A Tale Of The Continuing Time - The Last Dancer Part 38

"It may be recall. It may be..." Dvan hesitated. "It may be they intend your Demolition..." His voice trailed off.

"And what else, Dvan?"

Dvan met Sedon's gaze, and said honestly and grimly, "And it may be they intend toensure the colony's failure."

"This is the hard question, Dvan." Sedon paused, said very softly, "What will you do if that is true?"

"My duty."

Sedon shook his head. "What is that? A word. What is the reality? Of what does your duty consist?"

Dvan shook his head slowly. "I don't know, Sedon. I can't... imagine... a situation that brought me into conflict with Marah, or my mates. And what you're asking for-"

"I haven't asked youfor anything, Dvan. I've asked you questions."

Dvan rose. "I have to... think... on this." He shook his head. "What you're asking for-"

Sedon rose also. "Dvan, Istill haven't asked you for anything." He smiled, though it was a strained and careworn thing. "But by the Nameless One, Dvan, think on your choices. You know what awaits you on the World, if you return. If you stay, if you can-I had hoped to have this conversation with you some time ago, and I am sorry I did not; this is a poor time for it. So I will be blunt, because I have no time for subtlety. It seems clear that the Dancer's way is not for you; even among your mates I know there is no one you have ever truly cared for. Dvan, among my exiles are two women who were children in the body when we were exiled, who served as Temple Followers, and might someday have joined the Keeper's Daughters. They are intelligent, and well spoken, and I have seen them educated in many subjects. Join us, Dvan. Make yourself a household such as you choose; love whom it pleases you to love, and I swear to you by my Name I will build us a world in which no one will ever speak the worse of you for it."

Dvan stood still and spoke in a deadly quiet voice. "You forget yourself."

A quick flash of the man's smile: "Perhaps, but I lack the time for remembrance. And so may you, Dvan; I don't know how much time you'll have to decide. If any. Loyalty is a great thing, Dvan-I'd have been dead myself long since without it. But I think youknow where your duty lies, and your loyalty- Dvan shook his head mutely.

Sedon spoke with devastating evenness. "-and I think they are not the same places."

Marah and eight other s.h.i.+eld, all of them senior to Dvan, an engineer Dvan knew poorly, and the lady Saliya, sat in a semicircle around the Living Flame in Her quarters when Dvan arrived, facing Him.

It was near noon, a quarter day after his conversation with Sedon; they had roused him from a sweaty, uneasy, and dreamless sleep with the notice that he was to report to Her quarters.

A lord of the Aneda stood slightly aside from the group, pale-skinned and silver-haired, a gleaming long white shadow cloak flowing around him where he stood. His eyes were bright blue chips set in more white, and they fixed themselves upon Dvan as Dvan entered.

Dvan froze where he stood, and after a beat crossed his arms across his chest and inclined his head.

"Sir."

The man looked Dvan over. "You're Dvan of the Gi'Tbad. The one the heretic has tried to befriend."

"Aye, my lord."

He nodded. "I am lord Anton." Without looking at Saliya, he said, "My lady Keeper, it will go more quickly if you explain the situation to them."

Saliya nodded, gestured to Dvan to seat himself near her. She began without preamble. "Sixteen years ago-World years-one of our wars.h.i.+ps vanished. Renunciate cla.s.s. The Aneda a.s.sumed it had been destroyed by the sleem. Aboard that craft were three hundred s.h.i.+eld, forty Dancers. Two years ago another of our wars.h.i.+ps, entering a s.p.a.celace tunnel at one of the colonies we are abandoning, encountered that vanished wars.h.i.+p. The renegade attempted to negotiate before engaging in battle; and listen; the man who negotiated for them was not s.h.i.+eld, but Dancer."

The implication sank in on the a.s.sembled s.h.i.+eld instantly; among Sedon's rebels it had been the same, Dancers actively commanding s.h.i.+eld in battle. "Sedon, it seems, did not takeall his people with him into exile. Unknown to us, some remained behind. The battle ended inconclusively; our craft returned to the World, and the renegades escaped to Haristi knows where."

