Michael Flynn: The January Dancer

January turned to her from the ship’s viewer, his cherub’s face flushed with anger. “The groundside party has shifted the dig!”

Anne verified the mining party’s location. “Two hundred double paces to the west-southwest,” she acknowledged. She did not see that it much mattered, but the captain was given to fits of precision. “I’m sure they had a good rea—”

“They’re digging in the wrong place! The mass densitometer showed the ore closest to the surface here !” His finger stabbed the map projection on the viewer. “Greatest benefit, least work.”

“The least work,” she reminded him, “was to cannibalize part of the ship. That’s what Hogan recommended.”

“Cannibalize the ship! Oh, that’s a wonderful idea!” January cried, and for an instant Anne almost believed he meant it, so happy was his countenance. “And after a few rounds of that,” he continued, “there’d be no ship left to repair.”

Anne thought it might also mean less ship to break down, but she forbore expressing that thought.

“Someone should put a bug up their asses,” January said. “Hogan can’t spend his whole life playing cards.”

Anne sighed and turned away. “Alright…I’ll just…” But January stopped her.

“No, you stay up here, keep on top of things. I’ll have Slugger take me planetside in the gig.”

His Number One, who had been turning toward the radio and not toward the boat davits, hesitated. Amos had decided that the Personal Touch was needed. This was a mistake, in her opinion. On the radio, his voice, pure and hard, might have transmitted some of his urgency. Delivered in person, it never would.

Slugger O’Toole grounded the gig near the jolly-boat, and January was out the hatch before the sand beneath had even cooled. It was the sort of planet where skinsuits will do. The air was thin and cold, but could be gathered into breathable quantities by the suit’s intelligence. The breather made talking difficult, and gave the voice a squeaky texture—not a good thing, under the circumstances.

Striding across the gritty plain, he saw that the work party had moved the backhoe and sieve over into the lea of the low ridge that bordered the sea of sand. Further, having seen the gig land, they had stopped to watch the captain’s approach. This was one more straw on January’s personal dromedary. Did they think they could dally here forever?

The backhoe had been digging in a drift just below a cleft in the face of the ridge. Atop it, half-turned in her seat, Maggie Barnes waited. The engine hummed in idle. Every now and then, its insolators twitched a little to follow the world’s sun. Maggie—she liked to be called Maggie B.—was a short, thick woman with unwomanly strength in her shoulders. Her skinsuit was a sky-blue, but of a different sky on a far-off and almost forgotten world. Here, the sky was so pale it was almost white.

Tirasi, the system tech, tall and thin and with the look of a cadaver awaiting its tag, stood by the smelter with his arms crossed. The molecular sieve had already processed the needed silicon—mining sand had been no problem—and awaited now only some heavier metals. Occasionally, he tweaked a knob, as if fearful that the settings would otherwise all run amok. The deckhand Mgurk waited with a shovel planted in the sand, hands draped over the handle tip, and his chin resting upon the hands. His dull red skinsuit nearly matched the oxide sands, and he wore his hood pulled so tight that the goggles and breather mask were all that could be seen.

The sight of so much work not being done further aggravated January, who greeted them by squeaking, “You were supposed to be digging over there!”—indicating the vast open and featureless expanse of the desert.

Maggie B. had not known why the captain had dropped planetside. Anne had stayed out of it, and New Angeles was now below the horizon. A variety of possible reasons had suggested themselves, chief among them that Hogan had aroused himself and found another source of metal and, therefore, no further work was needed by the surface party. To be told she was digging in the wrong place was so unexpected that she laughed aloud.

It must be a joke, right?

No, it wasn’t. So she threw up her first line of defense. “Over there, it itches!”

Itches! Yes. The constant winds carried fines of sand, and while the air was too thin to carry much force, the continual spray on the skinsuit tickled.

“Tickled,” said January, suspecting some trick.

“Over here, we’re in the cliff’s wind-shadow.”

“But the ore body is buried deeper here!”

Now, by this time, it would have meant more work and more time to return to the original site and start over. The hole was by now already half-dug. Maggie snapped at him. “Makes no damned difference where I dig!”

Now, that may have been the last moment of sanity in the universe, because it should have occurred to all of them that if it made no difference, why had she moved in the first place? In fact, it did make a difference, and a damned one at that. But that came later. In truth, she had simply felt an urge to move the machine.

“You’re wasting my time, Captain,” she snapped, and as if to prove this point, she put the backhoe into gear.

One more scoop and the claw tips of the bucket made a peculiar, almost musical screech that set their teeth on edge. Even Mgurk roused himself, lifted his chin, and peered into the pit.

Something dull and metallic lay beneath the sand.

“The ore body,” said Maggie in quiet satisfaction, and gave January a triumphant look.

“Must be a meteorite,” said Tirasi. But January knew immediately that was not right. This close to the surface? With no sign of an impact crater?

“Who cares?” Maggie said, and drew the backhoe for another scoop. Again, that singing note called out. Mgurk cocked his head as if listening.

“It’s smooth,” said January when more of the body had been revealed.

“It’s bloody machined, ” said Tirasi, who had abandoned the smelter to kneel at the pit’s edge. Maggie Barnes hopped off the backhoe and joined him.

“Nonsense,” January said. “Rivers will smooth a stone the same way.”

Tirasi swung his arm wide. “See any rivers nearby?” he demanded. “Water ain’t flowed here in millions of years. Nah, this here’s a made thing.” He pulled pliers from his tool belt and tapped the object. It rang, dull and hollow, and the echoes went on longer than they should have.

January squeaked, “Johnny! Bring that shovel over and clear this out a bit. Johnny? Johnny!” He looked up, but Mgurk was nowhere in sight. “Where has that lazy lout gone now?”

It was a fair question, given that for many leagues in any direction lay nothing but gritty, open desert. Johnny had an aversion to hard labor and showed wonderful imagination in its avoidance; but where in all those miles could he have hidden himself? January used the all-hands channel on his radio. “Johnny, get your lazy carcass over here and help us dig!”

He heard static on the bounceback—a burst of noise that might have had a voice in the center of it. It seemed on the very edge of forming words.

O’Toole answered from the gig. The sudden excitement of the group at the site had attracted his attention. “Johnny’s after wandering off t’ the cleft,” he told them. “What’s going on?”

Maggie Barnes told him. “We found us a prehuman artifact!”

What else could it be, a machined object, buried under the sand on a forgotten world? The works of man are wondrously diverse and widely spread, but where you find them you generally find men as well; and none had ever ventured here. “Let’s not count chickens,” January chided them. But for once his Santa Claus countenance did not lie. There might be riches here, and he knew it as well as they did. Yet caution led him to say, “Not every prehuman artifact—”