The January Dancer by Michael Flynn Page B

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Geantraí: Bread and Salt
    It began on Jehovah, the scarred man says…
    …because this is the place where everything begins or where everything ends, and we are not yet at the end.
    The Bar of Jehovah hums like a bagpipe. All those private conversations blend together and couple with some curious resonances due to the architecture of the room. There is a permanence to this sound. Like those eddies that form in flowing water, it persists independently of the men and women who flow in and flow out. It is said that there are conversations still going on, long after their originators have passed away. The hum seldom changes in pitch, though it will rise and fall in volume and even, by random chance, drop into momentary silences.
    The Bar is a place where the dispossessed take possession. The skyfaring folk—freighters and liners and survey ships and military vessels—come and go, but there is a substrate beneath these transients, a more permanent population for whom the Bar is less a refuge than a home. Here, old grudges are endlessly rehashed and new plans continually laid. Here, the past is always remembered and the future never comes.
     
    There were five at the table, speaking in that desultory way of chance acquaintances. Drink and smoke and crowding and craft had placed them together. They spoke of ship arrivals and departures; of the quality of the drinks or the inhalations. The weather came in for much debate, not only the electric potential around the Jehovah Interchange and the local speed of space, but also the mundane weather planet-side. It looked like rain.
    “I saw a storm once,” Captain January told his companions. “A dust storm. Maybe seven, eight weeks back, it was. It covered half the planet, and the lightning flashed like popcorn.” It was a big Spiral Arm, with a lot of planets, and nothing has ever been seen or heard but that someone else hasn’t seen or heard a bigger. No one disputed January’s bragging rights; but Micmac Anne, sitting beside him, recalled that the storm had covered only a quarter of the southern hemi sphere. How long, she wondered, before raconteurial evolution produced a version that blanketed the entire world?
    She could not recall that escape without a shudder. She had seen the lightning spike upward five or six leagues from the cloud bank, to ground in the solar wind itself. It had licked each of the boats like the tongue of an indigo snake. She studied Amos under lowered lids and sought refuge from what-might-have-been in a tankard of beer. He could laugh about it; but he had only lived through it. He hadn’t had to watch .
    The man on January’s left had entered a world where none could follow, his face nestled in his arms on the table. From time to time, he roused himself and spoke. “Had me ’n ancestor on Die Bold, praise be,” he announced in a local accent, and the table chuckled. Who did not have an ancestor on the Old Planets? “Lef’ me a legacy,” he went on. “Got a ’ficial notice, an’ all. Lord knows I could use ut.” His hand snaked out and pulled to him the hose from which he sucked the smoke of his own particular fantasy. Air bubbled through the huqa, cooling the smoke, lying to the lungs. He exhaled slowly, contentedly, and the table filter gathered in the brume and it was no more. “There’s this guy there, on Die Bold,” he explained. “He can sennit t’me, God willin’, but he needs two thousan’ ’n Gladjola—’n Glad-i-o-la —Bills t’ file th’ right papers.” The man’s fingers moved restlessly, playing with the hose. “Fren’s ’r helpin’ raise th’ bills.” He paused hopefully, then added, “M’ fren’s can share the ’heritance whennit comes, God willing.”
    The others looked to one another and grinned. He had no friends here. Not for so transparent a ruse as that.
    Another of the tablemates, a woman as thin as a willow branch, mahogany-dark with blue eyes and bright yellow hair, wondered aloud