"Because I'm O'Hare's daughter. I mean, because I'd just been to see my father. He lives—lived at Sebastopol, you know. That's where he had his laboratory and the tanks where he grew the Dancers."
"Why would your visiting him make the Avengers want to kill you?"
"Because he told me something important about the Dancers. And when I got back here, I was dumb enough to hint to some of my friends that I knew something. The news got around. And the Mallo Pass Dancer decided to kill me." She coughed, and drew a little nearer to the fire.
Again I got excited. O'Hare should certainly know the Dancers' secrets, if anybody would. And if he had told his daughter what he knew ... "What did he tell you?" I demanded.
"I asked him—it was at breakfast, and we were just finishing our bacon—whether the Dancers were really immortal. He laughed and said no, certainly not, but the way to kill them was unusual. Simple, he said, but unusual—not the sort of thing anybody would be apt to think of.
"He was high on something when he said it. He was high most of the time, actually. He looked like an old, old man though he was only fifty. His face was one mass of wrinkles. It must have been all those drugs and mushrooms.
"Anyhow, I tried to get him to tell me what the way of killing them was, but he wouldn't. I think he wanted to tease me. I don't suppose he'd ever really have told me, because he was proud of the Dancers, and he knew people would kill them if they knew how it could be done.
"I asked him several times more, but all he did was mutter something about 'dominoes' and 'visions'. I didn't know what he meant. Then he grabbed at the tablecloth and fell over backward. He broke a lot of dishes. He'd had a stroke.
"I called a doctor, but before he could get there my father was dead."
"How long ago was all this?"
"Last week," she answered in an unemotional tone. She didn't seem to be overwhelmed with grief for her father, but that was easy to understand. "Why did you want to. know?" she went on. "You're a Grail Pilgrim, aren't you?"
"Yes. I wanted to know because I'm in trouble with the Noyo Dancer, and I thought you might have found out something helpful. Also, I've been—"
I explained about the extra-lives to her, and told her the relevant portion of my life as Bennet, while she listened thoughtfully, warming her hands over the fire. Her smooth round breasts and long legs gleamed in the dim reddish light.
When I had finished, she said, "I think the clue as to how the Dancers can be destroyed lies somewhere in your life as Bennet."
"Why? What makes you think that?"
"I don't know why. I just do."
I went- over my experiences as Bennet mentally, but found no enlightenment. "Maybe the clue is there," I said, "but I don't know what it is." '
"It may come to you." She coughed. "What's your name?" she asked. "I can't just go on calling you 'you'."
"Sam McGregor. I'm a medicine man."
"Well, people call me Franny—Francesca is too long, and too formal. You don't have anything to eat, do you? The sea water I swallowed was filling, but not very nourishing."
The bag of acorn meal and the pemmican were gone long ago. I started to tell her I was sorry, I'd have to see if I could find some limpets on the rocks, when I remembered the pinch of chia meal in my medicine bag. Chia meal is extraordinarily sustaining and restorative; I'd been saving it for an absolute emergency. But it seemed to me that this was enough of an emergency to warrant using it. Franny had been through a sufficient physical ordeal without adding hunger to it.
The chia meal was wrapped in a twist of aluminum foil. I got it out, filled my folding cup with water, and mixed in about half a teaspoon of the meal to make a thin gruel. I handed it to Franny. "Drink this," I said.
She drank gratefully. "It's good," she said, giving the cup back to me. "What is it?"
"Ground-up seed of chia. It's a kind of wild mint that grows down in southern California. I traded some herbs for it." I rinsed the cup out, and swallowed the rinsings. No use wasting even a little chia. What was left of the meal I rolled up carefully and put back in my bag.
Franny seemed to feel much better. She fluffed her hair to dry it in the warmth of the fire, and then got up to try the hem of her slacks for dryness. "Wet as ever," she reported, sitting down again. "—We'd better get out of here before morning, Sam. As soon as it's light the local Dancer will send an Avenger to make sure I'm dead, and if my body's gone the Avengers will look for me. We'd better get out."
"What do you suggest?" I asked, a little dryly. I was beginning to feel this girl might be the ally Pomo Joe had foreseen for me, though I had certainly expected that the ally would be a man. But I couldn't imagine where we were to go or what we should do next. Certainly we couldn't walk on to Gualala, or even back to Noyo.
She fingered her lips. "One of the Avengers has a motorbike," she said after a minute. "If we could steal that, they probably wouldn't be able to catch us.
"Of course our Dancer is smart enough to put two and two together—if I'm gone, and the motorbike is gone, he'll probably realize I went somewhere on the bike. But the tribesmen like me well enough, and even the Avengers might not really want to catch me. Besides, they won't know in which direction we've gone."
The motorbike sounded good. I said so. "He's crazy about his bike," Franny said. "He sleeps with it right next to him. Stealing it is going to be hard."
"Where's your tribe camped?" I asked.
