A Tale Of The Continuing Time - The Last Dancer Part 41

"And then you found the Dancers."

The improbably black eyes gazed at Denice without expression. "Yes. Thirty-seven thousand years ago.

It had been, oh, some thousands of years since we had last come upon a group of humans who spoke.

The Dancers remained, somewhere, we knew that; but the exiles, and their children, we had hunted them into extinction. What was left could hardly be called human; the roaming tribes of savages who exterminated the Neanderthal. And we continued the hunt for the Dancers, but we no longer expected to find them, for such a great time had pa.s.sed with no sign. We knew they had taken slowtime keys from the ship before destroying it; we thought that perhaps they had enclosed themselves in a stasis bubble somewhere, all the Dancers together, to await a better day.

"And then one of our search parties came across Indo.

"He was living among a tribe of the natives, living as one of them. He had done something to age himself, to make himself appear one of them; his hair was half gone, and his skin had grown wrinkles like theirs.

Neither of the Shield in the party recognized him; they could not have hidden their recognition from the likes of Indo. The memory-retrieval skills taught the Shield are slow, particularly with older data, and by the time of which I tell you, no Shield had seen Indo in twelve or thirteen thousand years. But though slow, our memories work well. Much later, after leaving the tribe behind, it came to one of the Shield that Indo had been among the tribesmen, living as one of them.

"We were more careful this time."

- 13 -.

The floats sat two hundred meters back from the edge of the great ocean.

Their names were an irony; they had not floated for better than five thousand years. The aft jets were cracked and so radioactive it was not safe to spend much time near them. The rockets had not been fired even once in those five thousand years; the lifeplants were dead and neither of the floats were airtight, even supposing they could be made to attain low orbit.

In another of the ironies it seemed to Dvan the universe delighted in, not three years after the floats had settled down for the last time, the courier ship in which Anton had arrived came tumbling down from the sky, and burned up in a brilliant fireball on reentry.

It was no surprise; the Shield had known for centuries that the orbit of the craft was decaying. But it was another sign of their increasing isolation. Even if a shipwere sent for them, there would be no sign of their existence. They had no beacon. The radios still functioned, but they were strictly local in nature; the stranded Shield had as much chance of reaching a ship in orbit with them as by shouting from a mountaintop.

Some of the supporting technology from the floats still functioned; besides the radios, some of the sensor equipment, the auxiliary matter/antimatter-based power supplies, several of the molar/circuitry-based kitjan, and one of the laser rifles. With the pa.s.sage of time the Shield stripped most of the weaponry from the floats, all those things that were functional without aid from the ma.s.sive power units in the floats. The grenade launchers had been removed, and the projectile weapon that spat, at hypersonic speed, slivers of radioactive ceramic. Virtually all the energy weapons, save their handguns and one laser rifle, ran off the float's power, as did the single particle projector; and the particle projector had never been intended for use in atmosphere in the first place.

The two floats sat facing one another, each in the spot where it had been set down some five thousand years prior. Dvan remembered the very moment they had set down, jets functioning with barely forty percent efficiency, remembered it as clearly as anything from the long eons of the exile; in that terrible moment when they touched down to the sand, he had known-they had all known-that the floats would never again move from that spot. In that moment he had given up any hope of rescue, had reconciled himself to such a life as this distant world of exile could provide.

At times during the long strange pa.s.sage of the centuries, Dvan found himself waking from nightmares of his own death. He knew himself sane-the training of his childhood ran deep, and functioned well-but at times he found himself wishing otherwise. The nightmares, the dreams of death, at some level promised release.

The pa.s.sion that had driven an infant to declare war upon the Dancers, that had led him to hope that an ancient Keeper might return in some measure his desire for her; that pa.s.sion was cold and dead now many thousands of years.

But the discipline remained, the Dedication of the Shield. With the nightmares, it was all Dvan had left.

The nightmares were curiously similar; in them Sedon stood cloaked in Dancer red, atop the long bluff that overlooked the unmoving pair of floats. In the dream the Dancer, without moving, seemed to come closer and closer to Dvan, and as he drew nearer Dvan saw that the red cloak was not the flowing scarlet shadow cloak of a Dancer at all, but the strung-together furs of some animal, still wet with the beasts' blood. Sedons fierce stare pierced through the gloom between them, weighed heavy upon Dvan.

