The January Dancer (4 page)

“Aaah! Those old stories ain’t worth shit.” O’Toole was unimpressed by tales of an imaginary prehuman “king.” But he stepped away from the pedestal.

January raised his eyebrows. “A whole universe compressed into a ball that small? No wonder it’s so heavy.”

Tirasi snorted. “Rot! It’s too damned
light
to be a whole universe. I don’t know what stories they tell in the Terran Quarter on Abyalon, Johnny, but that just doesn’t make sense.”

Mgurk shrugged. “Pukka tale. Here ball; just like tell story.”

Maggie B. pursed her lips. “How can the universe be inside a ball inside the universe? That’s like finding
New Angeles
inside a cargo hold of
New Angeles
! It ain’t…” She hesitated, searching for a term to express the
ain’t-ness
of it. “It ain’t
topological
!”

O’Toole made a disgusted sound. “I thought we come down here to get rich, not stand around discussin’ kiddie stories and fookin’ philosophy. C’mon, Bill, there’s three more things to check out here.”

Tirasi took one more look at the Midnight Egg, captured an image of it, and folded his magnifier. “If we can’t take it with us, it doesn’t matter what it is.” He announced this as if excuses were needed, and followed the pilot to the next pedestal. Mgurk said something about foxes and grapes that January did not catch.

January was about to follow the others when he noticed that the sandstone block beside him seemed now twisted into a half spiral. Curious, he took it off the pedestal—it proved lightweight and comfortable to hold—and tried untwisting it; but it was “rock solid” and had no give to it. And yet, imperceptibly, the thing had altered its shape, like a dancer turning his upper body while leaving his feet planted.

Whatever, it wasn’t moving now. He increased the sensitivity of the skinsuit’s perceptors, but could detect no movement in the thing. January took some comfort that the stone was not actually squirming in his hand.

The next artifact was what they finally called the Slipstone. It seemed to be a chunk of blue coral, irregularly shaped into tendrils and cavities, and about the size of a man’s head. Like the Midnight Egg, the Slipstone seemed to go on forever: each tendril, each cavity, when magnified, resolved into further tendrils and cavities. “Fractal,” was how Maggie B. described it and, since she was the ship’s astrogator and Electric Avenue was a fractal network, they accepted her word for it.

They could not pick it up, either.

It proved immovable, not because of its weight, but because it was frictionless. They could get no grip on it, not with hands, not with tongs, not even by first covering it with the sandy grit that they had tracked with them into the chamber. How could something so irregular be so slippery?

“It doesn’t make bleeding sense,” Tirasi complained. “If it’s frictionless, how does it stay put on the pedestal?”

Maggie B. shrugged. “Same way that other pedestal could support an entire universe.”

A joke,
thought January as he watched their hapless efforts with a growing sense of his own frustration. (Had they forgotten there was also a ship to repair?) The Slipstone was a joke like the Midnight Egg was a joke. One was very small, but very big. The other was very rough, but very smooth. Was this place the repository for prehuman practical jokes? A collection of alien whoopee cushions and joy buzzers?

Even the door was a paradox. Soft and yielding, but impenetrable.

Neither Maggie B. nor Johnny could recall a prehuman legend involving anything like the Slipstone; and the others came from worlds where such fables were never told, or at least never mentioned. “Oh-for-two,” Tirasi grumbled, finally conceding defeat in his effort to grasp the Slipstone. “What’s the point of finding a bleeding treasure trove if”—he waited out a burst of static on the radios—“if you can’t pick any of it up?”

His answer was a sudden howl of pain from O’Toole, who was dancing away from the third object, holding his right hand. “Sunnuvabitch!” he cried. “Sunnuvabitch, sunnuvabitch, sunnuvabitch!”

“Heard you the first time.” Tirasi laughed, reaching for the golden object, cupped on a pedestal of pure white. “But we’ve known that about you for…Bloody son of a bloody bitch!”

Now it was Tirasi nursing his hand and dancing a little. Mgurk cocked his head. “Hey, that piece one Budmash Lotah.”

Maggie B. pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t touch that, Cap’n, was I you.”

