The Dancers of Noyo Read online

  My training with Pomo Joe had involved a considerable amount of deliberate psychological dislocation: I was used to keeping going when I was not at all sure who "I" was. Finally I stood up and began walking along the highway. I—well, somebody—hoped the bodily movement would help restore me to myself.

  It was a very dark night. The moon was not yet up. I was shivering violently, and so stiff from sitting I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I thought it must be about ten o'clock.

  Had I been sitting in that one spot beside the highway all the time I—Alvin—had been visiting the New Life Commune? How badly I had behaved, really—it was not hyperbole, but merely accuracy, to call myself a mass murderer. I had a heavy burden of guilt to bear. But of course my mistakes of the past would be obliterated once I'd seen the Grail Vision. The sight of the Most Holy Grail makes up for everything.

  Grail Vision? Where had that come from? Confused as I was, I realized that the idea was appropriate neither to Sam McGregor nor to Alvin Riggs. Alvin had known nothing about the Grail, and Sam didn't believe in it. For a moment T wondered if a third personality were emerging. I even wondered what my name would be this time. Then I realized that the idea about the Grail, though inappropriate for Riggs or McGregor, was the sort of sentiment the Noyo Dancer would want one of his Pilgrims to have. The idea had seemed to come from without me—to be externally inspired.

  But Riggs—where had the Riggs extra-life come from? Anybody who has dealings with Dancers must expect to have an occasional hallucination; even being near a Dancer will trigger them. But my Riggs-life hadn't been hallucinatory at all. I had simply been Riggs, in full, unexaggerated detail, for some three-quarters of a day. If the Riggs life had been sent me by the Noyo Dancer, how had the sending been mediated?

  My first thought was that it had been Brotherly's doing. Yes, but how? He had obviously been following me waiting for something to happen, and once he was assured it had begun, he had turned back to Noyo. But Brotherly hadn't touched me, given me anything, or been in contact with me except verbally (the haymaker, I felt, didn't count). He'd behaved throughout as if he were expecting me to fall into a pit that had already been dug.

  I wrestled with this for a while—I was still far from normal—as I walked along. The moon should be coming up soon, but it was still so dark that I could barely make out the lay of the road ahead of me. I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't start looking for a place to sleep, a place above high tide where I could build a fire with driftwood, when I saw the road ahead of me light up like a stage. It was, in fact, a dissecting theater, with a cadaver lying on the dissecting table and several students in white coats watching the demonstrator. I seemed to be looking on from a double vantage point-partly from the road, where I was actually standing, and partly from the level of the dissecting table, where I was lying. I was the cadaver. My name was Alice Lemmon.

  The experience was a cross between an exceptionally vivid hallucination, and the sense of absolute identity I had had as Alvin Riggs. If you want to know how I could feel a real identity with a cadaver, I refer you to a literary work that haunted my childhood, Poe's The Case of M. Valdemar. (One of the group mothers had read it to us six-year-olds.) Alice Lemmon wasn't a "mass of detestable putridity", of course; she had been well preserved in formaldehyde. But I had a terrible sense of being chained to something cold and claylike, of an unnatural intimacy with the isolatedness of death. Sam could not even look away from Alice, since her eyelids were gone.

  It was beyond enduring. I (again the tertium quid) fumbled with the strings of the medicine bag tied around my neck. I remember feeling considerable surprise that my fingers would move as I was willing them to. When I got the bag open, I squatted down close to the bluff and felt over what was in the bag. The dissection, meanwhile, was silently being carried on.

  There were six or eight packets of dried herbs in the bag, a rattle, a piece of snakeskin, some loose mescal buttons, an elderwood whistle, and a polished copper disk about two inches across. Pomo Joe had got the disk from a white man, a self-styled sorcerer. It was supposed to be used for scrying. It was wrapped up in a piece of black cloth.

