A Tale Of The Continuing Time - The Last Dancer Part 44

July 4, 1776 Gregorian

Once there was a thief, and the thief was G.o.d.

-First line in theExodus Bible , first published 2312 Gregorian

- 1 -

Among human historical figures, I think there is no sentient being more like Ifahad bell K'Ailli than Trent the Uncatchable. Both were responsible for the spread of very basic concepts among their people; both, despite their undeniable accomplishments, were notorious cheats and frauds.

Ifahad the Mighty was born into the midst of what was later called the Dome Rebellion. The sleem empire conquered the Dome around 6200 b.c; three and a half centuries later, during Ifahad's early childhood, the Dome rebelled.

The rebellion was well under way before Ifahad's voice carried any weight among the Dome. That first rebellion lasted eighty years before fading. Toward its end, as Ifahad's power among the Dome grew, Ifahad the Mighty invented Hiding. If you are human-and if you are reading this account in French, English, Mandarin, Spanish, Anglic, or Tierra, it is likely that you are-then it will be difficult for you to understand how revolutionary the Dome, in modern times called the K'Aillae, found this concept. The K'Aillae are more like us than most alien species; which, at times, seems only to serve to highlight those areas in which we do not think alike.

An example of this comes from one of the first human translations of the works of Ifahad bell K'Ailli. It was t.i.tledProud Vengeance: The Writings of Ifahad. K'Aillae were alternately amused and offended by the t.i.tle. Their strongly worded suggestion for change resulted in a second edition with the t.i.tleSensible Vengeance: The Writings of Ifahad.

The K'Aillae are a practical people: when Ifahad introduced the concept of Hiding to the K'Aillae, responses were mixed. His explanation-that Hiding involved running away when defeat was certain, avoiding the enemy for an unspecified period of time, and then coming back and fighting again at a later date when victory was possible-did not arouse contempt among the Dome so much as puzzlement. The K'Aillae had, before meeting humans, no word for "coward"; but they had many for "crazy." Most of them were used on Ifahad.

Even after Hiding had been explained to them, K'Aillae were generally unable to grasp the concept.

Only Ifahad's own clan, the K'Ailli, followed him into Hiding, which is why today there are no Dome, only K'Aillae.

Trent the Uncatchable, of course, ran away. That running away could be not simply a strategically reasonable response to overwhelming military superiority, but in feet among the most successful of all forms of resistance, was a concept many humans of his time had difficulty understanding-at least until it was demonstrated.

Trent and Ifahad were undeniably similar in the roles they played among their people; it may be that they were in some ways similar in person.

I never really knew Trent the Uncatchable; I knew Ifahad well.

The cracks in the Continuing Time are small, and it takes great effort to widen them. The huge sweep of events during the First K'Ailla Hiding-dating roughly 5845 b.c. to 70 b.c, when the K'Ailla-led Confederation of Outland rose against the sleem-is as firmly set a sequence of events as any in the post-Zaradin period. And it is recorded that when the New Human Race "first" contacted the K'Aillae, in 2124 Gregorian, the K'Aillae claimed prior contact with humanity. At the time, with their own history so poorly known to them that they did not yet know of the Old Human Race, most of the New Humanity discounted the K'Ailla records as inaccurate, or the K'Aillae as liars.

They were not.

I was there, with Ifahad, with the Old Human Named Seeker, six millennia before the birth of Yeshua ha Notzri, eighty-one centuries before the New Human Race discovered the tachyon star drive, when Ifahad first announced that, if the K'Aillae wished to survive, they must learn to Hide.

Trent the Uncatchable, of course, made no such announcement regarding running away. He simply ran.

An avatar of mine once spoke to Trent.

Hedoes remind me of Ifahad.

- 2 -.

I am Neil Corona.

On Wednesday, June 17, 2076, I left the sh.e.l.l of the Unification warshipUnity and rode a Chandler HuskySled to the dock at Halfway Airlock Nineteen, Tytan Industries. I was late for an appointment with Marc Packard, and he's a difficult man to get along with at the best of times. So I did not bother to take off my pressure suit; I cycled through and into pressure, undogged my helmet, and headed down to the conference room where they awaited me.

Jay Altaloma met me on the way there. Jay is a young fellow, twenty-two and gorgeous even without biosculpture. "You're late."

I glanced at him. "Not yet. Not for another fifteen seconds."

"Packard's gonna be p.i.s.sed."

"b.u.mmer."

Halfway is an orbital city; with a population of nearly two million it is, next to Luna City at Copernicus, the largest city off Earth itself. It is also a company town; in some ways the government of Halfway is as much Tytan Manufacturing as the Unification.

But you know these things.

What Halfway mostly is, is a mess.

