Dream Dancer (3 page)

The ten days shipboard passed in a quick-drawn breath of excitement for Shebat, though so much had happened to her in such a brief span that her head spun when she considered it and her amazement spoke into that spinning that nothing more wondrous strange could happen than had already befallen her. But happen such things did, crowding in, jostling each other’s dazzling raiment to be the next to astound her.

Previously, there had been the sable “flight satins” and the “shop” where Marada took her to choose them, which were finer than festival garb and more mystifying than even the sky rippling above her head like a puddle perpetually showered with pebbles. Her gaping prompted Marada to tease her about keeping her mouth closed, but despite her wariness each new thing weirder than the last would elicit its tithe of sighs, and when she would remember to check again, she would find her lips parted, the odorless dry air wafting at will between her teeth, and Marada’s ingenuous grin sparkling out from his beard like her last sight of Earth gleaming out from its dark abode. Then she would close her mouth tightly. But the gilded shop and the smoky, soft undergarment called a mil-suit which fit her like a second skin; which covered her from toes to fingertips to neck in cloudy shimmer; which Marada slowly explained would keep her soul within her body (well, he did not say soul, but that was what Shebat thought he meant) and the cold without; which could protect her from harm by any projectile made of metal, or any made of light (this she just accepted: laser was in her vocabulary but out of her experience); but could not—and here Marada’s tone rasped dry and ragged—protect her from a common rock or wooded shaft or any organic attacker that was in the mil-suit’s experience not unfriendly—

Here Shebat stopped him, disbelievingly asking: “But it is not alive, this suit of skin?” while plucking with smoky fingertips at the shadow-gilded back of her other hand.

“Most exactly, it is alive. The mil-suit is—” She saw, as she had seen too often, him searching an explanation simple enough for her to understand. “—alive, an organic, living being, although designed by man. Its name comes from a measurement of thickness, its purpose is one of enclosing whatever is within, impervious to attempts by foreign objects to penetrate it . . . like a cell wall.” He stopped, seeing her eyes go sideward, as they did when she did not understand. “It is just exactly like your skin, but tougher. It was meant to keep a man’s blood in his body should all the air be drawn out of the ship in an accident, and to protect him from the crushing pressures beneath planetary seas in olden times, and from excessive acceleration in these days—”

She was looking at her feet, newly imprisoned in obsidian enchanter’s boots.

Despairingly, he gave up trying to make her comprehend. “As you have seen, a rock or two can defeat its protection, but none throw rocks who abide the platforms.”

Head still bowed, she murmured: “Is it this that keeps the dust from settling on enchanters’ boots?”

He laughed, and her head raised sharply, somber eyes resentful at being infinitely the butt of his joke. He apologized, and said that indeed such was the case, inasmuch as the boots themselves had a similar coating of mil.

Shebat resolved to learn all there was to know, so that none could laugh at her for not knowing.

She could not see herself, so she could not see the hot iron glowing in her glare like a dagger taking temper in a forge. But Marada saw it, and added that moment to the load of disquieting events he was carrying, that slowed his progress and made his feet sink searching purchase in quaggy ground at every step. He looked around for the salesperson, who folded and refolded a clear mil-suit nearby in shameless eavesdropping, and motioned the portly man near, saying he also needed a mil-hood. The man’s hirsute eyebrows raised, that a child of this age had never taken the hooding or so early had worn it through, but a Kerrion was a Kerrion, and though the Stump was a protectorate of the Orrefors bond, it would not do to question. And the price, of course, demanded a particular courteousness. Quickly the jobber calculated what the hooding of a fifteen-year-old might be worth, and went humming off to prepare an order, which would have to be executed, he assured Marada Seleucus Arbiter Kerrion, after the midday meal.

Which suited Marada, who needed at least that long to prepare the girl for the moment of choking panic, of smothering in unyielding dark in a hum-filled coffin, while the hood was fitted to not only the outer face and form, but to the inner cavities of her body.

