The January Dancer (26 page)

They might wonder what had happened to the other redhead, but everyone would pretend to believe a story that held together so wonderfully.

In the meantime, the data in her anycloth had better hold a damned good secret to make the whole effort worthwhile. What reason could Peacock have for protecting the phantom fleet that they would risk attacking a Hound?

She pulled off her srong and turban and linked them into her shipboard ’face, gave the intelligence the local dates for the ambush of the Cynthians, and asked it to track the ambushing fleet forward and backward. Then she showered and restored her appearance, produced a fall to complete her hair. When she returned to the ’face, the analysis was finished.

She studied the results. Then she asked for similar traces on
all
traffic, deleting first local in-system traffic, then traffic on the Silk Road and Route 66. Finally, she highlighted the points of origin and termination.

The results made her whistle.

The sky was full of holes.

“You have to admit,” the scarred man says, “to an element of farce to all this. The Hound had come sniffing after one secret and flushed out two others quite by chance.”

The harper plays with her strings, tuning them for her first set. Her head is bent, her ear close to the
clairseach.
She plucks an A, listens, turns a key to tighten the cord. “That’s the way of it among secrets,” she replies without looking up. “One thing leads to another. The secret of the Dancer to the secret of the phantom fleet to the secret of Peacock’s hidden holes. Sometimes I think there is only one secret, and all others are but manifestations of it, and if only we learned what that one secret is, we would know everything.”

The scarred man screws up his face. “That’s too mystical for me. I prefer the irony of chance to the certainty of myth. It was luck, not fate. When you have your eye fixed on one thing, it’s easy to stumble over others.”

The harper sets her harp aside. “The ‘certainty’ of myth?”

“Of course. You can have supreme confidence in a thing only when you don’t quite know what that thing is.”

“Really.” The harper considers that: what it may say about the universe; or at least about the part of it the storyteller occupies. “I’d have thought the opposite.”

“No.” The scarred man grows animated. His hands accentuate his words, fluttering, chopping like a meat cleaver on the tabletop, causing the morning bowls to dance. “The more you know a thing, the more you know how it can fail you. That’s why we fall in love with strangers—and grow estranged from our closest companions. ‘Ignorance begets confidence,’ an ancient god once said, ‘more often than does knowledge.’”

The harper shows her teeth. “You seem very confident of that.”

The scarred man’s laugh is like the rustle of ancient, long-dried leaves. “Very well. Let us leave the issue uncertain, and at least smile that Bridget ban struck a goal at which she hadn’t aimed.”

The harper brushes a glissando from her strings. “At least she struck a goal.” This, she punctuates with a single plucked note, high at the end of her harp. It lingers in the air between them.

“But later,” the scarred man foretells, “she lost what she had loved and the tragedy is that she never knew it.”

The harper’s smile fades and she lifts the harp to her lap and plays aimlessly for a time. “Why did they try to kill her?” she finally asks.

The scarred man studies her. His lips work as if tasting something. “Five uncharted roads on Electric Avenue? Unknown rivers of space leading to…Where? New worlds? Shortcuts to old ones? It was a secret worth killing for.”

“Provided you aren’t on the sharp end of the knife.”

He waves a hand, conceding the point. “What sacrifice goes willingly to the altar? The ’Cockers were terrified. Let word of such a prize leak out and every would-be highwayman in the Spiral Arm would cast his die to seize it. Perhaps even the Elders of Jehovah would stir at the thought of a rival so nearby. Certainly, the People of Foreganger would. The ’Cockers are clever and subtle and even dangerous in their quiet, treacherous way, but the ‘strong right arm’ is not their play and the wise man bets on the larger fleet. Who knows how many heads in their Halls of Remonstration once let slip the holes in Peacock’s sky through the hole in their face. Loose lips are best sewn shut forever.”

“There is not enough thread in the Spiral Arm for such embroidery,” the harper objects. “How many smugglers did they move over the years through those hidden channels? And none of them ever mentioned the clever way in which they laundered their cargo?”

The scarred man shrugs and looks about the Bar, where men and women laugh and trade stories and withhold secrets. “One hears a great many tales from captains in their cups. The stories move at a discount. But, no, the ’Cockers did the laundry themselves. Smugglers came to them, turned over their cargoes, and were paid ‘on the barrelhead,’ as the Terrans say. They might suspect a secret channel—most captains know of some here and there—but they would not know the currents, directions, loci, entry ramps, all those things needful for finding and using them.
That
was why Peacock could not let a Hound see the STC records. She’d learn not only that the roads existed, but also where they were.”

“Then it wasn’t the phantom fleet they were protecting, at all.”

“Not as such. I suspect they were surprised—and maybe even frightened—that the strangers knew one of their secret shortcuts. The ’Cockers told no one—but they forgot that holes often have two ends.”

