The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  "No. And now, O'Hare, I wish you'd get out. I don't understand why you've fixed on me. Surely you must have cell cultures available from some of the several million victims of bone-melt so far."

  "Oh, I have. But you see, Bennet, you're unique. You're the only person, so far as we know, who's had bone-melt and then had an arrest of the disease. The others were dead within a week of the time the first overt symptoms appeared. It's taken you more than ten years. I want a histological sample from you."

  "Sorry, you'll have to get along without me," Bennet said. He had been getting steadily angrier, much as he was trying to control himself. "Will you get out, or do I have to try to throw you out?"

  "Oh, I'll get out, I'll get out," O'Hare said placatingly. "But I brought you a present, a bottle of a wine you used to like. Grands-Eschezeaux. It's hard to get these days."

  "Very considerate of you," Bennet said, smiling a little. "Yes, I'm still fond of it. But I warn you, I'm not going to soften up any because of a bottle of good wine."

  "I don't expect you to. But we used to be friends." O'Hare produced the bottle and a corkscrew. "Let's try it together, and then I'll go. I promise I won't tell the county health department you've hocused their tests. When the chips are down, I don't care much more about human welfare than you do."

  He pulled the cork from the bottle. Under Bennet's direction, he got a couple of glasses from the cupboard. He poured, his back to Bennet. "Here," he said. He handed him one of the glasses. "... To your happiness."

  They drank. "Yes, I am happy," Bennet replied musingly. "I was never so happy in my life as I am now. I didn't feel like this when I had bone-melt before. I had a low fever, and I was badly frightened. But this time I'm happy. It doesn't matter that it's only going to last three days."

  "You're sure about the timing?" O'Hare asked. "You had an arrest of the disease before."

  "Yes, I'm sure. There's too much organic damage by now for me to recover. And I don't want to recover, anyhow. I'm too happy this way."

  "So you're beyond any fear of death," O'Hare said. "Could anything—I don't know quite how to put it—break your mood?"

  "Certainly. Ugly surroundings. Any sort of unpleasantness or struggle. Anger above all. Anger would probably cut short zum of my precious days ... This wine's not zo good as I remembered it."

  "Sorry," O'Hare said. "Perhaps it gets better toward the bottom of the bottle. They often do." He poured more wine into Bennet's glass.

  Bennet drank. O'Hare was watching him steadily. "Why're you looking at me zo?" he asked pettishly. "You ought to go 'way."

  "I will later. Not just now," O'Hare said.

  "Not ...? I'm getting sleepy."

  "Of course, of course," O'Hare answered soothingly.

  "Of course?" Bennet stared at the other man, fingering his lips. He tried to get up from his chair. "You've fooled me," he said with weak passion. "The wine was doped. You—"

  "What else could I do?" O'Hare answered. "I wanted the tissue sample. It won't hurt you any. You'll only be out six or eight hours."

  "Six or eight hours! Half a day! So much of my precious time!" Bennet was torn between slumber, rage, and weeping. He tried to tell himself that he would waken again, that he would still have two and a half days left of his precious dying.

  In vain, in vain. Rage swamped him, and the more he tried to fight it off, the more the crack in his euphoria widened. Terror was pouring in, the black terror of the icy waters of death.

  O'Hare bent over him. With his last strength, Bennet tried to spit in his face.

  -

  Chapter VII

  My chest felt damp. I tried to raise my hand to blot at it, and couldn't. I was bound too tightly in the funeral cerements. Well, the grave is a chrysalis for the moth of immortal life. No wonder I was held fast.

  The wetness kept on. I was still Bennet, but I managed to get one eye open. Gift-of-God was bending over me, weeping bitterly. Her wretched little face looked like dried orange peel, but the water of grief was dripping off it. "Don't be dead, Tham," she was saying, "pleathe, pleathe, Tham, don't be dead! I can't thtand it if you're dead."

  "... Not," I managed. My tongue was dry and thick in my mouth.

  Her small rough face lit up. "Ooooh," she said, "you're really OK?" She smiled uncertainly, sniffled, and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist.

  I managed an assenting, "Gluck," in the back of my throat.

  "Then lithen, Tham. They'll be here in a minute to tetht you. Pretend to be thtoned. Don't jump or let on when they thtick you. You jutht be thonzked. Be thtoned."

  "... Try," I said. An instant later I heard her get to her feet and run out of the room, and an instant after that I heard somebody come in. There was the sound of heavy breathing beside me. One—maybe two—men. All the male Russian Gulchers were heavy breathers, and if one couldn't smell them, one could always hear them.

  Somebody picked up my right arm and jabbed a needle into it. The needle felt hot, and about as big as a railroad spike, and yet Gee-Gee's warning hadn't really been necessary. The needle hurt, but it didn't hurt me; what the Russian Gulchers had wanted to achieve with me had very nearly happened. I had been reduced to a body that no especial or consistent personality inhabited.

  My arm was let drop. "He's had it, I guess," somebody said. "Wonder if he can respond to a simple command."