"Over in Irish Gulch, the next gulch down. Some of us live in the old houses, but Mike—that's the name of the Avenger who has the motorbike—sleeps in a driftwood shelter on a flat place a little above the beach."
"Let's go take a look at it," I said.
"OK. But we'd better wait until later. Then the moon will be up, and he's sure to be asleep."
We sat talking by the fire, filling in each other on our backgrounds and our pasts. The time did not seem long. Franny got up to wring or turn her clothing once or twice.
At last, as the thin moon was rising, she put on her scorched but still-damp clothes with a shiver of distaste. We climbed up the slope to the highway. I reclaimed my bow and quiver from where I had left them so much earlier, and Franny led me along the road and down into the gulch.
It was another steep descent. We went past huts and shelters where people were, presumably, sleeping, and paused on a grassy fiat spot above the sand and driftwood of the beach.
"There," Franny breathed. She pointed to a shelter of calked driftwood, roofed with a slab of redwood bark. There was a small window at the back.
I peered in through the door opening. After a moment I saw a man sleeping on the ground with his head propped against the saddle of a motorbike. It was going to be pretty difficult to get the bike away from him.
I drew back to consider. Of course, I could simply shoot him through the heart as he slept. Arrows are noiseless, and he probably wouldn't make much of a commotion as he died. But I disliked the idea of killing a sleeping man, even if he was an Avenger and Franny's intended murderer. There must be some other way.
Could I smoke him out of the hut? But he mustn't make an outcry, or rouse the rest of the tribe. The important thing was to get him out silently. After he was out, I was pretty sure I could deal with him.
I remembered one of Pomo Joe's lessons. "You don't really become a grizzly bear," he had said once, "even with the grizzly bear suit. But you make people think you have." If Mike saw a grizzly bear confronting him, he was certain to run from it. Anybody would. It was a matter of inducing an illusion and helping the illusion along.
I went through my medicine pouch, while Franny watched silently. At last I came out with a skimpy handful of Datura leaves. I put tinder in my drinking cup, got it to burning, and laid the leaves on top of it. Smoke sprang up.
The cup was getting too hot to hold comfortably. I padded its edge with a wad of damp grass, for coolness, and gave it to Fran. "Blow the smoke in on him," I said into her ear. "I'll do some medicine."
; She got the idea immediately and began to blow the smoke from the leaves in through the shack's glassless window. Meantime I, by snuffling around in the grass and growling, was getting into the proper frame of mind for my grizzly bear impersonation. Franny filled her lungs with clean air and blew on the leaves, filled her lungs and blew on the leaves. The hut began to fill with heavy smoke.
Soon there came a cough from inside. Then a louder cough and a convulsive fit of coughing. An outburst of sneezes. And then Mike appeared at the door of the shelter, choking and gasping, reeling and holding on to the door jamb. Datura stramonium is a potent hallucinogen. His lungs must have been full of its smoke.
The minute he had appeared at the door, I had dropped to all fours, head down, arms and legs massively planted. I could feel hair growing along my spine and covering my legs, feel my jaw grow horrid with fangs, feel my hands and feet turn to paws armed with fierce claws. I growled, low at first and then more loudly. As far as I was concerned, for the moment I was a grizzly bear.
The Avenger made a choking noise. I advanced toward him on all fours, scuffing the grass with turned-in paws. Once more I growled. The Avenger—I suppose he thought I might trap him inside the hut—tried to scream. He didn't make any noise. Then he ran past me toward the beach. There wasn't any place else he could run, really—the sides of the gulch were too steep to climb, and I was blocking the only other way.
I growled once more. Franny slapped me on the muzzle. "Come out of it, Sam," she said in a tense whisper. "We've got to get the bike."
I blinked. Then I stood up, shook myself, and dashed into the hut. I came out trundling the bike. I got on, Franny behind me, and stepped on the power. It was a good bike and only took a few seconds to get steam up. The roar of the surf covered the slight noise. The bike went up the path easily. In a moment we were back on the highway, on our way south to Gualala.
-
Chapter XII
"Have they an easy way of following us?" I asked as Manchester slid by and we neared the Boonville turn-off. The subject of pursuit was very much in my mind.
Francesca shrugged. She was sitting behind me, perched insecurely on the sketchy pillion saddle of the stolen motorbike, legs dangling, arms around my waist. The bike had certainly not been designed for serious passenger-carrying.
"No, I don't think so. But our Dancer is sure to make them try. I wonder whether it would be better for us to keep on straight down Highway One to Bodega, or to take the Boonville turn-off. They probably wouldn't expect us to go to Boonville. And we'd be pretty much out of tribal jurisdiction after we got on the Redwood Highway. I mean Hundred and One."
I was oddly reluctant to leave the coastal highway. I suppose this was partly because I had set out to make the Grail Journey to Gualala, and partly because leaving the coast seemed like running out on the younger tribesmen and their struggle with the Dancers. Still, Franny's suggestion was worth serious consideration. The route she suggested would take longer, but we might be safer.
The immediate question was settled for us by a detour sign at the turn-off. Highway One was closed ahead.