“We are only started,” he assured her as her glance followed the bustle of the corpulent proprietor, “making you into a Lady of the Consortium. Now comes the part you will like the best, if you are anything at all like the other ladies of my acquaintance: shopping. Then we will go to the finest restaurant in the Stump and shall feast the feast we have well earned, and then come back here to make sure that your head, your eyes, mouth, throat and lungs will be as well protected as the rest of you is now.”

Shebat smiled, not because she was pleased, but because she wanted to please Marada. So she made no sign that the one-piece flight satins bound her in the crotch and about the arms, but copied Marada, unsnapping them at the wrist and bending the cuffs back. About the bite of the beautiful boots, she said not one word, but stumbled along determinedly after him, as he led her hither and thither, collecting additional subtle tortures to be worn about the waist or at the throat, where the mil-suit’s butterfly-delicate pressure ceased.

When she thought back, at the end of the ten-day journey, it was the moment of the fitting of the mil-hood that caused her the most regret: in that moment she had lost all resolution and behaved like the barbarian Marada was with quiet desperation coaching her no longer to be, screaming (though he could not hear), gagging (though he could not know), pounding and kicking at the close enclosure that sizzled with noises like swarming bees (though he could not see). By the time the sarcophaguslike enclosure was reopened, she was leaning back, unmoving, breathing regularly. But the stink of fearful sweat preceded her out of the body chamber and on the sterile air rode straight to their noses: the proprietor’s wrinkled distastefully; even Marada’s nostrils flickered, pulling together briefly. Though his words were free of any notice, Shebat knew instantly that there was no place in the Stump for the pungent harvest of fear to hide. That he knew her fear shamed her, that he took her with discreet haste to their quarters forthwith riled her belly; that she cared so much what opinion he held of her took all the pleasure from her high-glossed finery of Kerrion red and black: even her bossed boots such as an enchantress might wear no longer pleased her.

It was that same evening when in the dark which whined and crackled and spat she could not sleep, she snuck in an age-long procession of stealthy steps out of her bedroom and into his bed.

He did not wake. Or he pretended not to wake. If he did, she was sure as she stood over his bed and drew the covers back and up, he would shoo her back to her own pallet. So she worked a deeper sleep onto him with her utmost skill, one hand drawing arcane figures in the air over his tousled head while the other held the blankets high. And the trails her finger, writing in the air, left were etched in blue, hovering a short while after above his head, illuminating his face in a soft glow, so that she knew the spell was well cast and strong.

In beside the sleeping man she slid, greatly comforted, her skin cold against his heat, her hip and thigh touching his. Twelve coils binding, she had put upon him earlier, to keep him safe, thus she had no fear that something might come upon him during the night, though he slept the sleep from which no man might return unbidden.

So it was that he slept with her and did not know, slept until she herself woke at a shamefully late hour, betook herself to her own bedroom, less malevolent now that the “day” was come, and from there recalled the soft cocoon in which Marada snored far from the sounds and sights of life.

He had never slept better, he said to her over a meal he had sent to their suite, and he had not been sleeping well of late. But he had slept so long that they must hurry: the ship had been readied for departure long since, and his sudden somnolence would be ill-received by those who controlled traffic to and from the platforms.

As she chewed the exotic foodstuffs doggedly, she listened to the apologies, to the cajolery, finally to the sharp hiss of anger that draped Marada’s threats as he spoke to a series of noncorporeal voices and ranks. At last he seemed to have prevailed against the disembodied speakers: they had been granted a new hour at which to depart.

There was a great hurrying, a stuffing of her new clothing into an equally new container of shimmering mil-like substance, and a porter come to carry all to the ship.

But the ship, when she saw it in its cradle of lights, was not the little pearly, spiky mantis of a ship she had gotten into on Earth and out of at this place of endless wonders.