January bent close to study the artifact. It was shaped like a discus bisecting an oblate sphere. “Saturnoid” was how he would describe it. Many gas giants were saturnoid, some with quite spectacular rings. January wondered if this was a compressed gas giant.
At least it won’t be as heavy as the Midnight Egg…

The surface had a cool metallic look, whether actually metal or not, and was smooth and shiny and golden. It seemed to glow from within, and waves of yellow and red and orange passed through it. “Those look like flames,” January said. “Was it hot?” he asked the two men, but another static discharge covered his words. “Did it burn you?” he asked when he could.

O’Toole had calmed down somewhat. “Like a million needles sticking my hand.” Tirasi pulled a pyrometer from his scrip with his left hand and gave it to Maggie B., who examined the object’s surface.

“Ambient temperature,” the astrogator announced.

That made the object rather more cold than hot. “It looks like it’s burning up inside,” January mused aloud. But fire was a chemical reaction. It could not have continued for eon upon eon without consuming eons of material.
Of course, maybe this pot is all that’s left.
There were chemical reactions that oscillated between different colors, and the appearance of roiling flames might be a consequence of such a reaction. But could such oscillations remain undamped over so long a time as these objects must have sat here?

They called this one the Budmash Lotah, which Johnny explained meant an evil-doing brass pot in the Terran patois.

January gave up. He could not grasp the nature of these objects. There was nothing in his experience from which he might analogize. Each was beautiful in some manner, but the only other thing they had in common was that they could not be moved.

That’s why all the other pedestals are empty,
he suddenly realized. Whatever else was once here could be removed, and so they had been. (But when? And by whom?) Leaving, what? A display of…immovable objects? Earth, water, fire…

He wondered where the irresistible force was. “Hey,” cried Mgurk, “come-come, look-see.” The Terran was standing by one of the empty pedestals and passing his hand slowly through the air above it.

“Now what?” Tirasi complained. He and O’Toole joined the Terran.

Maggie B. turned to the captain, who had not moved. “What is it?” she asked.

January waited out a growl of static. “Something’s missing.”

“Holy Alfven!” said Tirasi, and O’Toole turned to the captain. “It’s a fookin’ ghost.”

“You have to look at just the right angle,” Tirasi explained when the captain and Maggie had joined them. “Johnny, stand away. The light has to be…
There,
do you see it?”

January nodded slowly. He could make out the billowing of yellowed clouds against a ruddy background, as if a slice of orange sky many leagues deep had been captured and set on a pedestal. “It’s a whole-gram,” he guessed.

“Yah?” said Tirasi as he viewed his gauge in disgust. “A projected image
with mass
?” He showed January the readout. “
And
with a temperature
and
”—passing his hand through the image—“with a texture. Cool, smooth, and I can feel that it’s hollow.”

“You can feel it,” Maggie B. said, “but you can’t pick ’er up.” Tirasi nodded. “Like grabbing smoke.”

“Why am I not fookin’ surprised,” said O’Toole. He was answered by another outbreak of static.

The second chamber was right beside the pedestal and January idly felt one of the soft, spongy leaves that ringed the entry. It seemed made of the same material as the door of the vault.

At that point, Tirasi and O’Toole noticed their captain’s possession of the sandstone block. “Well, now,” said O’Toole with a glower. “And are ye cutting us out on the only bit of loot we can actually walk off with?”

January, surprised, looked at the sandstone block in his grip. It had fit his hand so comfortably that he had quite forgotten he was holding it. The stone was thicker at the ends now, and curved in a slight arc—and he had not felt even the smallest movement.

It was an exceptional piece, he realized. An exception not only to the beauty of the other items, but also to their immobility. A cuckoo in the nest.
And why wasn’t it taken when the rest of this vault was plundered?

Tirasi nudged the pilot. “Greedy sod, ain’t he? C’mon, Slug, let’s explore the rest of this place. Might be there’s more stuff in the next room.”

January suddenly knew. Those fleshy “leaves” were not the petals of a decorative flower that ringed the entrance to the second chamber. They were segments of another of those marshmallow doors. Something had pierced the door in the center, and it had peeled outward in pie-slice sections. From the arrangement of the pieces, the door had been pierced from
inside
the chamber. And there was nothing inside the chamber but an empty pedestal.

