Dreams That Burn In The Night (20 page)

Zared and Jarmster
forsook this ceremony for the gypsum baths, where they gladly immersed themselves in the
mechanical sensualizers.

Melyna, fearfully
rapt, was unable to leave. She made herself a pallet on the interior balcony and now and again
called down to Three Dream Woman to stop for a time. "You must eat," she pleaded. "Androlacrum or
no, you mustn't let yourself starve." Did she really care? Melyna wondered. Or did she simply
wish the insane dance to end?

But Three Dream
Woman thrived on her dancing.

On the fifth hour
of the Sun Dance, Rose Mashita reappeared in the bowlcove above. She stared down in lewd
fascination. Framing her face, a battery of PlayaSol lamps burned through their Ambersea ceiling
like nine gong-sized eyes. Three Dream Woman seemed unaware of these eyes. Even if the sun had
come back in them, she could not halt to acknowledge it. The world must be wound back up, the
decline of its energies stayed. These people had forgotten how to do that. They had let things
go. Even their BodiSheeths couldn't disguise the slackness spiraling through them: it seeped into
the world like diluted glue, loosen­ing the seams of creation.

Childhood.
Womanhood. Sly senility.

Three Dream Woman
united all in her dance; in one heaving of
a Sun Dance she lived a lifetime. The soles of her feet fed power into the earth, nine
coves up though they were. Three dreams, united, became something magically other. A world that
had for­gotten magic had no defense against it.

The dance rose up,
many-eyed, saw the triad's dream skull city before it, saw the relationship of Jarmster, Zared,
and Melyna embodied in a skull city that was empty of humanity but for a tiny piece of brain.
There was only a little bit of brain left but the dance couldn't get at it. The dance became an
ant in order to get into the skull city and get enough to eat.

The ant entered the
skull city. When the dance had picked it clean, the ant turned back into Three Dream Woman, but
Three Dream Woman had her head inside the skull city. Inside the skull.

Above, Rose Mashita
gasped as she saw the Androlacrum's head covered by a skull.

And now, as their
Androlacrum danced, Melyna felt the whole of the Villa shudder with the passion of Three Dream
Woman's dance. The gleaming white skull began to grow with each step of the dance. Lizards danced
in the cranial cracks. The great empty sockets filled with the wind of the burial pit. The spirit
canoes moved across the vanished ocean of the dead tongue, awash with the spit taste of death.
And the skull grew. The dance, drumming; the skull, growing. The angry dead teeth, biting out a
handhold of dust. The top of the skull was already brushing the upper-balcony floor; the weight
of the dead white thing was sending dead roots crashing downward.

"STOP!" Melyna
cried, her voice lost in the other's deep chant­ing. "Three Dream Woman, please! Please, you must
stop!" This was Ridpath's fault, it occurred to her. Who could she turn to for help?

Upstairs, Rose
Mashita now wore an expression ecstatically se­rene. Her hands pressed together. The gong lamps
around her sounded out glory. She was a Shinto, Melyna recalled. For her, poor wretch, miracles
were everywhere. The triad had often seen her at her bowlcove shrine, worshipping the
kami.
How she must be enjoying this, Melyna thought, terrified, as the skull grew and
grew.

Zared and Jarmster
burst into the cove. They were only half as tall as the skull, and its shadow seemed to
obliterate them. They
beheld Three Dream
Woman singing beneath the weight of the skull and the dance, and like Melyna, were
terrified.

"Melyna," Zared
shouted, "are you all right?" It almost made her cry, his uncharacteristic concern, brought on by
terror. She couldn't speak.

"Melyna!" Jarmster
called out, circling the wall opposite the still-growing skull. "The eight bowlcoves beneath ours
have been crushed into the earth! The whole Villa has gone down like a Blucite plunger! We're on
street level now, Melyna, and we've got to get out!"

