Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

“The pirate butchers; the king milks. On the whole, I’d rather be milked. Fir Li knew the difference.”

The scarred man runs a hand through the remnants of his hair. “I hate Fir Li. We hate the very thought of him. He thinks too much.”

“Normally,” the harper answers, “thinking would be accounted a good thing.”

“No, we mean his paraperception, his multitasking, or however your milk-tongue puts it. For a man so single-minded, he’s had too many minds.”

“I don’t know how the encoding works for parallel perception, but…”

“You don’t want to know. Beside, Fir Li doesn’t matter. He wasn’t a player, except on the edges. A fit role for a man on the edge of the sky, and perhaps on the edge of his own sanity. Although being of more than one mind, he might be edgier than most.”

“Who was the player then…? Ah. Greystroke.”

“Yes, the man no one sees. He could be sitting here at this table with us, and you’d not mark him, so well does he blend in.”

The harper laughs. “Surely, an exaggeration!”

The scarred man smiles, and his smiles are not pleasant. “Surely. An exaggeration. But what sort of music would you play to limn a man like that? Music wants to be heard, to call attention to itself, and that is the very opposite of the Grey One.

“I can hide a melody in the chords. It’s not always the top notes that sing, you know.”

“The trick,” the scarred man says, as if to himself, “is for all the notes to sing in concert.”

“January, Little Hugh, and now Greystroke. We’re for Jehovah now?”

The shrunken head dips, the smile turns bitter. “For now. There are a few others who aren’t in it yet. But we have enough to start with.”

It began on Jehovah, the scarred man says…

…because this is the place where everything begins or where everything ends, and we are not yet at the end.

The Bar of Jehovah hums like a bagpipe. All those private conversations blend together and couple with some curious resonances due to the architecture of the room. There is a permanence to this sound. Like those eddies that form in flowing water, it persists independently of the men and women who flow in and flow out. It is said that there are conversations still going on, long after their originators have passed away. The hum seldom changes in pitch, though it will rise and fall in volume and even, by random chance, drop into momentary silences.

The Bar is a place where the dispossessed take possession. The skyfaring folk—freighters and liners and survey ships and military vessels—come and go, but there is a substrate beneath these transients, a more permanent population for whom the Bar is less a refuge than a home. Here, old grudges are endlessly rehashed and new plans continually laid. Here, the past is always remembered and the future never comes.

There were five at the table, speaking in that desultory way of chance acquaintances. Drink and smoke and crowding and craft had placed them together. They spoke of ship arrivals and departures; of the quality of the drinks or the inhalations. The weather came in for much debate, not only the electric potential around the Jehovah Interchange and the local speed of space, but also the mundane weather planet-side. It looked like rain.

“I saw a storm once,” Captain January told his companions. “A dust storm. Maybe seven, eight weeks back, it was. It covered half the planet, and the lightning flashed like popcorn.” It was a big Spiral Arm, with a lot of planets, and nothing has ever been seen or heard but that someone else hasn’t seen or heard a bigger. No one disputed January’s bragging rights; but Micmac Anne, sitting beside him, recalled that the storm had covered only a quarter of the southern hemi sphere. How long, she wondered, before raconteurial evolution produced a version that blanketed the entire world?

She could not recall that escape without a shudder. She had seen the lightning spike upward five or six leagues from the cloud bank, to ground in the solar wind itself. It had licked each of the boats like the tongue of an indigo snake. She studied Amos under lowered lids and sought refuge from what-might-have-been in a tankard of beer. He could laugh about it; but he had only lived through it. He hadn’t had to watch .

The man on January’s left had entered a world where none could follow, his face nestled in his arms on the table. From time to time, he roused himself and spoke. “Had me ’n ancestor on Die Bold, praise be,” he announced in a local accent, and the table chuckled. Who did not have an ancestor on the Old Planets? “Lef’ me a legacy,” he went on. “Got a ’ficial notice, an’ all. Lord knows I could use ut.” His hand snaked out and pulled to him the hose from which he sucked the smoke of his own particular fantasy. Air bubbled through the huqa, cooling the smoke, lying to the lungs. He exhaled slowly, contentedly, and the table filter gathered in the brume and it was no more. “There’s this guy there, on Die Bold,” he explained. “He can sennit t’me, God willin’, but he needs two thousan’ ’n Gladjola—’n Glad-i-o-la —Bills t’ file th’ right papers.” The man’s fingers moved restlessly, playing with the hose. “Fren’s ’r helpin’ raise th’ bills.” He paused hopefully, then added, “M’ fren’s can share the ’heritance whennit comes, God willing.”

The others looked to one another and grinned. He had no friends here. Not for so transparent a ruse as that.

Another of the tablemates, a woman as thin as a willow branch, mahogany-dark with blue eyes and bright yellow hair, wondered aloud how many “gladdys” the enterprising Die Bolder had already snared from fools such as this one. “It doos not take mooch,” she assured the others, her Alabaster origin revealed by her accent. “He oonly needs to fool soom o’ the pipple soom o’ the time. Small change, boot he meks it oop in voloome.”

“Someday,” said the fine-featured man who wore a shirt of many colors, “there really will be a legacy discovered, and none of the heirs will believe it.” Lamplight glittered off his jewelry as he waved a dismissive hand.

Their banter was interrupted by a giant. Twenty-one hands tall with shoulders broad to match. Red, shoulder-length tresses entwined with glass balls of various colors. The scar that crossed his face should not by rights have left as much nose behind as it had. This apparition leaned his fists on the table. “I’m looking for a man,” he said without preamble.

“Aren’t we all,” said the mahogany woman to general laughter.

The fine-featured man studied the newcomer with interest. “Any man in particular?” he asked.

The smoke-drunk native began to snore gently.

The giant looked around the room, studied the people at the table, leaned closer, and lowered his voice. “The O’Carroll of New Eireann.”

The fancy man and the mahogany woman shook their heads. January scowled and Anne, who had picked up some notion of Eireannaughta politics in their brief stopover there, said, “Who wants to know?” She had it from Colonel-Manager Jumdar that this O’Carroll had been an assassin and a rebel whose death was sought by many.

“Sweeney. He’ll know the name—aye, an’ the nose. Should ye be runnin’ into him here…” And the giant again scanned the Bar. “If ye be sayin’ him, tell him the clans o’ th’ Southern Vale wait his retarn an’ th’ overthrow o’ the ICC tyranny. Those wards, exactly.”

As Sweeney straightened, January muttered, “I’d overthrow the ICC myself, if I could.”