, to the Ardry of High Tara, Tully King O’Connor, until, tiring of this Jeremiah in his court, the King had ordered Fir Li to take personal command at Sapphire Point.

So Fir Li had taken his “Pups” and his personal ships, and heighed off to stand the watch. Yet, where his enemies at court saw defeat and exile, Fir Li tallied a triumph. He was a Hound, and Hounds usually get what they want. Since then, captains and men and ships had come, and served their rotations, and gone, but the Hound of Fir Li stayed on—an exile from the court, or a sentry on the wall, depending on one’s point of view.

Over time, some courtiers had whispered, the sight of the Rift, of such an emptiness in the midst of light, could break a man, and drive him mad.

A Hound of the Ardry could be many things and any thing. Loyal for a certainty. Relentless on the scent. The High King had no more loyal servants than the Hounds. They were resourceful; skilled in all manner of arts, both politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could use words the way the Meathmen of New Eireann used claymores—often with the same decapitating results—but they were no strangers to other weapons. A single Hound, dropped at dusk into the Vale of New Eireann, could have stopped the civil war in a night and a day.

Na Fir Li, in his youth, had not been the least of this company. He had overthrown the Fourth Tyrant of Gladiola with a few well-placed rumors dropped in the bars of Florentz City. He had for five years managed the planet of Valency, where his name is yet revered, ending their awful Interregnum. He had directed the reconstruction on Ugly Man after the earthquakes there. He had assassinated fifteen men and women who had deserved death; and rescued twenty-seven who had not. He had even crossed the Rift, to walk the fabled streets of the Secret City on Dao Chetty, where none but Those of Name may tread.

Messenger, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, planetary manager—a Hound could be whatever the Grand Seanaid desired when the Ardry spoke “with office” in the name of the ULP, for no one loved the ULP more than the Hounds of “The Particular Service.” It might fairly be said that the League existed as something more than a theory only in the convictions of the Hounds; and if ever there was anything that could drive a man mad, it was not the Sapphire Point Station, but devotion to a thing that was not quite real.

But there is something enervating about a duty in which for the most part nothing happens and where success can be measured by nothing continuing to happen. It was a period of détente, and the border was supposed to be open, so there was a steady, if slow, volume in trade, and this made for an occasional customs inspection, but not often enough or varied enough to counteract the ennui of the long watch. Routine dulls the wits; so the Hound of Fir Li called random security drills and mounted exercises, neither too few to ensure readiness, nor so many as to dull it. It was a fine tuning, like stretching the strings on a harp, seeking the proper pitch without snapping the chords.

And so most time was spent in relaxation—in sports, in games of skill and chance, in debate, in reading and writing and painting and the creation of music. In romance and in quarrel. In all those things with which, since the Caves of Lascaux, human beings had decked their lives. It fell to Greystroke, Fir Li’s deputy, to manage these things, to arrange the concerts and the bounceball leagues and suchlike—and also to apply discipline when the music became too loud, the debate too physical, or the games of chance too certain; to adjudicate all those frictions that develop when those who have been trained to act on a moment’s notice must wait for that moment not to come. Greystroke was journeyman enough to chafe at such mundane duties.

Fir Li’s flagship, Hot Gates, was a faerie castle set loose in space. Never intended to enter an atmosphere, it lacked even a pretense of streamlining, and might have seemed more a small village to the ancients than what they had imagined a spaceship to be. It was Greek and Gothic and Tudor and Thai, and Fir Li, who had never heard of any of those folk, had managed to incorporate all the most monstrous aspects of each. Hot Gates was a chimera, odd even by the standards of its kind—blocks and spheres and tubes and causeways were all a-jumble, protected within a spherical field and given a whimsical variety of ups and downs by an idiosyncratic use of gravity grids. The faeries had been mad. It would have seemed out of place anywhere—save here on the ragged edge of space.

Fir Li himself had chosen midnight for his skin and moonlight for his hair. He was blacker than the gap he guarded, and in his dim-lit rooms, the white cascade of his mane could be the only visible sign of his presence. When he moved, it was swiftly and silently. Bridget ban, a colleague, had once compared him to a panther; others had compared him to the Rift itself.

He sat in a light-framed swivel chair in the center of an otherwise empty sitting room, one wall of which was an image screen kept tuned to the Rift. He can see the Point, some in the Squadron whispered. He got these funny eyes and he can see deep down into the currents. When the ’Feds come, he’ll spot them afore our sensors do. It wasn’t true, or maybe it wasn’t true; but the Rift drew him, possessed him; and the sight of it had impressed itself upon him like a signet impresses the wax, and a bit of its emptiness had invaded his soul.

