Free The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

notice must wait for that moment not to come. Greystroke was journeyman enough to chafe at such mundane duties.
     
    Fir Li’s flagship, Hot Gates, was a faerie castle set loose in space. Never intended to enter an atmosphere, it lacked even a pretense of streamlining, and might have seemed more a small village to the ancients than what they had imagined a spaceship to be. It was Greek and Gothic and Tudor and Thai, and Fir Li, who had never heard of any of those folk, had managed to incorporate all the most monstrous aspects of each. Hot Gates was a chimera, odd even by the standards of its kind—blocks and spheres and tubes and causeways were all a-jumble, protected within a spherical field and given a whimsical variety of ups and downs by an idiosyncratic use of gravity grids. The faeries had been mad. It would have seemed out of place anywhere—save here on the ragged edge of space.
    Fir Li himself had chosen midnight for his skin and moonlight for his hair. He was blacker than the gap he guarded, and in his dim-lit rooms, the white cascade of his mane could be the only visible sign of his presence. When he moved, it was swiftly and silently. Bridget ban, a colleague, had once compared him to a panther; others had compared him to the Rift itself.
    He sat in a light-framed swivel chair in the center of an otherwise empty sitting room, one wall of which was an image screen kept tuned to the Rift. He can see the Point, some in the Squadron whispered. He got these funny eyes and he can see deep down into the currents. When the ’Feds come, he’ll spot them afore our sensors do. It wasn’t true, or maybe it wasn’t true; but the Rift drew him, possessed him; and the sight of it had impressed itself upon him like a signet impresses the wax, and a bit of its emptiness had invaded his soul.
    Perhaps that was why he kept his sitting room dark at most times. The chair he occupied was an octopus, whose flexible arms caressed the Hound with controls and inputs and outputs. Using them, he could hear what the ship heard, see what the ship saw, speak with the ship’s voice—but he had muffled all but two for the moment. On one, he scrolled through a novel by the great Die Bold writer Ngozi dan Witkin, who had lived in the early days of the Great Cleansing and had written most poignantly of the loss and confusion of those first generations. But because Fir Li was paraperceptic, a second reader displayed statistics for traffic through the Rift. This did not divide his attention, for each called upon different faculties of his intellect. A third faculty, the one that touched on icon and myth and image, contemplated the great rift displayed upon his wall.
    Not all the trade ships came back.
    So the statistics said, and although Fir Li was aware of the shortcomings of all statistics—“They are first written down by the village watchman, and he writes what he damn well pleases!”—he found the figures troubling. As troubling as the cruelty of Those of Name, who had uprooted entire peoples of the Old Commonwealth and scattered them beyond the edge of space, Ngozi’s grandparents among them.
    Nothing compelled a ship departing Sapphire Point to obtain her return frank there, save the commercial regulations of the League. But the Hound of Fir Li had obtained the customs information from all of the crossings and had cross-tabulated them, and…
    …not all the ships came back.
    Many of the crossings were narrow, and a ship ill-piloted might run afoul of the shallows and beach catastrophically into the subluminal mud. The god Ricci, who caresses each point of space, had graced the roads with a “speed of space” far greater than flat space, and a ship might slide down them comfortably below local-c yet far above Newtonian-c. A ship at translight speeds that found itself suddenly in Newtonian space would become a brief but spectacular burst of Cerenkov radiation. Such mishaps were not common, but they did occur. Yet models existed