“Wait!” he said, and to his surprise the others stopped and turned expectantly. January looked again at the shredded door. What had sat on that pedestal, sealed off from the other objects? The irresistible force? How long had the door resisted it? Millennia? Eons? But it had failed at last.

Where was it now? It could not have gotten off-planet, surely. No, it must still be loose somewhere on this world.

Waiting for a ship to happen by.

“You’re absolutely right, Bill,” he said. “There may be other relics somewhere in the complex, but for all we know that corridor”—he pointed toward the half-open door at the end of the room, half enticed by the dark at the end of the tunnel, half expecting
something irresistible
to come pouring through it—“for all we know that corridor leads nowhere but to a dead end deep inside the planet. That would fit, somehow. But we need to get off this world, now.”

O’Toole scratched his ear, cast an uneasy glance at the corridor, and said, “Sure thing, Cap’n. But I hate to leave without getting
something
out o’ this.”

The lack of objection surprised January. “Something’s happening,” he told them. “Have you been listening to the static on the comm channels? It’s getting stronger. There’s a storm brewing, and a big one. Look.” He wanted desperately for them to understand. “We can’t take these other things with us, but we can still cash in. Think what people would pay to come see them. They have to come through the tunnel, so we can control admission. But…” And here his voice became lower, more urgent. “We must leave
now
. We don’t have the supplies to stay and explore every pocket in this entire complex. We need to get a stake, so we can come back and do this proper and controlled.”

Maggie B. pursed her lips, thinking. “Who you thinking might stake us?”

January took a deep breath. “The Interstellar Cargo Company…” He hesitated, waited for the objections; then, when none were forthcoming, stammered on. “The ICC’s a damned pack of jackals, and ships like ours only get their leavings; but we may be able to work out a deal with them. If we’re going to do a seismic survey, map the complex, conduct a grid-by-grid search in an orderly manner, document our discoveries, we’re going to need more resources than the poor old
Angel
can earn in our lifetimes.”

A moment of silence passed. Then Maggie B. said, “Right, then. There’ll be time between here and the Jenjen to cook up a plan to protect our rights.”

Tirasi nodded. “An’ we’ll be able to show ’em that thing”—he indicated the now S-curved sandstone block in January’s hand—“and the videos we took of this place.”

“But if ye show ’em yer rock,” O’Toole warned him, “be fookin’ careful, or they’ll be taking it off ye. That bein’ yer honor’s very own stone.”

The display of unanimity and agreement was so unexpected that January waited a moment longer for the objections. Then Johnny Mgurk cried, “Chop and chel, sahbs. We go jildy. Hutt, hutt! Big dhik.” And the spidery little man led them up the tunnel.

January half expected to find the main door now shut, trapping them inside, but it was still rolled into its slot in the wall. The five of them tumbled out into the rocky cleft, blinking at the light, noticing that it was already dimmer.

Through the growing static on the radio, he heard Micmac Anne calling, “…swer me!
Angel
ca…Jan…! C…in, Amo…!”

January flipped the responder. “Tell me thrice,” he said three times. The ship’s intelligence could create a coherent sentence by splicing the fragments that got through the static.

“Amos!” said the reconstructed Anne. “There’s storm coming your way, a big one. It started over your eastern horizon, and we’ve been tracking it since…There’s lightning. Lots of lightning. Lots of
big
lightning. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s coming right down on you. Amos, get out of there now!”

They had already reached the excavation site. Maggie B. began to mount the backhoe, but January said, “Leave it. You heard Anne. The wind won’t be much at this pressure, but the sand can clog our breathing masks. And the lightning…”

He could hear it now. Thunder like galloping hooves. Underneath—a steadier tympani of deeper booms, like the lumbering gait of a giant. Black dust clouds loomed on the eastern horizon and lightning flashed within them like fireworks. The clouds seemed a-boil, rolling toward them. Johnny began to run toward the jolly-boat. “Shikar storm!” he wailed. “Hutt, hutt!”

“Shut yer food-hole, ye Terry slob!” O’Toole cried, bounding past him to the gig. Tirasi had fallen behind, staggering with the molecular sieve in his arms. “Drop it,” January ordered him. “Drop it and run for the jolly-boat.” The system tech threw his precious machine to the sand and sprinted.