Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

“Och, Large-hound,” said Bridget ban, “is there no end to the catalogue of what you don’t know?”

“You,” Grimpen said to the Fudir, “are a Terran, or I miss my guess.”

“Is that important?” the Fudir asked him.

“To you, I suppose.” He looked at his colleagues. “Is he alright? A Terry? Confederate ties?”

“Enough Confederate ties to make a fancy bow,” said Greystroke, “but he works for himself.”

“He’s the one,” said Hugh, “who got us on the trail of the Dancer in the first place.”

“Dancer?”

“Oh. You’d know it as the Twisting Stone.”

“Oh, that. What’s your interest in that?”

The others looked at Grimpen in astonishment until Bridget ban spoke. “Why hae ye come here, then, if nae for the Dancer?”

Now it was Grimpen’s turn to look astonished. He pointed to Greystroke and Bridget ban, in turn. “You, Fir Li sent to track down Donovan. You went off after the phantom fleet. I went to learn how the ICC knew so much so soon. Yet, here we are, all together. It’s enough to make me think there really is a purpose to the universe. Or at least a punch line. Why don’t we take turns explaining how we all wound up here in this cockroach heaven?”

The briefing took them into the night. Grimpen listened carefully, took notes, asked penetrating questions. He was merciless in undermining their assumptions, pointing out alternative explanations for each of their conclusions. But in the end, he had to admit that the legend of the Twisting Stone seemed to have some substance to it. “Though I’d be wary of putting too much faith in the details.”

“Then why did you consult the Book of Legends in the Archive?” Hugh asked.

“I lost a day and a half on that,” Grimpen complained. “My ship’s intelligence had trouble translating it…”

The Fudir told him it was because the refugee camps in this region had been settled by a mix of people called Brits and Rooskies and the language was an amalgam of their two tongues. Grimpen smiled and said, “That’s nice. But what I didn’t know was what I was looking for in that manuscript.”

“Then how,” said the Fudir, “did you know when you found it?”

Grimpen smiled and pointed a finger at the Terran. “I like you. You’re funny. No, I knew the kind of thing I was looking for.”

“Which was…?” Greystroke said.

“The Cynthians knew too much, too soon. When they came through Sapphire Point the first time, they said they’d tortured the factor on Cynthia over some slight of etiquette and he warned them that the ICC had the Twisting Stone. They came back later—you’d already gone by then, Grey One—and they’d gone to New Eireann to get the thing. But, d’ye see, they left the Hadramoo before the word could have reached them. It’s six or seven metric weeks from New Eireann to the Hadramoo. As near as I could tell, they’d set out to seize the stone no more than a week after the ICC laid hands on it in the first place. And that meant…”

“The ICC has some way of sending messages faster than courier ships.” That was the Fudir. “Well, it makes sense, now that the Big Fella here has pointed it out. They always seem to know where the prices were best and what was selling well on which planets.”

Hugh began to curse. “Then Jumdar didn’t come to New Eireann by chance, either. I’ll bet a shiny ducat that Nunruddin called for troops as soon as the coup went bad. And when the Cynthians came, she had plenty of time to warn her superiors so they could intercept the rievers at Peacock Junction.”

Grimpen nodded. “If the Dark-hound had spent as much time analyzing ICC activities as he did Rift crossings, one of us would have tumbled to this years ago. I suspected they had something; but I didn’t know what. A swifter swiftie? A secret shortcut, like you found at Peacock? I was reasonably sure it wasn’t a new invention—‘There’s nothing new under the suns,’ right? But maybe, just maybe, a prehuman technology that they had stumbled on. So I translated the titles of the old legends in the archive, looking for anything relating to communication. I found five that were suggestive. One was the Tale of the Calling Ring.”

Hugh remembered the chair facing the Ourobouros Circuit, remembered too a similar arrangement in the ruined vault on New Eireann, and suddenly he knew. “The Ourobouros Circuit! It’s a communicator.”

Grimpen growled. “The sketch in the manuscript looked like a torus—a ring, not a wreath.”

“A case for the Circuit,” Greystroke suggested. “Now lost.”

The large Hound’s brow knit. “As might could be,” he said, “or I’d’ve realized sooner. I scouted the ICC facilities, here in the City and out in the Hills for some sign where the communicator might be. Kidnapped one of their security guards out at the estate, and babble-juiced him. He didn’t know anything, but he thought there was secret stuff going on with the Trade Desk. So I snatched a trader out of a bar in the City, ran the usual roster, and hit pay dirt. Sent a swiftie to Fir Li. But somehow they got wind of me and I had to go to ground.” He looked at Greystroke and smiled. “Not as easy for me to hide as you. I had to find a bigger tree to duck behind.” His laugh was like a fault line splitting under the earth.

Greystroke nodded. “The Circuit was warm when I got near it; so I knew it had been doing something, but I thought it might have been, oh, a quantum computer or some other magical instrument. Something they used to project the markets with such uncanny accuracy.”

“I’m thinking,” said Hugh, “that they stumbled onto the secret when they were building a duplicate. Once there were two of them, that ‘infinite depth’ illusion turned into a channel. I’ll bet that it bores a Krasnikov tube somehow between two wreaths.”

“And now we know, meegos, ” the Fudir said, “why Lady Cargo was so anxious to have the Dancer. I never saw the sense of it, myself. With it, she could control a single system—one that she already effectively controls—and maybe dominate systems close by. For this, she sends a flotilla to tangle with Cynthian pirates? But the Dancer and the Circuit, ah, that’s another kettle of soup entirely. Her voice could be heard on every inhabited world, as near to simultaneous as matters.”

“Except, it’s the commodore, not the chairman, we have to worry about now,” Hugh said. “And it occurs to me that a naval base might be tougher to enter than Dalhousie Estate.”

When the Fudir awoke in the middle of the night, he saw Bridget ban sitting in a soft chair across the room. The night lighting from the baseboards gave an odd sort of blue-white insubstantiality to her upper body. The shadows were cast upward, like spirits freed of the body.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

He could see the head shake briefly, but her face was in shadows and he could not make out her expression. “How could I have missed it?”

“The same way we all did,” he told her. “We see the world through our assumptions; and when we don’t know what those assumptions are, they can trap us. Sometimes, it’s only possible to see the truth in the right moment of time. In the ancient legends, the god Darwin prophesied in a world in which tradesmen struggled in competition. The god Newton appeared in a world that had discovered machinery; the god Einstein in an age when…”

“Awa’ wi’ ye and yer gods. I don’t think they were gods at all, but only Terrans that the One God gifted with wisdom.”

“The One God?” The Fudir had always imagined the gods as beings much like men, but with powers beyond those even of the Hounds, and with an ability to act unseen greater even than that of Greystroke. As Newton controlled the motion of stars and planets, Maxwell and his demons shaped and moved whole galaxies and the electric roads that entwined them. And the quarrel between them could not be resolved even by the god Einstein, who sought a rune that would join them. The idea that there might be only one god astonished him.