“What means this fable?” another asked, but the chairman put her hand on his forearm.
“I tell you later, Dieter. Explain, Fudir. I know you have always a great mouthful of words, but this should be one of your better efforts. I was not happy that you called us out tonight. What should the rectors have taken alarm?”
The Fudir pressed his palms together and bowed over them. “Nandi, Memsahb. Certain things have I learned…”
But again one of the committeemen interrupted. “No pukkah, bukkin’ Standard,” he said, pointing at Hugh. “That fellah no fanty, him.” At that, all of them descended into the patois, words running too thick and fast for Hugh to follow. They began to shout at one another, all talking at once, gesturing, voices rising in pitch as well as volume. Hugh studied the room and its exits, thinking that he might need one soon.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the commotion died. Everyone was bobbing their head side to side and smiling. “Very well,” the chairman said. “We are agreed. New Eireann lies but two weeks down the Grand Trunk. The proposal may be a fantasy, but so is our Hope. If the one may win the other, it is worth the shot. And should it prove to be nothing, the cost is minimal. Sahb the Fudir, you will have your certificates at this time tomorrow. See Cheng-fu at the seal-maker’s dukān. You know the man. We will secure you the vacancies you require. The rest is up to you.”
“Mgurk is one of us,” the Fudir told them. “He will do as we ask. The other, let it be the woman, Micmac Anne. She is at the edge of knowledge, and might guess too much too soon. We can be thankful that January did not know what he had; we can only hope that Colonel-Manager Jumdar has not yet discovered it.”
The chairman struck the table with her knuckles. “Bread and salt,” she called out. The Fudir bowed over his folded hands as a servant scuttled in bearing on a silver tray a plate of naan and papad. Then, when small cups of thick, creamy tea had been served out, they all rose but Little Hugh and faced the picture and, bowing over their hands, chanted in a rough unison, “Next year, the hajj upon Terra.”
An Craic
The harper has grown steadily more impatient, and when the scarred man pauses for another drink, she strikes the table with the flat of her hand. “Is this to be all beginnings and no ends? Who is the Fudir? What is this story of the Twisting Stone?”
But the storyteller taunts her with his smile. “All things in their season, harper. You do not strike all your chords at once or it would be naught but noise. How can there be ends without beginnings? Besides there are more than seventeen different versions of that Twister story, and not all of them support the Fudir’s plans.”
“This Fudir, who was he? What was his interest in the Dancer? Why did he favor Little Hugh over Handsome Jack?”
The man looks into a distant corner of the room, and perhaps beyond it. “The Fudir cared nothing for either,” he says finally. “He told the Committee that the Dancer would regain them their lost Earth. He told Little Hugh that it would regain him New Eireann. What he told himself, he never told another; and that was the egg from which much later hatched. Perhaps he hoped to regain a world, too; or maybe his hopes were more modest than that.”
“You speak of him in the past tense. Is he one of those who died?” The harper’s fingers trace the beginnings of a goltraí, but the scarred man stops her.
“Don’t mourn him yet. There will be mourning enough when that time comes. After all, we are all dead men. Our younger selves have died, and yet we live. If some of them live on in my stories or your songs, why, that is the greater immortality. For now, ‘let them have their moment.’ Little Hugh escaped the assassin. The Fudir secured his “ticket outta here.” Perhaps the Committee had their moment, as well, for the Fudir was not to their taste, we think, and they may have been happy to see the back of him, fables and a madman’s chance notwithstanding.”
The harper considers his words while aimless notes drift off her strings. She wonders if the scarred man is making the whole thing up in the hopes of cadging more drinks. But if he is, what recourse has she? Against what other touchstone might she rub the tale to test it? Her one other source is gone. Finally, she asks, “Are all the players in place now? I’ve heard other names mentioned. When does this thing finally start?”
“Oh, the ballet is already begun. The dancers are whirling and turning, but they do not all step off at the first bar. What sort of dance would that be? Yet the prima ballerina is halfway to her goal. There is a telos, if you’ve been following. There is a direction. And it all lies implicit in January’s initial error.”
“January’s error…You’ve mentioned that before. What was it?”
“We need to bring another dancer in. You’ve met him before, but have forgotten him already.”
Suantraí: Dispatches from the Edge of Night
Na Fir Li exercised in the old Greek style, though he did not know that he did.
Sweat gleamed on his torso, his brow, his thighs, so that he seemed to embody the glittering blackness of the sky itself. He moved lithely from bars to rings to bags to weights across the gymnasium of Hot Gates in an intricate ballet impossible to remember save that the body had a memory of its own—which is just as well, because his mind was engaged, as always, on three or four other matters.
On the floor mat, Fir Li executed a series of motions that were half dance and half combat; pleasure and threat combined, though it was the dance that threatened. “Pup,” he said at the top of a twirling leap, “would you care to walk on the ceiling with me?”
Greystroke had entered quietly and was standing by the edge of the mat. Fir Li was the only person he knew who could be aware of his unannounced presence. “Aren’t you too old for that?” he mocked. “The swift-boats report a monoship approaching.”
“I can reduce the gravity in here, if you think the ceiling out of your reach.” The Hound whirled to rest in the center of the room and made a gracious bow. “You may strip, too, if you think it would help.”
Greystroke grunted and went to his master’s side in his coveralls. “In what combat do we pause to strip? The blue wall, then?”
“It offers fewer obstructions. Go!”
The two raced across the gymnasium floor toward the chosen wall. As they neared it, they leaped, as nearly simultaneously as made no difference, and landed feetfirst about halfway up. Two more steps up the wall and…the gravity grid won. Both men back-flipped to the floor again, landing on their feet side by side.
“I don’t recall raising that ceiling,” Fir Li complained. “Whence this monoship? Go!”
Another dash at the wall. Two, three, four steps up. Na Fir Li grinned whitely and touched the ceiling with the ball of his left foot before back-flipping once more to the floor. Greystroke did not quite make it and landed a split second later. Fir Li clapped him on the back.
“At least you landed on your feet, Pup. Some don’t. Perhaps when you are as old as I am, you will run higher.”
“It comes from the Galactic East.”
The Hound, who had bent into his cooling off exercises, paused and gave his full attention. “I knew you were saving a surprise for me. Excellent. I was growing bored since the little incident with the Cynthians. Your conclusion?”