Dancer's Luck Read online

  ANN MAXWELL

  Dancer’s Luck

  Futura

  An Orbit Book

  Copyright © 1983 by Ann Maxwell

  First published in Great Britain in 1988

  by Futura Publications,

  a Division of Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd

  London & Sydney

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 0 7088 3605 4

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

  Futura Publications

  A Division of Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd

  Greater London House

  Hampstead Road

  London NW1 7QX

  A Pergamon Press plc company

  I

  The ship came out of replacement in a soundless explosion of energy. Rheba checked the colored status lights, peeled away the pilot mesh, and stood stiffly. She wanted nothing more than sleep, but that was impossible. All around her in the control room were former slaves whom she had promised to take home. Behind them a city and a culture lay in ruins, burned to ash by a fire dancer’s rage and slaves’ revenge.

  It would not be smart to stir such hatred again. The sooner the ex-slaves were off the Devalon, the sooner she would feel safe.

  A questing whistle rose above the babble of languages around her. She whistled in return, looking over the heads of strangers for the familiar face of her Bre’n. Kirtn’s whistle came again. His tall, muscular body pushed through the crowd of people. Around his neck, bright against the very short copper plush that covered his body, there was a snakelike being known as Fssa. Shy, vain, and astonishing, Fssa was both friend and translator.

  “We can keep everyone alive and nothing more,” said Kirtn, bending over her. He spoke in Senyas now, an uncompromising language known for its bluntness and precision. It was his native tongue, as it was Rheba’s. The second half of their language was Bre’n, known for its subtlety and beauty. “'The power core is good for two replacements and maybe four days of maintaining this many people.”

  Rheba looked at the slanted gold eyes so close to hers. Absently she rubbed her palm over the soothing suede texture of Kirtn’s arm. “What does the navtrix show within two replacements?”

  “Onan.” His voice was carefully neutral.

  “Onan,” she said bleakly. A place she had every reason not to return to, having left behind there a gaggle of enraged Yhelle Equality Rangers, a burning casino called the Black Whole, and a sizable amount of money. She would not mind getting her hands on the latter, but the former she would gladly avoid. She looked at the people around her, overflowing the control room and tubular hall, packing the tiny galley and crew quarters, stacked breast to back in the exercise room until only tiredness kept them from turning on each other with snarls of outraged privacy. “Onan.” She sighed and began to climb back into the pilot’s mesh.

  “Wait,” said Kirtn.

  Rheba’s cinnamon eyes searched his. “More bad news.” It was not a question.

  Kirtn whistled a Bre’n curse. “Our navtrix.”

  “Yes?”

  “It didn’t recognize any of the planet names we tried on it.”

  “What? But—” She stopped, then turned her attention to the silver snake draped around Kirtn’s neck. “Did you try languages besides Universal?”

  Fssa flexed, taking time to create the proper internal arrangements to speak Senyas. It would have been less trouble to whistle Bre’n, but when Rheba’s eyes sparked gold in their depths, Fssa knew that precision was preferable to poetry. “Where planet names could be translated into other languages, I did. The navtrix,” he said primly, “was completely unresponsive. Onan is the only Yhelle Equality planet it acknowledges. Kirtn told me you programmed in Onan yourself, long after you left Deva.”

  Rheba whistled a sour Bre’n comment. Their navtrix had been made by her own people. It reflected the extent—and limitations—of their knowledge. On her home world of Deva, the Equality had not even been a myth. In order to take the slaves packed aboard the ship to their farflung homes, she would have to get her hands on a Yhelle Equality navtrix.

  Fssa darkened as he mentally translated Rheba’s whistle into its Universal equivalent. When he spoke again, his voice was coaxing rather than arch. “I’ll keep trying, fire dancer. Maybe one of the new languages I’ve learned will help.” Then he added, brightening visibly, “Twenty-three of the slaves want to get off on Onan.”

  “How many does that leave, Kirtn?”

