The Dancer from Atlantis Read online

  The Dancer from Atlantis

  Poul Anderson

  To:

  L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp

  Contents

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.

  And the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

  And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.

  And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

  And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.

  And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

  —Revelation, viii, 6-13

  Where is the fair assemblage of heroes,

  The sons of Rudra, with their bright horses?

  For of their birth knoweth no man other,

  Only themselves their wondrous descent.

  The light they flash upon one another;

  The eagles fought, the winds were raging;

  But this secret knoweth the wise man,

  Once that Prishni her udder gave them.

  Our race of heroes, through the Maruts be it

  Ever victorious in reaping of men.

  On their way they hasten, in brightness the brightest,

  Equal in beauty, unequalled in might.

  —Rig-Veda, vii, 56

  (Max Müller, tr.)

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Full moon tonight,’ he said. ‘Come up on deck with me. It should be beautiful.’

  ‘No, I’m tired,’ she answered. ‘You go. I’d rather stay here’

  Duncan Reid made himself look squarely at his wife and say, ‘I thought this was our trip.’

  Pamela sighed. ‘Of course. Later, dear, please. I’m sorry to be such a rotten sailor, but I am. All the bad weather we’ve been having till now. Oh, the pills kept me from getting actually sick, but I never felt quite good either.’

  He continued to regard her. A dozen years ago, when they married, she was well endowed. Later a waxing plumpness became her despair, dieting her anguish. He had tried to say, ‘Don’t weep over it. Take more exercise. Mainly, remember you’re still a damned attractive woman.’ And she was, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, with soft brown hair and regular features and gentle-looking mouth. But he was less and less often able to say it successfully.

  ‘Seems I made a mistake, booking us onto a ship.’ He heard how bitterness tinged his voice, and saw that she did too.

  ‘Well, you knew I can’t go on your sailboat,’ she retorted. ‘Or backpacking or—’ Her head drooped, as did her tone, ‘Let’s not start that quarrel again.’

  His glance went past her, across the impersonal coziness of their cabin, to the picture of their children on the dresser. ‘Maybe we should,’ he replied slowly. ‘We don’t have to worry about them for a while, what they might overhear. Maybe we should bring things out into the open at last.’

  ‘What things?’ She sounded almost frightened. For an instant he saw her immaculate gown and grooming as armor. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He retreated. ‘I … I can’t find words. Nothing obvious. Spats over ridiculous issues, irritations we learned to live with very early in the game, or imagined we had – I’d, uh, I’d hoped this could be, well, I told you, a second honeymoon—’ His tongue knotted up on him.

  He wanted to cry something like: Have we simply been losing interest in each other? Then how? Nothing physical, surely; not to such a degree; why, I’m a mere forty, you thirty-nine, and we still have enough good times to know how many more we might have. But they’ve been getting steadily more rare. I’ve been busy and you, perhaps, have been bored in spite of your assorted bustling around; after dinner I’ll read a book in my study while you watch television in the living room, till the first who grows sleepy says a polite good night and goes to bed.

  Why won’t you come on deck with me, Pam? What a night it must be for love! Not that I feel hot especially, but I want to feel hot, for you. I could, if you’d let me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, and patted his head. He wished he could tell how real the gesture was. ‘I am tired, though.’

  Of me?’ came out before he could stop it.

  ‘No, no, no. Never.’ She came to him, laid arms around his waist. He patted her back. To him both motions felt automatic.

  ‘We used to have adventures,’ he said. ‘Remember? Newly wed and poor and making do.’

  ‘I didn’t think scrimping along in that horrible cramped apartment was an adventure.’ She broke off her words, but also from him. ‘Let me get my coat, darling.’

  ‘Not as a, uh, duty,’ he protested, knowing that was the wrong thing to say but: not sure what would have been right.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. I could use a stroll.’ Her smile was extremely bright. ‘It’s stuffy in here. And the ventilator’s noisy.’

  ‘No, please. I understand. You do need rest.’ He stepped to the closet and fetched his own topcoat in one hurried motion. ‘And I’ll be kind of galloping. Want to stretch my legs. You don’t enjoy that.’ He avoided seeing her face as he departed.

  Topside he did in fact stride himself breathless around and around the main deck. Once he went up to the forepeak, but left it after he came upon a young couple necking there. Presently he felt somewhat less churned and stopped by the rail for a smoke.

  The wind, rain, fog, and heavy, hacking waves of springtime in the North Pacific had died down. The air was cool, alive with unnamed sea odors and a low breeze, and it was clear; despite the moon, he had seldom seen as many stars as glittered in that lucent blackness. The light lay in a shivering road across waters whose crests it made sparkle and whose troughs it made sheen like molten obsidian. They murmured, those waters, and rushed and hissed and lapped, most softly in their immensity, and took to themselves the throb of engines and gave back the slight trembling of hull and deck.

