To Hold Infinity (24 page)

“It's a line dance,” Lori said. “A traditional warm-up, before Xanthia performs her
pièce de résistance
.”

“You can join in.” Vin grinned at her. “I know you're fit enough. Look, here are the steps.”

She danced a fast jig sideways, then back to her starting position.

The low mournful sound of pipes blew eerily through the ballroom, announcing the dance was about to start.

“Sorry.” Yoshiko shook her head. “I think I missed that. You'd better go ahead.”

“Nonsense.” Lori was firm. “This is an intro before the dance, for people to get in the mood. Go on, Vin. Show her again, but slowly.”

Vin did the first five steps, and Yoshiko mouthed to herself: heel-toe-side-heel-toe.

Vin paused, and Yoshiko motioned for her to continue. One-two, one-two, one-two-forward-three. One-two.

Very slowly, Yoshiko moved through the steps, concentrating on placing her feet correctly and not worrying about anything else.

“Perfect.” Lori nodded.

Then Yoshiko reversed the sequence of steps, moving faster this time, returning to where she had started.

“Er, not bad,” said Vin.

Then Yoshiko danced the full routine, back and forth, at full speed. She did it once more, just to make sure. Got it.

“Bloody hell.” Vin stared at her. “Are you sure you're not a Luculenta?”

Yoshiko laughed, wondering if Lori had brought Vin up to date on the conversation with Federico and friends, and deciding that she probably had.

“Okinawan dance and martial arts are practically the same thing.” Yoshiko shrugged. “Well…depending on how you look at it.”

“We're impressed,” said Lori. “Come on, let's take our places. Yoshiko, you've just to do those steps and perform a simple turn with everybody else. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.”

As Yoshiko followed Lori and Vin into the lineup, she saw Maggie at the side of the room, and waved to her. The big Fulgidus gentleman was standing beside her.

Maggie stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle which caused half the heads in the room to turn.

“Shake a leg, Yoshiko!”

Yoshiko closed her eyes in embarrassment.

“Who's your friend?” Vin was laughing.

“Never seen her before.”

There was a roll of drums, and the sound of lively pipes and strings.

“Yee-hah!” called someone, probably Maggie, and then they were into the dance.

Heel-toe-side-heel-toe…Yoshiko's heart was jumping like the rest of her as she danced in time with the whole line in front of her.

They turned ninety degrees and danced the steps again as the lively jig filled the air and made her very bones dance.

The ground flew past beneath Yoshiko's feet, and she danced as though she were twenty again, no, fifteen, and the sap of youth rose in her veins and she danced and she danced and she danced…

When the music came to an end she was gasping for breath, and the clapping was thunderous as all the onlookers congratulated them and the dancers applauded each other. Yoshiko's blood was singing, and the music still coursed through her brain though the sound system was silent.

Vin hugged her.

“That was marvellous.” Yoshiko hugged her back. “You're wonderful.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. Need a drink?”

“I think so.”

Lori left them to talk to someone, while Vin escorted Yoshiko to the side of the room, where Maggie was waiting with her new escort.

“Down this.” Maggie handed Yoshiko a goblet. “Roberto here assures me it'll do you good.”

“Thanks.” Yoshiko gulped down the drink. “How do you do, Roberto?”

“Hi.” The tall Fulgidus' voice was very deep.

“I don't suppose,” asked Vin, “anyone knows who shouted ‘Yee-hah!' just as the dance was starting?”

Maggie and Roberto shook their heads, exaggeratedly innocent expressions on their faces.

“I didn't think so.”

Yoshiko drained the goblet completely. The drink was tart and fruity, quite thick, but something in it was perking her up.

“Thanks, Roberto. This is good.”

Roberto nodded.

“Say, Maggie,” Yoshiko added. “Did you find Xanthia, in the end?”

“Er, no.” Maggie looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I forgot.”

Vin smothered a laugh.

“Gotcha.” Vin smiled, as the colour rose in Maggie's cheeks. “Serves you right.”

Roberto looked puzzled.

“It's a female thing,” Yoshiko explained.

Roberto smiled uncertainly.

“Anyway,” said Maggie hurriedly, “if you're still worried about Xanthia, maybe Vin should do that Skein thing, or one of those tricks.”

“No need.” Vin looked around. “It's almost time for the Sun-Wheel Dance to start. She has to be here for that.”

“Oh, no.” Yoshiko groaned. “I don't think I can manage another dance.”

“Well…actually, you can sit this one out.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Sorry, but it's Luculenti only. You see, everyone opens up a channel direct to the prima donna—that's Xanthia, this year—and she creates kinaesthetic directives to a hundred Luculenti simultaneously, who all choose to follow her directions, almost letting her control them.”

“She's conducting?” Maggie looked interested. “Or choreographing? Something like that?”

“Kind of,” Vin replied. “She makes up the pattern as she goes along, to suit the individuals she finds. She'll also be in direct interface with the sound system, composing and creating the music, too.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

“Actually—” Yoshiko interrupted. “There's more. Isn't she creating some kind of light show at the same time?”

Vin nodded.

“One dance, and you're an expert, huh?” Maggie shook her head, smiling.

Yoshiko pointed to the big skeletal array suspended in shadows, high up in the ceiling's vault.

“I was here when Xanthia was getting attuned to it, or something. And I've seen Lori use it to sculpt huge blocks of stone.”

“As one does.” Maggie sighed. “Doesn't anyone round here just sit down and watch a holodrama?”