  His torso moved in a muscular Bre’n shrug. “I gave up trying to count at sixty.”

  “On a ship built for twenty and modified for two.” She stretched, brushing against Kirtn. “Take us into orbit around Onan. I'll see if Ilfn needs help with the lottery.” She scooped Fssa off Kirtn’s shoulders. With a delighted wriggle, the Fssireeme vanished into her hair. Next to a live volcano or ground zero in a lightning storm, Rheba’s energetic hair was the snake’s favorite place to be.

  As Rheba began to work through the people toward the tube way, two compact brown forms appeared. M/dere and M/dur quickly cleared a path for Rheba. No one, not even the fierce survivors of the Loo slave revolt, wanted to antagonize J/taal mercenaries.

  “Where are their clepts?” Rheba asked Fssa softly, referring to the J/taals’ war dogs.

  The snake’s whistle was pure and startlingly sweet against her ear. “Guarding Ilfn and her storm dancer.”

  “Are they all right?” she whistled, concern clear in each note.

  “Yes, but when I told M/dere how much the female Bre’n and the male dancer meant to you, she insisted on putting a guard over them. She’s not at all happy with the slaves we took on. They’re a murderous lot.”

  “They had to be to survive Loo,” pointed out Rheba.

  “And we’ll have to be to survive them,” the Fssireeme added sourly.

  She said nothing. She had given her promise to get those slaves home, and get them home she would. She did not need any carping from a snake to tell her that she might have cooked more than she could eat.

  With a human sigh, Fssa subsided. He liked the energy that crackled through Rheba’s hair when she was angry, but he most emphatically did not like to be the focus of that anger.

  Ilfn and Lheket were packed into what would normally have served as a single bunk. The Bre’n woman, like all of her race, was tall and strong. Where Kirtn’s body was covered with a copper plush, Ilfn’s had a dense chestnut fur that was slightly longer than his. Like him, she had a mask of fine, metallic gold fur surrounding her eyes. Like him, she was totally devoted to the Senyas dancer who was her protégé.

  As Rheba pushed against the bunk, Lheket’s blind emerald eyes turned unerringly toward her. She touched his cheek, allowing some of the energy that was her heritage to flow into him. For an instant her hands brightened as akhenet lines of power flared. Lheket smiled dreamily, a child’s smile of contentment.

  Although he could not see, she smiled in return. He was the only Senyas besides her that she knew to have survived their planet’s fiery end. Someday he would be her mate. But until then he was a blind, untrained dancer, one more burden on her shoulders.

  As though she read Rheba’s tired thoughts, Ilfn’s hand protectively smoothed the boy’s fine hair.

  “Did
the computer respond for you?” asked Rheba, looking up from the boy to his Bre’n mentor.

  “Once I got the accent right,” said Ilfn wryly. She was from the far side of Deva; her inflections were not precisely those that the computer had been programmed to respond to. “I gave each of the thirty-eight planets a number, stored them in the computer under a code word, and gave orders for the computer to be continually choosing among those numbers. When you say the word, the computer’s choice will go on the ceiling display. Whoever belongs to that number goes home first. All right?”

  “As good as any and better than most.” Then, realizing how grudging that sounded, Rheba added, “Thank you.” She leaned against the bunk. “We have to go to Onan first. Power core and navtrix.”

  Ilfn touched Rheba in quiet sympathy. Although the Bre’n had never been to the Yhelle Equality’s most licentious planet, she had heard about it from Kirtn. Rheba could expect nothing but trouble there.

  Rheba pushed away from the bunk. As she did, she noticed a man watching her. He was her height, about the Equality norm for a man. He smiled at her, a smile of startling beauty. He twisted deftly through the press of people beyond the bunk until he was standing close enough to speak to her. He would have come even closer, but a grim-faced J/taal prevented him.

  “Can I do something for you?” he asked in Universal. “You’ve done so much for us.”

  “Do you have a Yhelle Equality navtrix in your pocket?” asked Rheba dryly.