  His pipe started, Reid cradled the bowl in his hand for a bit of warmth and hearthglow. He had always found peace on the sea. Lovely and inhuman. Lovely because inhuman? He’d attempted to make Pam see that, but she didn’t care for Robinson Jeffers either.

  He stared at the moon, low to aft. Do
es it make any difference to you that four men’s footprints have marked you? he wondered. Recognizing the thought as childish, he looked outward and ahead. But yonder lay the seemingly endless war. And behind, at home, was the seemingly endless upward ratcheting of hate and fear; and Mark, and Tom (as he, a proud nine years of age, now insisted on being called), and little, little Bitsy, whom there was so short a time to cherish before they must walk forth into a world breaking apart beneath them. When you considered those things, what importance had two people, middle-class, slipping into middle age, other than what was conferred on them by the inverse square law?

  Reid’s mouth quirked wryly around the pipestem. He thought: Too bad you can’t quantify the statics and dynamics of being human in neat vectors, or develop a tensor calculus for the stresses in a marriage. – The smoke rolled pungent over his tongue and palate.

  ‘Good evening, sir.’

  Turning, Reid identified the moon-whitened shape: Mike Stockton, third engineer. Aboard a passenger-carrying freighter, acquaintanceships developed fast. However, he hadn’t chanced to see much of this particular officer.

  ‘Why, hello,’ he said reflexively. ‘Nice night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure is. Mind if I join you? I’m due on watch in a few minutes.’

  Am I lonely for everyone to see? wondered Reid. And then: Cut that out. You’re at the point of sniveling. A bit of talk may well be precisely what you need. ‘Do stay. Think the weather will hold?’

  ‘The forecasters do. The whole way to Yokohama, if we’re lucky. Will you and your wife be in Japan long?’

  A couple of months. We’ll fly back.’ The kids will be okay at Jack and Barbara’s, Reid thought; but still, when we walk in that door and Bitsy sees her daddy and comes running on her stumpy legs, arms out and laughing—

  ‘I know the country just enough to envy you.’ Stockton scanned Reid as if, in an amiable fashion, he meant it.

  He saw a lanky, rawboned, wide-shouldered six-footer, a long craggy head, jutting nose and chin, heavy black brows over gray eyes, sandy hair, no-longer-fashionable turtleneck sweater beneath the coat. Even in the tuxedos he must sometimes wear, and after Pamela’s most careful valeting, Reid managed to appear rumpled.

  ‘Well, a business trip for me. I’m an architect, you may remember. Quit my job recently to form a partnership.’ Pamela didn’t like the risk. But she’d liked less the drabness of semi-poverty in their first years, when he refused to accept a subsidy from her parents; and she’d stuck that out, and now they were in the 20-K bracket and if his try at independence failed (though he was bloody well resolved it wouldn’t) he could always find another position somewhere. ‘Considering the strong Japanese influence in homebuilding nowadays,’ Reid went on, ‘I figured I’d sniff around after, well, all right, inspiration at the source. In provincial villages especially.’

  Pam might holler. She wanted her comfort. … No! He’d fallen into an ugly habit of doing her injustice. She’d joined his outings, and apologized afterward for spoiling them with a humbleness that came near breaking his heart, and finally stayed behind when he went. Had he tried as hard to interest himself in her bridge games, her volunteer work at the youth center and the hospital, even her favorite TV programs?

  ‘You’re from Seattle, aren’t you, Mr. Reid?’ Stockton asked. ‘I’m a native myself.’

  ‘I’m a mere immigrant, as of five years ago. Chicago previously, since getting out of the Army. Before then, Wisconsin, et cetera, back to dear old Boston. The American story.’

  Reid realized he was babbling of matters that could not imaginably interest the other man. It wasn’t his usual behavior. If anything, he was too withdrawn unless a few beers or a couple of Scotches had relaxed him. Tonight he was seeking to escape his thoughts. And why not? If he’d shaken off the Presbyterian theology of his boyhood, did he have to carry around the associated conscience?

  ‘Uh, I’d visited Seattle before and liked the place,’ he continued almost helplessly, ‘but at first the only halfway decent job offer I got was in Chicago. A concrete monstrosity, that town. They said there you’d better wear glasses, whether or not you needed them, or somebody would unscrew your eyeballs.’

  He’d kept remembering people who were relaxed and friendly, and boats white-winged on Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier’s snowpeak floating high and pure above, and virgin forest a couple of hours’ drive from downtown. To Pam, of course, Chicago was home. Well, Evanston was, which made a difference. When he finally landed a position in Seattle and they moved, she found the city a backwater, where the weather seemed to be mostly leaden skies, or rain, or fog, or rain, or snow, or rain. … Had he, waiting happily for the next cataract of sunshine, failed to notice how the rain gnawed at her?

  ‘Yeah, we’re lucky, I guess, living where we do,’ Stockton said. ‘Apart from those medieval liquor laws.’

