Dancing in Dreamtime (42 page)

During launch, strapped in seats and cloaked in pressure suits, they looked like ordinary passengers. They might have been a load of tourists, or physicians heading to a symposium in orbit, or bureaucrats on a junket. But once the simulated gravity kicked in, they shrugged free of the suits and emerged wearing loincloths, patched blue-jeans, sequined skirts, fur-trimmed parkas, with necklaces and bracelets of bones or copper amulets. These bizarre outfits wheel about me now like figures on a carousel. One man wears an iron helmet and decrepit tuxedo. A woman wears a feathered headdress and a coat stitched with gleaming seashells. Snakeskins trail from ankles, bird-wings flap from shoulders, tails wag from bare haunches. The exuberant faces glisten with sweat. Most of the stamping feet are bare, but some are shod in moccasins, others in boots, sandals, or sneakers.

Aside from me, the only person in the cabin who doesn't dance is the major-domo for this expedition, a bulky, sun-roasted Australian named Patrick Johnson. “I'm a humble servant, not a leader,” he told me when I met him before launch. “Merely a facilitator, an oiler of gears.” It is hard to see where he will find the oil, because his manner, like his flesh, is so dry. “Then who
is
the leader?” I asked him. He pointed a forefinger at the sky, saying, “The Great Spirit.” I assumed, from the glint in his ice-blue eyes, that he was joking.

Now, through breaks in the circle of dancers, I catch glimpses of him lounging in the front row, his ruddy face beaming, oblivious to the uproar. He wears a grass-green caftan with a large rufous eye painted on the chest.

As a steadying contrast to the ruckus that flows in through my right ear, the voices of the crew reach me through the plug in my left ear, reciting numbers, formulas, and procedures, mixed with occasional barbs.

“Do they have you wearing feathers yet, Connie?” says the captain. He and the copilots remain forward in the cockpit, the engineers remain aft, all of them amused that I must ride in the passenger cabin. The shamans need to study the images of Earth on my screens as they choose the routes to follow, so my console has been moved from the flight deck and socketed here next to the area cleared for dancing.

“No feathers yet,” I tell the captain. “But I'm tempted by these bear-tooth bracelets.”

“Warn us before you go native,” he says.

To play along for the crew, I say, “You never know what lurks back there in the genes. My triple-great grandmother was a full-blooded Lakota named Hawk Soars.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. According to family stories, she was a fierce woman. At the Battle of Little Bighorn she castrated seven soldiers.”

“Dead ones, I hope.”

“The stories don't say.”

There is a chorus of male groans from the engineers, and a female snigger from one of the copilots.

“Was this ancestor of yours a witch doctor?” the captain asks.

“I wish I knew.”

The dancers whirl about me, grunting and hollering. When I glance at Patrick Johnson, the rusty eye on his chest appears to wink.

The ship has been leased by the World Indigenous Peoples Fund to carry seventeen passengers—the shamans plus Johnson—for a week in orbit. It is a small party to run upstairs, but otherwise there is nothing unusual about the arrangements. We are to fly wherever our customers ask us to, as we would for a load of joy-riders or eco-artists, or officials wishing to see with their own eyes the expanding deserts and dwindling forests. Never before, however, have I been asked to navigate according to the dictates of our passengers' dreams. The point of the trip, outlined in our briefing paper, is to heal the Earth with dance and song.

To keep from going gaga, I slip between a bear and a wolf in the circle of dancers and make my way to the cockpit, an arena of meticulous order and subdued voices. It is like escaping from a whirlpool into a calm lagoon. My face must betray my relief, because Lillian Riggs, a copilot whom I know from previous runs, asks me, “Pretty wild back there, Connie?”

“Bedlam.”

“It's the screwiest bunch I've ever hauled,” says Captain Blake. “Just look at them.”

The sound has been muted on the cabin monitor, so the outlandish figures wheel in silence on the screen.

“I have the feeling they're still warming up,” I say.

The captain strokes his kempt beard. “You mean they'll get crazier?”

“Why do they need a ship, anyway?” says Lillian. “Couldn't they just fly on their own?”

Magical flight is only one of the powers attributed to the shamans in our briefing paper. Supposedly the spry old coots can visit the underworld as well as heaven, dive to the ocean depths, converse with animals, pass unharmed through fire, travel outside their bodies, stab themselves without bleeding, cure all manner of sickness, and raise the dead.

“Maybe they can put me in touch with my dear departed wife,” the captain muses.

“Why not have them bring her back?” says Lillian.

The captain frowns. “She wasn't that dear.”

All this while, the other copilot, a solemn trainee named Sonya Mirek, never utters a word. Tall, custard-skinned, with lank hair cut ruler-straight across forehead and neck, she must be twenty-five or so, half a dozen years younger than I am. Seated stiffly erect at her instrument panel, she runs a light pen down a checklist, as though to declare her devotion to duty while the rest of us joke around.