The skull on Three
Dream Woman's head, as large now as a water tank, was only an inch under the Ambersea ceiling,
the cranial ridges straining against the weakening ceiling. On the other side of the transparent
membrane Rose Mashita was on her knees, the gong lamps around her popping out one by one as if
from an electrical overload. Surely, Melyna thought, surely the world is dying. Only wall glow
remained in the two final coves aboveground, and everything trembled.

"The other minnows
just made it, Melyna!" Jarmster called. "Come down from there and go with us!"

But she couldn't
move. Although she was frightened, fear did not immobilize her. What held her in place, a slender
woman gripping the balcony rail, was awe at what Three Dream Woman was showing her. She
had
to watch the ceremony; it was ordained that she see this.

"Melyna!" Zared
shouted, terror in his voice.

Their Ambersea
ceiling, at transparency stage 2, buckled as the skull grew through it. Aphrodite fell from her
pedestal and shat­tered.

The fibrafoam
ceiling collapsed and toppled into their bowl-cove a roomful of inflatable furniture, nine dead
sun lamps, and the woman, Rose Mashita herself, in a slash-pattern kimono. Jarmster and Zared
jumped back against the wall to avoid being struck, and Melyna flattened herself against the
balcony wall. The fibrafoam, yielding, would have prevented injury to Rose Mashita had she fallen
so as not to snap her neck. As it was, she was the first bit of rubble to stop bouncing. She lay
broken, lifeless.

Zared, who had
never liked the woman, shouted at their Androlacrum, "You've gone too far now! Much too
far!"

"And we're going to
stop you!" cried Jarmster.

The two men found a
bowl of polystyrene apples on the contin­gency cart near the cove's kitchen bubble and began
flinging them feebly at Three Dream Woman. They bounced off the skull . . . like polystyrene
apples.

The skull, whether
by accident or design, as if wounded, cracked open like a fire-shattered rock. Melyna crouched
away from Three Dream Woman on the balcony floor and watched transfixed as the woman cracked open
as the skull had done. The Androlacrum's body shattered beneath the cracking skull, de­cayed and
withered like overripe fruit. The hair withered gray, as if it were poisoned grass; bones pushed
through the sagging folds of the Androlacrum's skin.

Jarmster and Zared
had exhausted themselves flinging apples against the skull. Now it gleamed whitely, like some
obscene vase shattered by the hand of a god. The Androlacrum body was frag­mented, collapsed
among the bone ruins. Melyna rose, sobbing.

Three Dream Woman's
soul streamed through the dead husk's skin, a bright pool of light rising, taking an eloquent
human form. The soul, hovering over the myth of the body, spread upward, moving to the place
where the sky lives.

Jarmster and Zared,
blinded by the glow, fell back into them­selves, screaming. They tumbled among the fragments of
the skull, mere shells.

"The shadows, their
shadows disappear into night. The sun cannot reach them," whispered Three Dream Woman, her words
alive in the air.

"But as a stone is
a star in the heaven," she said then, "all that is of the heart is touched by all else. Come with
me, Melyna, memory of a daughter, live again in me. Come."

"No," cried Melyna,
shaking her head in despair as she huddled in the ruin of the triad's life. The break was too
final, too different, too alive.

"Come live among
the living. Give up what is dying." Gentle, the wind of Three Dream Woman's words.

But Melyna didn't
wish to die in order to give up what was dying. Her body shriveled, tightening around her like
wet rope. Her body said: I am afraid of living, never having tried. She could only shake her
head, and lower her eyes.

The bowlcove
cracked and collapsed, plunging down into ruin. Jarmster and Zared, screaming, joined Rose
Mashita.

Three Dream Woman's
soul united with the placenta of her
dreaming and rose toward the sun of life, fusing to form a dimen­sion, a world, come
alive with power.

"I would have
planted you in the earth of my body," whispered the soul of Three Dream Woman upon the wind. And
then gone. Back among the living. The might of her translation set every star and the horns of
the moon trembling in the seamless fabric of the dark.