“But why not lie? Tell her the fleet had come out of Route 66 or off the Spice Road from Jehovah. Then she’d leave and…Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ She’d reach Foreganger or Jehovah and find that no such fleet had passed through there. There are nodes where trans-cooper traffic is not well tracked and passersby go unrecorded; but
not
at those two suns. She’d’ve been back in a fortnight or two, and not in the best of humors.”

“Then they ought to have had a false record already prepared against the day.”

“But they were ’Cockers, and forethought is not their métier. The need for a ‘second set of books’ was never urgent until it was critical. And then, when they were faced with it, they doubted their ability to fool a Hound. A quite reasonable doubt,” the scarred man adds with a smirk.

The harper finds a menacing chord and plays out, in theme and variations, the grim array of severed heads, stretching back and back into the dawn of the Peacock’s Era. Their world might be accounted a paradise, but paradises have always been bound by strict rules, the breaking of which means exile or death. But she follows it with a jaunty, triumphant strain as Bridget ban leaps though the backyards of Nolapatady. “So, she left Peacock Junction and followed the phantom fleet down a secret hole. But I had thought…”

“What?”

“That she and Hugh…and the others, of course…joined forces.”

“Because it would make a better story?” The scarred man rubs the side of his nose with a forefinger and works his lips. He looks to the side, as if he studies the scene, as if he sees it in his mind’s eye. “There is a move in shaHmat in which an opponent’s princess is blocked and each of her replies ends badly. Having asked for the records, Bridget ban could not now say, ‘Never mind,’ and leave. They would know she’d gotten the intelligence some other way, and the planetary defense batteries would take her out before she reached low orbit. She was clever and her ship was quick, but the god Newton is cruel, and they would pot her on the rise. Of course,” he adds cruelly, “she could not wait too long, either, or they would wonder at her patience. She was pinned like a butterfly on the Spaceport Hard. She dared not leave.”

“They would dare a Hound? Would panic overcome their common sense?”

The scarred man spreads his hands wide. “They have an excess of the former and a deficit of the latter. It is a world where impulse rules thought.”

“No matter,” the harper says, her fingers entangling an intricate and triumphant strain. “She was too clever for them. She
will
find a way.”

“How can you be certain?” he mocks. “Two of our players are already dead.”

But the harper makes no answer. The scarred man studies her closely. His eyes narrow and he allows himself a moment of wonder…But his uisce bowl is empty and the hum in the Bar is rising to midmorning volume. “Consider, then,” he says, “how suited she and Peacock were for each other.”

The harper arches an eyebrow in lieu of the question.

“Each one beautiful on the surface; each one deadly underneath.”

If a story begins in many places,
the scarred man says,
it will also continue in many places. Little Hugh and the Fudir, on their unwilling way to Jehovah, were caught up in a web of lies and deceits and, worst of all, of truths.

Little Hugh was a romantic, but only when it suited.
When the circumstances warranted, he could be as cold-eyed a realist as anyone. Hadn’t he proven as much in the Glens of Ardow? It was only through the tear of sentiment that his vision blurred. And hadn’t he proven that, too, in the Glens of Ardow? If anyone could be called a cold-eyed romantic, it was Little Hugh O’Carroll. So his kidnappers took him farther and farther from New Eireann in more ways than one. His tenure there seemed to grow unreal, like time spent in Faerie, and his sulks gradually dampened, although what replaced them was not at first evident. It was better to dwell on the exigencies of the present, the realist in him declared, than on the injustices of the past; and he came to this epiphany while the sun of New Eireann was still visible to the ship’s telescopes. He borrowed a kit from Olafsson, and the ship’s intelligence even tailored him a set of coveralls. Thereafter, he began to explore the boundaries within which he had been so suddenly and involuntarily circumscribed, and that included the human boundaries.

The Fudir, he thought he had plumbed, but the doubts were always there, beneath the surface, for the Fudir was a doubtful man. The Terran seemed genuinely pleased that Hugh was aboard; but did the pleasure grow from friendship, or from something else? It was hard to tell. With him, there might be no difference between the friendship and the something else.

But Olafsson was another matter. He was the anti-Fudir, as displeased with Hugh’s presence as the Fudir was pleased; as remote as the Fudir was companionable; as simple as the Fudir was complex. And where the Fudir was a petty criminal, with all the scrambler’s swagger and carefree independence, Olafsson was a lawman, single-minded in his duty, humorless in its execution.

There was some game about between Olafsson and the Fudir. Hugh caught enough snatches of conversation to know that the Pup was interested in a man named Donovan, perhaps the man at whose trial the Fudir was to testify. But the Fudir contrived always to have Hugh about when Olafsson was present. This made the one reluctant to ask, gave the other an excuse not to answer, and produced no little unease in the heart of the third.

