The Elementals (28 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: The Elementals
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“Even less sophisticated than that,” she assured him. “This is purely subsistence level.”
“You weren't born here,” George said bluntly. “And you've had an education.”
“Right on both counts. I'm Comanche, if you must know. Born in Oklahoma, educated in Chicago. Widowed in New Orleans,” she added without inflection.
“I'm sorry.”
“Why? You didn't know him.”
“No, of course not, but … hell. I'm just sorry, that's all.”
He felt his neck burning in spite of the Stetson. This woman made him uncomfortable. She was, he suspected, the one who had undressed him last night. The one who had left the flowers. And looked at his pictures.
“My fiancée died too,” he said.
Kate nodded, her eyes on her work again. “White girl.”
“Yes.”
“Some white people are surviving.”
“Not many.”
“Not many people period,” Kate said. She moved to the next bean pole, knelt beside it, her fingers working automatically, sure and deft. “You weren't telling us much we didn't already know, yesterday. Except when you said that aboriginal people seemed to be surviving better than anyone else. Is that true?”
“It's what I heard. Or read, rather. The report I saw named American Indians, Maoris, Inuit—”
“Alaska?”
“That's right. But I don't know how accurate it was, Kate. I read that report not long before I left, and we were hearing a lot of hysterical claims by then.”
“Not long before you left,” she repeated. “Do you think that's why you came here? Because you hoped you'd have a better chance for survival on an Indian reservation?”
“No,” he told her honestly. Her dark eyes demanded honesty. “I've always thought of myself as an Indian, I suppose that's why I came. To be with my own at the end of the world, some romantic notion like that. Sounds silly, doesn't it?”
“No,” she said shortly.
George went on, “Besides, if there is some gene-linked ability to survive our current disasters, it doesn't affect everyone. Indians and Maoris and Inuit are dying, we know that. Just not as large a percentage of them, perhaps. And I'm only half Indian anyway, so it might not do me any good at all.”
Kate finished tying up the runners to the last bean pole and started to get to her feet. Without thinking, George reached out and took her hand. She gave him a swift, startled glance, then accepted, rising with a fluid grace.
He was concentrating on the way she moved when she said, “The diseases of civilization, like measles and chicken pox, killed vast numbers of aboriginal natives who had no immunities to them.
Wouldn't it be ironic now if the natives were the ones to survive the last, worst plagues of civilization?”
George forgot her grace and admired her mind. “Ironic indeed,” he agreed. “Nice and neat and savage. But unfortunately, even they won't be able to survive the—” He bit off his word.
“The what?” Kate asked sharply. “They won't be able to survive the what? What didn't you tell us?”
“I told you. I said there was a decrease in breathable oxygen. I just didn't make a big point about it. There's no sense in scaring people when nothing can be done.”
“Decreasing oxygen,” Kate said slowly, her eyes widening as the message sunk home.
He nodded reluctantly. “Yes. We're running out of air we can breathe. Haven't you noticed that your lungs have to work harder than they used to? Don't you get tired easier, even over and above the heat? The people with weak lungs or emphysema or TB died quite a while ago, Kate. When the air is gone, we'll all go. End of story.”
“When the air is gone,” Kate said. He watched her draw a deep breath, tasting it with a sudden, desperate hunger. Her eyes met and locked with his.
“We won't die today,” he told her. “Or even tomorrow. It'll just be a little harder to breathe tomorrow.”
“But we will die. Everything that needs oxygen as we do will die.” She searched his face for denial.
“Yes,” he had to tell her. “Within the foreseeable future.” The phrase had a new and awful meaning.
Kate stood still, breathing. Feeling the apparatus of her lungs work.
“Well then,” she said at last. Turning from him, she walked down the row and picked up a hoe someone had dropped. “In that case, we don't have a lot of time, George. So we shouldn't be wasting what we do have. Here, take this and chop some weeds.”
“After what I just told you, you still want to chop weeds?” he asked in disbelief.
“They won't chop themselves,” she said briskly.
George shook his head and made an attempt at the weeds. But after a few efforts he admitted, “I'm afraid I can't tell a weed from a valuable plant.”
Her lips twitched. “Some Indian you are. I'll bet you think milk comes out of cartons too. Here, give me that hoe before you do more harm than good. You might as well get a bucket and help the children carry water. Everyone who wants to eat has to work, and we need to finish tending the garden and doing the outside chores before the day gets any hotter.”