Perhaps that was why he kept his sitting room dark at most times. The chair he occupied was an octopus, whose flexible arms caressed the Hound with controls and inputs and outputs. Using them, he could hear what the ship heard, see what the ship saw, speak with the ship’s voice—but he had muffled all but two for the moment. On one, he scrolled through a novel by the great Die Bold writer Ngozi dan Witkin, who had lived in the early days of the Great Cleansing and had written most poignantly of the loss and confusion of those first generations. But because Fir Li was paraperceptic, a second reader displayed statistics for traffic through the Rift. This did not divide his attention, for each called upon different faculties of his intellect. A third faculty, the one that touched on icon and myth and image, contemplated the great rift displayed upon his wall.

Not all the trade ships came back.

So the statistics said, and although Fir Li was aware of the shortcomings of all statistics—“They are first written down by the village watchman, and he writes what he damn well pleases!”—he found the figures troubling. As troubling as the cruelty of Those of Name, who had uprooted entire peoples of the Old Commonwealth and scattered them beyond the edge of space, Ngozi’s grandparents among them.

Nothing compelled a ship departing Sapphire Point to obtain her return frank there, save the commercial regulations of the League. But the Hound of Fir Li had obtained the customs information from all of the crossings and had cross-tabulated them, and…

…not all the ships came back.

Many of the crossings were narrow, and a ship ill-piloted might run afoul of the shallows and beach catastrophically into the subluminal mud. The god Ricci, who caresses each point of space, had graced the roads with a “speed of space” far greater than flat space, and a ship might slide down them comfortably below local-c yet far above Newtonian-c. A ship at translight speeds that found itself suddenly in Newtonian space would become a brief but spectacular burst of Cerenkov radiation. Such mishaps were not common, but they did occur. Yet models existed that related that probability to the local properties of space, and the number of disappearances exceeded the expected value at the five percent risk level.

The Dao Chettians had exiled their defeated foes with deliberate disregard for cultural homogeneity. A Babel of exiles could not combine and conspire if they could not even understand one another. Like all the others finding themselves far from home in the company of strangers, Ngozi’s grandparents had tried to maintain the old country customs—but there were too few compatriots and they were scattered too widely and over too many worlds. “The center cannot hold,” an ancient poet had written, and so things had flown apart. Ngozi herself had lived at just the right moment in history and could look back upon her grandparents’ struggles to maintain the old, and forward upon her grandchildren’s struggles to create the new.

How to explain the excess in the number of lost ships? Those of Name had become decadent—Fir Li had seen this for himself—and they had forgotten many things; but they had not forgotten how to be cruel. The code that had allowed them to disperse whole peoples, to dissolve living cultures into artfully re-created and inward-looking archaisms, would not forbid the seizure of an occasional ship for no better reason than the joy of it.

And so each faculty of his attention came to rest upon the same object. From settlement days on the Old Planets to the disappearance of ships in the present to the sight of the starless abyss, the menace of the Confederation ran like the drone note of a bagpipe.

“Yes, Pup,” he said, for three channels did not exhaust his paraperception. “What is it?”

Greystroke always stumbled a bit when he entered his Master’s quarters. It was not so much the three-fourths’ gravity as it was the sight of the Rift. The span of the wall screen played with one’s peripheral vision and so it seemed as if the ship’s hull had been stripped off and the emptiness without had poured within. Fir Li’s quarters were deep within the vessel—no architect was so foolish as to put a commander’s suite at the very skin of the ship—but the illusion always caught some part of a man’s mind off-guard, and no one ever entered the suite when the screen was active without a sudden and unwitting hesitation in his step.

Greystroke was no exception, and the momentary stumble was a source of great vexation to him, for he tried to school himself against it. It irritated him that an illusion would catch him up.

He was a young man the color of his name, so average in appearance and demeanor that he had achieved an operational sort of invisibility. This could be advantageous for a journeyman Hound. When he desired so, he could remain unnoticed for a very long time. “Cu!” he said.

Fir Li scrolled a page on his viewer. “Something unusual.” Fir Li’s voice was a bass rumble, something between a growl and the grinding of rocks.

“Aye, Cu.”

“But not an emergency at the crossing, or I would have been summoned by the alarms.”

“Aye, Cu.”

