Dancing in Dreamtime (45 page)

“He's all right,” Patrick assures me, peeling my hands away and holding them firmly in one big paw, where I let them stay.

The slapping of thighs accelerates. The men cry sharply, and in their frenzied circling they begin to glow, their chests and faces burning like embers. A headdress smolders. Where are the alarms? Why don't the extinguishers spew foam? The cabin reeks of singed fur.

The blood slams in my head. My muscles twitch. Craving some bit of order, I count the graybeards as they wheel past. Only
nine, yet they seem like a mob. I count the seated crones, whose arms thresh the air. Eight? There should be seven. I count again. Eight. Suddenly, the crone nearest to me rises. Her face is cloaked in a bird mask with a hooked copper beak. Silver braids sway against her doeskin dress. Over her shoulder, a raven-haired papoose squints at me.

“Come home with me, daughter,” the old woman whispers. Her voice is soothing, like water over stones, washing away all other sounds.

The bird mask and peeping child crowd out all other sights. “Where, Grandmother?”

“You know the place.” She rakes a finger across my brow.

An image rises in me of stony crags, blowing dust, the moon caught in the limbs of a leafless tree. I do know the place—the Black Hills, where Hawk Soars hid while soldiers killed the rest of her family. The old woman nods. “Fly us there,” she says.

Power surges through me. I tug my hands free from the grip of a hulking man with a giant eye on his chest, and fling him aside. My fingers find the keys. I start to punch in coordinates for the Black Hills, when my wrists are seized by a scarecrow with lightning on his chest. I try to lift my arms to shove him away, but his strength is greater than mine. He squeezes my wrists and bends down as though to kiss me. Instead, he puffs air into my left ear, then my right, and noise comes crashing in on me again, my vision widens to take in the cabin, the chanting women, the whirling men, and I see Patrick with an astonished expression picking himself up from the floor. My mouth fills with the tinny taste of fear.

“She came, and you did not warn me,” Luke tells me sternly.

“I didn't realize who it was.”

“She tried to make us crash.”

“But why? Why would she hurt us?”

“She does not want us to sing Earth back to health. She wants to hasten the end, wipe out the two-leggeds, clear the land of those who mined and paved and poisoned it.”

“She'd condemn everybody, even the innocent?”

“The innocent would be reborn on a new Earth. Her tribe and all the tribes that never caused harm to Earth would be reborn, along with all the animals and plants.” He says this with the fervor of a man who has been tempted by the same vision.

Patrick slouches up, rubbing his ribs. “What did you hit me with?”

“It wasn't Constance,” Luke says. “It was her ancestor. The black shaman.”

I shiver, counting the crones. Seven. None wears a bird mask or carries a papoose.

“She will try again,” Luke warns.

The dancing men and drumming women put out a fierce heat, yet I keep shivering.

“Why doesn't Connie move to the cockpit?” Patrick suggests.

Luke shakes his head. “She is our link with Earth, which she holds inside her.”

“How?” I ask, startled.

Luke points at my screens. “It pours in through your eyes.”

I look, and see India spreading away toward the rumpled quilt of the Himalayas. The sight is more familiar than my own bed.
Do
I carry the Earth inside me?

“While I am gone,” Luke tells Patrick, “Constance must not use her machine.”

“How can I stop her?”

The old man plucks the rainbow belt at Patrick's waist. “Catch her with this.”

The arms of the women blur as they pound their thighs. The men whirl so fast their feet scarcely touch the floor. There is a banging on the hull and the squeal of tortured metal. In the earphone I hear Sonya Mirek shrieking and the engineers shouting and the captain bellowing for silence. The ship is breaking up, I feel certain, yet I am oddly calm.

From the inner circle, the Inuit woman, Marie, struggles upright and stumps over to me on her bowed legs. Placing a hand on my neck, she pushes me gently forward until my cheek rests on my crossed forearms atop the console. “Be still, young one,” she tells me. “You must hold us up and welcome us back.” The fat old woman clambers onto my shoulders, light as a child. With my upturned eye, I watch her grab the birch trunk and climb nimbly up. When she reaches the tip of the tree, a hole opens in the cabin roof and she vanishes through it.