The Pup conducted a fine simulation of hospitality, and was so unobtrusive that half the time Hugh hardly knew he was about. Yet, he had shown himself on Eireannsport Hard capable of sudden and violent action. That made more sense than Hugh liked. As the Ghost of Ardow, who knew better how deadly the unnoticed man could be? Therefore, Hugh slept but lightly as the ship crawled toward the Grand Trunk Road. The airlock was uncomfortably close by, and the solution to “three’s-a-crowd” stunningly obvious to anyone sufficiently ruthless.

It was not until two days out of New Eireann that Hugh and the Fudir found themselves for the first time alone. They were in the refectory breaking fast when Olafsson was called to the saddle to deal with the entry onto the Grand Trunk Road. The Fudir had programmed the
kuchenart
to produce a vile Terran sauté of rice, potatoes, onions, green chilies, mustard, curry, and peanuts whose pungent odor the air filters struggled to overcome.

Hugh began to say something about the Dancer, but the Fudir cut him off with a sign. He fingered his ear and rolled his eyes toward the pilot’s room. Hugh nodded and brushed his lips.

Sighing, he rose from the table and went to the sideboard to brew more tea. The Fudir seemed disinclined to discuss either the Dancer or their current predicament, at least while Olafsson might be listening—and Olafsson might be listening at any time. “Did I ever tell you,” he said, “that for my first seven years I didn’t have a name?”

The Fudir grunted and looked up from his breakfast. “And now you have too many of them.”

Hugh took that as a sign of interest. “I was what they called a
vermbino.
I ran the streets with a gang of other boys, stealing food or clothing, dodging the
pleetsya
and the
feggins,
searching out bolt-holes where we could sleep or hide. The shopkeepers had guns, and we were nothing to them. Worm-boys. Now and then, they’d form…hunting parties. Oh, it was great fun dodging them, and the prize for winning was that you got to live and do it again the next day. That’s why Handsome Jack could never find the Ghost. Not when being found has been a death sentence almost from birth. I grew pretty good at it. Not all of us did.”

The Fudir shoveled a spoonful of the
masala dosa
into his mouth. “Did you ever know your parents?” he asked around the potatoes and onions.

“Fudir, I didn’t even know I
had
parents. I didn’t know what parents were. Then, one day—there were only three of us left by then in my…my pod—I tried to rob a man in the market along the Grand Canal. He was a lean man and carried a purse that he wore on a belt around his robe. So, I ran past him, slicing the belt on the fly, and grabbing the purse as it dropped. I was halfway to the alley when he called after me. He said…”

Hugh paused over the memory.

“He said, ‘Wait, you did not get it all.’ I turned and stared and he was stooped in the street, gathering some ducats that had spilled from his purse and was holding them out to me. Well, as I learned to say later, ‘time was of the essence.’ There were several people on their handies calling the
pleetsya,
and two others who had pulled knives of their own, though whether to restore the money to its owner or take it for themselves, I don’t know.”

“The nature of every animal,” the Fudir said, “is to seek its own interest; and if anyone or anything—be it mother or brother, lover or god—becomes an impediment, we will throw it down, topple its statues, and burn its temples. I don’t understand the man with the purse; but I understand the men with the knives. It was a mistake to stop and turn. You lost lead time.”

“Yes.” Hugh dropped into silence and studied his past as if from the outside, trying to recognize the
vermbino
as himself. He seemed to float in memory above the scene on the Via Boadai, looking down on everything: the men with knives, the passersby frozen in anticipation, the robe with his hand outstretched, most of all the
vermbino
poised in flight. “I don’t know why,” he said. “To this day, I don’t know why. But I ran to him, to the robe, I mean; and he threw his arms around me, warding off the two knife-men, and he said…He said, ‘Would you like to have a name?’” Taken by surprise at the immediacy of the recollection, at the echo of that voice in his memory, Hugh turned away.

“And that was your first name. What did he call you?”

“Esp’ranzo, the Hopeful One. I thought he must have seen something in me to give him hope.”

“Your initiative,” the Fudir guessed. “Your daring, your survivability. He may have been a priest of the Darwinists, naturally selecting you because you had survived.”

“No, I asked him once, years later when I brought him a
beneficio
from my father; and he said that he had the hope before he had the boy.”

“And your father was della Cossa.”

“Della
Costa
. Shen-kua della Costa. He came to the home where the robes kept several boys like me and he lined us up and walked back and forth in front of us, and then he crooked his finger at me. He took me to the family compound, and they dressed me up in red quilted clothing, put golden rings on my fingers, and had a feast where they toasted me with wine and tea, as if I had just been born.”

“And so you became Ringbao della Costa. And later…”

“There were office-names. Those, I usually chose myself. I was Ludovic IX Krauzer when I was deputy finance minister on Markwald, Gessler’s Sun. I was Slim—just ‘Slim’—when I was education minister on Jemson’s Moon, Urquart’s Star.”