It looks like a bowl of noodles that somebody dropped just a moment ago, while you had your back turned: a roughly spherical collection of metal and metal-ceramic and plastic noodles, falling free, headed for the ground but not quite there yet. Halfway is aggressively and, in some measure, intentionally disorienting to downsiders. Among s.p.a.ceFarers and Halfers the ability to move about in three dimensions without becoming disoriented is considered a matter of simple competence. I once heard a downsider call it a matter of "pride," but that is not the correct word; s.p.a.ceFarers and Halfers no more consider it a matter of pride than downsiders are proud of their ability to walk without falling down.

I've been here since '34, ever since the Peaceforcers decided that if they weren't going to kill me they might as well keep me off Earth, away from the Johnny Rebs. At first I hated it, and kept hating it for nearly a decade. I worked at half a dozen different trades and stayed broke at all of them. The last job I had before Marc Packard hired me was as head bouncer at one of the rowdier places out on the Edge.

They tend to cl.u.s.ter out there on the Edge, the places where you wouldn't take a visitor from Earth, if you ever had any; the wh.o.r.ehouses and sensable parlors, bars and sleazier restaurants, and the odd juice dealer or two. Electric ecstasy is not illegal at Halfway, the way it is on Earth, but n.o.body will hire a man or woman wearing a plug. Juice junkies either starve or go downside; it is one of the rarest addictions at Halfway.

I finally stopped hating Halfway about a year after I went to work for Marc Packard.

I was working a wh.o.r.ehouse-a step down from one of the sleazier bars, a step up from a sensable parlor-when Marc hired me. At first it was just as a bodyguard; later, as Marc got more powerful, I ended up heading all the private security at Halfway.

I'm a little under two meters tall, about ninety kilos when I'm in a good weight, and there are more than a few visible signs of rough usage here and there. Any half-competent biosculptor could make me pretty, if I wanted; I don't. Looking like something dragged out of one of the Fringe's nastier back allies can be useful at times.

The wh.o.r.ehouse was Kitten's, a twelve-room place out on the Edge. Kitten was an old boy who had once been one of the highest-paid wh.o.r.es in pre-Unification Washington D.C., about ten years before I was born. He was a charming old fellow, middling honest about small things, scrupulously so about any part of the employer-employee relationship. My pay was never late and never short, and when he made me a promise-rare-he kept it.

Marc Packard started going there late in '42. He was, I understand, nursing a broken heart. To this day I have no idea whether he was seeing one of the boys or girls, or both. It hardly matters. He wasn't anybody in particular back then, the son of one of Tytan Manufacturing's middle managers. He hadn't gone to work for Tytan yet, hadn't yet carved up most of Tytan Industries' management in his climb up the corporate ladder.

Early in '43 we got an idiot from Earth carrying a slug-thrower.

Look:all projectile and energy weapons are illegal at Halfway. The closest thing to a laser you will ever see in public is the gadget they used to bury inside a PKF Elite's fist, the one they're putting in the index fingers today; and we'd probably make those illegal if it were possible. It's not so much that we mind people getting shot up, bad though that may be in some cases, as it is our desire to avoid trying to breathe in death pressure. People learned early on at Halfway that breathing and gunfire were incompatible habits. A breached bulkhead doesn't just kill the intended victim, it also kills the shooter and everybody around him who doesn't get to a p-suit in time; his friends if he has any, tourists, his grandmother,everybody. Simply being caught with a firearm at Halfway is good for time downside in a Public Labor work gang.

This cretin downsider was carrying one of those all-plastic hideaway automatics that were so popular back in the first half of the century, and the scanners I'd installed at the public entrance to Kittens didn't catch it. (Remember, this was '43; the slowscans today are smarter than you are, yes, but I worked with what I had.) I don't even know how the fight started, though later I heard that Marc and the downsider had come to see the same wh.o.r.e, and neither one particularly wanted to wait.

The first I knew about it I had a hostage situation on my hands.

Because a fair amount of Kitten's business came from downsiders who wanted to try free-fall s.e.x before going back to Iowa or India or wherever, the lounge at Kitten's was laid out with a local vertical designed to help decrease the downsiders' inevitable disorientation. Standing with both feet planted on the bottom of the room, the downsider had one hand wrapped in Marc's hair, the other held the slugthrower poised at the base of the boy's skull.

The downsider screamed, "Back off!" as I entered the lounge.

I froze there, just inside the lounge's entrance, and hung motionless a few centimeters above the floor.

Little details jumped out at me. At the far end of the room two of the hosts were peering through an open door, watching the scene unfold. The hostage was a boy-I had the quick impression of youth, no more; I wasn't paying him much attention. The boy was fully dressed; the downsider wore nothing but a pair of magslippers, keeping him in touch with the floor.

