The Last Dancer Read online

  * * *

  THE LAST DANCER

  A Tale of the Continuing Time

  DANIEL KEYS MORAN

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it are real people and any resemblance to anybody, living or dead, is a coincidence.

  It is the author's intention that this work should be freely downloadable, copyable, and shareable in electronic format. It may not be reproduced, shared, or transmitted for a fee by any party to whom the author has not contractually granted permission. The author retains all other rights.

  Copyright (c) 1993 by Daniel Keys Moran

  * * *

  Dedication:

  For Holly. I love you.

  And Goodbye To....

  My friend Richard Sommers, who died as this edition of the book was being typeset. I knew him fifteen years, and have never known a more optimistic, nor perhaps better, man. Just being in his presence made me feel better about myself and about the world around me. I keep expecting to hear the phone ring and hear that gruff voice on the other end of the line, saying "Hello, groovy" -- which was what he called almost everyone, because in his heart he knew everyone was. I miss him.

  "What the head makes cloudy, the heart makes very clear."

  -- Don Henley, The Heart of the Matter

  * * *

  THE LAST DANCER

  A Tale of the Continuing Time

  There are no longer "dancers," the possessed. The cleavage of men into actors and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish... We have metamorphised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.

  -- Jim Morrison

  * * *

  Prolog:

  The Dancer

  In the last hour of sunlight the Dancer fled through the forest covering the base of the mountains.

  The trees were tall, emaciated things of some pale wood, with dull, silver-white leaves. They spread themselves thinly but evenly, and in the shadows of approaching night the Dancer could see no more than fifteen or twenty paces ahead at any moment. The winds blew cold, growing colder, dropping down below freezing even before the sun had set. The Dancer barely noticed except to wonder, briefly, if it might in some way slow the Shield who pursued him.

  If the Shield was Marah, perhaps. But the Dancer suspected Marah was dead, and if so, the Shield pursuing him was Dvan. Dvan might well notice the cold; he was no Dancer.

  But he would not permit it to stop him.

  The Dancer ran faster as the slope of the ground began to rise, whipcord muscles moving gracefully beneath the sheath of his skin.

  One way or another it would all be over soon.

  From behind him came a shrill scream, the cry of the kitjan. Closer than it had been. The Dancer's neural system, vastly more sensitive than any normal human's, registered a twinge of pain. The kitjan was a terrifying weapon; the Dancer's companions, four of the eight, had died in agony at its touch, and if the Shield chasing him got much closer he would be the fifth. He picked up speed, pushed his amazing body to its fullest, demanding more speed, and getting it. He wove through the shadowed trees, pushing aside the barrier of the cold night air. His breath came smoothly, drew the air, the life-giving oxygen, through his nostrils, warming it, and then deep into his lungs.

  The trees thinned around him as he moved higher up the mountainside, and the slope grew steeper. Now and again as he climbed he used his hands to help himself along.

  Above the cover of the trees, the huge chain of mountains became visible again. He moved upward through a long ravine, the sides of the ravine rising away on either side of him. It was shadowed here, but not shadowed enough; from nearly any point outside the thickest part of the forest, the Dancer would be visible now. This was the point of greatest danger, where, for long moments, he would be in plain view.

  A lucky shot; at that distance it could be nothing else. The kitjan whiplash touched the Dancer, held him for an instant. Nerves fired at random; every superbly trained muscle in the Dancer's body spasmed at once. He fell in midstride and struck the ground hard, rolling limply, tumbling back down slope.