Why aren't we sucked into space, with our precious air? I am too astonished to feel afraid. Next comes the woman from Borneo amid a cloud of butterflies. Once again, child-light feet tiptoe along my spine, then up she climbs to the top of the tree and disappears. One by one, the other women follow her through the hole, taking the sound of their clapping with them.

I glance at Patrick, who watches me, the rainbow belt tightly balled in his fist. The sunlight has drained from his face. “It's dicey,” he says, “but they may pull it off.”

The hull groans. The panicky voices of the crew swell in my ear.

The Pygmy skips in from the ring of men, stamping his feet, yet when he pounces on my back he weighs less than a cat. Up he goes, vaulting from my shoulders to the tree and on up from branch to branch and through the opening. Next the antlered herdsman, then the Siberian with his clanging copper amulets, then the immense Mongolian in his iron helmet and tuxedo, nearly weightless, all of them, skittering up my back. As each man vanishes, the cabin grows quieter.

Last of all comes Luke, in his bowler hat and red loin cloth, his face solemn above the white beard, the lightning streaks on his chest flashing. He glares at me. “You must not move, Constance. You are the threshold, our way in and our way out.” Then he climbs swiftly, and just before disappearing calls down, “Mind her, Patrick!”

The hull ceases to groan. The crew hushes. I hear only the thudding of my heart. Then a creek-water voice pours over me, calling, “Daughter! Daughter!” I lift my head, and feel the prickle of hot skin as my cheek peels away from my sweaty forearm.

“Hold still, Connie!” Patrick's voice is muffled, as though he shouts through layers of cloth. “You'll trap them out there!”

His hand on me is a fly I shrug off. “Grandmother,” I whisper. Her brightness dims the air. The bird mask is thrown back and her face is webbed in wrinkles, the mouth cinched tight with bitterness. Her silver braids gleam. In place of arms she has russet wings, folded now, and her toes are talons. The papoose gazes over her shoulder with my face.

“Come away, Daughter,” the bird woman murmurs.

There is a resistance in me, but it gives way before the pressure of her stare. I gather myself to rise, ignoring the man's fumbling efforts to hold me.

“Come, child, I will take you to the soul's country.” She opens her wings. The undersides glow with the soft luster of a full moon. The papoose gazes at me with my own eyes.

I am drawn to my feet. The wings open wider, and I step toward them, but a serpent coils around my waist and yanks me backward an instant before the wings can embrace me.

“Daughter!”

“Grandmother!” I wail, clawing at the rainbow snake that binds me, and I tumble backward, knocking the man down, but he pins me to the deck and keeps tightening the belt.

“Connie,” he hisses, “wake up!”

Suddenly I recognize the voice. “Patrick, you're hurting me.”

“Is she gone?”

I gaze wildly about, but can no longer see Hawk Soars or the baby. I nod, sobbing.

Patrick loosens the belt a little. “Crikey, you're strong when she gets in you.”

Between sobs, I say, “Why won't you let me go with her?”

“And kill my wizards and crash the ship? I'd sooner throttle you.” As though to demonstrate his willingness, he picks me up and sets me roughly in my seat at the console. “Now put your head down, just like before.”

As my cheek touches the console, there is a sharp high whistle, and the cabin goes dark, the ventilator quits, my screens black out. The stewards grind to a halt. Gabble roars from the earphone, Sonya Mirek screeching, the captain barking orders, then static, then dead air. I hear a scuffle from above, a pounding on the hull, then nothing but my own gasps. The lights flare as the back-up power kicks in, then dim and go out. We are left in utter darkness.

Her strength is in me. The ship may die, but I can soar without it. I snatch the rainbow snake from my waist and fling it away. I smack the hand loose from my neck. I could snap this man like a twig. He pants, his voice gone small and fearful. “Listen, Connie. You've got to put your head down, or you'll kill them. You're their way back in.”

In the darkness I hear the scrape of talons on the floor, feel air move from the slow beating of wings. She waits for me. I can crawl onto her shoulders, become the papoose, fly with her. Or I can stay here in this life, puny, mortal, and walk on my own legs.

I stare into the gloom, unable to see her. Why doesn't she grab me, force me to go with her? Why leave me this choice? Seconds pass, like bubbles swelling and bursting.

“Grandmother?” I whisper. No answer.

“They'll die, Connie,” the man cries. “We'll all die.”