Marah nodded. "Lord Anton, my lady Keeper, you think they may be headed here?"

Anton answered him. "Sentinel, we do not know. It seems likely, if they have the routes that lead here."

The engineer, appropriately for his place, sat with his eyes directed at the deck. He spoke his own name: "Engineer Sinyal."

The lord of Aneda nodded to him. "Speak."

"I cannot believe they do. To my knowledge, only four engineers and a handful of Keepers ever saw the translations of the Kulien records that gave us the s.p.a.celace tunnel routes leading to this System."

Anton nodded. "It may be so. We are fortunate, if true. Nonetheless, we cannot a.s.sume that this planet of exile is secure from them. As the Keeper said, the renegades have a Renunciate-cla.s.s wars.h.i.+p;this s.h.i.+p, even if it were in orbit rather than sitting dead on the ground, is no match for it."

The Sentinel said, "Dvan?"

Dvan met Marah's gaze. "Aye?"

"The Dancers," said Marah, plainly watching Dvan for his reaction, "have vanished."

"We'll go in two floats," said Marah over their meal. Most of the s.h.i.+eld were out searching First Town, verifying that the Dancers were indeed gone; not that anyone had real doubts. Dvan and Marah ate alone. "I'll take a squad of ten in mine, and Baresst will take a squad of ten with him. You'll go with Baresst."

Dvan accepted the long roll of warm bread Marah offered him, dipped the length of the bread into the pot of kliam between them, and ate it with the sauce running down over his fingers. "You'll leave Kladdi behind to defend the s.h.i.+p?"

"Aye. I'll handle the weapons on my float. Lad, do you think you can do what's needed?"

Dvan chewed the bread before answering. "What might be needed, Marah?"

The Sentinel leaned forward, a thing hard and fierce descending upon him like a mask, grabbed the back of Dvan's neck and pulled him forward until their foreheads touched. His whisper was harsh."Will you do your duty?"

Dvan did not blink. He said flatly, "I will."

Marah held the stare a moment longer; then released Dvan and grinned savagely. "Aye. I know you will.

The rest will do as told, until they have a Dancer in their sights. During the rebellion, eight of ten froze when the moment came, and among the twenty percent who did not freeze total, most were impaired enough that they died at the hands of the Dancers they fought."

"You've killed Dancers."

"Three. It's not impossible; only very hard. Remember this; they areheretics, not Dancers such as you were raised to revere, and the resemblance is only that, a resemblance."

Dvan could hear Sedon's response:And perhaps, Dvan, the Aneda are not the Aneda you were raised to obey, but only a resemblance.

Marah glanced at the pot of kliam. "Are you done?" Dvan swallowed the last of his bread, washed it down, and wiped his fingers clean. "Aye."

"Let's go."

They did not know when the Dancers had left First Town, only that it was sometime during the night.

They discussed, briefly, whether they ought to interrogate some of the townspeople, and decided against it, more from lack of time than anything else. Sedon would not likely have taken any of those left behind into his confidence, and even if he had, finding those few among the two thousand four hundred who would know nothing would take prohibitively long.

The floats they would search in were not gravity craft-they were orders of magnitude too small to carry a gravity ball-but rather kept their height with a mixture of jets and wings that would have been familiar to a human of Denice Castanaveras's time. They were designed for use in either gravity or free fall, atmosphere or vacuum; though the rockets could not be used in atmosphere, the craft possessed them as well as jets.

Their first a.s.sumption was that the Dancers were headed toward Second Town, which no s.h.i.+eld had ever seen. Second Town was a five-day walk, but none of the s.h.i.+eld doubted that the Dancers could have run that distance in the s.p.a.ce of a night.

It would be their first approach; if they did not catch the Dancers at Second Town, they would widen the area of their search.

Their job was made more complex than it had to be; the Aneda, fighting for their survival against the sleem, had not invested much in exiling the Dancers, not even the relatively small resource of an observation satellite.