  The man fished in his gray slave robe, then turned his hands palm up in apology. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t even have the Equality coordinates to my own home world.”

  “You and every other ex-slave aboard,” she muttered. She looked again at the young man with the engaging smile. He appeared closer to Lheket’s twelve years than to her twenty-one, but it was hard to tell with some races. “Do you have a name?”

  “Daemen.” His smile widened, inviting her to share his good nature. “Actually it’s The Daemen, but on Loo no one seemed interested in a slave’s former rank. Daemen is what I’m used to now.”

  “Were you on Loo long?”

  “Yes.” His smile changed, cooler, like his voice and his rain-colored eyes. “And you?”

  “No. It just seemed like it.”

  Daemen laughed, a sound too adult for his appearance. “My family—there were ten of us when we were kidnapped—kept talking about home, how beautiful it was under its single sun.” His left hand moved in a dismissing motion. “Maybe it is. I barely remember its looks, much less its location.”

  Rheba felt a rush of sympathy. She, too, had lost her planet, had felt what it was like to stare at a night sky and know that not one of the billion massed stars was home. “We’ll find it, Daemen. I promise you.”

  His smile returned, full of possibilities and silent laughter. “'That’s what he said.”

  “He?”

  “The man who looks like her,” said Daemen, indicating Ilfn. “'Huge and fierce.”

  Rheba’s smile was as much for her Bre’n as it was for the stranger in front of her. “Yes, he’s all of that. He was one of the finest poets on Deva, as well . . . when there was a Deva and when he still believed in poetry.”

  She scratched the top of her arms absently. The new lines of power that had appeared when she fought her way off Loo itched unmercifully. She would have to get some more salve from Ilfn. But first, the lottery. Thirty-eight names, thirty-eight planets. Only one could be first. She wondered aloud who the lucky one would be.

  “Me.”

  Daemen’s voice was confident, yet not arrogant. She looked at him closely, trying to see beyond the charming smile and gray eyes. “You sound very sure.”

  “I was born lucky. That’s the only way I survived Loo.”

  She smiled perfunctorily. He was neither obviously strong nor obviously gifted. Perhaps he believed that luck was responsible for his survival of Loo’s various hells. “'What’s your planet’s name?”

  “Daemen.”

  She blinked. “Daemen? Just like you?”

  “Yes. The oldest member of my family is always called The Daemen.” His face changed, looking older than it had, almost bitter. “I’m the only one left. Whatever name I was born with, I’m The Daemen now.”

  The ship chimed like a giant crystal, warning its passengers that replacement was imminent. The masses of people shifted subtly, seeking secure positions. In the absence of nearby gravity wells, it was unlikely to be a rough translation.

  Chimes vibrated up and down the scale of hearing until no known race could have missed the warning. There was a heartbeat of silence, then the ship quivered microscopically and replaced itself. It was a brief maneuver, accomplished with Kirtn’s usual skill. The Devalon ran on silently, gathering speed in another direction, bringing itself into alignment for a final replacement in a far orbit around Onan.

  Rheba whistled soft instructions to Fssa. The snake moved beneath her hair, changing shape to accommodate the needs of translation. Almost all of the former slaves understood the language of Loo. Many understood Universal. Those who understood neither usually did not survive. The Loos had not distinguished between ignorance and disobedience.

  “While we maneuver for the next replacement, we’ll have a lottery to decide which planet we’ll stop at after we pick up supplies on Onan. The ship’s computer is randomly scrambling the planets by number. At my command, the computer will display the number that is under its scanner at that instant.”

  Rheba spoke in Universal. Fssa’s simultaneous translation into Loo was accomplished with a minimum of distraction. The snake could control its endless voices with such skill that words seemed to come out of the air above the crowd.

  A buzz of speculation in many languages greeted the announcement as it was carried throughout the ship by the Devalon’s intercom. Fssa changed from a snake to a bizarre listening device of quills, spines, dishes and tiny spheres in every shade of metal from copper to blue steel. It was one of his more astonishing performances, but then he had rarely had the chance to hear so many new languages at once.