Perhaps sensing her rebuke, the captain says, “Well, we'd better earn our fat paychecks.”

I return to my station at the heart of the whirlpool.

A spell of quiet. The drums and rattles are still. The shamans are resting, a few in seats, most on the floor, squatting or sitting
cross-legged or lying down. A graybeard in a turban balances on his head, his gown drooping to reveal scrawny shanks. A kneeling crone draws a landscape on the deck with colored sand. Stewards wheel through the crowd, taking orders for food and drinks. Their translation programs have been severely tested by these polyglot passengers, whose voices sound to me less like human speech than like the racket of nature.

The one human servant the shamans brought along seems to have precious little to do. Patrick Johnson cleans his fingernails with a penknife, picks lint from his grassy sleeves, stretches and yawns. The eye on the front of his caftan droops. At length he ambles over to my console, his body moving with a horsy weight, his sunburned face cracked by a smile.

“All serene there, mate?” he says to me, the Aussie accent as thick as his neck.

“Smooth sailing,” I reply.

“How do you keep track of all those screens?” He nods at my console, where half a dozen monitors currently show views of Iceland, Greenland, and the Arctic Ocean.

“It takes a while to learn. Like a musical instrument, I suppose.”

“Only thing I ever learned to play is a harmonica, and that fair rotten.”

I glance sidelong at him. In the right setting—a desert, say, under a broiling sun—he might look good. Big as he is, at least he'd offer shade. “First time up?”

“First time in a ship.”

I want to ask how else he came up, if not in a ship. Then I remember the claims about magical flight, and let it pass. Instead I ask, “How did you meet your friends?”

“This lot?” He jerks a thumb at the shamans. “By accident, the way I tumble into most things. I was collecting Aborigine songs for my thesis, when this bloke from the WIPF hired me as a guide. Wanted to visit the dawn of time. Learn the wisdom of primal peoples. He talked like that! Funny Pom, he was, with bags of money. Pretty soon I was guiding him to oases in the Sahara, huts on the Amazon, temples in the Himalayas, Pueblos in the American Southwest—anywhere the old Earth-religion survived. Eventually, he persuaded all these folks to fly up here and see what they could do for the planet, and paid me to ride along.”

“There must be lots of squabbles,” I say, “with so many different beliefs.”

“Oh, it's all the same religion.”

I survey the cabin. The sand-painter still broods over her artwork, the turbaned elder still balances on his head. Horns and feathers show above the seats. “One religion?”

“Oh, they dress bloody strange,” Patrick concedes. “Look at my own getup!” He plucks the blousy waist of his caftan, causing the rufous eye to blink. “But don't judge by costumes. Underneath, we're all the same forked animals, living on the same planet.”

“Do you believe all of it? The shamanic flights? Spirit trances? Dreamsongs?”

“I believe they believe it.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I heard what you asked, and it's what my mum calls a rude question.”

I blush, feeling stupid. “So it is. I'm sorry.”

“No need. My hide's as thick as a kangaroo's.”

Jaw clamped tight, I fiddle with dials, stare at screens, pretending to be busy.

“Ah, now, don't go all glum,” he says. “Here, I know what you need.”

I look up from my console only when I hear the music. His grin is as wide as the silver case of the harmonica. His cheeks puff, his blue eyes narrow to larky slits. He does indeed play rottenly. The shamans rise once more and begin to shuffle.

Shutters descend over the windows to give us night, and eight hours later they open to give us dawn. I wake with scraps of a dream caught in my throat: a hooked claw, a baby, a knife. I sit up in fear, slither from my pouch, check the screens, do fifteen minutes of aerobics. Gradually, the lump in my throat dissolves. When I go aft for my shower, the engineers call me Hawk Soars and check my shoulders for the buds of wings.

By the time I return, the shamans have gathered in a ring to discuss their own dreams. Patrick Johnson hunkers down among them, translating, a globe in his lap. Now and again one of the shamans crouches beside him and points with a gnarled finger at some geographical feature. The others nod their heads, as if the same location appeared in their own dreams.

After a while they break their circle and approach my console, pushing Patrick ahead.

“They're spooked by your flame-colored hair and your electronics,” he says, “so they want me to do the talking.”

“The electronics part I can believe.” What a dizzying leap it must be, from grass huts in the bush to our ship hurtling through space. “So where do they want to go?”

“All business, eh? Right-o, then. Here's the first path.” He traces an arc on the globe from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, over Tasmania, New Guinea, the Philippines, and China, to the highlands of Mongolia.

“Then where?” I ask.

“Won't know until one of them goes into a trance.”

I relay this to the cockpit. “Bizarre,” Captain Blake sighs into my earphone. “Trances, dreams! But you punch it in, Connie, and we'll cruise it.”

As I set the coordinates, the shamans crowd closer, smelling of incense, musty fur, sweat, and grease paint. I hear the rasp of breath, clack of bracelets, tinkle of bells. Patrick explains to them in signs what I am doing.