The Dancers of Noyo Page 5

  I got the roof up about six inches this time and let it down gently on the oak. Up the wall, through the gap with a good deal of scraping on my buttocks—the gap was only about four inches wide—and down the other side. I was out. It had been wonderfully easy, actually.

  I stood there panting for a moment. I planned to make a wide circuit of the Gulchers' camp through the bushes and rejoin Highway One a good deal further down. I didn't think the Gulchers would pursue me very far on foot, and it ought to be several hours before they missed me. But I wished I had my bow. I felt empty-handed and defenseless without it.

  There were bushes contiguous to the back of the shack where I had been imprisoned, and I made my way through clumps of ceanothus and an occasional rhododendron until I came to an open space. Nobody seemed to have noticed my escape. I had had wonderful luck ,so far. But the open space offered difficulties. I hesitated on the edge of it.

  There was no use in waiting. I set out across it, hoping that a brisk, unhurried pace would keep a distant spectator from getting suspicious.

  It might have, except that Gee-Gee, when I was almost across the clearing, came ambling along from the women's latrine. I don't know where she was on her way to. Anyhow, the instant she spied me, she set up a piercing shriek. I don't see how such a wizened child could make so much noise.

  An instant later, assorted Russian Gulchers came bursting through the thicket. I, of course, had taken to my heels as soon as Gee-Gee started her keening. I headed downslope, toward the beckoning ribbon of Highway One.

  I probably could have made it, since I was younger than any of my pursuers, except that one of them had the presence of mind to shoot me in the back with a blunt arrow. It knocked the wind out of me, and by the time I had recovered myself, they were swarming over me with clubs.

  They tied my wrists much more securely this time, but they didn't take me back immediately to my jail. Instead, they marched me off to see the local Dancer.

  Dancers are all grown from the same clone, an aggregate of cells from the body of the late, well-known Bennet. So every Dancer is identical with every other Dancer, at least initially. It is always a shock, though, to see how identical they are. This one was a perfect replica of the Noyo Dancer, even to its loincloth. The only difference between the two was that this one had a broad metal band around its upper arm, like a bracelet. It even had a whip like the Noyo Dancer's in its hand.

  A couple of men were stamping around in the circle below its dais. They were older than the dancers I was used to. The Dancer let me and my escorts cool our heels for several minutes while it watched the dancers. Then it said something to us in the same old fruity voice.

  I hardly noticed what it was saying. As soon as I had seen the men moving in the circle I had begun to feel an urgent desire to move my feet, hobbled though they were, in the rhythm of the dance. It took all my willpower to keep them still.

  The Dancer made quite an oration, dwelling, I think, on the heinousness of my offense, and ending with the words, "It is unpardonably bad behavior from a Pilgrim, someone who has gone forth to seek the vision of the sunbasket."

  "Um," I answered. There was a particularly nasty urgency in the instep of my left foot.

  "Is that all you have to say?" the Dancer demanded, switching the lash of its whip so it just missed my feet.

  "... Whatever I'm accused of, I didn't do it. I didn't do anything."

  The Dancer made a wide gesture of dismissal. "Take him back to the. jail," it said to my escorts. "Keep him there until he's in a better frame of mind."

  They led me off, making little mincing steps with my hobbled feet. I was constantly afraid that I'd start doing the dance step. When we got to the shack, they shoved me inside; and after a few minutes, a surly Gulcher brought in an armload of redwood bark. He threw it on the floor, and then lay down on it. "Don't try to get away again," he told me pugnaciously. "We'll tell the agent you fell over the bluff and the waves marked you." He shook his club menacingly at me.

  Time passed. My guard dozed, but I found that every time I moved, he opened his eyes and glared at me. It got dark. Nobody brought me anything to eat. I could hear the guard chewing on something, possibly jerkee or pemmican.

  I spent a miserable night. I kept wanting to dance—and to be forced to dance before a lout like my guard seemed to me a real degradation—and I was puzzled as to why the Gulchers wanted so desperately to detain me.

  My guard began to snore. It was a regular, repeated noise, rather like surf breaking. I must have found it soothing, for I dozed off a few moments myself. When I woke, the moon was up. I don't know whether or not that had anything to do with it, but I abruptly realized something I ought to have thought of before: that there wasn't a single Gulcher, male or female, who was approximately my own age. Gee-Gee was the oldest of the children. After her there was a gap, and then the adults, people of thirty-five or so and up. Where had all the people in my age group gone?

  Gone? Well, it was possible that nobody had been born at Russian Gulch for twenty-two years, or that all those who had been had died in the plagues. Or perhaps they had all gone on the Grail Journey.

  I meditated on this for the rest of the night, in the intervals of trying to get my wrists loose and keeping my feet from moving.

  My guard woke up about sunrise. He yawned, stretched, and checked over the withes around my wrists. While he was doing it I said, "Where is everybody?"

  "Hunh?"

  "I mean, all the people my age. What did you Mandarins do with them, poison them and dump them in the water? Or stash them away in a convenient cave?"

