So Long Been Dreaming (4 page)

Griots of the Galaxy
Andrea Hairston

The Griots of West Africa are musicians, oral historians, praise singers negotiating community. They stand between us and cultural amnesia. Through them we learn to hear beyond our time and understand the future.

The first thing I knew, I was thigh-deep in swamp scum, strangling a silver and white Siberian husky with ice eyes and dead fish breath. I liked dogs, vaguely remembered being one once, and would have let him go, but he was trying to eat me. I pressed through matted hair and squeezed his windpipe. He gagged, startled out of attack mode by my newfound vigour and the rapidly healing wounds on my neck, wounds he had just made. We wrestled in a jungle swamp, more Amazon than Florida, drenched in a chemical haze. It was high noon, but the trees gobbled up ninety percent of the photons. It might as well have been evening, except for the heavy heat hanging in the mist. A husky could die in weather like this. What was he doing here?

What was I?

He stood on hind legs and looked right in my eyes. I didn’t know how tall I was, but that seemed like a lot of dog to me. From the smell of my ripped pants, the body I was in had already lost control of sphincter muscles once – which explained why I didn’t piss myself looking at his bloody fangs and intelligent eyes, like people’s eyes. What had this body ever done to him, I wondered?

He smacked his six-inch paws against my arms, clawed at my breasts, and tried to shake my hands from his throat, but I didn’t feel it. I was pumped from the drop into this body and I had him. That dawned on him too, and with a panicked look, he stopped squirming and whimpered, a tortured sound I didn’t want to hear. My new heart banged against ribs and backbone, flushed nerves and muscles with potent stimulants, and obliterated my fledgling compassion. When you dropped into a life, the story of the host body, its impulses and desires, were almost impossible to resist. A body historian, working the soul mines of Earth, but I wanted to resist. What the hell was wrong with me?

The husky lunged. Turning his momentum against him, I plunged his head and shoulders into the water and grunted a cheer through clenched teeth. His struggle splashed swamp in my face. I snorted stagnant muck out of my mouth and nose. It tasted like dandelion and beet greens, like my past lives breaking out on a new tongue. Panicked, I swallowed down this old history. My skinny brown forearms trembled with holding 150 pounds of dog under water, and I wondered just how long my drop-in power surge would last. I’d been wrestling the husky less than a minute, but I dimly recalled entire lifetimes that seemed shorter. I was suddenly terrified:

What kind of life was it going to be in this body?

The lapse of killer concentration cost me a chunk of leg flesh and my balance. The husky could have chewed through bone, so I was lucky. Still, it hurt like hell, and I roared a mezzo-soprano glissando that startled me out of pain. The diva holler was definitely one of my former voices breaking out, and no way should that be happening. Body historians never let the past take over; you were now or nothing.

No time for existential crises. Flailing under water, the husky banged into my wounded leg, and a blues holler burst from my chest. Another old voice. Loudmouth jungle fauna joined in, chattering and hooting like they were on my side. The dog thrashed up to suck in some air, his face just cracking the surface. My hands wanted to shove him back toward the bottom of the swamp, but looking at his soggy snout and mud-rimmed eyes, I couldn’t do it. The body I was in had already died once, and I could drop into another dying somebody – if complex enough and within range – risky, but the husky’s only life was on the line. I summoned the divas back to my mouth. Singing syncopated rhythms in a minor mode, I forced the hands to let go of his neck. His ears shot up. My blues aria surprised him as much as me. He gulped down air, shook the water out of his fur, and without blinking, watched me scramble away. I couldn’t stop singing until the song was done. He cocked his head at the last notes, like he knew the melody. Brown saliva dripped off his tongue as his ears went flat again. I hauled butt for dry land when I saw a plan working behind his eyes.

The mucky bottom grabbed my feet and pitched me against two dead dogs. Buttocks and hind legs dangled in the algae soup, head and shoulders slumped on the slimy shore. Dobermans. I vaguely remembered them trying to eat me too, but I’d managed to waste them before it came to that. They had holes in their heads, and blood was attracting the bugs: crawlers, fliers, and swimmers. I recoiled, glad I hadn’t dropped in as a Doberman attack dog. I recoiled again, this time at myself. You didn’t get to choose a life; you only had minutes to find what was available. A true historian should be glad for any dying body to ride. Every story offered precious insight.