The floats left before midday, through an upper hatch that had not been used since landfall. The gravity ball's effect ceased abruptly at the s.h.i.+p's hull. The adjustment to local gravity was less severe than usual; as the floats moved out through the open hatch, into the harsh suns.h.i.+ne, the gravity vertical abruptly flipped by about thirty degrees. Suddenlydown was no longer toward s.h.i.+p's center; it was the direction of the ground. The mild s.h.i.+ft of vertical did not bother Dvan; when leaving or entering the s.h.i.+p through the lock at the s.h.i.+p's bottom, the local vertical flipped a full hundred and eighty degrees.

The two floats split up, and, sensors at maximum sensitivity, headed south.

Dvan sat at the weapons console and familiarized himself. None of the weapons were unfamiliar to him, though there were s.h.i.+eld present who knew them better. A single large kitjan, large enough to kill half a dozen Dancers at a shot; a projectile weapon that spat hypersonic slivers of radioactive ceramic; a grenade launcher that held some two hundred thermonuclear explosions, pinched into tiny stasis bubbles in the moment of their explosion. Energy weapons included heat beams that would fry any living thing in instants, cutting beams taken from the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a single particle projector that it was not particularly safe to use in atmosphere.

He sat there at the controls and wondered if he would use them.

They flew across the tall yellow gra.s.s in the heat of the day, beneath the high blue dome of the sky.

Grazing beasts fled at their approach, and the predators, lazy in the sunlight, kept to the relative cover of rare patches of trees.

Because they were searching, the floats moved slowly, covering the ground beneath them at only two or three times the speed of a running man. Their craft could not move much more slowly, even given the lower weight of this world; the thin air more than offset that advantage.

Dvan could see Marah's float, a distant silver-gray gleam at the edge of the horizon, pacing the float he was in.

They floated on through the afternoon, across the prehistoric veldt of Ice Age Africa.

They reached Second Town during darkness, and found it empty.

It was what the reports had led them to believe, a larger, handsomer version of First Town, set at the edge of the largest body of water Dvan had ever seen in his life, a river so huge and fast flowing that it sent a s.h.i.+ver down Dvan's back.

The World was cold and dry, and the Flame People did not swim.

A distance downriver from Second Town, a long, ugly slash in the surface of the earth gave the location of the strip mine that had caused the exiles to choose this location as their second town. Radar showed significant deposits of iron ore, barely impacted by seventeen years of mining.

A patchwork of fields surrounded the town, growing crops that none of the s.h.i.+eld recognized, strange plants that had never been grown in those First Town fields near the s.h.i.+p.

The floats circled high overhead, watching Second Town, its empty dirt streets and cold buildings.

Infrared signature showed nothing but buildings cooling from the heat of the daytime sun; no cooking fires, no people.

With Baresst and Dvan on the circuit, Marah held an open conference with the s.h.i.+p. "They've an entire planet to choose from, if they wish to hide from us. And with the incredible variety of animal life this planet sports, you cant a.s.sume that any heat-emitting object is a man. It's far more likely to be a grazer or predator."

Saliya's voice held obvious frustration. "There were two thousand of them in this town, plus whatever number of children had been born to them. They have no radio, can hardly have had more than a day's start; how far can they havegone?"

Any people with experience in tracking would have found the vanished Second Towners within hours; they had left a trail of broken gra.s.s stalks and disturbed earth on their way down to the river, and had left sufficient evidence of their boats behind them, to make it clear enough exactly where they had gone.

The Flame People not only lacked trackers, but lacked the very concept. Radar hunted for metal or other dense objects; IR hunted for body heat; sonar, on occasion, was useful in enclosed areas. But there was no awareness among them of how to proceed whennone of their traditional tools applied.

It occurred to none of them that the Second Towners might have fled across open water. Natives of a dry world that lacked any but artificial bodies of water, the idea of usingrunning water for transportation-had it crossed their minds at all-would have seemed to them as foolish as trying to walk through vacuum without a shadow cloak sealed around oneself.