  A very odd gleam came into my guard's eyes. "Listen, McGregor," he said, "put your attention on trying to get out of your fix, and leave our own affairs to us. Rape isn't any motherfucking picnic."

  "I didn't touch her," I said. "Nobody would have to use force on her anyhow. She's been up for grabs since she was ten."

  He hit me on the mouth—not very hard, just enough to show he wouldn't stand any impudence. "You'll stay here, unh, until you're in a better frame of mind," he said.

  "On a diet of bread and water?" I asked, through my thickening lips.

  "On a diet of water."

  "... You'd better untie my wrists once in a while, if you don't want me to die of gangrene before I die of starvation," I said.

  He considered this for a while. Then he called three other Gulchers, and they stood around me with drawn bows while my guard undid my wrists and let the blood start circulating again. It hurt.

  After about ten minutes, two of the men rolled in a huge redwood stump, about four feet in diameter, and tied my arms around it and my feet to it, so I was standing upright. The stump was nearly six feet tall and must have weighed half a ton. I didn't think the new arrangement was much improvement over the old. It seemed to me it was going to get pretty painful in a few hours.

  It did have the advantage of sparing me more of my guard's company. He and the others went out, barring the door from the outside. There wasn't any chance I'd be able to get over to it anyhow.

  I was hungry, tired, and confused. I couldn't think why these things were happening. The Gulchers knew as well as I did that I hadn't laid Gee-Gee, forcibly or otherwise.

  About half an hour later there was a faint "Pssst!" from beyond the redwood shakes of the window. I turned my head toward the sound. Gift-of-God's ugly little face was pressed up hard against the shakes.

  "You!" I said.

  "Uh-huh. Lithen, Tham, I'm thorry."

  "Why'd you do it, then?"

  "They told me to. I was thcared not to."

  "Why'd you try to get my medicine bag?"

  Her face puckered up so her wrinkles were even deeper, and she made a sniffling noise. "I'm tho thcared," she said dolefully. "I thought maybe your bag would protect me. It'th magic."

  "What're you scared of?"

  "I don't know. There aren't any kidth older than me. Thomething happenth to them."

  "What?" Despite my
personal situation, I was getting excited.

  "I don't know. They jutht aren't here anymore ... I'd better go, Tham. If they find me here, they'll get mad."

  "Wait. Why've they put me in jail? What do they mean when they talk about keeping me here until I'm in a better frame of mind?"

  "I don't know." She turned her head away from the window. There was an evasive note in her voice.

  "Yes you do! Why—"

  "No I don't! I don't!" I heard the sound of her feet as she ran away.

  I sighed. My arms were beginning to hurt. I didn't know which of the problems before me I ought to worry about—whether to concentrate on what had happened to the junior Gulchers, or on how I was to get loose, or on why the Gulchers were detaining me. Maybe the last item would be best—if I knew why they were keeping me, I might be able to persuade them to let me go.

  Perhaps my increasing physical distress acted as a catalyst. Anyhow, when my guard came in about nine and looked at me questioningly, the answer came to me full-blown: the Gulchers were holding me until I had some more extra-lives.

  Brotherly had left me on the highway, convinced that I had begun the cycle of confusion and extrapersonal crisis that constituted the Grail Journey. But when I had got to Russian Gulch, I hadn't acted crazy enough. They had sent for Brotherly. He had consulted with them, and advised them to hold me on some pretext until I was obviously living another identity. After that, I ought to be confused enough to be released safely. Probably hunger and physical suffering were supposed to hasten the experience.

  OK, but how did somebody behave who was having an extra-life? I really didn't know. I hadn't been around to watch myself when I was being Alvin. I'd have to fake it.

  I relaxed as much as I could in my bonds. I let my knees bend and my jaw drop. I made my eyes cross and my gaze blank. I drooled.

  "What'sa matter?" the guard asked suspiciously. He came closer.

  Was I doing it right? I opened my mouth to say something crazy, something like, "Green grows the gladstone." Before I could get the first word out, I was no longer there to say anything. I had begun to be somebody else.

  -

  Chapter VI

  The big problem, on the seashore, was to find a protected place for the candle to burn, for the flame would develop its characteristic visionary quiver only if it burned in still air. Jarred and buffeted by the wind it burned—paradoxically enough—with a long, steady flaring sodium flame.

  Bonnet picked his way carefully over the driftwood, fearful of breaking an ankle. His bones were slushy and soft these days, like rotten ice. But he wanted to be by the water when he lighted the candle. It seemed to him it was the only possible place for him to be.

  Up close under the bluff was a shallow cave, hollowed out by the waves of the highest tides. Picnickers had hauled up lengths of driftwood for fires. Bennet sat down with his back against the bluff. For a moment he was quiet, looking out over the always-renewed line of the waves and letting happiness settle around him like an ethereal cloak. But there was something wrong with his emotion, something flawed and imperfect. It wasn't intense enough, and there was fear under it. He wasn't getting the happiness that, as a dying man, he was entitled to.