  Handling these familiar and valued objects made me feel better, able even to look away from Alice for a moment—though of course I remained lying on the dissecting table. The moon was just clearing the horizon. I unwrapped the disk and stared at it.

  But I was standing in too-dense shadow. I walked over to the seaward side of the highway. Here, with my back to the moon, I looked into the disk once more. The dissection, I saw out of the comer of eye, had moved with me, and was now being carried out against the background of the glinting surf.

  I have never been much good at scrying. I suppose I had selected the copper from my scanty arsenal of "magic" with the idea of using it for a mirror. Now I saw a thin, dark face, hawk-nosed, dark-eyed. I don't know what I had been expecting, but for a minute I didn't recognize myself. I remember thinking that the dim image in the disk was an improvement on Alice, anyhow. Then something clicked, and I recognized Sam. And the next instant I was Alvin again.

  A good deal of time seemed to have passed. The sun had set, there were fewer dancers in the circle, the dust was a little less dense. Alvin—the tears on his cheeks had dried long ago—was standing in the center, beside the medicine woman. She was addressing him in a series of short sentences, punctuated by sharp explosions of breath. "The dance gives joy," she said, "Hu! It restores youth, hu! It heals disease, hu! It can revive the dead, hu!" She looked intently into Alvin's eyes.

  He drew back a little. A certain doubt was stirring in his mind, despite his experiences and emotions. He may have been a mass murderer, as he had called himself, but he was an intellectual one. "Revive the dead?" he said with his thickened tongue.

  She nodded. "Revive the dead, hu! It can make men walk on water, pass through fire, hu! It can—"

  The next minute I was Alice, back on the dissecting table. And from then on I oscillated between being Alice Lemmon, the cadaver, and Alvin Riggs, the CBW worker, like a ball bouncing. It was almost worse than just being Alice consistently. For now I felt that I was standing with a foot on either side of an abyss, and that the sides were drawing apart. I must either be split in two, or fall into the abyss.

  When I was Alvin, I had no sense of having ever been either Alice or Sam. The medicine woman seemed to be giving him a feather, and exhorting to some sort of missionary action in connection with the dance. As Alice, I had some awareness of my real identity, and it was in one of those moments that I groped blindly among the herbs in my bag for something and shoved it into my mouth.

  What I had got was some dried caps of Panaeolus campanulatus, the Variegata Mushroom. (I had found its name in a botany book years ago, when I was about fifteen, after getting wildly high on some specimens I had found growing near an old stable in Fort Bragg. Pomo Joe had reintroduced me to it.)

  The book had said that Panaeolus is remarkable for the quickness with which it acts. Almost as soon as the saliva from chewing the mushroom began to slide down my throat, I was roaring drunk: Alvin's world began to reel around him, and I saw the dissecting table expand and contract like a piece of bubble gum being blown in and out.

  I thought this was wonderfully funny. I might still be a female cadaver, pumped full of formaldehyde and carved into sections, but I could appreciate a good joke as well as anybody. I began to laugh, the noise ranging from whining giggles to a loud, Falstaffian roar. Funny! I never heard of anything funnier in my life! The moon, the sea, the sky were one vast roar.

  I wanted to share this quintessential comicality with somebody. I took a couple of steps in the direction of the table where I was lying. The surgeons ought to appreciate the humor of it, if anybody would. On the second step I lost my balance, teetered, and fell over on my face.

  I thought that was even funnier than the expanding dissecting table had been. I laughed and laughed. Then I began to cry. Poor Alice, lying there, s
o cold, so lonely (Alvin I Wasn't, currently). It was a dreadful thing to have happen to a girl.

  Girl? I was Sammmm, Sammmm. But I was getting awfully sleepy. Sleepy-bye, sleepby-pye-bye. The surf below me was a gorgeous changing aquamarine. Rocked in the cradle of the perfectly beautiful deep. Then I passed out.