Good news; the downsider was breathing heavily through his mouth.

I said slowly, very quietly, "Okay, amigo. Just relax." Before coming down to the waiting lounge I'd turned off the ventilators. "n.o.body's going to hurt you." If I could get the fellow to calm down and stay in one place for any significant length of time, a still bubble of air around his head would slowly be leached of oxygen. Anoxia is sneaky, and with the adrenaline pumping through his system he'd be using up the oxy at a good clip; with any luck he'd go limp in midsentence and I could send him downside and get him out of my life without having to hurt anyone. "I'm Neil Corona. I'm the director of security here at Kitten's. Tell me what you want, and if I can get it for you I will."

He jerked his head toward the two wh.o.r.es behind him, watching the scene from the doorway. "Get themout of here."

"My pleasure." I glanced at them and they faded back into the pa.s.sageway leading to their rooms.

"What else?"

It froze him; he hadn't thought things out that far, if he was thinking at all. He'd played the sensables, he knew the drill; he was supposed to make demands of me-a million dollars, a fast horse and a jet waiting at the airport to take me to Cuba, and n.o.body follows me, copper, or the kid here gets it -but there are practical details in these sorts of matters that the sensables rarely discuss. When he spoke his voice was ragged, scared of the mess he'd dragged himself into, but the adrenaline pumping through his body had left him so keyed up he couldn't see how to get out of it. "If you mess with me this dumb f.u.c.kdies."

I studied the boy briefly-tall and skinny, teenage Halfway homebrew. He looked back at me without expression; if he was afraid, and he was if he had any sense at all, he wasn't showing it. Could just be that he was young enough he didn't know how very long he was going to be dead.

The young tend to be concerned with dying well. Personally I worry more about when; I expect to go out screaming and shooting and generally comporting myself with a lack of dignity.

I spoke to the downsider. "Why don't you just put the gun down? Kitten's already called the Peaceforcers; you have maybe five minutes before their sleds get here."

Wrong thing to say. The muscles in the downsider's right forearm, the hand he held the gun with, bunched suddenly, and a wince of pain crossed the boy's face. The barrel of the gun must be grinding into the back of the kid's skull. "I'll kill him if they dock, Iswear I will."

I kept eye contact with the boy, watching him. He was alert and clear-eyed, there with me in the moment, and it made a difference in what I said next. "You're in bad trouble, amigo. The PKF doesn't negot-"

"I'll kill him if they dock."

I believed him. "Amigo, I have a hideaway tucked behind my belt. The PKF lets registered security carry them." (A lie-but they would look the other way. The hideaway, a practically invisible little two-shot Beretta, fired a pair of 10-mm slugs. And it was in my sleeve.) "So you kill the kid, but unless you've practiced firing a gun in free fall, it's going to push you way off balance." I shrugged. "So you shoot him and I'm going to put you down."

It froze him absolutely solid for the s.p.a.ce of maybe an entire second. Unless you've been there you'd never believe how long a second can be. Finally he said desperately, "Let me see the gun."

"I don't think so. You." I directed the word at the boy. "What do you think I should do?"

The downsider screamed,"Shut up! You talk tome."

Marc Packard looked straight at me. He said, loud and clear, "Do me a favor. After he shoots me, kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

I shrugged. "Okay." I hung there looking at the downsider, my toes four centimeters above the deck.

"You heard him. Do you put the gun down and live, or do you shoot him and die?"

The dumb f.u.c.k tried to shootme. In gravity he might have gotten away with it, pulling the gun off the boy and popping me with one shot, putting the gun back on the boy before he had a chance to react.

Downsiders don't know how to move in drop. Not even if their lives depend on it. He pulled the gun off Marc, and I saw his center of gravity change on him as he moved the gun over toward me. I kicked with my right foot, caught the edge of the doorway behind me strongly enough to get me moving off to my left at a good clip. Downside my man must have been a good enough shot; his first bullet went by my right ear close enough to leave me deaf the next day. He never got a second. The recoil knocked him off balance, and he fantailed slightly, arms outstretched and one foot out of contract with the floor. He was out of position so I took my time, pulled the little Beretta free, and kicked up off the floor. I got my back up against the ceiling to handle the recoil, and when he looked up at me I shot the stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h twice in the face. The slugs were an ultrathin metal sheath wrapped around light plastic. Designed to fragment upon impact, you could fire one directly into a bulkhead without much danger of damaging the bulkhead and exposing yourself to death pressure. Flesh and bone didn't handle them so good; his face melted a little bit under the impact of the first slug, and the second one shattered what was left. He spurted bright red arterial blood straight up at me out of the stump of his neck.