  He ended in a crevice beneath an overhanging, ice-scoured boulder. The Dancer lay on the cold hard ground, fighting the unconsciousness that crept in on him. He monitored his heart, found it had ceased beating at the kitjan's touch. He restarted it, inspected its operation briefly to ensure that it would continue beating unattended. Spasms ripped the muscles of his abdomen, made breathing impossible. The Dancer concentrated on the abdominal muscles, and well before he was in danger of losing consciousness from anoxia had regained control of his breath. His eyesight cleared slowly of its own accord. The Dancer lay on the frozen ground, waiting. The kitjan screamed once, twice, while he waited there. The first shot came nowhere near him; the Shield had not seem him clearly when he fell. The next shot came closer, sent another wash of wracking pain through the Dancer; more of the unlikely luck that had felled him in the first place.

  It was dark now. Once, long ago, before the Dancers had learned to control the temperature of their bodies, that lack of visible light would have meant little; the Shield saw body heat as well as any Dancer. Now that darkness might well make the difference between life and death. Lying motionless at the base of the boulders, looking down the mountain, the Dancer saw the first flicker of motion among the thinning trees, of the Shield closing in. The Dancer let his heartbeat slow, let the blood move sluggishly through his veins. He felt it first in his hands, as his body temperature dropped slowly toward freezing, toward the ambient temperature of the world around him. At last he moved, rolled carefully into a crouching position. He could not feel his extremities well. He moved cautiously now, not certain how close the Shield might be, up through the ravine, through what little cover existed above the tree line.

  To the cave.

  There was little enough inside besides the cache of hardware from the ship. The cave was small, and even though the Dancer had not been there in a very long time he found the device he needed quickly: a key meant to be held in the palm of a man's hand.

  In the darkness the Dancer felt for the studs on the surface of the key, and moved his thumb to cover the oval stud which would bring him safety.

  Behind him, at the entrance to the cave, Gi'Tbad'Eovad'Dvan said quietly, "Good-bye, Sedon."

  The kitjan found him while Dvan was still speaking. The Dancer never heard his name uttered. In the moment of his death as the air left his lungs in a desperate, convulsive scream, the Dancer's thumb spasmed on the stud controlling the stasis bubble.

  They were above the tree line; Gi'Tbad'Eovad'Dvan unslung the ancient laser from across his back, and with it set the side of the rock face near him to glowing. He sat outside the entrance to the cave, with the mirror-surfaced stasis bubble at his back, and waited. In the hours before morning it grew deadly cold from the arctic wind coming down off the nearby glaciers. Dvan shivered so badly that even with his glowing rock, lased regularly to a cherry red, he was not certain he would survive the night. His clothing was cured leather inlaid with fur; crude, warm enough most of the time, but perhaps not for tonight.

  He did not sleep that night. He wasted no time thinking about the Dancer; Sedon was dead. The stasis bubble might postpone the moment of death, but Dvan was content that his work was done. The sort of medical technology necessary to save a Dancer touched at close range by the kitjan existed nowhere on this planet, and had not for a long, long time.

  The night wore on forever. Once Dvan nearly slept, but found himself jerking awake to the conviction that blazing red eyes hovered out in the darkness beyond the glowing slab of stone, watching him; the red-furred be
ast that had led him to Sedon, the spirit sent by the Nameless One--but when he shook himself fully awake the eyes were gone.

  When dawn finally came, the morning sun lighting the peaks of the mountains around him, Dvan looked around, fixing the place in memory, the relationships of the peaks to one another. It took some time, imprinting the image into deep memory, but at length he was satisfied; though eons might pass between visits, he would know this place again.

  After a while he got up and stretched to relieve his stiffness, and headed back down the mountain.

  Thirty-seven thousand years passed.

  * * *

  Summer: 2075

  They had themselves a party

  To wash away their cares

  They busted up the furniture

  Said they would take back what was theirs

  Said they would take back what was theirs

  --Mahliya Kutura, Independence Day

  * * *

  1.

  "Jasmine."

  The voice echoed through the cool empty gym like God calling from a cheap pay phone.