  I must have slept for quite a long time. The moon was well over in the western part of the sky when I sat up. I felt weak and nauseated, and my clothing was dank with dew and sweat. But I was Sam McGregor, indubitably Sam. Alvin and Alice had gone with the wind, leaving, I felt, no traces. There was an almost beatific quality in being Sam.

  All the same, I wanted to find a place where I could make a fire and bake the chill out of my bones. I ached all over. After all, I had spent a lot of time in the past twelve hours being stationary beside Highway One.

  I got up and hobbled over to the railing on the seaward side. No, the descent to the water was too steep here. I'd have to go farther on.

  Did everybody who took the Grail Tourney have my experiences? I wondered as I began my creaky plodding once more. My "mother" had said that nobody ever seemed improved by the journey; suddenly I realized that none of the Mandarins had ever gone on it themselves. And yet they were insistent about the desirability of the journey for their juniors, a journey from which nobody returned unchanged. Was it—did they—

  It was a messy supposition. But were the Mandarins and the Dancers accomplices in a silent conspiracy, not quite conscious to the Mandarins, to keep the rising generation dependent, weak-minded, confused? The Mandarins wouldn't be the first generation in history that, despite its youthful rebelliousness, had wanted to hold on to status and power. An insignificant status, a feeble power. But, status and power.

  My joints were loosening up. I was walking faster. I longed to get to some place where I could rest for what remained of the night. I would have liked to fly or run.

  Run? Fly? But I was really dancing, moving along the road with the hard, stamping step of the Noyo dancers. I'd been dancing for several minutes now.

  As soon as I realized what I had been doing, I stopped myself. I could stop; this wasn't the beginning of another extra-life. But I was conscious of a quiet, constant push in myself toward dancing. It made me feel a little foolish, a little ashamed. And a little afraid.

  -

  Chapter V

  Gift-of-God was feeling carefully over my chest with her chapped, scratchy little hands. The action purported to be a caress, but I had my doubts, and the doubts became certainty when she gave a surreptitious tug at the string of my medicine bag. I had known she was up to something.

  I lay on my back, staring up at the roof of the sweat-house and trying to think. I had got to Russian Gulch a couple of days ago, and the tribe—it had a bad reputation—had been almost pressingly hospitable. I'd been glad to lie around resting for the first day. I was still suffering from the peculiar fatigue that had afflicted me ever since I started down Highway One, and my mind was confused. But I'd been ready to go on my way for the past twelve hours, and the tribe had thought up one excuse after another to detain me. Gee-Gee's was only the last of a considerable series.

  Abruptly I sat up, throwing Gee-Gee to one side. "Why'd you bring me here?" I asked.

  "Tho you could have the Grail Vision, Tham," she answered, all wide-eyed innocence. Sometimes her conversation was as witless as a five-year-old's and sometimes as knowing as that of a teenager on the edge of voting age. Actually, she was an unpleasant, pitiful little girl of eleven or twelve.

  "Have the Grail Vision in a smokehouse at Russian Gulch? It isn't reasonable."

  "Oh, shure. People have it all the time, Tham." She moved her head, and the light coming in through the smokehouse door lit up the side of her childish face, showing it to be heavily lined. When I had first seen her, I had thought she was a little old woman. Then she had moved, and I had realized that she was a child.

  She giggled, and reached out with a ghastly amorousness toward my chest. I drew away from her instinctively. She was under age, she was unattractive, and the girls of my own tribe all had had contraceptives implanted. I was in no state of sexual deprivation, or disposed to be uncritical. I reached for my bow, lying on the hide beside me, and got to my feet.

  "Where're you going?" Gee-Gee asked, watching me apprehensively.

  "I'm going to get started on my way down Highway One. I can put a few miles out of the way before it gets dark."

  She stared at me for a moment. Then she opened her mouth and gave vent to a piercing shriek. It had a clarion quality, a high-pitched penetration, through which the word "Help!" was occasionally audible.

