Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

“You shouldn’t call yourself that. Look at what you’ve accomplished. You’re a certified planetary manager. You’ve run entire government departments and, from all I’ve heard, run them well.”

He smiled thinly. “And I ran a guerilla, too. Don’t forget that. There is a part of me that knows what I’ve accomplished. But there’s one small sliver of my brain—somewhere back here in the old cerebellum—that still thinks those shopkeepers were right. It’s not something you can hear for years and years when you’re young and ever entirely forget. And what was my guerilla but another and vaster case of vandalism? That’s why I’m fit for—” But he stopped then, and did not say what he was fit for. Instead, he smiled. “And you, a vawn Chu? I’ve told you my base-name.” He managed to bow sitting down. “Ringbao della Costa, bēi rén . How did you become Bridget ban? Was it your childhood dream to go to the dogs?”

“Are you going to move that piece or not?”

Hugh looked in surprise at his hands and saw that he was playing idly once more with the princely hound. He replaced it on its square and moved a councilor up the white diagonal. “Sorry,” he said. “We should concentrate on the game.”

“It takes the mind off…” She bit her lip as he looked up.

“Off what?”

“Off entering an uncharted road.”

“Greystroke knows what he’s doing. And the Fudir’s a licensed charts-man.”

“Aye…” Bridget ban blocked his councilor by advancing a minion. “But, well…Alright. My base-name is Francine Thompson. There’s no secret in that. I never wanted to be a Hound, though. Oh, I read all the stories growing up. About Efram Still or Moddey Dhu and the others. But I never wanted to be one. I only wanted to be regular Francine Thompson. You see, I grew up on Die Bold, and the most important thing in the world was to be ‘regular.’ At least in the Pashlik of Redoubt, where we lived. All I ever heard was ‘communal solidarity’ and ‘the fingers work together make a fist.’ Things like that. So I studied for my assigned career and worked at perfecting my character for it. I was to be a nurse-practitioner in the Kentwold Hills. It was a good assignment, one worth doing. The hill towns are scattered far between and don’t see a medico very often. But…” She watched Hugh slide a fortress slowly up the leftmost file, as if doing it surreptitiously. But she had expected the move and immediately castled her emperor. Hugh frowned over the board.

“But try as I might with the character-building exercises,” she continued, “I couldn’t enjoy nursing or, more importantly I think, I couldn’t do it well. So, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I lacked the plasticity to mold myself to the type that society needed me to be.”

“And what was it,” Hugh asked, “that you most loved hearing about in those days?”

Bridget ban closed her eyes and became young Francine Thompson, sitting before the televisor in the block community center. There had been a terrible arson in Ark Alpikor. Two hundred people had died. “When the public inquiry agents caught the bastard who did it, everyone was pleased to hear it; but I was…‘ecstatic,’ I suppose is the word. After that, it seemed that every time I opened a newscreen or picked up an idle book at the center library, it was something about policefolk, and more often than not it was a story about one of the Hounds. It was almost as if the idea of being a Hound was tracking me, hunting me down.”

“Not all policers are worth the aspiration,” Hugh told her. “The People’s Police on Megranome wouldn’t have cared if the man they caught was the true arsonist or not. And if I’d fallen into the hands of the New Shanghai pleetsya, I wouldn’t be here today.” As if to underline the point, he took one of her minions with a counselor and swept it from the board.

“That might be the other question: What did I most hate to hear of? It wasn’t anything like the arson itself. That was only tragedy. They rebuilt the dormitory, named it ‘The House of Sorrow,’ assigned new families to live in it, and life went on. No, what I hated most was when I read of innocents wrongly prosecuted.”

“You should have been a Robe, not a Hound. They were always on about ‘justice.’ So when did you—Pay no attention to the counselor. He’s innocent and you’re wrongly prosecu—Damn.” Bridget ban had sent one of her hounds leaping across the field to take the piece. “You weren’t supposed to see that line of attack.”

“If you don’t want me to see your line of attack, you shouldn’t pursue it. Unless you want to play in the dark,” she added in a playful voice. “What was I…? Oh. When I was fourteen, local, the County Planning Board sent me to a medical school across the border in the Kingdom.”

“The Kingdom of what?”

“Just ‘the Kingdom.’ The odd thing is that they don’t actually have a king, just a regent. The story was that they’d had a king once who had been so just and wise a ruler that no king after could hope to measure up. So after he was gone, they set up a regency to await his return. The Kingdom’s medical technology was more advanced than Redoubt’s; so I was supposed to learn what I could and bring it back to the Pashlik. But after a month at the Université Royale, I asked for asylum and was granted it and I transferred my major to criminology. And then one day while I was walking past the Eglantine Traffic Star to my classes, I passed the League Consulate and, purely on a whim, I walked in and asked them how I went about becoming a Hound.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“‘If you have to ask, you’ll never be.’ I don’t think they really knew and were just brushing me off. So I insisted they send an inquiry to High Tara.” She smiled in self-deprecation. “Obstacles harden my whims. Well, I didn’t think much about it afterward, but a couple of doozydays later, when I was sitting under the great fir tree in the university Green, a shadow fell across my textbook—and there stood Zorba de la Susa, the greatest Hound of them all. He had come personally to evaluate me. Yes, of course I recognized him. He could have become the Little One Himself, had he wanted the post, but he preferred the field. ‘The Spiral Arm’s a more spacious office,’ he used to say, ‘than the Little One’s palace suite.’ He examined me, ran me through a battery of tests, and must have seen some hope, because he made a place for me at the Kennel School.”

“‘He must have seen some hope,’” Hugh repeated, as if to himself.

“I was nineteen, local. I didn’t know if I could ever measure up to the likes of de la Susa or na Fir Li.”

Hugh laughed. “And now you’re almost single-handedly chasing an entire battle fleet down an uncharted hole because of a fanciful legend.”

She had made sure that they exercised together in the fitness room, running in tandem on the slidewalk, spotting for each other on the mass machines, and afterward sitting side by side on the floor mats. The day before they were to enter the uncharted road, he asked her what her most difficult case had been.

“I can tell you what the most frightening one was. I’ve never been tasked with governing a planet or with disaster relief like Black Shuck carried out on Kamerand. Those would be frightening, but in a different way.” She described her escape from Pulawayo’s house, her discovery of the monstrous exhibits in the remonstratorium, and the artful disguise she had used to elude the guards at the maglev station.

“So there I was,” she said, laughing, “striding proud as ye please along Uasladonto Street with my breasts stuck out for everyone to see.”