Melyna, among the
dead. Melyna, afraid to live, was taken to emergency facilities erected by crane on the Boing
tarmac. Among the victims of the seismic disturbances that had engulfed the bowlcove villas on
the city's perimeter. Among the dead. She was given a cot. She was given a blanket. She was
bathed, tran-quilized, and psychiatrically shriven. "Feel no guilt," the mecho-analyst told her;
"it's not your fault, Melyna, that you're still alive."

Afterward, envying
the dead, she was able to sleep.

She had three
dreams that night, childhood, womanhood, and her own slow senility, one inside the other, like
Chinese boxes. She saw her whole life telescoping to ruin. It was emptiness, all of it, and when
Melyna, among the dead, cried out in her sleep, not one of the earthquake victims moved to
comfort her.

Great-grandfather
stared at his gift with a sharply critical eye. Great-grandmother gnashed her teeth like she
always did when Great-grandfather was about to make a social error.

"This tobacco
stinks!" said Great-grandfather. He held the pouch away from his nose. "As usual, my cheap
great-grandson has shown his respect by bringing me cheap tobacco."

Great-grandmother
kicked Great-grandfather in the shin, as she
had been doing in such instances as long as she could remember. Not that it did any good.
Great-grandfather had grown old and independent and it took something of the magnitude of an
earthquake to change his ways.

Great-grandson
sighed. He knew that no matter what kind of tobacco he brought or how much it cost,
Great-grandfather would always say it was cheap.

"You are looking
well, Great-grandfather," he said.

"A fat lot you
know!" said Great-grandfather irritably.

"It's the vapors.
It gets him in the back," said Great-grand­mother. "And he hasn't got enough sense to come in
when the cold clouds are out. Not him. He stands out in bad vapors and rain looking for a demigod
or trying to remember where he's sup­posed to be, as if one rock didn't look like another, as if
one burial rack didn't. . ."

"Someday your
tongue will go crazy and beat you to death!" roared Great-grandfather.

"Great-grandmother
gave her great-grandson a sympathetic look and shrugged.

"How are the white
people treating you in away school?" asked Great-grandfather. He shifted his position upon the
hard rock so that the sun did not shine directly into his weak, old eyes.

"As badly as usual,
revered one. Those white people are crazy."

"And what kind of
things are they learning you? Healing arts? Better ways of hunting? Surely these white men are
teaching you many things?" said Great-grandfather.

"No,
Great-grandfather," answered Great-grandson. "They are not teaching me any of those things. I am
learning science. I am learning how lightning is made and what rocks are made of and what stars
are and how fast light travels."

"Spells! Most
excellent! These white people are smarter than I thought. But what was that you said about light
traveling? I have never heard of such a thing! Of what use is it?" Great-grandfather
asked.

"They are not
spells," explained Great-grandson patiently. "And the traveling of light is
mathematics."

Great-grandfather
nodded his head wisely. "Ah yes! Mathe­matics." A shadow darkened his face and he scowled. "What
the hell is mathematics?" growled Great-grandfather.

"Counting and
measuring. Adding and subtracting the number of things one has," said Great-grandson.

"Sending you to
away school has turned you into a wise nose! Why didn't you say that the first time! Mathematics!
Any fool knows how to count on his fingers! You went to away school to learn a four-dollar word
for counting on your fingers? This is the kind of a thing you are learning?"

"You don't
understand. We learn more than just how to count on our fingers. We've learned how to measure
great distances. For instance, I know how far away the stars are."

Great-grandfather
shook his head. He looked at his wife. They both shrugged. "That is very interesting," said
Great-grandfather. "And what is that used for?"

"I don't know,"
admitted Great-grandson. "They only told me how far away it is."

"What other kinds
of things have they told you?" asked Great-grandmother. "These things sound as crazy as eating
rocks."

"Well, I have
learned that man was once an ape, that the earth flies in the air around the sun, and that when
people die their bodies rot and their souls go to heaven. Also I learned that. . ."