  I swallowed. Then I started to run. But before I could get to the smokehouse door, two male Russian Gulchers had come pelting in.

  "What's he doin to ya, Gee-Gee?" the taller one demanded.

  "He—he—" She seemed on the verge of angry tears. "He tried to—and he tore my dress." She exhibited a small rip in the thin, faded blue fabric.

  "Rape, hunh?" said the shorter man. "Can't you pricks from Noyo even be normal when it comes to shoving the meat? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A little bitty girl like that!"

  "1 didn't," I said. I tried to push past him to the door. We scuffled. I hit him on the jaw, and he hit me beside the right eye.

  The other man joined in the fight. There were two of them, but they were both older than I and rather slow. I managed to hold my own. But then three other Russian Gulchers burst through the door and began hitting me. I went down under a hail of blows.

  In the end, they tied me up with long witches of Clematis ligusticifolia. This is a very strong fiber. The Pomo used to make deer nets out of it. They dumped me in a sort of jail, a low, rickety old summer cabin, and stationed a guard in front of the door.

  I looked around me. My heart was still thumping unpleasantly as a result of the fighting, and the places they had hit me hurt. My eye was beginning to swell up, and I couldn't see any too well, but there didn't seem to be much in the cabin except a bucket and a chair-high section of redwood log. The window had redwood shakes nailed across it like bars.

  I hobbled over to the window and peered out. The Gulchers were lying around in the sun indolently. After a minute I saw an astonishingly familiar figure walking out of the sweathouse. I squinted. Yes, it was Brotherly Love.

  Brotherly. What was he doing here? Russian Gulch is only a few miles from Noyo, but we never visited each other. Things were apt to disappear mysteriously when the Gulchers were around.

  Brotherly went behind a clump of ceanothus. He came out riding my motorbike.

  I must have made some sort of noise, for my guard jumped up, scowling. "Get away from that window!" he yelled. He shook a club of mountain mahogany at me.

  I went back to the redwood slab and sat down on it. I was badly puzzled. I didn't know why the Gulchers had elected to jump me, and I couldn't think what Brotherly had been doing in their company. The answer was perfectly simple, of course; but ever since I had been Alvin Riggs, my thinking had been confused.

  Suddenly, it came to me that I had to escape. Whatever the Gulch tribe was up to, it was plainly nothing good. I began to work at my bonds.

  The Gulchers weren't very good at woodsy lore, and I had had sense enough to expand my chest and keep my wrists apart while the smelly sods were tying me up. (All the Gulchers stank of sweat.) I had a little slack to work with. But for half an hour or so it didn't do me any good. The clematis strips were like leather, and my wrists were beginning to swell. What finally turned the scales was that I began to sweat copiously, and the moisture acted as a lubricant.

  Once my hands were free, my feet were simple enough. Now what? The window was barred, the door was bolted, and there was a guard in front of the door.

  I thought fleetingly of trying to tunnel out under the rear wall, but it would take too long, and I had nothing to dig with.

  I remembered something I had read in a paperback short-story collection when I
was a kid: that the weak spot of an amateur jail was apt to be its roof. I moved the section of log so it was under the lowermost of the rafters. Then I got up on the log and pushed.

  Nothing happened. I couldn't exert enough leverage with my hands. I readjusted the log so it was quite a lot closer to the wall and got up on it once more. Now, with my knees bent, I had my powerful back muscles to help me. I began to push.

  Cobwebs tickled. There was a lot of dust. I hoped I wouldn't sneeze. I hoped the guard wouldn't look in. I was shaking with the strain. Then, with almost no noise, the edge of the roof went up an inch or two.

  Fine. It could be done. I hopped down and looked about for something to wedge under the roof. The bucket was too flimsy, and I needed the section of log to stand on. Finally I found a piece of oak, still with the bark on and bearing ax marks, in a dusty corner. Somebody had tried to split it and failed.