  Rheba felt the snake sliding out of her hair, too intent on his listening modes to keep a secure position. She caught him before he hit the floor, then held him up to facilitate his reception of the various sounds. Out of the energy field of her hair, his weight quadrupled.

  Whether it was the appearance of the glittering, changing shape over her head or the simple fact that the lottery needed no further discussion, people stopped talking and stared at the snake.

  No longer consumed by the Fssireeme imperative to learn new languages, Fssa realized that he was the focus of attention. He darkened with embarrassment, cooling palpably in Rheba’s hands. Being on display frightened the shy snake. He was convinced he was repulsive because he did not have legs.

  “You’re beautiful,” fluted Rheba, using all the complex shadings of Bre’n to reassure Fssa.

  Glints of metallic silver ran in ripples over his arm-length black shape. When a few gold traceries joined the silver, Rheba smiled and lifted Fssa back to her head. Immediately, he became so light that she did not notice his presence in her hair. She tilted her head and whistled an intricate Bre’n trill.

  The computer responded with a single short tone that indicated that she had established access. Her lips shaped another Bre’n sound, a single command: Choose.

  In the air over her head a number glowed, then the corresponding planet’s name appeared.

  Daemen.

  Rheba felt a chill move over her neck. She whirled to face the charming stranger. He was gone, swallowed up in the seething disappointment of the former slaves.

  II

  Kirtn stared glumly at the hologram of the port city of Nontondondo. The view shifted as the Devalon’s sensors responded to his curt Senyas instructions.

  “Any Rangers?” asked Rheba.

  “Not yet. Maybe they believed the name we gave them.”

  Her lips twisted skeptically,
but she said only, “What’s our OVA?”

  He frowned. The Onan Value Account was established for each ship before it was allowed to touch down on the planet. It was one of Onan’s less endearing customs. “Subject to physical verification of the gems, our OVA is eighty-thousand credits.”

  Rheba looked at the multicolored, brilliantly faceted jewels winking on the ship’s sensor plate. She frowned. “On Onan, that’s not much.”

  His whistle was eloquent of pained agreement. “A power core, four days’ dock fees and some odd change.”

  “That’s all?” she demanded. Her whistle flattened into a curse. “How much does a navtrix cost?”

  He did not answer. She looked at him and felt her breath catch. His eyes were narrow, hot gold, and his lips were so tight that his faintly serrated teeth gleamed. It was the face of a Bre’n sliding into rage, and from rage into rez, the Bre’n berserker state that was almost always fatal to the Bre’n and whoever else was within reach.

  She stroked his arm slowly, trying to call him back from anger. For a moment he resisted, then he sighed and stroked her hair until it crackled beneath his big hand.

  “I can play Chaos again,” she offered hesitantly.

  His hand closed tightly on her restless hair. “No. If you’re recognized they’ll lynch you.”

  Rheba did not disagree. She had cheated at Chaos the last time she was in Nontondondo; in Chaos, cheating was not only expected, it was required. But for a stranger to cheat so successfully that she bankrupted half the players in the casino . . . She shuddered, remembering the riot that had ensued. She had been forced to burn down the casino in order to escape. Even if the Black Whole had been rebuilt, she had no desire to play Chaos in it again.

  Together, Rheba and Kirtn watched the hologram of the seething city. In Nontondondo, everything had its price. It was the only place in the Yhelle Equality where everything was licensed and nothing was illegal. With money you could do anything.

  But they had no money.

  Absently, Kirtn fiddled the controls, zooming in on a street where people of all shapes, colors and races mingled. The scene enlarged until it filled the curved ceiling of the control room and merged crazily with the heads of the taller slaves. Suddenly, one of the depicted citizens screamed and began clawing at her neck. Just behind her, someone darted into the crowd, a stolen bauble glittering in his hands the instant that he vanished.