Dancing in Dreamtime (47 page)

Against the dazzle at the center shone fainter lights, like dim stars set off against the awesome fire. The lights formed a ring, and with her last shred of consciousness Teeg knew which light was her own and which Phoenix's. The ring drew inward, the ten lights merged into one and that light merged with the fire, and Teeg was
Phoenix was Jurgen was Hinta, Teeg was all the other seekers, and she was God, and she was herself. There was no wind anymore, for she was at the source of all winds, and no time passing, no urge to go anywhere else; there was only abundance and peace.

After a while the breeze caught her, shoving her away from the center, back toward the two-legged packet of flesh called Teeg Passio. The walls thickened around her again, walls of galaxies, walls of bone, shutting her up once more within the confines of her own self. Yet as she roused from the trance she brought with her glimmers of that inner blaze. She held her fingers close to her face and bent each one in turn, feeling the joints mesh, the blood flow, the billion cells flame with their sparks of the infinite burning. Each time, coming back from the center, she was more amazed by life, by this flame leaping in the meshes of matter.

She reached out to left and right, found Marie's hand on one side and Phoenix's on the other. Hand joined to hand around the circle and the shudder of return passed through them, like the involuntary shudder after a bout of crying or lovemaking. Following a spell of quiet, to let the ecstasy settle in them all, Jurgen said, “Peace.”

“Peace,” said Teeg.

“Peace, peace, peace,” Phoenix murmured. His cheeks were slick.

“Welcome, new one,” the others said.

Phoenix gazed at them, letting the tears come. He sat there with a look of baffled joy on his face while the seekers approached him, each one in turn pressing palms to his palms and forehead to his forehead. Marie came last. Her shaved head glistened. She
beamed down at Phoenix with all the intensity of her weathered and finely wrinkled face. “Now you know where we truly are,” she said, brushing her forehead against his, “and don't you ever forget.”

“That's where we are,” Phoenix echoed her. “And all this,” he said, gesturing at the other people and the oilsmeared walls of the tank, “all this is illusion?”

Marie's gleaming head wagged side-to-side. “No, it's not illusion. It's performance. We're all performing the history of God, all of us, men and women and trees and pebbles, each one carrying bits of fire.”

She withdrew to join the others at the far side of the tank, leaving only Teeg beside him. His lips parted as if he were going to thrust out his tongue and taste the air.

“That's Marie,” Teeg said. “She and Sol have taken the longest spirit journeys, so we listen to them. Sol's the one over there with skin the color of ripe plums.” Realizing Phoenix had never seen a plum, she pointed. “There, see, the one kneeling down and unrolling the map.”

Phoenix nodded sleepily, but his eyes were not focused. It was no use telling him the names of the others tonight; he was too dazzled to see their faces. Their voices chattered on about dates, routes, meetings, about plans for escape from Oregon City. Contrive a water accident, make Security think the entire crew had drowned, then boat to Whale's Mouth—that was the gist of it. Teeg was not paying close attention to the talk, for she had this joy to share with Phoenix. She kept his fingers laced in her own, giving him time to come down, to come back. Let him giddy about on his own inner winds for a while longer. She remembered her own first ingathering, the sense of coming home at last to the place she
had been seeking all her days. Rainwater rediscovering the sea. Sexual orgasm was delicious, but it could not rival the splendor of that homecoming.

At last his fingers came awake in her hand, and this time when he looked he really saw her. “Now I know why you gave up trying to describe it,” he said.

Later, walking back with him through the ruins of the tank farm, after the crew had worked out all the details for escape, she asked, “Was it what you expected?”

“The test?”

“The journey inward.”

He lifted both arms, hands cupped domeward. “How could I ever dream of a trip like that?”

“Of course you couldn't.” She skipped gaily, boots scuffing on the metal floor. She felt like a gauzy sail again, blown along.

“Is it always like that?” he said.

“Is sex always spectacular?”

“Is sex—what?” he stammered.

“Spectacular. Like fireworks.”

“Do you mean—”

“I mean sometimes loving is magnificent, sometimes it's okay, and sometimes it's just a sweaty thumping of bodies. And the sky's not always perfectly blue and the crocuses don't burst through the soil every day. There's rhythms to these things.” She couldn't stop using the speech of natural things, even though she knew it meant little to him. Soon it would mean a great deal to him, once he was outside. “Things come clear in their own sweet time. We just prepare, open ourselves, and wait.”

“So it was special?” he said.

“Rare, very rare. We'd never been that close to the center before. Some of the others might have, privately—Sol, maybe, or Marie, even Hinta. But as a group, that was a whole new . . . intensity. Maybe you were just the bit of chemistry, the trace element, we needed.”

“And you think they accepted me?”

“You were there, weren't you, in the fire? What other proof do you need?”

He didn't need any other, for he seized her by the hands and danced her in circles, their gowns kiting outward, their boots clumping. Gravel skittered away over the gray metal floor. They were like two stars orbiting one another, drifting closer as their spinning slowed, until they danced to a stop with hips and breasts and lips pressed together. For once his body felt easy against hers, yielding, as if the glacier that had built up in him during years of emotional restraint were melting at last. This time, when his cock bulged against her, he did not turn away. He kept his lips on hers, his hands on the curve of her rump. They stayed that way for a spell, with the scraps of cut-up oil tanks heaped around them, with sirens and delirious shouts rising from the nearby gamepark. Then Teeg felt the chill slowly coming over him again, the glacier accumulating, the cold spreading through his body like crystals of ice. And finally he pulled away.

“I lost control,” he said with an abashed tone. She could see him ticking over in his mind the articles of the mating code.