  He sighed. He would light the candle, stare into its fluting, spiraled, green-zoned flame, and hope. Something might happen within him. Or something might come out of the water to him.

  The candle burned. There was too much wind. Not until he fenced it in with a protective chimney of ends of wood did it settle to pulsating upward, its heart a pool of liquid green.

  For a moment he felt disgusted with himself. The candle was from Hong Kong, cheap, an out-of-date gadget, a toy for children. (How had he got it? He couldn't remember. Perhaps somebody had given it to him.) That a man of science should turn to such a cheap trick for solace was actually shameful. But he kept on looking into the flame.

  The air seemed very still. A mist was drifting in. Bennet changed his position cautiously. He felt he had been looking at the pulsing flame a long time. Expectation was growing in him. The pit of his stomach felt tense.

  There was a splashing, seemingly a long way out in the water. He couldn't think what might have made it. The visibility was getting steadily poorer. He might have a difficult time finding his way back to his cabin ... What did it matter? What was important now was to hold his mind quiet and steady, and watch the flame.

  The fog had grown quite thick when he heard a muffled splash close at hand. It startled him. Had he, perhaps, slipped into a light trance? He got to his feet, peering eagerly, "his fear for his bones forgotten. Could it be ... incredibly, that ... An almost painful thrill ran over his thighs.

  The fog deadened sound. Suddenly, quite near him, a figure appeared out of the night. It was dark, glistening wetly, with the face a round blank. It held a spear in one hand. After an instant Bennet decided it was a scuba diver. Disappointment made him sick.

  The figure pushed back the faceplate and spoke. "Hello, Mr. Bennet." It was a neighbor of his, Kate Wimbold.

  "Hello," he replied. "... You've been diving at night? When it's so dark? I don't understand how you could see anything."

  "There's always some light," she answered vaguely. "The abalone are dying," she continued after a pause.

  "Abalone?" Bennet, torn between disappointment and a hope that, after all, Kate Wimbold might be what he had been waiting for, felt that the conversation was getting out of hand.

  "Yes, out on the rocks. The water is warm ... I found this on the beach." She held something out to him.

  Bennet accepted it. It was a fat silver disk, bearing on one side a woman's helmeted head, on the other an owl. It was faintly warm to the touch. It must be a coin, a Greek coin.

  After a moment he gave it back to her. He was oddly eager to get rid of it. The girl stared at him, her face seeming to get bigger and bigger until it filled the whole field of his vision. "Don't you remember the covenants?" she said.

  -

  I came back to myself briefly. I had been untied from the redwood log and was lying on some hard surface. I had time to wonder whether this were the particular Bennet who was said to be the source of the cells from which all the Dancers had been grown. Then back to being Bennet again.

  -

  The cabin was small, fit by a naked lightbulb, but it looked out over the water. There was a constant susurrus of surf.

  The man in the green whipcord suit turned from the window and said, "Bennet, you've been faking the tests."

  "I don't deny it," Bennet answered from the plastic swivel chair where he was sitting. "You're O'Hare, I suppose, dressed up like a county health department worker. I wonder I didn't recognize you before. We've spent a lot of time together."

  "I was careful you shouldn't," O'Hare answered. "And I really am a worker in the health department; I've been trying to find you for a long time."

  "Well, you succeeded," Bennet replied calmly, though anger was growing in him. "I'm sorry, but I must ask you to be on your way. I have nothing for you."

  "What if I should tell my superiors you've been faking the tests, that you're really a sick, a seriously sick, a dying man?"

  "By the time you manage to convince them, I'll be dead," Bennet replied, more confidently than he felt.

  O'Hare raised his eyebrows. "Will you? I have only to drop a hint, and they'll take you into custody. Nobody wants to take any chances on another outbreak of bone-melt. I don't see why you faked the tests. It must have been a lot of trouble. And surely your, umh, conscience must bother you slightly."

  "No, not really. I mean, it wasn't much trouble and my conscience doesn't bother me particularly. And it's worth it anyhow, for the privilege of dying undisturbed."

  "You value that so much?"

  "Yes. I do."

  "Then I'll make a bargain with you," O'Hare said briskly. "My silence, complete and absolute, in exchange for a few scrapings of the mucous membrane of your mouth."

  "No," said Bennet instantly.
"I refuse to be the author of a race of androids, no matter how tempting the bargain."

  "You're really astonishing, Bennet," the other man said. "Doesn't it strike you as irrational to refuse me a few cells from your body, and yet to be willing to be a vector of bone-melt cancer to millions of men? In all the outbreaks, the mortality has been one hundred percent."

  Bennet shrugged. "A death like mine is no penalty. I feel it is the crown of my life. Incidentally, I wonder you dared try to find me. As you're well aware, contact with me is dangerous."

  It was O'Hare's turn to shrug. "A simple, effective prophylaxis for the disease has been worked out since you contracted it. Provided the nasal passages are washed out promptly with ephedrine solution, or even buffered saline, there's very little danger. It has to be done in time, of course. Didn't the health department tell you?"