His brown eyes glowed red, and his teeth, visible in an animal smile, were sharp and pointed and b.l.o.o.d.y.

The nightmares were curiously similar, and curiously real. Dvan had woken from them, more than once over the course of the millennia, convinced theywere real, convinced that Sedon stood atop the overarching bluff, and stared down into their camp, stared down at Dvan, and accused him of betrayal.

One night at dinner, a crude parody of the civilized common meal of the Shield of the World, as the remaining Shield sat out beneath the glow of the huge moon, the Shield Pasol said quietly, "We saw Indo last summer."

Dinner consisted of water with the salt leached from it, dead flesh from the salted, roasted corpse of a horned animal, and vegetables boiled to within a hairsbreadth of destruction. One of the stern lessons of the years; never eatanything without cooking it until it fell apart, or nearly. The Shield immune system was strong, but not so strong that many of the Shield had not been poisoned almost to death from local food.

Several minutes pa.s.sed before Pasol's comment drew a response from one of the twelve surviving Shield.

The Sentinel said, "Where?"

Pasol said, "I must consult the maps. Early summer-Valley eight hundred four or eight hundred five.

Near the base of Mount Seven, Chain Two."

Several minutes later, Dvan said, "He will have recognized you."

It was a less obvious point than it might have been; they were dressed in the same animal skins that the primitives wore. But the cut of their clothing was far superior to anything any primitive had ever sewn together.

Pasol's partner on last summer's trip, the Shield So, nodded after another several minutes. "Yes." He spoke slowly: "It was Indo, though his skin has grown wrinkles, and much of his hair has fallen out. I do recall it."

Marah spoke almost immediately: "Indo will have left, but perhaps the others will be nearby. Let us seal and leave the floats, and in the morning we will journey to kill them."

It was clearly a sensible course. Several of the Shield nodded, and returned to their dinner.

In Valley 804 they found the tribe that had sheltered Indo. Indo himself was gone, doubtless within the day after Pasol and So had pa.s.sed among them. The Shield spent some time interrogating the locals, most of two days, but though they shrieked and screamed and cried as though they were people, none of them spoke, not shiata nor any of the degenerate dialects that had descended from shiata, regardless of the torture to which they were subjected.

When they were done they piled the remains of the animals up on a pyre and surrounded them with wood both dry and green. A tedious task, but neater than leaving them to decompose where they and their limbs had fallen. Dvan drew the duty; with the Shields So and Tensel he cut and dragged wood until his muscles were weary. He had not counted exactly, but there had been better than two hundred of the animals. Dvan might have let them rot where they lay; some thousands of years prior, the Sentinel Marah had corrected him in the matter. "No. So long as we are Shield, we shall behave as Shield. For what we kill, animal or not, we are responsible. Besides, Dvan, think on the Dancers. After we have gone, and they come across one of our kills, what will they think to see bodies scattered randomly, as though one barbarian tribe had slaughtered another? They are proud creatures; what respect they have left for the Shield will be all but lost."

"Would that be such a bad thing? If they respected us less, they might take chances-"

Marah had simply gazed at Dvan blankly, the words clearly not penetrating, and then turned away. "We burn them. Always."

In the lengthening shadows of afternoon, Dvan played their sole functioning laser rifle, beam at wide dispersion, across the pyre, and stepped back as the wood caught, and thick white smoke, tainted with the smell of burnt meat, rose from the small clearing where the animal tribe had lived.

Down at the edge of the river, Marah sat with the sensors, scanning through the small valley. Searching for metal, or the radar signature of a slowtime bubble.

It was a difficult job at the best of times; there was ore everywhere on this planet, the world was laden with it. It made the deep radar scans less useful than they might have been. As the small tribe burned behind them, the twelve Shield a.s.sembled and waited well into the night before Marah announced that the sensors were inconclusive. If there were refined metal artifacts around them, the sensors could not make them out against the general background of unrefined ore.

In the morning, the Sentinel said, they would move the sensors and try again.