The Hound scrolled another page on the reader. “Traffic control, then. A ship on our side of the Rift approaching the Interchange, but not a typical merchant or you’d not disturb my rest at all.”

“Cu, the pickets have detected the bow waves of a large fleet coming up the Palisades.”

The Hound was about to turn another page, but paused in thought for a moment. “A fleet,” he said. “How many ships?”

“The swift-boat counted twenty. All corvette class.”

The Hound bobbed his head side to side. “Too small for a colony fleet; too many for a survey expedition. A war has started somewhere.” He turned off his viewer and stood gracefully from his chair. “I will be in the command center shortly. Such a grand fleet, I must dress for the occasion.”

The command center in the heart of Hot Gates was a broad, ovoid room, the dome of which was a display screen of impressive and subtle scope. Staff were arranged by units and sections around the room’s circumference—clerks manning the consoles, department heads standing inboard from them at podiums.

Greystroke entered, fastening a red-and-gold dress jacket. “Point Traffic,” he said, “alert me when you spot Cerenkov glow from the Parkway exit. Swift-boats are fast, but that fleet won’t be too far behind.”

The supervisor in charge of Sapphire Point Navigation and Tracking Section acknowledged. “Timer says four metric minutes until arrival.”

“I assume they’re heading for the Silk Road. Communications, hail their commodore as soon as they are subluminal. And Fire Control?”

“Aye, Pup?” The captain of Battle Management Section turned at her podium.

“We’ve gotten no swifties from Hanseatic Point, but we cannot discount the chance that a Confederate fleet has forced the crossing west of us. If so, they’ll come off the ramp firing. Be alert.”

“On it,” said Fire Control; and she directed her staff to key off Traffic’s bearings.

“Customs,” Greystroke said dryly, “prepare for maximum likelihood.”

The supervisor of Customs Section grinned as he set his screens. “Maximum likelihood; minimum impact. Boring.”

“Boring,” said the Hound of Fir Li as he entered through his personal door, “but preferable to the more exciting alternatives.” He wore a tight-fitting suit woven of thread-of-gold, bearing no insignia of rank and but a single decoration: the red-and-blue lapel ribbon of the Appreciation of Valency. It was the only one he ever wore. He strode through a chorus of greetings to the dais in the center of the room and stood behind the rails, gripping them with both hands. “Status?”

“Two metric minutes,” said Traffic.

“Cu,” said Greystroke. “Squadron is dispersed and all ships on amber alert.”

The Hound nodded. “Sensors, dome view. Palisades at focal.”

The ceiling dome darkened to the outside night. To the right and rear of the command station: the emptiness of the Rift. To the left, the frontier stars of the League with the haze of the Periphery beyond them. At the forward focal point, enclosed in red-line crosshairs, the exit from the Parkway. Invisible, an anomaly in n-space, limned in false colors so as to resemble the mouth of a tunnel.

“Ninety beats,” said Traffic. “Sir, a swifty exiting the Parkway.”

“Message from incoming fleet,” said Comm. “Screening for viruses. Clean.”

“Play it.”

A window opened on the dome display just to the right of the crosshairs, revealing a flat-faced man with thin black moustaches and hair done up in greased braids that fell past his shoulders. His skin was pale with a greenish cast. Studs, rings, and gems graced every feature of his face, though effecting no discernible improvement on any of them. A golden torque encircled his neck. A ruby was set in the center of his forehead.

“G’day, to youse, yer honors,” the apparition said, with an easy confidence and a predatory smile. “Don’t be a-frightened at our little outing here, youse. We’re just passing through Sapphire Point. Welcome to it, sez I. Oh, yeah. I hight the Molnar khan Matsumo, me; chairman of the Kinlé Hadramoo out of th’ Cynthia Cluster. We’ve twenny ships exiting th’ Parkway, an’ makin’ cut-off to th’ Silk Road. No reason to go waving yer weapons all about, youse. Oh. And nothing to declare,” he added with a smile.

“Fleet exiting!” called Traffic.

“Hold all fire,” ordered the Hound.

“He didn’t say where he was bound,” Greystroke murmured to his chief.

“I noticed, Pup.” Then, louder, “Comm, put me through. What’s the time lag?”

“A grossbeat.”

“Metric time, if you please, Mr. Lazlo.”

“Sorry, sir. One-point-um-three, now.”