  The woman who called herself Jasmine Martinez slowly exhaled the breath she had been holding, released her toes, and sat up. She had been doing stretches for the muscles in the backs of her thighs, sitting with her legs straight in front of her, grasping the instep of each foot with her hands, and leaning forward until she was completely doubled over. The walls of the huge gym were mirrored and out of the corner of her eye she watched her image in the mirror: a black-haired woman of average height, wearing nothing but a pair of shimmering blue shorts; bright green eyes in a vaguely Asian face, with muscle definition so startlingly detailed she could have served as an anatomy model.

  The holo wavering a meter or so away from her held the severe image of Alaya Gyurtrag, the witch who managed Goddess Home's business transactions. At 6:30 a.m. Alaya was already dressed for a day at the office, in a conservative and expensive raw silk business suit that would not have been out of place for the Mayor of Capitol City, but which struck Jasmine as pretentious for the City Manager of a township located in Sunland, California.

  Jasmine wiped a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose and said after a moment, "Yes?"

  "You're leaving us today?"

  You've only had it on your calendar for four months. "Yes."

  "Could you come see me after dinner, dear?"

  "Certainly. Anything else?"

  The witch smiled at Jasmine. It was clearly an effort. "No. That's all."

  Jasmine nodded and returned to her workout without saying anything further. She did not like Alaya--Alaya was one of the reasons she was leaving--and saw no reason Alaya should not know it.

  At 6:30 in the morning she had already been working out for an hour. She had five hours left to go, and would break off then only because she had preparations to make before taking her leave of Goddess Home. She felt she could have kept moving, pushing against her limits all day without stopping or slowing.

  Only four years prior she had been making a living as a professional dancer; even then she had not been in such incredible condition.

  That she was not human did not bother Jasmine Martinez in the slightest. But sometimes she wondered what her limits were, where she would find them.

  Sometimes she scared herself.

  After the stretches she did weight work, then pushups, and then sit-ups. At 7:15 two witches Jasmine knew slightly came in, warmed up too quickly, and started running on the padded quarter-kilometer track that ran around the gym's perimeter. Jasmine ignored them; after finishing her sit-ups she waited sixty seconds for her heartbeat to slow, then came to her feet and strapped a pair of fifteen-kilo weights to each wrist. She stood motionless a second, thinking. She considered Kutura, and then rejected it; Mahliya Kutura was her favorite musician, but Kutura was too slow: she wanted to move.

  Jasmine said aloud, "Command: The Politics of Dance."

  The music, the work of a Brazilian artist who had been dead for fifteen years before Jasmine had even been born, came up slowly enough, as slowly as anything by Kutura. Jasmine closed her eyes, let the sound wash over her, the slow beat of the drums, the rising saxophone, and the sax rose and rose, higher and higher, and despite herself Jasmine felt her breath quickening in anticipation of the coming moment--

  --the music broke like a wave, enveloped Jasmine inside a wall of sound. She took a slow step forward, arms unfolding like a flower greeting the sun, pivoted, lifted a foot and turned, spun, brought her hands and the weights back in toward herself, the spin whipped her to a dizzying speed, and then the drums came back, faster now, and faster, and Jasmine Martinez danced into the music, brought the music into herself, and ceased to be aware of the world, of the witches who had stopped running to watch her, and with the music holding and enveloping her moved and moved and moved and moved.

  Until she could move no more.

  Darkness descended around Jasmine as she walked to Alaya's office.

  She wore traveling clothes: a black jumpsuit with silver zippers, and a pair of soft gray boots that came to midcalf. Everything she owned in the world was packed into the black satchel in her right hand: a makeup key, changes of clothing, her Net link. Hardcopy of two letters, unsigned, from Trent the Uncatchable.

  That Thursday evening was warm, with a gentle summer breeze; the sky to the south glowed with the faint lights of Los Angeles. White and yellow glowfloats bobbed over the streets of Goddess Home, came flickering on one by one as Jasmine walked the two kilometers to Alaya's office. Goddess Home was a small place, a feminist witch's enclave of eight thousand. Men--some witches themselves--were welcome to visit, and Jasmine saw a few on the streets as she walked; but they were not supposed to spend the night and were not allowed to live among the witches.