In the darkness and silence, I hold the spinning Earth inside me, the sheen of oceans, the continents with their snowy mountains and meandering rivers, the forests and prairies, and the host of living creatures, sadly diminished, battered, but beautiful still. At last I choose. “No, Grandmother, I will not leave.”

There is a rush of air, the sharp high whistle of a hawk, and she is gone.

The cabin lights flicker on, the ventilator hisses, stewards purr, monitors glow, and the earphone sputters with talk. The captain announces that Sonya Mirek has been sedated. All stations report systems normal. The ship appears to be undamaged.

I bend over the console and lay a wet cheek on my crossed arms. I weep and weep. Patrick strokes my hair.

Presently, a dusky foot appears through the hole at the top of the tree, then two bony legs, then the entire scarecrow figure of
Luke Easterday, who eases down from branch to branch, steps on my back, and hops to the floor. “You frightened us, Constance!”

“Leave her alone,” Patrick says.

“The door was locked.”

“I said leave her alone. Can't you see it tore her up?”

The old man grunts. The other shamans descend the tree and scramble over my back, heavier now, their trinkets and beads jangling. They encircle me, charged with triumph from their journey, chattering in their many tongues. Patrick translates for me. They have spoken to the powers, tuned the cosmic strings, sung the melodies of Dreamtime.

Have they truly? I don't know what to believe. When I go back to my home on that miraculous, exquisite globe, I must walk in the woods, wade in creeks, hunt for wildflowers, search for birds and butterflies, foxes and frogs, to see if Earth has begun to heal.

No longer a stepping-stone, I rise and stretch. Every joint aches. I gaze at the spot where the hawk woman stood in all her splendor. Two long russet feathers lie on the deck. I pick them up and place one behind each ear. Noticing, Patrick smiles and runs his palm over my cheek. I have been wrenched out of a world I thought I knew and thrust into a bewildering new one, unsure what I have lost, what found.

Earlier versions of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following periodicals and books:

“The Audubon Effect,” “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” “Dancing in Dreamtime,” and “Travels in the Interior” in
Omni
; “The Land Where Songtrees Grow,” “Sleepwalker,” and “Terrarium” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
; “The Anatomy Lesson,” “The Artist of Hunger,” “Ascension,” “The Engineer of Beasts,” “Mountains of Memory,” and “Clear-Cut” (under the title “Tree of Dreams”) in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
; “The First Journey of Jason Moss” in
Poet & Critic
; “Quarantine” in
Habitats
, edited by Susan Shwartz; “Eros Passage” in
New Dimensions 11
, edited by Robert Silverberg and Marta Randall; and “Touch the Earth” in
Edges
, edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin.

“The Engineer of Beasts,” “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” and “Mountains of Memory” were later adapted for the novel
The Engineer of Beasts
. “Terrarium” and “Quarantine” were later adapted for the novel
Terrarium
.

Most of the stories in this collection behaved themselves and quit haunting me after they were finished. One of the exceptions was “Terrarium,” which kept stirring my imagination long after I had written the final scene. I wondered how Phoenix, this cautious man, would find the courage to abandon the Enclosure, the only world he has known, and escape with Teeg into the wilds. I wondered how Teeg acquired her daring, and her passion for nature. Would these seemingly mismatched lovers go outside alone, or with fellow conspirators? If there is a conspiracy, how was it formed? How would they escape? How would they survive in the wilds? Would the security forces discover them, and, if so, what punishment would follow? Has Earth begun to recover from the ecological breakdown that forced the move into the Enclosure? What species have survived the pollution and climate disruption, and what ones have perished? Is there any prospect for reconciliation between the human and natural worlds?

As I wrote my way toward answering such questions, the stories “Quarantine” and “Touch the Earth” emerged, and eventually the tale of Phoenix and Teeg grew into a novel called
Terrarium
. To give you a taste of the novel, which is also available from Indiana University Press, here are two sample chapters. In chapter 4, while
outside on a repair mission, Teeg surveys a bay on the Oregon shore as a possible site for a colony. She tries to imagine what her mentor, Zuni Franklin, a designer of the Enclosure and an advocate for moving humankind inside, would make of the plans for an escape into the wilds. In chapter 10, Teeg takes Phoenix to a meeting of the conspirators, in hopes that he will pass their test and be accepted as a member of the group. With or without him, they will make their move soon.