In the last hour of darkness the Dancers attacked.

Dvan awoke to silence. He lay curled up beneath a tree, back to the trunk, holding the Shield So for warmth; for a brief, groggy moment he was not certain what had awakened him. Then he realized, complete silence, and abruptly came fully awake. The birds whose song normally filled the hour before dawn had fallen silent; even the chirping of the small amphibians and insects had ceased. Dvan raised his head to peer into the dark, felt with one hand for the kitjan, tied with a thong to his upper thigh. The moon had set and only the stars gave any light to speak of. A couple of dim, distant IR sources were visible; wolves, likely, or the horned grazers. Slowly, as silently as he was able, Dvan loosed the thong, slipped the kitjan free.

Where are the sentries?

Tmariu, and, who was it, Addil-Dvan strained for their forms; there a motionless figure, down toward the stream, that might be a sentry, but his unnatural motionlessness was- He drew breath to shout warning, and the whistling sounds of arrows filled the night air. One seemed to sprout from nowhere, the thin shaft simply appearing in the neck of the Shield So. So stiffened in Dvan's arms, let out a long, bubbly scream, dying even as he awakened. Dvan wasted no time attempting to acquire a target; he fired a dozen shots at random into the forest, was rewarded with the high-pitched shriek of a Dancer touched by the kitjan, came to his feet and leapt, near two meters straight up, into the lower branches of the tree beneath which he and So had slept. He climbed free of the tree, and into the tree beside it, and from there into the tree beside it. He moved silently through the dark roof of the nighttime forest, calculating. One Dancer down, possibly; three Shield dead, at least, both of the sentries and So. The shriek of the Dancer might have been a ruse, or a true hit. If a hit it was nine to four; it not, nine to five.

A beep that even Dvan barely heard announced a call. His radio, sewn into the breast of his tunic, was simply the fragment of a collar from an original Shield tunic. He ceased his movement through the treetops, lifted the fragment of the collar to his lips, and whispered, "Dvan." He held the stiff piece of cloth to his ear in time to hear Marah's voice.

"It's bad, Dvan. We've for sure lost Tmariu and Addil and Baresst." Brief silence, and Marah's voice again, struggling with the words. "And Els. I tasted his skin, and it smelled of the Dancer Lorien."

Mai'Arad'Els, dead; so far as any of them knew, Marah's last living kin in the Continuing Time. Dvan had no comfort for the man; four Tbad had died aboard the ship, and in all the millennia since then Dvan had had no one to call kin; there were neither Gi'Tbad nor even Ea'Tbad among the surviving Shield.

The Dancer Lorien was Gi'Tbad, and Dvan was sworn to kill him.

After a bit, Marah's voice resumed, near silence in near-total darkness. "I killed the Dancer Elemir myself, took his head from his body; I think your shots took Trega, I saw him being carried away."

If true, it meant there were three left alive; Sedon and Lorien and Indo. Dvan brought the patch of ancient collar back down to his lips, whispered, "And ours?"

Another long hesitation, and then Marah said, "Dvan, you're the only one who responded when I called."

Dvan did not even think about it: he raised his head to the sky, and screamed until his lungs were empty of air.

"Sedon! I'm coming to kill you!"

The scream echoed in his head long after it had faded into the forest around them.

They took the time to scout the forest immediately around them; found their ten dead, and the Dancer Elemir where Marah had left him lying; they found Trega a ways farther on, motionless and already so frigidly cold that Dvan knew the Dancers must have cooled themselves to the temperature of the forest around them before attacking. Sensible, in a way; it had made them nearly invisible in the darkness, as cold and dark as the trees around them. Foolish in another way; had the blood been pumping through Trega's veins as it was intended to, he might have survived a brush with the kitjan.

They cut Trega's head from his body and tore his heart from his chest, in case the Dancer had simply stopped his heart and stilled his breathing to fool them into believing him dead, and then set out after the remaining three.

They trailed the Dancers for four days, as the mountains grew larger and larger, raised up to cover much of the sky before them. Between them they carried the grenade launcher and the laser rifle; each of them had a kitjan.