The dog lowered his head and extended his snout. I knew huskies were quiet, not barkers or yappers. They put everything into the growl. Still, feeling the rumble from his chest forty feet away surprised me in my bones. I glimpsed a pistol just beyond the dead Dobermans, easily within reach, but I hollered out another aria and squashed the urge to grab it. Staring into the husky’s eyes, I let the melody fade. This body for his life, it seemed fair.

We both gulped shallow breaths. I ran my fingers across the smooth skin on my neck and remembered the husky ripping out my jugular. Body historians were serial amnesiacs, conscious only of our griot’s creed and the Edges, the sliding in and out of a life. I had twice ten thousand Earth years of Edges. That and a griot’s loyalty to the soul mines. Dropping in for a quickie then suiciding out to somebody else was a total waste of resources. Griots rode a body as long as possible. In the soul mines, you collected lives; you didn’t sacrifice yourself to save one.

The husky came at me like a flash of silver lightning. Dropping out was going to hurt like hell, but I was prepared. I focused on his eyes, not his fangs. The husky was quite beautiful, a strange presence in this jungle world, a special Edge for my memory tatters. . . . At the last second, with astounding speed and grace, and despite my spark of rebellion, this body reached across the dead Dobermans, grabbed the gun, and shoved it down the husky’s mouth. The pistol barked five times, and he was gone before I could think, before I could struggle with my new self to save him. I yanked the pistol out of his mouth, and the corpse slid down my belly into the water, ice eyes gone dull gray, jaws frozen in a deadly grin. My right hand was shaking, but my gun hand was still. I threw up the meager contents of my stomach and tried for a few tears. Nada. This body didn’t want me to care about dead huskies or Edges of pain. It swallowed my distress almost before any emotion registered, and directed me toward its Mission. I shivered.

When the husky corpse floated against the other dead dogs, I stopped waiting for it to come back to life and crawled ashore. Now or nothing. I stuffed the pistol in my pants, squeezed water out of my spongy hair, and headed for a tangle of trees and vines. My drop-in power surge had faded. Solid ground wobbled under my legs, even when I stopped moving. The trees threatened to turn upside down and stick the sky under my shaky toes. Blood and white froth spurted out of the puncture wounds in my leg, and one arm looked liked mincemeat. Tatters of a taupe cotton shirt stuck to blood and muck on my belly and breasts. I ripped off a piece of pants that wasn’t swampy or piss-yellow and tied it tight around the leg wound. I tried touching myself all over to feel who I was, but I was too raggedy. Settling down in a tree root throne, I watched thin spears of sunlight bounce off my shark navel ring and cut through the haze. Glints of metal among the branches made me blink and squint.

The trees had eyes, and they were watching me. Mechanical worms with camera heads wriggled up branches into blossoms and clumps of foliage. I should have checked them out. Instead I convinced myself I was paranoid, hallucinating, and what I needed was to sit still and gather myself, not chase spooks. Dizzy from the heat, sore and itchy from sweat, bug bites, and dog gouges, I didn’t feel excitement for a new life, just fear at a moral chasm opening before me. At each drop-out, specific memories from a finished life slipped beyond consciousness. Body historians dropped into a new life with old lives repressed, except for the Edges, the first and last moments, or there’d be no space for new experiences. Damned serial amnesia was working my last nerve – getting me all caught up in patterns I didn’t remember – or why else would I be too lazy for paranoia and morally outraged over a dog killed in self-defense?

Because at a certain point, you get tired of being a gig slut.

I couldn’t tell if this thought was griot creed, from past lives, or from my current body. One thing I did remember – if you got too full of life, a historian could unravel into chaos, into a jumble of nothing. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war.

Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories. Collecting life’s dazzling permutations, however sweet or sour, was our science, religion, and art – nothing nobler in eternity. I peered in the direction of the nasty noise. At the south end of the mucky water where the trees thinned out, I saw a leather jacket, one sleeve inside out, flung across a signpost. The sign read: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” in English with a vividly drawn skull dead centre.