There have been brilliant men and women throughout human history; and Sedon of the Gi'Suei was one of them.

Silence crackled across the open circuit after the Keeper had finished speaking. Finally Marah said, "They have no vehicles, and cannot have gone far. We will spiral out from this spot, in an expanding search pattern, until we find them."

The lord Anton's voice reached them clearly. "Destroy the town when you leave."

"We shall."

It took a single round of grenades from Marah's float. The buildings burned fiercely and well, and soon the wind picked up the fire and threw it off across the prairie, lit a gra.s.s fire that set the night ablaze.

The s.h.i.+eld moved off into the night, left Earth's second city in ruins behind them, a wreckage of glowing embers at the edge of a great prairie fire.

- 9 -.

"And as begun," said Robert, "so our history continued."

Denice sat in the center of her bed, orbiting high above the surface of the Earth, and drank tomato juice the temperature of blood. "Why didn't you join him?"

Dvan said softly, "I nearly did. But-events come between people. And even if you wish it were otherwise, the events have happened; and you cannot go back into a world that no longer exists."

"From what you've told me of him," said Denice, "and from what I remember of whatyou remember, I think I like him better than I like his enemies."

Dvan shrugged. "Rebels are always romantics. It's an attractive thing. I would not think too highly of Sedon; in his rebellion, he did worse things than burn empty cities."

Robert said mildly, "I am curious, 'Sieur Devane-Dvan if you prefer. Your people employed Dancers as warriors, and soldiers as-what?"

Dvan was silent a long moment before answering Robert. "It is difficult to put it into terms that are comprehensible in English. I could use s.h.i.+ata, but I would have to teach you the words there too, so it's much the same thing. And I would have to struggle with your accent, which is horrid." Dvan's lips quirked a moment. "But that's not surprising; I killed the last of the exile Dancers only twenty-three hundred years ago, the Dancer Indo, in Alexandria. It is only since about that time that nightways as you know it has existed, and that s.h.i.+ata has begun to devolve."

"If you would try?"

"Night face, Dancers were made by the Zaradin. There were Dancers before the Desertion, long before the Dance was subjugated to the service of the Flame. Indeed, during the Splinter Wars, the Dance fragmented into a number of disciplines, the Dance of the Flame being only one among many. The martial use of the Dance was a secondary thing, a thing developed long after the Zaradin left us. It was, in its origin, a thing designed to amuse, to entertain our Masters."

"Indeed?"

Dvan gave the small man a hard look. "You seem skeptical, night face. Does your understanding of my people surpa.s.s my own?"

Robert smiled at Dvan. "I concede your superiorknowledge of your people. But I have studied the martial arts, its history as we know it today, and inour history, the history of my people, dance has come of fighting, and not fighting of dance; oppressed peoples taught their children martial disciplines under the noses of their oppressors, for the movements of the dance served equally well as the basis of the martial discipline. I suspect you made poorer pets than the Aneda told you; I suspect, William, that now and again one of your Zaradin masters was desperately surprised at the intensity of your entertainment."

- 10 -.

The search continued, without sign of the vanished Dancers.

At the s.h.i.+p, two s.h.i.+eld stood duty. They stood before the lower airlock, the only ground-level entrance to the s.h.i.+p. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances-the ordinary circ.u.mstances of the last twenty-seven years-there would have been six s.h.i.+eld on duty, more as a symbol for the exiles than anything else, a reminder of where power lay. On this day, with twenty s.h.i.+eld away from the s.h.i.+p, only sixteen were left to defend the Keeper, and most of those had been kept inside the s.h.i.+p, depending on the wards to prevent any renegade Dancer from pa.s.sing through the airlock.

The airlock was a five-sided enclosure, warded with the same wards that had kept the Dancers imprisoned during the journey out. No Dancer, not even one of the heretics, Consecrated as they had been to the Flame, could have pa.s.sed through that ward while the ward stood.

And the ward would stand so long as the Keeper lived.