Everything else they had destroyed and left behind.

It seemed to Dvan that his life was drawing visibly to a close. The loss of the colony, the loss of the ship, the loss in this one day of ten of his mates.

As they ran together, through the overarching forests, Dvan tried to forget the image of So, dying with a primitive arrow in his throat, to forget the feeling of the man going rigid in his arms, the image itself some barbaric remnant from the Splinter Wars. In the steady pounding of the earth against his feet, in the deadly serious business of drawing sufficient air into his lungs, he found some measure of forgetfulness.

With the pa.s.sage of the days-three days, and then four, running virtually without stop through the endless brown and green forests of Ice Age Earth-Dvan found further cause for forgetfulness.

Red exhaustion crept up on him, stole the strength from his limbs. It became a supreme act of will simply to keep moving, to keep the spoor of the retreating Dancers fresh. Stops for rest, brief, brief stops for sleep, so brief there was no time even to make a fire; they slept in the freezing cold, in the wind off the mountains, holding one another for warmth; and then up again, and moving on.

It must surely have been harder for Marah than for the longer-legged Dvan, but the short, squat form of the Sentinel, a few paces behind Dvan, never wavered, never faltered in its steady pace.

They were never more than an hour or so behind the Dancers; the broken twigs, crushed leaves, bent branches were clearly visible. No group of three, moving at the speed the Dancers must, could have hidden the evidence of their pa.s.sage from either Dvan or Marah. The Shield who had once had no idea how to follow a trail from Second Town down to the riverside were now the finest trackers on the entire planet; thirteen thousand years of practice will do that to you.

In late morning, the fourth day of the chase, they entered a long, open field, an open s.p.a.ce between two stretches of forest. They stopped at the edge of the field, scanned the s.p.a.ce between it. In the long gra.s.s, they could clearly see the path the Dancers had taken, the bent and broken stalks marking their way as clearly as though guide lights had been set.

The paths had split, one moving straight off to the north, the other off toward the west. They followed the path out to where it branched, examined the gra.s.s and earth around it. "Two this way," said Marah quietly, "one that." He paused. "Indo's the lightest of the lot; that's his mark, there, the others would have crushed that leaf."

Indo had gone north.

"Sedon will have gone with Indo," said Dvan quietly.

"Aye. Which means that Lorien-"

Dvan nodded. "Lorien's Gi'Tbad; kill him slowly, if you have the opportunity."

Marah nodded also, turned slightly away from Dvan, squinting off already along the westward path the Dancer Lorien had taken. "Aye."

"Butkill him."

"Aye."

Dvan stood motionless beneath the warm sun, watching Marah, and said finally, "If I survive, I'll meet you back at the floats."

"If we survive." Marah turned suddenly, embraced Dvan with the savage strength of one who did not expect to see him again. Dvan returned the embrace, then released the Sentinel. The Shield turned away from one another, and moved on to their destinies, without once looking back.

Dvan had expected it; it made it no less frustrating when it happened.

The path split again.

At first he did not catch it; the split took place deep in the thick of the forest. He backtracked, moved back to the last place he was certain he had been following not one Dancer, but two. From there he moved outward in a slow circle, found the second path off some sixty meters to his right; one of the Dancers had taken to the trees, come back down again far enough away that, had Dvan been less careful, he would have lost the track.

The original track had veered off toward the northeast; the second track, the one coming down out of the trees, had continued north.

Toward a valley, leading up gradually into the mountains.

Dvan stood motionless, breathing deeply and rapidly, thinking it through. He felt his eyes closing, allowed them to shut. In the quiet darkness he tried to perform a.n.a.lytical thought for the first time in perhaps a millennium. If the young Shield he had once been could have seen how his thought processes had atrophied, it would have horrified him to the point of seeking his own death; but Dvan had no standards to judge against except his mates among the Shield, whose ability to reason had in most instances atrophied far worse than his own.

Moving north. Sedon's party, and Sedon himself the leader; if they are moving north together at first, it is because Sedon has made the decision, because Sedon has determined their destination.

Sedon will not turn aside, not as a ruse, not out of fear of the Shield who followed him, no matter who the Shield might be.