  "Try it and find out," the other man said. He had a light, precise way of talking that left all the syllables separate and distinct. It wasn't at all like the slurred, slobby way the R. Gulchers talked.

  "OK." The hard-breathing one pushed and prodded me into a sitting position and then bellowed into my ear, "Wake up, Boyle!"

  Boyle? Why was he calling me that? I'd been Bennet, hadn't I? I let my eyelids flutter an instant before I opened them.

  Two men, just as I'd thought. The bellowing, hard-breathing one I'd seen before. He'd chased me or attacked me or guarded me—I couldn't remember clearly. The other, the precise e-nun-ci-a-tor, was new to me.

  "Get to your feet, Burke!" the bellower bellowed.

  I didn't know whether I ought to obey or not. Finally I said, only a little more confused than I actually felt, "I thought my name was Scottish. A name with 'Mac'."

  "Never mind that," the precise man said. "You're whoever we say you are. Get to your feet."

  Stumblingly I obeyed. I stood swaying, my head down, wondering whether I oughtn't to just lie down again. If I lay down, I might be able to decide who I was. The vapors of confusion had risen around me blindingly, perhaps because of my precise-spoken jailer's denial of my right to any one name, and I felt I had a whole beanpot full of identities to choose from. There were not only the lives I had actually lived—Alvin Biggs and Bennet—and the assimilation with the cadaver of Alice—but a broad spectrum of possibilities, most of which weren't even names. Who did I want to be? I didn't know. And I didn't know who was wondering about it.

  The bigger man began to push me toward the door, propelling me knowingly with his fists and knees. "What a lot of trouble this asshole from Noyo has been," he said. "If we'd only thrown him in the water, we'd of been lots better off. But your sensitive chemical conscience wouldn' let you."

  "I don't see why you mock me for having a chemical conscience," the precise man said. "It's certainly better to have one's ethical considerations activated by chemical than not to have them activated at all."

  "Ethical!" The other man made a snorting noise. "Why, you've done things that would disgus' a skunk. The kids, to mention one. Don't talk to me about your fuckin' ethics."

  "Ask yourself what I'd have been like without my chemical conscience," the other man said between his teeth. "I might just forget to go in for my shot some month, and prefer to settle with you. Watch yourself."

  I heard all this without really comprehending it. I knew, of course, that the California Republic had elected to deal with its most troublesome criminals by means of the "chemical conscience." But I was preoccupied with trying to
sort out what began to feel like my identity from Bennet's. And what about Bennet himself? Had the visionary scene on the seacoast with Kate Wimbold been as veridical as the interview in the cabin with O'Hare? Both had been lived by me as Bennet; but had the historical Bennet actually lived both of them? (I was unshakeably sure that Bennet's last few hours—Bennet, whose concealment of his disease had been responsible for the deaths of millions—had been as I had lived them. Strange sidelight on history! And O'Hare had grown the Dancers from Bennet's oral cells.)

  They were propelling me up the slope from the gulch to the road. "On your way, Jack," my jailer said when I reached the top. He gave me a parting shove.

  I turned north. In my fuddled condition, I was convinced I could deal with the Dancer at Noyo by appealing to the covenants the girl in the scuba suit had mentioned to Bennet. Why walk a long way down the coast, hunting an ally or trying to have the Grail Vision, when I could get rid of the unnatural creature so immediately? And after him, all the other Dancers. It would be as easy as swatting flies on a garbage heap.

  "He's headed north," my hard-breathing jailer said. "Shall we let him go?"

  "No, I think not," the precise man said reflectively. "He still looks a little too intelligent, a little too normal, to me. Turn him to face south. He can use a little more processing."

  I was turned around as neatly as a cable car on a turntable (Jade Moon took me on a visit to San Fran once, when I was about five and she was in one of her fits of being convinced I really was her child.) Docilely I began walking south. I didn't mind abandoning my plan particularly. It was like a dream in which I was convinced that whatever happened, it was all for the best.

  The men watched me in silence, hands on their hips. "He sure is confused," the heavy-breather said.

  "Fine," said the other. "Ideally, he shouldn't be able to tell his own butt from ours. Brotherly told us not to let him go unless we were sure he'd never come out of it. I don't think he ever will. But he could use a little more processing, and he'll get that on south."

  I was being discussed as if I weren't present. I felt a dim irritation, but I kept my head down and made no sign. I had gone a fair distance—three or four hundred feet—when I heard a voice behind me.

  "Tham, Tham, oh, Tham! Tham McGregor! You forgot your patheth! Tham!" It was Gee-Gee, and she was carrying my sheaf of wooden passes in her hand.

  Involuntarily I turned around and took the passes she was holding out to me. An instant later I realized that I had betrayed myself, that my captors would realize I was somewhat less zonked than they thought.

  It was too late. The next minute the two men were after me with thudding feet. I began to run, still feeling poorly connected with my body. But I was connected enough to be pretty frightened. I knew that if they caught me they wouldn't let me go until I was crazy for good.

  They were gaining on me. Panting and rubber-legged, sweating heavily, I struggled on. Then a car stopped beside me. It was a rancher in a truck, headed south.