“Compress and squirt, then. ‘Intruder fleet, this is His Majesty’s battle cruiser, ULS Hot Gates, Sapphire Point Squadron; Cu na Fir Li commanding. This is interdicted space, and authorization is required for transit. Do you have a visa?’” A wave of laughter rippled across the bridge.

“Let me blast them,” said Fire Control. “Please?”

Na Fir Li shook his head. The Cynthians had twenty ships, all corvettes. Hot Gates and her support ships could take any one of them easily, perhaps any five of them; but she could not take all twenty. The Squadron expected to die when the Confederacy crossed the Rift; but there was no reason to die to enforce League commercial regulations on some back-cluster pirate fleet.

The reply packet came, and once more the Molnar showed his teeth. “I’m impressed such an important boy as yourself is standing by to wave at me as I pass through. And dressed so pretty, youse. Sorry ’bout th’ visa, me. Nobody told me, not even th’ late ICC factor. An’ I thought he told me everything he knew before he passed on. Ha ha!” Muffled laughter was heard in the background.

“Where away?” Fir Li asked.

The reply came sooner, as the Cynthian fleet’s trajectory brought it nearer the Squadron. “Oh, some folk need a civics lesson, and we’re to be th’ tutors.” The Molnar had a diamond stud embedded in his top right incisor. When he grinned, it flashed. “There’s been a bit of a dust-up there and they need a strong hand to set them right.”

“You’re going to raid a planet!” Fir Li said.

“Well, we won’t stay longer ’n we need to make our point! Oh. And to tell the ICC people there that they need a new factor on Cynthia Prime. Poor fella’s heart gave out. Cracking on and blinding, he was, how the ICC would settle things in Cynthia, now that they had the Twister.” The Molnar sat straighter in the viewscreen. “Maybe he didn’t know th’ insult was mortal, him bein’ an outlander, and all; but that don’t excuse him saying it. He learned better. Ha ha! So, I figger, once we have this Twister thing, we’ll be safe from th’ ICC. Don’t know why you doggies don’t go barking after them and their threatening free folk and all.”

“If you need to tell the ICC anything, you could go straight to Old ’Saken. It’s closer to Cynthia.”

The lag time had begun to increase again as the Cynthians accelerated toward the entrance to the Silk Road.

“Ha ha,” said the Molnar with apparent delight. “That’s a good one. Wait’ll I tell my wives. Old ’Saken, she’s like a lion’s den. Lotsa tracks go in; not many come out. You don’t beard a lion in his HQ, Fido. All we want is the ICC should leave free men be.”

“Free men!” said Fir Li. “Free to pillage! While across the Rift the Confederacy waits to scoop us all up. To travel so far…What profit in that?”

The Molnar’s reply this time came through grim lips. “Hear me, Fido. A man pleasures only in battle. Everything else…” He spit to the side. “Money? Love? Power? The stars care nothing; and death ends all. I live. I eat. I have women and boys. I kill. ‘The bright madness of battle,’ say the holy books. You know how th’ world works, Fido. ‘The strong take what they can; the weak suffer what they must.’ I do it better, me. I live, make sons. The weaklings, their seed is lost. You fear the ’Feds, you? Then be happy some men here know how to fight!”

“And…he’s gone,” Traffic Control announced. The pirate fleet had vanished down the Silk Road.

“I live,” said Fire Control. “I eat, I fart, I stink.”

“I have women and boys,” said Comm, “and sheep and small mammals!”

Fir Li said nothing amid the laughter, for the lawlessness endemic to the Periphery was no laughing matter. Would that the Ardry smite them as they deserve… But it took too long for the Ardry to learn of matters remote from High Tara; too long for the response to follow. In practice, the will of the Ardry and the Grand Seanaid extended no more than a week’s streaming from High Tara. And wherever his Hounds might find themselves. Each planet or planetary combine kept the peace locally as best they could. And some of them were the worst offenders.

“What was that ‘Twister’ he mentioned?” Greystroke asked. “If the ICC has come up with some new weapons system, the Ardry ought to know of it. Whatever it is, this Molnar is willing to take an entire flotilla on a long trek to grab it.”

Fir Li looked over his right shoulder, at where the Rift spread across the ceiling. “It’s a distraction from our duty. Send a swifty to High Tara and pass this Twister rumor on to the Little One. Let the Master of Hounds decide.”

“Aye, Cu,” Greystroke said and turned to the supervisor of Auxiliary Vessels and Drones; but Fir Li held him back with a word.

“Pup,” he said. “Hear me. No effort is the greatest effort. You stumble because you try too hard not to stumble.”