North ran toward a small valley at the foot of the mountains, a natural path upward into the mountains.

The original trail, veering now northeast, led almost straight upward, toward the foothills of the mountain, into an area so steep that it was as much a climb as a run.

Iwill go north. Dvan opened his eyes- The wolf sat watching him from the shadows, absolutely silent, a huge beast, seventy or eighty kilos. Red eyes and a russet coat, and a muzzle with blood fresh upon it. Dvan took a step toward it, and the beast turned tail instantly, fled northeast into the steep foothills.

Dvan followed it without thinking.

He followed the wolf all morning, into afternoon. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that it was not a wolf at all that he followed, but a spirit, sent down into the world by the Nameless One as a tool to help Dvan punish the heretic.

In late afternoon the wolf vanished, and shortly thereafter Dvan saw the Dancer, saw him in the flesh, for the first time in thirteen thousand years.

Sedon.

Visible just for a second, far ahead of him, moving upward through the thinning forest, up toward the place where the trees ceased altogether. Dvan got a shot off with the kitjan, knew he had missed, and put on another burst of speed. Another thick cl.u.s.ter of trees, and then the trees thinned out, the thick needle-bearing trees giving way to trees with small, waxy white leaves. Another glimpse of the Dancer now, closer, perhaps only a klick away, and Dvan fired again. Nothing, no cry such as any Dancer would give when struck by the full force of the kitjan. Dvan gave the effort everything that was left in him, threw himself forward so quickly he barely had time to negotiate the s.p.a.ces between the thinning trees.

Branches scratched at him, tugged at him like clutching fingers as he pushed his way through. It was a place where his bulk gave him the advantage; in places where the Dancer must negotiate a pa.s.sage, Dvan forced his way through, up now to the very edge of the tree line- There.Movement flickered up on the side of the mountain and Dvan fired without aiming, without time to aim, paused a moment and then fired again. The sun had nearly vanished now, leaving nothing but the last gleams of twilight to light Dvan's way to vengeance. He squeezed off a fourth shot, shifted his aim slightly and sent another bolt up the mountainside in the general direction of the movement he had seen. He considered the laser, slung across his back, and discounted it; if the kitjan, with its wider field of effect, had not taken the Dancer, then the laser was no better.

He tied the kitjan down over his thigh, and resumed his pursuit.

The mountain grew steep now, so steep that Dvan had to use both hands to help himself move up the icy cold rock, up the side of the mountain in near darkness. The sky itself was near as dark as the rock around him, and Dvan was forced to go more slowly, and more slowly yet, and he felt his heart pounding away inside him; he was losing the Dancer, losing ground he would never recover- He glanced upward, up the mountainside.

The G.o.d had been kind.

The Dancer's figure stood straight, like a Shield on duty, and Dvan knew from the way the Dancer held himself that he had been touched by the kitjan; the Dancer stood outlined against the starlit sky, as visible as though in daylight, no more than a hundred meters ahead of Dvan. Dvan clawed for the kitjan, got it free and saw that the figure had vanished again. He did not tie the kitjan down again, but rose and leapt up the rock in great bounds, no longer climbing, accepting the chance of a misstep and mortal fall. A long dark ravine lead upward and Dvan went into it, and then out of it, and found himself on a small ledge that led off to the east and west alike,heard the sound of the Dancer shuffling across the stone off to his right, and sprinted the last distance, not tired at all, filled with a joy so profound he had never known its like, fulfilling the service the G.o.d had requested of him, and he rounded an outcrop of rock and found an open place leading inward to a cave, and there, in the middle of the cave, groping cautiously for something, his back turned to Dvan, was the Dancer.

For a moment so short and so long it could have no meaning, Dvan stood perfectly motionless, frozen in the awareness of success. Hollowness filled him, made him an empty vessel for the touch of the G.o.d, and the G.o.d used him for the tool he had always been. He watched the G.o.d bring up the kitjan, heard the G.o.d say softly, "Good-bye, Sedon," and felt his index finger depressing the stud, watched the bolt strike the Dancer full on, heard the Dancer's death scream- A slowtime bubble appeared from nowhere.

The G.o.d released him.