So George Burningfeather found himself bustling between well and vegetable patch, carrying water. He watched Kate out of the corner of his eye. Stolidly pursuing an age-old task, she could have been any primitive female. Yet she had an air of confident self-possession that almost amounted to sophistication, as if her experience in the non-Indian world had altered her very genes, adding a new element. Yes, a new element. Kate was an amalgam. Earth and fire. And water—those liquid eyes.
Whoa, George, he told himself. Armageddon came and went and we lost, no contest. The world is ended, at least for the human race. There's no point in thinking the thoughts you're thinking. All that's left is to fall down and die, and that won't be very long.
Will it?
He looked at Kate again, calmly tending the vegetables.
And at the damned vegetables, green and growing. They did not have human lungs, they were a different life form.
Other life will inherit the planet we despoiled, George thought sadly. I wonder if they'll know, or care, how beautiful it was. Once.
His eyes stung. He blamed the pollution.
When the outdoor chores were completed, everyone gathered in the general store. It seemed to be a combination meeting place, day center, and dining room, with people willingly sharing a communal existence. Apparently other buildings were only used for sleeping.
I wonder where Kate sleeps? George asked himself.
Breakfast consisted of homemade bread, homemade jam, slabs of a peculiar substance Anne Swimming Ducks identified as goats'-milk butter, and instant coffee from a jar, the water boiled on a tiny camp stove.
“This is our second-last jar of coffee,” Will Westervelt told George. “Don't suppose you brought some in that bag of yours?”
George said ruefully, “I didn't. I've been trying to give up caffein.”
Someone laughed.
“Why?” Harry asked. “Not good for your health?”
This time everyone laughed.
To keep the laughter going, George added, “I've given up smoking too.”
They roared.
When the laughter died down, an ancient voice said, from the shadows at the end of the room, “No smoke. No pipe. How can you burn up your anger if you do not smoke it away?”
The people in the store met one another's eyes with brief, embarrassed glances, then looked away again.
“Cloud-Being-Born clings to the old traditions,” Mary Ox-and-a-Burro, the mother of the little girl, explained to George. “The buffalo robe, the peace pipe, the Ghost Dance …”
Harry shot her a warning look. She fell silent.
“Ghost Dance,” George said. “Someone mentioned that before. Last night?”
“Lotta things got mentioned last night,” drawled a thickset man perversely known as Slim Sapling.
“And forgotten,” added a man called Two Fingers.
But George persisted. “What is the Ghost Dance?”
Bert Brigham said, “Hell, I don't even like talkin' about this. Can't we just let it go?”
“We cannot forget the Ghost Dance,” said the voice in the corner.
George felt Kate's light touch on his arm. “Come out on the porch,” she said in a low voice, “and I'll try to explain it to you. There's no point in upsetting people in here.”
Feeling their eyes on him, he followed her out.
When he and Kate stood together under the sagging shingled roof of the porch, George asked, “Why did mentioning the Ghost Dance upset people?”
“It only bothers some of them, not all. But some people don't like being reminded that they were made to do something through magic.”
“Magic? Come on now, Kate. I love Indian lore and tradition as much as the next person, but you can't really expect me to—”
“When things started to get really bad, Cloud-Being-Born was all but alone here,” Kate interrupted smoothly. “Most of his family was scattered to the four winds. He had a daughter and a granddaughter and their husbands, that was about it. He wanted something more, so he worked with what he had. He taught the two men to dance the Ghost Dance. He danced it with them.
“It must have been very hard to make anything happen at first, with so few of them. But Cloud-Being-Born believed, and he made the others believe.
“The Ghost Dance is about communicating with the spirits of the ancestors. But Cloud-Being-Born used it to … to summon kindred spirits, I guess you'd say. Living kindred spirits. He used the magic of the Dance to reach out and call to Indians who'd left their ancestral homes and got lost in the white man's world.
“And it worked. People started coming to him here, seeking out this place. Two or three were his own relatives. The rest were just misplaced Indians. Like you, like me. Like Will and Harry and Slim and the rest. People who wandered in and didn't really know why they'd come.
“The old man turned some of them away. He never explained why. But the ones he wanted, he kept.
“A few weeks ago, when the radio broke past fixing, he told us we needed to dance the Ghost Dance again. I figured that with so many people dying, he wanted to save more while he could.”
“Did you do it? Did you dance the Ghost Dance?”
Kate dropped her eyes. “The men did.”
“What about you?”