  For most of the witches the exclusion of men was not an inconvenience. Many were lesbians, and those who were not often found the lack of enforced day-to-day contact with men refreshing.

  From her handheld a voice issued, the voice of Ralf the Wise and Powerful: "Flight confirmed. I had to kill a web angel in Dallas; stay out of the Net while passing through Dallas. Otherwise your journey should be safe."

  Jasmine knew a response was not expected of her, and did not give one. Indeed, Ralf's message barely altered the flow of her thoughts, impinged only slightly upon her melancholy awareness of the home she was leaving.

  Goddess Home was different from any other place Jasmine had ever known. There were no slidewalks, and no powered vehicles except for those employed by the three witches crippled beyond even the reach of modern medicine. In her adult life it was the only place Jasmine had lived where she had felt any sense of community. Four women greeted her by name as she walked through the streets to see Alaya Gyurtrag, and everywhere women were gathered in groups: at the town's only park, at one of the town's five sidewalk cafes. Their voices floated at the limits of comprehensibility, hundreds of women, a few male voices: the sounds of home.

  I'm going to miss this.

  The thought came unbidden, closely followed:

  But it is not safe to stay.

  "I'm catching the Bullet out of Burbank at nine-fifteen. If we could make this quick I'd appreciate it."

  "Certainly," said Alaya warmly. "Have a seat."

  Jasmine seated herself in the indicated chair, travel bag between her feet. She was distantly amused to note that the chair left her eyes about eight centimeters below Alaya's, though Alaya was not a tall woman. Alaya had changed out of that morning's business suit; now she was dressed almost as casually as Jasmine, in a pair of yellow shorts and a white silk blouse. She went barefoot on the office's pale blue shag rug.

  The office reflected the personality its occupant wished to project. A power crystal hung on a solid gold chain over the doorway. Another somewhat larger crystal sat atop a small stand at the side of Alaya's desk. The desk itself was antique American, real redwood, over 150 years of age and hand polished on every surface until it glowed dusky cr
imson beneath the office's pleasant yellow sunpaint. The walls were hung with neo-Impressionist paintings, dating largely from the 1920s: women with parasols at the beach, a man on a bicycle, two children sharing an ice cream cone, all done in warm yellows and blues and greens.

  "What can I do for you, Alaya?"

  Alaya Gyurtrag sat with her hands folded before her. Her silver hair was pulled back from her face and hung in a single long braid down her back. Bright blue eyes fixed themselves upon Jasmine. "We're going to miss you, you know that."

  "So I've been told. But between us, Alaya, you and I have never been close, and neither of us is going to miss the other. So what can I do for you?"

  Alaya chuckled with what seemed to Jasmine genuine amusement. "Your point is well made. What you can do for me, Jasmine, is--relieve my curiosity about a business matter."

  "Oh? In what way?"

  "Why are you leaving us?"

  The blunt question gave Jasmine a moment's pause.

  "Really," Alaya continued, "you could not choose a worse time for it if you tried. July the Fourth is only six days away; the Independence Day riots are due to begin shortly. Goddess Home is safe; we haven't had Independence Day riots in our history. And you're not the only one leaving us; we've had resignations pick up twelve percent this year."

  "Twelve percent?"

  Alaya nodded. "I haven't publicized the figure. Next month I will complete my first anniversary as City Manager, and women are leaving Goddess Home, for the first time, faster than they are joining. And I know it's my fault but I don't know why."

  Jasmine considered. "Many of the reasons I'm leaving are personal, Alaya. But there are two I will share with you. My finances are poor. I haven't worked except at community tasks in over two years, and my savings are nearly gone. The two ways I am capable of making a living--as a dancer and as a martial arts instructor--are inapplicable to Goddess Home. The population is too small to support a dance troupe--"