  Bless that man. Bless his monogamous, beer-drinking, flag-saluting squareness. For a moment he looked from wild-eyed me to my angry pursuers. Then he opened the truck cab door. "Want a lift?" he said.

  "You bet."

  "Get in." I got in with alacrity, and we drove off. The truck was a gas-burner, but it accelerated well.

  "Thanks. Thanks a million," I said when I had got my breath back. Through the rear window I could see the two men standing in the road, looking sore and glum.

  "That's OK," the rancher said, waving his pipe (he was smoking, which shows how square he was). "I don't like those people. Anybody they're chasing must be all right"

  "Thanks," I said again. We were silent. I wondered whether I was wise to be going south. Had the idea that I could deal with the Noyo Dancer by invoking some dreamy convenant been accurate? Probably not; and yet I was convinced that my experiences as Bennet held the key to getting rid of the Dancers' tyranny.

  I was to forget this intuition, and remember it only later. Yet it was truthful and accurate.

  -

  Chapter VIII

  The artist's house bothered me. I had scarcely crossed the threshold when I began to feel uneasy, so that I found myself sniffing and turning my head from side to side, trying to locate the source of my distress.

  The artist—he said his name was Farnsworth—had picked me up just above Mendocino town after the rancher, who had grown a little too inquisitive, had turned off for his cousin's place. I had been glad of the lift, for no sooner had I parted from the rancher than I began to feel a sort of shudder, like the aura of epilepsy, between my shoulders. It hadn't happened before, but I knew immediately what it meant. I was in for another extra-life.

  "Life" isn't quite the word, for I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be human this time. A tree, a clod, something marine—anyhow, something pretty far down in the vital scale. What was left of my ego was itching with fear. I hoped the company of another person might help ward off an experience that I knew I couldn't return from. I got into Farnsworth's Mercedes eagerly.

  He was a slim man in his middle-thirties, with slim well-drawn eyebrows and a fine-featured, smooth, flesh-less face. His hands were big. We went bumping along past the town (the highway around Mendocino town has been blown up several times by dynamiters who didn't approve of quite so much concrete on a scenic route), and when we got to the southern outskirts Farnsworth asked me if I'd like to come up to his place for a drink. I accepted this offer eagerly too, since I dreaded being alone. Farnsworth was not the most pleasant companion in the world; but the extra-life I feared hadn't materialized. With him, I had stayed myself.

  We drove up a glittering driveway and stopped between two Monterey pines in front of a low redwood shack. "Like my drive?" Farnsworth said as we got out. "It's made of ground-up glass bottles. I do them in a tumbling barrel myself."

  "Fine idea," I said, fighting down the desire to start dancing along the strip of glittering glass. "Good ecology." ... Well, it was better fighting down the wish to dance than it would have been feeling my roots wandering around looking for water or my shell being forced open by a knife.

  We went into the house. As I said before, it made me uneasy, and I didn't like the artist much better than his house, though he exuded kindliness and goodwill. He reminded me of somebody, but I couldn't think who. Finally I placed it. He reminded me of the e-nun-ci-at-or at Russian Gulch.

  When he came back with the drinks—red wine from the Italian-Swiss colony at Asti near Cloverdale—I said, "Excuse me, uhn, but are you, uhn, having what they call the chemical conscience?" I was so apologetic because I was, in essence, accusing him of being at least a murderer; the "chemical conscience" has never been administered for anything except really serious felonies.

  His face changed. He made a gesture with the wine glass, so wide and sweeping that wine slopped out on the floor near the door that led to the workshop. "Somebody told you!" he said angrily. "It isn't fair! Won't people ever forget? Won't the ever let me alone? I'm paying my debt to society!"

  "I'm sorry," I said placatingly. "I didn't mean to offend you. Nobody told me anything. It was just a lucky guess on my part."

  "Somebody must have told you!"

  "No, really not. Say, though, wouldn't it be a good idea to mop up the wine on the floor? If we take some paper towels—"

  He made a gesture toward the towel rack on the wall. He was still fuming. I got towels and began blotting at the spilled wine. I saw that the jamb of the door that led to the workshop was badly splintered, as if the door, locked, had been violently burst open from the workshop side. It would have taken a lot of strength. But perhaps it had never happened—the door, at any rate, was in good shape.

  "That looks better," I said, rising from my knees.

  "Unh." He glared at me, only a little less angry. "Tm trying to do the right thing! I don't deserve to be persecuted like this!" All his sentences were italicized.

  I was getting sore. I could
n't think of anything to say. We looked at each other silently for a moment. "I am trying to do the right thing," he said, more calmly. "And I'll prove it. I'll do my best to help you."

  "Thanks," I answered, a little dryly.

  "You're a Pilgrim, aren't you? Making the Grail Journey? I've seen people like you on Highway One before."

  "Yes."

  "Now here I might be able to help you," he said musingly. "Sit down, and I'll get us some more wine."

  "I could use some help," I said. I sat down in the chair he had indicated, in front of the Franklin stove. I was wondering whether he could possibly be the ally Pomo Joe had predicted. It didn't seem likely. I mistrusted him too much.