He was a better shot dead than alive. I got my arm up to cover my face and then the blood hit me in a sticky fountain.

Kitten was in there vacuuming up the floating globules of blood and brain when I got clean enough to look around again. Somebody, either from a macabre sense of humor or, equally likely, from the humorless pragmatism that wh.o.r.es tend to learn, had tied a tourniquet around the corpse's neck.

One of the boy wh.o.r.es gave me a towel to wipe my face with.

On the other side of the room, I got my second look at the kid who turned out to be Marc Packard.

With time to look more carefully he was, clearly, younger than his composure had led me to believe; fourteen or fifteen, tops. (Over five years later heproved he'd been paying attention, mentioned in pa.s.sing that I'd negotiated the situation badly; aside from asking the shooter to put down his weapon, I hadn't made it clear to the man what was necessaryfrom him to get us all out of it with no gunplay. A mistake, Marc said, given that the man was clearly in no shape to make such decisions for himself.) He didn't say that at the time; then, only moments after it had happened, the boy looked straight at me, rubbed a spattering of blood off one cheek with a towel another of the wh.o.r.es had handed him, and said, "Thanks. I owe you one."

I shrugged and stored the spent Beretta back in the forearm holster, making a mental note to reload, soonest. "No problem."

"Okay. Who are you?"

"Neil Corona."

He was educated. "Marc Packard. Pleased to-theNeil Corona?"

I was in no mood either to deny it or explain it. "Yes."

"Oh." He looked surprised. "Pleased to meet you." Then he fainted, the way people do in drop, going limp all over, all at once, and hung there motionless in midair.

I did something stupid once.

You may know what it is. Packard had; in 2043 it was still recent enoughmost people with any sense of history knew of it.

When I was eighteen years old I joined the United States Marine Corps.

That wasn'tthe stupid thing, although I never convinced my father of that. Dad was dead of pancreatic cancer in '14, four years before I did the stupid thing that made me famous. Yes, it was that long ago; people still died of cancer, and dozens of other diseases of which n.o.body who is not at least my age can even remember the names.

In the summer of 2018 I was a twenty-seven-year-old Marine Corps sergeant. By late summer the Unification War in America had come down to the battle between the orbital battalion of the Marine Corps and the U.N.'s s.p.a.ce Force. You know how that one ended; s.p.a.ce Force won.

We should have given up then. There were about twenty thousand of us left, not counting the Sons of Liberty. We had heard the Sons of Liberty were still fighting, that the President and the remains of the Secret Service were with them. To this day I don't know if that was true; at the time it was one of the things that kept the marines fighting.

The Peaceforcers swept us back across the Atlantic seaboard, and we found ourselves making the last stand of the Unification War at the city of Yorktown, Virginia, 237 years after George Washington accepted the surrender of the British there.

The battle lasted two days. They sh.e.l.led us and swept us with laser cannon from orbit, until it was clear that surrender was the only option left to us. The highest ranking officer left alive on our side was a major named Eddie Henson. He negotiated the terms of our surrender over one of the few remaining phones in Yorktown that still worked, an old ISDN job that was hardwired to the Network-cellular was knocked out across most of the Eastern seaboard. My squad guarded the house out of which he was operating.

About three-quarters of the way through the negotiations, when all that was left was the finalization of some details, Henson suddenly stopped talking, sat motionless for just a moment, and then abruptly put his maser in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I finished the negotiations myself. I didn't know it at the time, but the fellow I was negotiating with was Jules Moreau, the man who had, with Sarah Almundsen, started the Unification six years prior, in Europe.

It was a stupid thing to do-again, notthe stupid thing, but dumb. I should have waited until a commissioned officer was brought in to handle it. We still had a couple left alive, and it would only have taken perhaps five minutes to find one. But Moreau was threatening to burn Yorktown off the face of the map, and we both knew he had the firepower to do it, so I got in front of the phone's lens and identified myself as Captain Neil Corona. We weren't wearing insignia any longer-Peaceforcer snipers made a point of shooting officers-and Moreau had no reason not to believe me.

Moreau wanted us to surrender in Yorktown.Right now.

That's when I said it: "We will fry under your G.o.dd.a.m.n cannon before a single Marine will lay down his arms in Yorktown."

It was a stupid,stupid thing to say. A frog who had less history than Moreau would have fried us over it.

We marched out of Yorktown, twenty thousand strong, and laid down our arms at the city limits.

I don't suppose that clip of me surrendering-we will fry under your G.o.dd.a.m.n cannon,the brave, haggard young man says-has been accessed by more than about twenty billion history students over the course of the fifty-eight years that have pa.s.sed since that day.

Marc was p.i.s.sed that I was late. I could tell; he smiled at me when I came in.

"Thank you for joining us, Chief."