This was a grand, deep-water fish, roughly scaled, opaline, striolate, polychrome lights binding it round. By a commodious port the crimson eagle blazed. Beneath it numbers danced: beside the numbers was the word “Hassid.” The ship was of awesome size, Shebat thought, though Marada called it small. It was possessed of salons and three cabins more elegant than the fine suite that had held them overnight in the consular house of Orrefors. But each cabin held more than opulence: the personal effects and tastes of three very different personalities therein had their say: they whispered to Shebat louder than the three padded couches in the control room of the ship; they spoke more clearly than the two refrigerated corpses in gilded coffins draped with hastily fabricated Kerrion blazons in the cargo bay. They spoke to Marada, and he spent a time alone in each cabin in turn, leaving Shebat to her own devices, emerging at last with arms full of items and eyes full of grief.

His mouth, that day, seemed empty of words, or of tongue to speak them. He contented himself with a gesture when giving her the soft, pearly room that had surely been his lady’s. When at dinner she bantered briefly, his scowl quickly seared all her own words to ash.

During the taking of space by the craft, there came no voice speaking from the air, after a monosyllabic exchange with the disembodied dispatcher of the Stump. And there was no sensation to prove to her that the marvelous Leviathan was truly embarked, no blinking of lights or flipping of toggles, though lights abounded and toggles bristled the control room’s waist like quills on a porcupine. Shebat sat in a soft, canted couch to Marada’s right. Sometimes he reached over her and brought a panel into view, livened it with a touch, but no more.

When it occurred to her that were she the woman who had sat here previously—for the couch was smaller than that on his left and was doubtless the enchantress’s own, as the cabin was her own and Marada, too, was hers seemingly as much in death as in life—that woman, were she in Shebat’s place, would have known what to do, would have been, in fact was accustomed to, bringing quiescent panels into rainbow excitation: flying the ship! Shebat’s excitement overcame her kindness, her envy drove her empathy away, and she demanded: “Teach me to fly it!”

“No!”

“But she flew it.”

He sighed, leaned back, staring straight ahead. “She and I were betrothed, so the ship and she needed to make acquaintance. I have returned all sensitivity to the master panel: if something happened to me during our flight, it would do you no good to have your keyboard sensitized. It was not a practical matter, in any case, but Iltani’s whim and my pleasure to please her. These ships, unlike the little bird who came at my call in the forest, are tuned to the minds of their operators; one ship, one mind, though the possibility of sharing the navigation does exist. In this case, if I should drop dead this moment, the
Hassid
would still bear you without incident to my family’s welcoming arms.” He said it with a pride like a parent’s in an exceptional child: like such a parent, he was boasting. Why this was so she did not understand, but neither did she doubt her assessment.

She remembered the moment on horseback when she had seen him touch a bracelet, heard it sing, then fall quiet. He had not worn it since they had arrived at the Stump, but she had thought nothing of that. Still, another thing concerned her more: “Die? Why would you die? Are you sick? No man dies of grief!”

“How old did you say you were?” he retorted, but she made no answer.

“Normally, passengers do not talk to a pilot while he is navigating. It is not so easy, being with the ship and with you, both at once. I have heard that in the olden days, men died from it, from losing themselves between the stars, from not concentrating on what they are doing.”

“But you are not doing anything!” Shebat cried defensively.

Marada’s laugh was not kind, and at last he looked at her. “Go to your cabin, if after this you cannot keep silent. You will learn about the sponge between the worlds of space, soon enough. The ship and I speak silently, there is no need to touch more than the alarm to wake her. All this—” He waved around at the panels. “—is for a passenger’s safety, should the pilot be incapacitated; or for the pilot’s safety, should the ship’s brain be incapacitated. But if either were to happen, that safety is not, by any of this, assured. We travel awesome distances, the only temporal binder being the insistent chronology of the human mind. In accelerating to the speed at which punching through the fabric of space is practical, elapsed ship time and planetary, platform, or calendar time are at variance. In a sojourn behind the surface of temporality, human time readjusts this variance, biological time being adamant and unchanging. The amenable nature of sponge—this reality behind the curtain of space—reverses any loss, until when one emerges, the time that one thinks has passed is indeed the time that has passed for those in the worlds of spacetime. Without the human part of the circuit, such travel would be impractical if not impossible. Do you see?”