“The Ghost Dance is for men. It uses their male power.”
“Come on now! I'd say you're a pretty liberated woman, Comanche or not. Do you accept that six-steps-behind business?”
“No. But Cloud-Being-Born knows the Ghost Dance. I don't argue with him.”
“If it ain't broke, don't fix it, eh?”
“Something like that,” Kate said serenely. She gazed past him, sweeping her eyes across the drought-destroyed earth.
She looks at peace with this place and herself, George thought. Under the circumstances, that's damned near incredible. When did I last see anybody look that way?
Stacey for all her beauty had never looked at peace with herself. Like all their friends Out There, she had been charged with tension, anxious over her looks, her weight, her level of fitness, her achievements, her potential, even her ability to be multiorgasmic. Stacey had been many things, but never at peace with herself. Until she lay in her coffin, perhaps. But her family had kept the coffin closed at the funeral, so George would never know.
He dragged his thoughts back to the present. “So you're saying Cloud-Being-Born danced the Ghost Dance again, and I came as a result? Is that what you want me to believe?”
“Firstly, Cloud-Being-Born didn't do the dancing. He's too old. It must have been a terrific strain for him to do it that first time. Once he had a few more men gathered, he let them do the Dance under his supervision. But yes, you came as a result. I haven't a doubt.”
“I do,” George told her. “I certainly do. There's such a thing as free will, you know.”
“I'm not denying that. I'm just telling you that some things override free will, or at least alter what we choose to do.”
George was shaking his head. “I still can't buy it. And you haven't explained just how this Ghost Dance is done.”
Kate crossed her legs and dropped effortlessly to a sitting position on the dusty porch. Mindful of splinters, George eased down less gracefully beside her.
“Since I didn't attend the Dance, I can't tell you the details,” Kate told him. “But I do know there was fasting first and we built a sweat lodge out back. When the dancers were purified and ready, Cloud-Being-Born took them to a sacred place and had them go through the steps of a very ancient pattern, one his people have known for centuries. As I understand it, the pattern conforms to a pattern his tribe perceives in their own vision of the cosmos.”
“Pattern.” George screwed up his forehead. “You know, there was a time when I got interested in the Irish side of my family, just to irritate my mother, I suppose. I read a lot of books on Ireland. One of the things I remember was that the people used to do what they called ‘a pattern' on religious feast days. It involved visiting some holy well, usually, and walking around it in a certain way.”
Kate looked at him with light in her eyes. “Is the custom very old?”
“It predates Christianity, I think. The Christians just grafted their own saints and doctrines onto the pagan religion they found in Ireland. So the pattern may go back millennia, for all I know. There's been a civilization in Ireland for six thousand years.”
“But in spite of an interest in Ireland, you chose to think of yourself as an Indian,” she said. “Why, George?”
“Well, the way I look, for one thing. Black hair, bronze skin, features that aren't what you'd call Caucasian. But mostly I suppose I made that choice to irritate my mother even more than the Irish interest did.”
“Did you dislike your mother so much?”
George considered the question. “Not dislike. I resented her because she resented me. It's a long story.” He started to say, “I'll tell you some time,” but then stopped. There might not be time for long stories. Time might have run out.
The sky was a hideous brassy color and the heat was intensifying. “Good thing we got your vegetables watered,” he remarked.
“Yes.” She smiled.
“But this Ghost Dance … what's the purpose of it, Kate? That's one thing you still haven't explained. You said old Cloud-Being-Born did it to draw people here, but why? Just to save them? And for what? It looks like we're all going to die anyway, of oxygen starvation if nothing else.”
Kate's face sobered. “I honestly don't know. But I know the old man has a purpose. I have to be content with that.”
There's her Indian passivity emerging, George thought. Then he checked himself. Are Indians passive? God knows I'm not. Are the Irish all drunkards? Of course not. When did we start accepting these stereotypes?
He thought again of Stacey, starving herself to be fashion-model lean because that was stereotypical beauty Out There.
Harry sauntered out onto the porch. “Well, old hoss, do you know all about the Ghost Dance now?” he asked George.
“Not really. It's still pretty much of a mystery.”
“To all of us,” Harry confided. “But the old man knows what he's doing. He's had a vision.”
Suddenly George thought he understood. These people were sharing a common delusion brought on by stress. They were escaping an unbearable reality by putting their faith in the mystical visions of a senile old man. All over the planet, people were reacting to worldwide catastrophe in various ways. Plenty of them were losing themselves in religious mania, hyping up the adrenals, preparing to meet the end in a trance.