  Reid chuckled. ‘Come, now. No medieval king would have dared pass liquor laws that barbaric’

  Then, as his mood was lifting a trifle, Stockton told him, ‘I’d better go on to the engine room. Nice talking,’ and was quickly out of sight.

  Reid sighed, leaned elbows on rail, and drew on his pipe. The night sea went hush-hush-hush. Tomorrow Pam might feel happier. He could hope for that, and hope Japan would turn out to be a fairytale as advertised, and beyond—

  Beyond? His mind, free-associating, conjured up a globe. Besides excellent spatial perception, which he’d better have in his profession, he was gifted with an uncommon memory. He could draw the course if the ship continued past Yokohama. It wouldn’t. The owners knew better. Reach Southeast Asia, or pretty close. Hard to understand that at this moment human beings were maiming and killing human beings whose names they would never know. Damn the ideologies! When would the torment be over? Or had every year always been tragic, would every year always be? Reid remembered another young man who died in another war, a lifetime ago, and certain lines he had written.

  The way of love was thus.

  He was born one winter morn

  With hands delicious,

  And it was well with us.

  Love came our quiet way,

  Lit pride in us, and died in us,

  All in a winter’s day.

  There is no more to say.

  Rupert Brooke could say it, though. Thanks for that, Dad. An English professor in a tiny Midwestern college hadn’t had a lot of money for his children – wherefore Reid, earning his own, needed an extra year to graduate – but he gave them stubbornness about what was right, wide-ranging curiosity, the friendship of books – maybe too close a friendship, stealing time that was really Pam’s. … No more brooding, Reid decided. A few final turns around the deck, and probably by then she’d have fallen asleep and he could do likewise.

  He clamped the pipe between his teeth and straightened.

  And the vortex seized him, the black thunders, he had no moment to cry in before he was snatched from the world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Where the Dnieper snaked in its eastward bend, grassland gave way to high bluffs through which the river hastened, ringing aloud as it dashed itself over rocks and down rapids. Here ships must be unloaded and towed, in several places hauled ashore on rollers, and cargoes must be portaged. Formerly this had been the most dangerous part of the yearly voyage. Pecheneg tribesmen were wont to lurk nearby, ready to ride down upon the crews when these were afoot and vulnerable, plunder their goods and make slaves of whoever were not lucky enough to be killed. Oleg Vladimirovitch had been in one such fight as an apprentice. In it, by God’s grace, the Russians sent the raiders off bewailing their own dead and took many husky prisoners to sell in Constantinople.

  Things were far better since Grand Prince Yaroslav – what a man, cripple though he was! – trounced the heathen. He did it at the gates of Kiev, so thoroughly that ravens afterward gorged themselves till they could not fly and no Pecheneg was ever again seen in his realm. Oleg was in the host on that wondrous day: his first taste of r
eal war, thirteen years ago, he a fuzzy-cheeked lout of seventeen winters. Later he rode against the Lithuanians, and later still sailed on the ill-fated expedition against the Imperial city. But mainly he was a trader, who wanted no troubles that cut into profit. (Tavern brawls didn’t count, they nourished the soul, if you made sure to clear out before the Emperor’s police arrived.) He was happy that the Greeks were likewise sensible and, soon after throwing back the Russians, resumed business with them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to the bumper of kvass in his hand, ‘peace and brotherly love, those are good for trade, as Our Lord preached when he walked this earth.’

  He stood on a clifftop overlooking the stream and the fleet. It was beneath the dignity of a shipowner to haul on cables or lug bales; and he had three vessels by now, not bad for a boy who in birchbark leggings had run traplines through northern woods. His skippers could oversee the work. But sentries were needed. Not that anyone expected bandits; however, the furs, hides, amber, tallow, beeswax being transported would fetch a price down south that just might draw many masterless landloupers together for a single swoop.

  ‘To you, Ekaterina Borisovna,’ Oleg said, raising his cup. It was for traveling, wooden, albeit silver-trimmed to show the world that he was a man of consequence at home in Novgorod.

  While the thin sour beer went down, he was thinking less of his wife or, for that matter, various slave and servant girls, than of a tricksy little minx at journey’s end last year. Would Zoe again be available? If so, that gave him an added reason, besides extending his connections among the foreign merchants resident in Constantinople, for wintering there. Though Zoe, hm, over several months Zoe might prove painfully expensive.

  Bees hummed in clover, cornflowers blazed blue as the over-arching, sun-spilling sky. Below Oleg, men swarmed about the bright-hued swan- and dragon-headed ships. They must be longing for the Black Sea: in oars and up mast, loaf and let the wind carry you on, never thinking about the currents, never caring that that was when the poor devil of an owner must worry most about a wreck. Their shouts and oaths were lost across a mile or two, blent into the clangor of great Father Dnieper. These heights knew quietness, heat, sweat trickling down ribs and soaking into the quilted padding beneath the chainmail coat, which began to drag on the shoulders, but high, high overhead a lark chanted, and the joy floated earthward while a mild buzzing from the beer rose to meet it. …