Vin laughed, just as a flight of silver swallows passed by overhead—

“What the hell?” said Maggie.

—and arced up into the darkness of the domed ceiling, where a small moon appeared. The swallows, diminishing in size as though with vast distance, travelled to the far moon, orbited nine times, and dwindled into nothingness.

There was scattered applause, and all eyes turned to the main entrance as the lights grew dimmer, becoming dark as night. Tiny distant sparks of blue. The doorway glowed eerily green.

Tiny lambent blue flames licked across the floor in two parallel lines, forming a pathway. A low, almost subsonic hum, sounded through the floor, dark and threatening.

A lone castrato voice…

Dark figures, standing in the doorway.

The tinkling of bells…

A misty column of silver stars hissed softly upwards in the centre of the room, like a pillar reaching to the heavens. The dark figures marched towards it, between the lines of flickering flames.

The goddess, and her four attendants.

Haunting pipes, and a distant drum, accompanied their journey into light. An eerie chorus sang like insistent ghosts, in languages dead for centuries.

…And Yoshiko felt for a moment as though her youth, her dear Ken, were but a touch, a reaching gesture away…

The blue flames died, while a lonely lyre wept in the night. In a low rustle, the onlookers slowly, quietly, drew back to the edges of the vast room.

Solid shadows, in the darkness.

A hundred figures stood in frozen ranks, a century of spirits haunting the goddess—The goddess who ascended to, climbed
into
the pillar of silver light…which burst apart in lambent golden flame.

And the goddess, Xanthia, danced with a stirring sway of her powerful hips between two ornate steel pillars—real, not holo—which burned in showers of gleaming sparks. The air shimmered, where lasers from above cut through the darkness, igniting the metal.

Xanthia's four attendants, yellow-robed Luculenta girls with garlanded hair, knelt before her.

“My God,” said Maggie.

Sea-green light, mistlike, rose from the floor.

Among the rows of Luculenti, movement. Scattered at first: at a corner of the pattern, a man danced three paces, and stopped. A woman danced an ellipse, grew still. At opposite edges, two groups leaped in awe-inspiring unison, clicked their heels, and stamped.

Violet swarmed through the sea of green.

Everyone danced forward one thunderous step, advancing like one giant fearsome organism, then burst into swirling dance.

Life and death, courage and despair, balanced on uncertainty's edge.

Haunting, haunting, the plaintive flute, dispersing the mist.

Joyous, joyous, the dancing drums and strings, drawing a silver grid upon the darkness.

They danced.

Ordered synchrony broke apart into athletic turbulence. Sparks rose from their feet, while infinity fell away below.

They formed a cross, dancing clockwise, while swallows flew in counterpoint.

Faster and faster, they spun.

Maggie whooped as golden suns fell through the air and the dancers whirled impossibly fast and the music climaxed,
boom-boom-boom
, and was still.

Stunned silence.

Thunderous applause.

A tide of sound washed through the room, wave after wave of it, and Yoshiko was clapping hard enough to hurt, and tears were stinging in her eyes.

 

Such love. The goddess: such impossible, unreachable, magnificent beauty.

Rafael's chest was swelling, and pure hot emotion such as he had never known swept over him.

It was her moment of greatest triumph.
Xanthia, Xanthia, Xanthia—can you imagine the sweet fulfilment of literal godhead?

Be mine, be mine, be mine.

The applauding onlookers were forgotten as he focussed upon her, the object of his desire, the pinnacle of his love.

Her sweetness was an elixir he had to drink. Her brilliance, a star which must become part of his constellation, his galaxy. Her warmth, her soul's core, cried out to be subsumed in the volcanic furnace of his desire.

Now, my love.

Our moment comes.

Now.

 

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Go.

Rafael loosed his infiltration code.

His mouth drew back in a rictus of sheer lust as his vampire modules thrust through the fast-comm link that was his and Xanthia's alone, and penetrated LuxPrime protocols, and entered her.

He drank her soul, as deep scanware plunged through her thoughts, her memories, her most intimate desires, and heisenberged them into oblivion even as it sent back the info in wave after wave of pulsing code, filling his cache, dumping her mind and experience into him, ready for integration.

A mad desire rose in him to go all the way, actually to open up his cache and merge Xanthia's soul into his right here, before two hundred witnesses, but that was utter madness.

Whimpering with frustration, he fought that desire down.

Control.

Ah, control.

Yes, Xanthia. Yes, my love.

You're mine.

Xanthia screamed.

 

 

A thousand banshees wailed, screeching all the way into ultrasonics, as the goddess's fear and terror screeched through the sound system and everyone in the room clapped hands to ears.

A man dropped in front of Yoshiko, hands clamped over his head, blood trickling between his fingers.

“What's happening?” Maggie shouted. Blood was running from her nose.

“NO! NO! NO!”

Xanthia yelled as streamers of lethal red shot in all directions through a chaos of purple light and jagged lightning.

“Some kind of seiz—Look out.” Yoshiko pulled Maggie aside as a Luculenta fell, eyes turned up inside her head, showing pure white.

“We've got to stop her.”

Blazing light. The room disappeared in a psychedelic hell, spinning sickeningly round and round, crawling with bloody pulsing colours. Torture, instantiated in light.

Yoshiko shut her eyes, moving by touch, and grabbed hold of Maggie.

“I've got you. Can you see?”

“No—”

Darkness.

Silver moons fell crazily through the air.

“Maggie. Get out of here.”

“It's only light.” Maggie, standing unsteadily, rubbed her eyes.