Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

Reid’s mouth quirked wryly around the pipestem. He thought: Too bad you can’t qualify the statics and dynamics of being human in neat vectors, or develop a tensor calculus for the stresses in a marriage.—The smoke rolled pungent over his tongue and palate.

“Good evening, sir.”

Turning, Reid identified the moon-whitened shape: Mike Stockton, third engineer. Abdard a passenger-carrying freighter, acquaintanceships developed fast. However, he hadn’t chanced to see much of this particular officer.

“Why, hello,” he said reflexively. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. Mind if I join you? I’m due on watch in a few minutes.”

Am I lonely for everyone to see? wondered Reid. And then: Cut that out. You’re at the point of sniveling. A bit of talk may well be precisely what you need. “Do stay. Think the weather will hold?”

“The forecasters do. The whole way to Yokohama, if we’re lucky. Will you and your wife be in Japan long?”

“A couple of months. We’ll fly back:’ The kids will be okay at Jack and Barbara’s, Reid thought; but still, when we walk in that door and Bitsy sees her daddy and comes running on her stumpy legs, arms out and laughing

“I know the country just enough to envy you!’ Stockton scanned Reid as if. in an amiable fashion, he meant it.

He saw a lanky, rawboned, wide-shouldered six-footer, a long craggy head, jutting nose and chin, heavy black brows over gray eyes, sandy hair, no-longer-fashionable turtle-neck sweater beneath the coat. Even in the tuxedos he must sometimes wear, and after Pamela’s most careful valeting, Reid managed to appear rumpled.

“Well, a business trip for me. I’m an architect, you may remember. Quit my job recently to form a partnership.” Pamela didn’t like the risk. But she’d liked less the drabness of semi-poverty in their first years, when he refused to accept a subsidy from her parents; and she’d stuck that out, and now they were in the 20-K bracket and if his try at independence failed (though he was bloody well resolved it wouldn’t) he could always find another position somewhere. “Considering the strong Japanese influence in homebuilding nowadays,” Reid went on, “I figured I’d sniff around after, well, all right, inspiration at the source. In provincial villages especially?’

Pam might holler. She wanted her comfort.. .. No! He’d fallen into an ugly habit of doing her injustice. She’d joined his outings, and apologized afterward for spoiling them with a humbleness that came near breaking his heart, and finally stayed behind when he went. Had he tried as hard to interest himself in her bridge games, her volunteer work at the youth center and the hospital, even her favorite TV programs?

“You’re from Seattle, aren’t you, Mr. Reid?” Stockton asked. “I’m a native myself.”

“I’m a mere immigrant, as of five years ago. Chicago previously, since getting out of the Army. Before then, Wisconsin, et cetera, back to dear old Boston. The American story.”

Reid realized he was babbling of matters that could not imaginably interest the other man. It wasn’t his usual behavior. If anything, he was too withdrawn unless a few beers or a couple of Scotches had relaxed him. Tonight he was seeking to escape his thoughts. And why not? If he’d shaken off the Presbyterian theology of his boyhood, did he have to carry around the associated conscience?

“Uh, I’d visited Seattle before and liked the place,” he continued almost helplessly, “but at first the only halfway decent job offer I got was in Chicago. A concrete monstrosity, that town. They said there you’d better wear glasses, whether or not you needed them, or somebody would unscrew your eyeballs.”

He’d kept remembering people who were relaxed and friendly, and boats white-winged on Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier’s snowpeak floating high and pure above, and virgin forest a couple of hours’ drive from downtown. To Pam, of course, Chicago was home. Well, Evanston was, which made a difference. When he finally landed a position in Seattle and they moved, she found the city a backwater, where the weather seemed to be mostly leaden skies, or rain, or fog, or rain, or snow, or rain.... Had he, waiting happily for the next cataract of sunshine, failed to notice how the rain gnawed at her?

“Yeah, we’re lucky, I guess, living where we do,” Stockton said. “Apart from those medieval liquor laws.”

Reid chuckled. “Come, now. No medieval king would have dared pass liquor laws that barbaric.”

Then, as his mood was lifting a trifle, Stockton told him, “I’d better go on to the engine room. Nice talking,” and was quickly out of sight.

Reid sighed, leaned elbows on rail, and drew on his pipe. The night sea went hush-hush-hush. Tomorrow Pam might feel happier. He could hope for that, and hope Japan would turn out to be a fairytale as advertised, and beyond

Beyond? His mind, free-associating, conjured up a globe. Besides excellent spatial perception, which he’d better have in his profession, he was gifted with an uncommon memory. He could draw the course if the ship continued past Yokohama. It wouldn’t. The owners knew better. Reach Southeast Asia, or pretty close. Hard to understand that at this moment human beings were maiming and killing human beings whose names they would never know. Damn the ideologies! When would the torment be over? Or had every year always been tragic, would every year always be? Reid remembered another young man who died in another war, a lifetime ago, and certain lines he had written.

Rupert Brooke could say it, though. Thanks for that, Dad. An English professor in a tiny Midwestern college hadn’t had a lot of money for his children—wherefore Reid, earning his own, needed an extra year to graduate—but he gave them stubbornness about what was right, wide-ranging curiosity, the friendship of books—maybe too close a friendship, stealing time that was really Pam’s.... No more brooding, Reid decided. A few final turns around the deck, and probably by then she’d have fallen asleep and he could do likewise.

He clamped the pipe between his teeth and straightened.

And the vortex seized, him, the black thunders, he had no moment to cry in before he was snatched from the world.

Where the Dnieper snaked in its eastward bend, grass-land gave way to high bluffs through which the river hastened, ringing aloud as it dashed itself over rocks and down rapids. Here ships must be unloaded and towed, in several places hauled ashore on rollers, and cargoes must be portaged. Formerly this had been the most dangerous part of the yearly voyage. Pecheneg tribesmen were wont to lurk nearby, ready to ride down upon the crews when these were afoot and vulnerable, plunder their goods and make slaves of whoever were not lucky enough to be killed. Oleg Vladimirovitch had been in one such fight as an apprentice. In it, by God’s grace, the Russians sent the raiders off bewailing their own dead and took many husky prisoners to sell in Constantinople.

Things were far better since Grand Prince Yaroslav—what a man, cripple though he was!—trounced the heathen. He did it at the gates of Kiev, so thoroughly that ravens afterward gorged themselves till they could not fly and no Pecheneg was ever again seen in his realm. Oleg was in the host on that wondrous day: his first taste of real war, thirteen years ago, he a fuzzy-cheeked lout of seventeen winters. Later he rode against the Lithuanians, and later still sailed on the ill-fated expedition against the Imperial city. But mainly he was a trader, who wanted no troubles that cut into profit. (Tavern brawls didn’t count, they nourished the soul, if you made sure to clear out before the Emperor’s police arrived.) He was happy that the Greeks were likewise sensible and, soon after throwing back the Russians, resumed business with them.