“And now you’re Hugh O’Carroll.”

He didn’t answer the Fudir, and the silence lasted while he steeped the tea ball. He waited for the Fudir to make some reciprocation, but the Terran had evidently not had a childhood, or at least not one that he wanted to talk about. Finally, the urgent call of the boiling water drew him back to the sideboard, where he prepared a cup. “Olafsson’s taking his time,” he said over his shoulder, but the Fudir made no reply.

The odor of the steeping tea was quite savory. The Eireannaughta were great tea-drinkers when not on the creature, but this smooth and fragrant flavor was something Hugh had not encountered before. Surely these leaves had been born on Peacock Junction or at least on Drunkard’s Boot. He brought the cup to his companion, who took a sip and scowled.

“It isn’t the real thing,” he said, indicating the cup with his hand but the passage to the pilot’s room with a toss of his head. “It smells funny. Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?”

Hugh nodded. Message received. Olafsson wasn’t a real Pup, and Hugh should be careful around him. The Fudir had hinted early on that the ship might not be Olafsson’s. He returned to the sideboard and made a cup for himself, using the last of the leaves in the canister. Of all his names, he decided, he liked Esp’ranzo the best.

He wondered what had led the Fudir to suspect Olafsson’s authenticity. Did he know Pups so well as to sniff out a false one? And what sort of person would dare such a pretense? Someone well north of harmless. Yet, the Fudir had gone with Olafsson willingly, so it must be something he had learned since boarding.

But if Olafsson was a fraud, there was no trial and the Fudir too was being abducted—for what purpose, the Terran either did not know or would not say.

Good fortune, then, that Voldemar had decided to press Hugh on board. The Fudir at least had someone with him to back his play.

When he upended the canister to tap the last of the leaves into the tea ball, Hugh’s fingers discovered an embossing on the bottom. Perhaps the logo of the tea-smith? Idle curiosity revealed a blank shield with a broad diagonal brushstroke across it. In ribbons above and below, writing that he could not make out. He turned the canister to catch the light at an angle, and the Fudir, attracted by the action, left the table and joined him.

The writing was Gaelactic.
An Sherivesh Áwrihay.
“The Service Particular.” Underneath the shield, a motto:
Go gowlyona mé.
“I would serve.” Hugh shook his head, and when the Fudir reached for the canister, he relinquished it.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the Terran muttered; then continued in a whisper. “The Particular Service is the Kennel, the Ardry’s dogs.”

“So,” said Hugh aloud. “Then the blend
is
what it appears to be?”

The Fudir tossed the empty canister back to Hugh. “Either there’s more like that in stock, or that’s the end of it.”

Either Olafsson really was of “the Particular Service,” or his masquerade ran to such fine details as this. Hugh grunted. His companion was given to fits of subtlety; but the simplest explanation was that Olafsson really was a Pup.

What bothered the Fudir the most and, in more reflective moments, amused him the most was that it had been at his own suggestion that Olafsson had masqueraded as a Hound’s Pup. It had been meant only to make his removal from New Eireann more palatable—to Hugh, to the Eireannaughta, not least to himself. Now, it seemed, the Confederate agent pretending to be a Pup was likely a Pup pretending to be a Confederate agent pretending to be a Pup. Oh, there was recursion for you!

Now that he knew, much of what he had noted in passing made sense. He had thought this ship a hijacked vessel; but that it was in fact a Pup’s field office was the simpler explanation. And Olafsson’s evident sympathy for the Eireannaughta…A true servant of the Confederacy would have felt indifference, or perhaps a mild satisfaction at a Member State’s misfortune.

The real question was whether he was better off in the custody of a false Pup or of a genuine one. The Kennel was reputedly less ruthless than Those of Name; but that did not make them especially merciful, and it seemed to him that a Hound’s Pup would take a dimmer view of someone who had served the Names than a ’Federal courier would.

But Olafsson, genuine or not, wanted Donovan—and the Fudir was inclined to let sleeping Donovans lie. He was afraid, a little, of what might happen should the long-dormant agent be aroused. But so long as he was aboard Olafsson’s yacht, he was safe. Whether League Pup or Confederate courier, Olafsson needed him, and needed him agreeably hale—at least, until they reached the Corner.

After that, his options would open up.

Greystroke did not mind the Fudir’s evident complacency. The traitor knew he was in no immediate peril. Donovan was a door, and the Fudir was the key and, like all keys, must be kept carefully, at least until the lock was turned. Once Greystroke had learned from Donovan whether CCW ships had also been disappearing in the Rift, he could decide what to do about both men. There was some benefit to allowing a known agent to remain in place. Much could be learned by observing who he met and what he did. But there were advantages also in cauterizing a wound.