Michael Flynn: The January Dancer

For her set piece, she sings “Tristam and Iseult,” the cruelest of the songs of love, and with its ferocity she holds her listeners’ hearts in her hand. When she plucks out the strokes of war, their hearts gallop with the thundering strings. When she caresses the gentle tones of trysting, they yearn with the lovers in their bower. And when her fingers snap the sudden chords of betrayal, a shiver runs through them and they look at their own comrades through lowered lids. She plays with her audience, too. The music suggests that this time, somehow, it will all end differently, and in the end she leaves them weeping.

Afterward, the Bartender directs her to a dark corner, where a man sits before a bowl of uiscebeatha . The bowl is empty—or not yet refilled, depending on the direction of one’s thoughts. He is one of those lost men, and it is in this very bowl that he has become lost. So he stares into it, hoping to find himself. Or at least some fragment of what he was.

He is a man of remnants and shadows. There is a forgotten look about him. His blouse is incompletely fastened; his face concealed by the ill-lit alcove. It is a niche in the wall and he, a saint of sorts, and like a statue’d saint, he makes no move when the ollamh sits across the table from him.

The harper says nothing. She waits.

After a time a man’s voice issues from the shadows. “We thought it was a potion that seduced Tristam from his duty. We thought he fell in love unwillingly.”

“It’s not love unless it is unwilling,” the harper answers. “Otherwise, why speak of ‘falling’?”

“Your eyes remind us…” But of what he doesn’t say. It may be that he has forgotten. She might be one of those ghostly images that haunt the berms of Electric Avenue, crawling along at the laggard speed of light, only now arriving from some distant past.

The harper leans forward and says, with unwonted eagerness, “They tell me you know about the Dancer, that you knew those who were in it.”

Mockery from the shades. “Am I to be a seanachy, then? A teller of tales?”

“Perhaps, but there is a song in the tale somewhere, and I mean to find it.”

“Be careful what you look for. I think you sing too many songs. We think you sing more than you live. It all happened so long ago. I didn’t think anyone knew.”

“Stories spread. Rumors trickle like winter snowmelt down a mountain’s face.”

The shadowed man thinks for a time. He looks into his bowl again, but if he intends another as the price of the story, he does not name that price and the harper again waits.

“I can only tell it as it was told to us,” the man says. “I can weave you a story, but who knows how true the threads may be?” His fingers play idly with the bowl; then he shoves it to one side and leans his forearms on the table. His face, emerging from the darkened alcove at last, is shrunken, as if he has been suctioned out and all that remains of him is skin and skull. His flesh is sallow, his cheeks hollow. His chin curls like a coat hook, and his mouth sags across the saddle of the hook. His hair is too white, but there are places on his skull, places with scars, where the hair will never grow back. His eyes dart ever sidewise, as if something wicked lurks just past the edge of his vision. “What can it matter now?” he asks of ghosts and shadows. “They’ve all died, or gone their ways. Who can the memories hurt?”

The shadows do not answer, yet.

It began on an unnamed planet, the scarred man says…

…around an unnamed sun, in an unnamed region distant from the Rift. That was a bad sign to begin with, for what can come from nameless places but something unspeakable? It was a bad place to break down, a bad place to be, far off the shipping lanes, on a little-used byway of Electric Avenue known as Spider Alley. But it was just the sort of place where a baling-wired, skin-toothed tramp freighter might find itself. When there is little to lose, there is much to gain, and the secret shortcuts of the Periphery have a way of finding profit.

And this at least can be said about such forgotten corners: It is in such places that the flotsam and the jetsam of the galaxy wash up.

One such bit of flotsam was the free trader New Angeles, out of Ugly Man and bound for the Jenjen Cluster with a cargo of drugs and exotic foodstuffs that the folk there do not make for themselves. The jetsam had been there much longer. How much longer, no man could say.

There were contractual dates, penalty clauses, maintenance budgets. It was the sacrifice of the latter on the altar of the former that had brought the ship to this place. Something had blown—it doesn’t matter what—and New Angeles had drifted into a side channel and into the subluminal mud.

…and alfvens aren’t really designed to entangle at Newtonian speeds. One hard yank on the fabric of space to slide off the ramp of Electric Avenue without becoming a Cerenkov burst, a few more tugs to get below the system’s escape velocity. Past that, they tend to smoke and give off sparks. Here on the edge of nowhere there was no Space Traffic Control, no magbeam cushions to slow them, and the unwonted deceleration strained New Angeles to the limit. The twin alfvens screamed like tormented souls until the ship finally entered the calm of a Newtonian orbit.

By the grace of physics, every strand of Electric Avenue is tied to a sun, but there is no guarantee of planets to go with it, or at least of useful ones. As the ship shed velocity circling the star, the crew imaged the system from various points, searching anxiously for parallax, until…There! A planet! Hard acceleration to match orbits; and a long, slow crawl across Newtonian space, during which each crewman could blame another for everything that had gone wrong.

The planet was the sort called a marsbody: a small world of broad, gritty plains and low, tired hills that barely interrupted the eternal westerlies. The winds blew at gale force, but the air being thin, the storms were but the ghosts of rage. Orbiting the planet, the ship’s instruments detected sand and iron, and with silicon and heavy metals, a man could make most things needful. So a downside team was assembled, equipped with backhoe and molecular sieve, and sent below in the ship’s jolly-boat while the engineers and deck officers waited above in various states of patience.

In one state was the chief engineer, Nagaraj Hogan, who whiled his time in certain recreations based on the laws of probability—to the benefit of his assistant, who had found those laws highly malleable.

In the other state fidgeted Captain Amos January, who, like a sort of anti-Canute, spent his time not sweeping back the tide, but urging it forward. He was the orifice through which all the pressures of budget and schedule were concentrated and directed at the crew—though with little more consequence than the spiritless wind on the planet below. January owned that most treacherous of countenances, for he was a hard man with a soft man’s face. Who could take seriously anything he said? The lips were too full, the cheeks too round, the laugh lines too prominent. They belied the harshness with which he often spoke.

There comes a time when fatalism conquers logic and conquers even common sense, and the crew of New Angeles had reached that point, and perhaps had reached it long before. They ought to have worked with more passion on the repairs, but why hustle to meet the next disaster?

Because the ship would miss the delivery date, January fumed. Micmac Anne, his Number One, thought that if the folk in the Jenjen had sent all the way to Ugly Man for the drugs, they would hardly return them because they were a trifle stale.