Damn!

Everything hurt. I’d sat in the tree root throne for quite awhile. Stiff muscles and joints protested as I stood up. At least the ground stayed still and the sky didn’t fall. I limped along the shore to the sign and jacket. A cell phone jangled in the breast pocket. I didn’t want to answer, especially not knowing who I was or how I wanted to deal. And it seemed like I’d been hating phones for over a hundred years, but you got to start somewhere.

“What’s up?” I said in full-throated mezzo irritation.

“If you got the hot sauce, I got the stew,” a male basso said in Standard American English. I couldn’t fix a more specific point of origin.

“Diablo sauce,” I said without thinking. “Sets your mouth on fire.”

“You get the recipe?”

“Yeah.” I wanted him to mention my name, what I was supposed to be doing, where I was, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the sort of operation you discussed on an open line.

“Twenty-six hours or we lose the bonus.” His voice tickled the backs of my knees and under my arms. “You’re almost inside the white circle. How you holding up?”

I looked at the bloody rag around my leg. Claw marks on my breasts raked over old scars. My hands slid across muscular thighs and buttocks, narrow ribcage and broad shoulders, to a big head sitting on not much neck. I tried to fill the sculpture of this woman. Something in me resisted, not her exactly, but. . . . Fingertips glided down high cheekbones, broad nose, and full lips to a blunt chin. The supple skin felt good. A middle-aged firebrand in great shape, scarred and battered here and there but. . . . “Nothing significant.”

“You sound . . . tired.”

Did he hear something in my voice or was this just code? “It’s the heat, mostly.”

“After the dinner rendezvous, can you handle an explosive situation?”

“I can handle anything, as long as the food’s good.” That seemed the right amount of bravado for this body. “How’s the rest of the menu?”

“Out of this world.” He chuckled, and the connection went dead.

I felt abandoned. Rubbing my cheek against the phone, I checked through the jacket pockets and found a few ammunition clips for the pistol, a purple beanbag lizard, a fountain pen/flashlight, two packets of extra-strength Frizz Ease, crushed sunglasses, menthol eucalyptus cough drops, and a slip of fortune cookie wisdom:

The Gods who were smiling at your birth are laughing now.

My lucky numbers were two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen – and somebody had scrawled “plus five backward.”

No wallet, no name, and a pathetic bunch of random clues. I dumped one packet of Frizz Ease into my hair and worked my fingers through tight knots. The frizz didn’t ease. Feeling vigilant at last, I scanned the trees for mechanical worms with camera heads. All I saw scurrying along the branches were furry black millipedes squirting stink gland poison at ants. A bug, smudge of mold, blade of grass – they were too simple for a griot drop-in, yet still compelling. The front-runner ants got a blast of lethal funk, curled up into balls, and fell out of the trees. The other ants kept marching forward. The millipedes’ stink glands would be empty soon. I smiled. An eye trained on movement, a scientist hooked on bugs, an assassin with murder on the brain – how to read the signs of life and make a story? That was a griot’s challenge. That’s what I loved: being in a life, discovering the story, no matter how rough the ride.

The dogs had ripped my shirt to shreds, but putting on a jacket in heavy, no-breathing heat seemed mucho loco. The sleeves were several inches too long and an odd combination of black coconut oil and seaweed smells permeated the lining. The bugs having a party on my skin finally drove me inside the leather – at least until I knew what I was doing.

Surveying the area, I realized the swamp was actually flooded land in the oxbow of a stream, not a proper swamp. An endless relief of trees and water in every direction offered no perspective. Which way was the white circle and the damn rendezvous? From the marks in the ground at the Biohazard sign, I could see where my body had fought with the dogs. I traced the footprints to a narrow path that led north through the trees. At a flowering tree split by lightning so that it stooped over the path with innards exposed, I found a brown leather knapsack that matched the jacket. The straps were caught in scorched branches and dead vines. Here the footprint trails diverged. My host and the husky had dashed down the path until the two Dobermans jumped out of the bush, then we all hightailed it to the water.