I turned toward Boonville. I wondered how long the detour was and what the reason for it might be. It couldn't be the Garcia River's being in flood, not in the summer time. Probably road work.
It was a very dark night. The moon was a thin crescent in the sky. I had been driving without lights, to be less conspicuous. Now I decided it was probably safe to switch on the bike's headlight. I wasn't familiar with the Boonville road.
Franny shifted on the pillion and changed the position of her arms around me. She must have been thoroughly uncomfortable, but she didn't complain. A deer ran across the road in front of us, sharply lit-up by the bike's headlight. We went down a long curve into a dip and started up the other side. The bike began to lose speed.
I pressed down on the fuel pedal. Nothing happened. The bike continued to lose momentum. It came to a noiseless stop and then slowly began to roll back. It was plain what had happened. There was no more fuel in the tank.
I cursed Mike, that shiftless Avenger, who'd let his bike get so low on juice. We hadn't come more than eight or ten miles. Franny and I had got off the bike, to keep it from going over with us, and now stood looking at each other. From some dim idea of conserving the battery, I switched off the headlight. "Can we get alcohol at Manchester?" I asked.
The girl shook her head. "No, the nearest place is Point Arena. The store and the service station there both handle it."
"How far is that?" I asked.
"Oh, about eleven miles."
Eleven miles, at night, on foot, pushing that gutless wonder of a motorbike ... I couldn't think what to do.
We had been speaking almost in whispers, as if we feared being overheard. Now Franny said, still softly, "There's a house up there, back from the road."
"Where?"
"Among the trees." She pointed.
I couldn't see anything, not even the outline of a house, but I was willing to take her word for it. (She had, as I was beginning to realize, exceptionally keen senses, and could see in poor light almost as well as a cat.)
"There's nobody there," she continued. "I mean, the house is deserted, I'm almost sure. How about—if—maybe it would be a good idea if we stayed there until morning. We could hide the bike."
She didn't, I realized, want to admit that she was tired and needed rest. But I hesitated. We couldn't, it was true, get very far on foot in the dark. But the house felt like a trap to me, and I remembered that my really serious troubles during the Grail Journey had always occurred inside some sort of structure—Farnsworth's house, for example, and the Russian Gulchers' jail. On the highway I'd never done much more than hallucinate. And abandoned houses are apt to harbor nasty surprises in a country that has had a pandemic of bone-melt plague.
"It's all right, Sam, I'm almost certain it is," Franny said, as if she were reading my mind. "We'll be able to think better in the morning."
She might be right. Anybody who could send out the clear, urgent call for help that she had when she had been chained to the rock must have unusual mental abilities. And I certainly didn't feel very clear-headed at the present moment.
I remembered something Pomo Joe had said to me once: "Don't ever let yourself get too tired—dumb-tired—if you can help it. That's when people have accidents and make mistakes."
"OK," I said finally. The bow slung across my shoulders—it must have been a considerable annoyance to Franny, riding behind me—gave me confidence. "We'll stay here tonight. What shall we do with the bike?"
"Let's take it in the house with us."
It seemed a good idea. With me pushing the bike, Franny and I started up the inconspicuous gravel drive that led up to the house.
The house was a small one, relatively new, with a big uncurtained picture window looking out over the road. It had probably been built not long before the outbreak of the plagues. And it certainly seemed deserted; even in the bad light I could see weeds coming up through the gravel of the drive, and when we got closer I saw that the tiny front lawn was a mass of dead weed stalks.
I left the bike beside the drive, went up the few steps softly, and gently tried the front door. It didn't open. I hadn't thought it would.
"Try the back door," Francesca suggested softly. "It'll surely be unlocked."
I felt a twinge of suspicion. How could she be sure the back door would be unlocked? And why, if she thought the house were deserted, did she keep on speaking in such a low tone? Still, she might be right. People do leave a back door unlocked even when they're careful to secure the front one.
We went around to the back. To the left there was a small garage, plainly much older than the house. Its doors sagged on their hinges, and it plainly hadn't been used for years.
I tried the back door. Yes, it was unlocked. I pushed it open gently, put my head inside and sniffed. There were no funny smells, only a general smell of dust and mildew. I beckoned to Franny and, with m
e still pushing the stolen bike, we stepped inside.
We seemed to be in some sort of a kitchen. There were draperies on the windows, and the room was extremely dark. We groped our way from the kitchen into a room with a round table, and from there into the room with the picture window. Nobody anywhere, and everywhere the smell of mildew and dust.
Yes, it seemed to be all right. "Let's look for the bedroom," Franny said in my ear. "I'd rather sleep on a bed than on the floor."
We found a bedroom on the other side of a little hall. A noise of scurrying as I opened the door made me hesitate. But it was probably only a mouse or a pack rat.
Still I hesitated. There was a smell in the room I couldn't identify, something besides the usual dust and mold, and it made me uneasy. "What's the smell?" I asked Franny, who was pressed up against me in the doorway.
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