To meet the end. It all came back to that. To meet the end.
Why shouldn't American Indians prepare for the end by reverting to the faith of their fathers? It would do them no more or less good than any other.
George could not sit still any longer. He got up abruptly, clamped his Stetson more firmly on his head, and left the porch, seeking physical activity to ease his own tension.
Neither Kate nor Harry called after him to ask where he was going. They just placidly watched him leave.
He struck off aimlessly, not looking at anything in particular. Just moving. Using the body. Then he started watching the ground. The baked earth was scored with cracks caused by the heat, some of them wide enough for a man to put his foot into. They looked, to George's imagination, like mouths gaping for air.
Air. He looked up and saw the shimmer of a heat mirage in the distance. It floated, incorporeal, illusory, like a lake in the desert.
Desert, he thought sourly. The earth's turned into a desert.
The mirage sparkled ahead of him, as out of reach as a rainbow.
How long has it been since I saw a rainbow? George asked himself.
He could not remember.
He walked on, eyes fixed on the mirage. The sun beat down on his Stetson. He could smell his white cotton T-shirt, his sweat, his baking skin. I should have taken a couple of aspirin before I came outside, he thought tardily.
The sky was, as it had been for months, a flat-looking sheet of light with the blue long since leached out of it. It appeared to have
no depth, no dimension. Yet when George looked at it more closely he discovered that the air was filled with tiny little squiggles, darts and flashes of color against that flat backdrop, minute figures liked coiled hairs wriggling and twisting in empty space.
What I'm seeing, George reminded himself, is really the imperfection of the human eye. Scratches on the eyeball, glitches in the optic nerve. Everyone has them.
Yet he kept on watching, with mounting curiosity. The longer he stared, the more convinced he became that he was seeing something of substance.
Dust motes?
Life forms?
Whoa, boy, the sun's getting to you! he cautioned himself.
But he was intrigued. The air looked alive.
It's full of angels, he thought fancifully.
That was the moment when he decided to turn back. Obviously the sun was getting to him.
When he reversed course he was startled to see how far away the buildings of the reservation were. They were only tiny dots in the distance. He extended his stride, anxious to be back in the shade again.
But the busy air kept pace with him, the tiny darting spiraling figures accompanying him, monopolizing his vision. It was like swimming through a school of … of … beings?
George stopped abruptly. He had a compelling sense that he was not alone. He turned around slowly, but in whatever direction he looked, he saw no human, no animal. Only the tiny images in the air. When he blinked his eyes, they were still there. Not on his eyeballs. Beyond. Outside. Around him.
Watching him.
An irrational fear overtook him and he began to run.
He pounded up onto the porch of the store, panting hard and dripping with sweat. The porch was empty. He stopped for only a moment, then went inside.
Cloud-Being-Born had come out of his corner. He was sitting on a stool just inside the door. He looked up as George entered.
“Come to me,” the old Indian said.
George stood in front of him, still panting, feeling slightly foolish. What had he been running away from?
Air?
“Let me look in your eyes,” Cloud-Being-Born commanded.
George bent down. The old Indian's eyes met his for a long, searching look. Then the ancient man nodded, satisfied.
“This is the one,” he said.
Straightening up, George looked beyond Cloud-Being-Born to the others in the store. Only half a dozen were there at the moment, the rest, presumably, being in their own quarters, in the barracks or the stifling tin-roofed shacks. There were no women in the store, George noted, automatically looking for Kate. But Harry Delahunt was there, and Two Fingers. And Jerry Swimming Ducks, and Slim Sapling, and the one called Westervelt whose first name George had forgotten, since it was not as memorable as an Indian name.
“What's he talking about?” George asked the men. “What does he mean, I'm the one?”
“He's been talking about doing another Dance,” Harry said.
“Another Ghost Dance?” Maybe I'll learn what it is, George thought.
“Not this time,” Two Fingers said. He was a short, swarthy man with only two fingers on each hand, obviously not the result of an accident but of some peculiarity of birth. “This one's going to be a new Dance. One we haven't done before.”
“We were waiting for you,” Cloud-Being-Born said.
George tensed. I don't want to be part of this, he thought. It's one thing to be an Indian, it's another to buy into all this religious ecstasy nonsense. I don't believe in it. I want a clear head when I go, it's going to be the last great adventure and I don't want to miss it.

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