“What you lost were those stupid shackles, for about half a minute.” She kicked a chunk of gravel, sent it clattering. Patience, she reminded herself. He had already come a long way in a few months. He had become a walker, an inward exile from the
Enclosure. Did she expect him also to become an uninhibited lover so quickly? “I'm sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting. And we'll have time, outside. We'll melt the polar icepack if we need to.”

“Polar icepack?”

“Never mind. Let's go, before the healthers come sniffing after us.”

She led the way cautiously through the outskirts of the tank farm, avoiding the rings of oil. The crew had decided not to meet again in the doomed tank, but still, it would not do to give the place away. Properly booted and hooded with streetmasks over their faces, Teeg and Phoenix skirted the last heap of scrap and emerged into the many-colored illumination of the gamepark. The noise was deafening. People shuffled from one buzzing electronic box to another, climbed in and out of bump-cars, stood howling in the laughter booths. The loudest shouts came from the eros parlors, long anguished cries of pleasure, as if the customers were releasing in a single burst all the pent-up emotion of the day. Around the chemmie dispensers people hopped on one leg or flapped their arms, eyes rolling, or crowed with heads thrown back, or skittered about on all fours.

Teeg drew the gown tight at her throat, made sure the mask snugged down over her jaw. Beast time, she thought. A few minutes of licensed animalhood to relieve the dread they carry with them all day. She stopped short to let a man slither past on his belly; his painted face lunged at invisible targets in the air, jaws snapping. Before he left the park he would swallow a capsule of eraser, and never know he had played lizard.

“Hurry,” Phoenix hissed over her shoulder. “I can't stand this.”

No one paid any attention to them as they passed, quickly, through the park, their pace as frantic as the revelers'. At the gate,
where pedbelts dumped the rigid bodies of new customers and carried away the limp exhausted ones, Teeg hesitated. She turned for a moment to look back the way they had come, across the riotous glow of the park toward the squat oil tank where so many ingatherings had taken place. She could not actually see the tank—which was just as well, since she would go there no more. The crew would remain scattered until the next call for emergency work, and that call, if the weather and the sea cooperated, would carry them outside the city for good. Sometimes, even here inside the dome, she thought she could detect shifts in the weather, as if some antique portion of her mind had never fully submitted to life indoors. This was one of those times, standing there at the gateway of the amusement park with Phoenix. A stirring in her marrowbones, a tingling along her spine, told her of storms brewing outside.

Turning back around, still holding onto Phoenix, she stepped on the slick black river of the pedbelt and let it carry her away.

1. Critics have debated whether to describe these stories as science fiction, speculative fiction, magic realism, or fantasy. What label, if any, would you use to describe them?

2. Some of these stories, such as “The Artist of Hunger,” are satirical, and laced with humor; others, such as “Land Where the Songtrees Grow,” are somber and brooding. Do you find yourself drawn more to one type than to the other?

3. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that fantastic tales require from the reader a “willing suspension of disbelief.” The degree of strangeness in these stories increases over the course of this book, from stories set on Earth in our own day, to ones set on Earth in the near future, to ones set on distant planets. Do you find yourself willing to accept the fantastic elements, or do you find yourself resisting?

4. A number of the stories extrapolate features of contemporary American society into the future, as if to make them more visible, and therefore more available for examination. What extrapolated—or exaggerated—features do you notice?

5. Sanders appears to lament the increasing separation between humans and nature. Do you see evidence of such a separation in America today? If so, does it trouble you?

6. In his memoir,
A Private History of Awe
, Sanders has written about his youthful fascination with rockets and space travel. How does that fascination show through here?

7. Sanders often draws on science in his nonfiction, as a way of understanding the world and as a source of metaphors. What role does science play in these stories?

8. What trends in technology appear to worry Sanders?

9. What do you think of the way “Clear-Cut” explores the sources of human dreaming?

10.
Déjà vu
is the apparent inspiration for “Sleepwalker.” Have you experienced
déjà vu
? If so, how have you interpreted it?

11. What motifs from folktales and fairytales do you find in “The Anatomy Lesson,” “Ascension,” “The First Journey of Jason Moss,” or any of the other stories?

12. What present-day forms of sexuality might have inspired “Eros Passage”?

13. A global “Enclosure,” consisting of domed cities linked by travel tubes, provides a setting for a number of the stories. Why have humans moved inside the Enclosure?

14. What do the Enclosure stories suggest about the ways that attitudes toward the human body might be influenced by the banishing of wild nature?

15. “The Engineer of Beasts,” “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” and “Mountains of Memory” gave rise to Sanders' novel
The Engineer of Beasts
. Likewise, “Terrarium,” “Quarantine,” and “Touch the Earth” inspired his novel
Terrarium
. If you have read either book, what changes do you notice between the stories and the resulting novel?

16. This book is dedicated to Ursula K. Le Guin, a distinguished writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her parents were celebrated anthropologists, and her work has been described as “anthropological science fiction,” because of the way she creates imaginary worlds as lenses through which to view our own world more clearly. Do you see a similar impulse in “Travels in the Interior,” “The Audubon Effect,” or any of the other stories?

17. Look up an on-line description of the Australian Aborigine concept of “Dreamtime.” Why would such a concept appeal to a storyteller, such as Sanders?

18. In interviews, Sanders has described his debt to writers such as Mark Twain, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges. Insofar as you may know the work of any of these writers, can you see their influence in these pages?

19. If you have read any of Sanders' nonfiction—books such as
A Conservationist Manifesto, Earth Works
, or
Hunting for Hope
—what parallels do you see between his concerns in those works and the concerns expressed in these stories?

20. Has the reading of these stories prompted any fantastic imaginings of your own?

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS
is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including
Hunting for Hope, Earth Works
, and
Divine Animal
. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington in the hardwood hill country of Indiana's White River Valley.