The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  But fear had cleared the remains of the datura fog from my mind. My thoughts were precise and clear, bobbing above the sea of my terror like chips of balsa wood. And abruptly I understood what Francesca had been trying to say.

  I was as sure of it as if she had shouted it to me. I knew what she wanted me to do, and what the reason for it was. But I didn't see any possible way of being able to do it.

  Our cortege was making slow progress through the crowd of tribesmen. Dogs snapped and barked at us, probably because of the way I smelled. Without any preliminary warning, Franny moved away from her guards and proceeded effortlessly in the direction of the Dancer. It was almost as if she were floating.

  There was a moment of paralysis. Then, though the men on each side of Franny remained gripping her arms, their mouths open, the other jailers started after her double.

  It was the fetch, of course. That was what Franny's abstraction, her calmness, the sweat on her face, had meant. She had been calling the fetch to her. It was here now, the bringer of an opportunity Francesca had schemed for me to have. I must use it well.

  The fetch was walking a foot or two in front of its pursuers, evading them with the perfect ease of the immaterial. Everybody was watching it, including my guards. I began working my hands up under my shirt.

  The ropes cut into my wrists painfully, but I managed to grasp the edge of my medicine bag. One sharp yank-half strangling myself, for the cord around my neck was strong—and the bag was in my hands.

  I lurched backward toward the fire. My guards were not holding me very firmly, and I got into the pile of burning cones and branches without any serious resistance from them. There, my pants almost ablaze and my wrists scorching, I dropped my medicine bag into the heart of the blaze. None of these maneuvers would have been possible, except that the attention of my guards was divided between trying to hold me and watching the fetch, which was currently floating at an angle a little above the ground, with its head cocked and a silly smile on its face.

  I jumped out of the fire just as my pants legs began to ignite. The bag remained, leaning against a ruddy ember of pepperwood, and I watched it anxiously.

  It caught. The leather pouch burned slowly away from its contents, writhing a little. I saw the packets of herbs, the rattle, the disk for scrying. A small blue curl of smoke rose from the pouch, and a puff of wind carried it toward the Dancer.

  The Dancer had been standing with its whip in its hands, watching without any apparent emotion while guards and tribesmen grabbed after the fetch. As the tendril of smoke reached it, it started back and made a noise as if it had stepped on a thorn. Its hand went to its throat. It dropped the whip. Its red skin began to pale. Its eyes bulged.

  Its knees buckled and it fell forward. For a minute it lay on the ground kicking, its head almost in the fire. Then its legs drew up to its chest in a violent convulsion. It struggled for breath, heaving its chest upward and falling back again. It gave a final gasp and straightened out. Its skin had turned a pinkish white. It was dead.

  The tribe was in an uproar. My guards had let go of me and were yelling questions at each other. One of the younger men had picked up the Dancer's whip and was swishing it through the air.

  I stood rubbing my wrists, which hurt like blazes, and congratulating myself. At the cost of a pair of scorched wrists and a not irreplaceable medicine bag, I had killed a theoretically immortal Dancer. Francesca sent me over her gag a glance that shone with triumph. There would be no menace from the Avengers now. We both knew that we had won.

  There came a great flash of light. It was so bright that it made the night shake like a curtain, and we seemed to hear it rather than see it. The next minute the Grail Vision—the sunbasket vision—had begun.

  -

  Chapter XXII

  At the top of the tree, beyond the flapping pennants of vision, was darkness. The first great light of the vision had fragmented into light in a thousand beautiful and splendid manifestations—light reflected from water in uncounted sparkles, light glowing down from the sky, piercing through a gorgeous amphitheater of clouds, light daring over mountains—through which I had ascended overjoyed, yet somehow never quite satisfied.

  The ascent had been quasi-physical, with straining muscles and arms that sometimes trembled; and at times I had tasted and felt the light. Now at the very top, among jade and emerald leaves, darkness waited for me, propounding the question: what did I want?

  I could stay here, comforted by shreds of the effulgence, until the time for staying was over and no more could happen to me. Or I could climb out into the darkness and go in search of what I wanted. But that meant taking upon me the whole weight and blankness of the night.

  I leaned back against the branches, waiting. Darkness got in under my eyelids, when I closed them, and drowned out the memory of light. Like a man roused too soon from sleep, who clings to the tatters of his dream, I clung to the scraps of the splendor I had climbed through. They were torn from me, and the treacherous darkness welled over me. But enough light remained for me to be able to endure the darkness. The branches would shelter me.

  It was a test, the first of the tests of the strength of my longing for the sunbasket vision. But nobody required that I pass it. It was my own affair.

  I tried to think what made the darkness so terrible. The answer was so simple that it increased my fear. I was afraid that I might wander forever through the darkness, in a February midnight of the soul. I was afraid the sunbasket vision might never come.

  (That the danger was real is shown, I think, by the disposal Bill, and several others of the chemical-conscience people, eventually made of themselves. The vision, in general outline, was the same for everybody within its range. But the details varied from person to person, and so did the final effect.)

  It didn't occur to me to wonder, at the moment, why my longing to behold the vision was so intense. I'd never given the tribal talk about the vision any particular credence. But the longing was with me now, as real and actual as if I'd been born with it. In a sense, I suppose I had.

  I really didn't have any choice. I wanted too much to be possessed of—"seized of", to put it in archaic English—I wanted too much to be possessed of the vision to let the time go by without trying for it. I stayed among the branches a moment longer, feeling how good their shelter was. Then I climbed up and out into the dark.

  At first it wasn't as bad as I had feared it would be. I felt a rather cheap pride in my own bravery. Then the darkness caught up with me, and my memory of light was gone. I couldn't remember what I missed so much.

  And my amnesia was a grinding misery, the small hours in the February night of the soul.

  I tried to remember the word "light" but it eluded me. The best I could do was a periphrasis, a tag about "the uncounted laughter of the waves," which was what Aeschylus had called the glinting of light from the rippling surface of salt water. But I had forgotten what "laughter" was.

  I wasn't disembodied; and I was my real self, Sam McGregor, who had been trained by Pomo Joe to be a medicine man. This experience didn't resemble my handful of extra-lives at all. But I don't know how I could have had such a strong sense of my own body when the space through which I moved was, so to speak, highly abstract. The fabric of it seemed more generalized than that of our ordinary world, perhaps more tenuous. But there was nothing tenuous or unreal about the misery I was experiencing. I was Sam McGregor, and I could have howled with misery and despair.

  There were flickers of ... something ... now and then. Not light. The darkness never wavered. But it was as if, at moments, I had almost succeeded in recalling what light was. Every time this happened, I felt worse.

  I seemed to be walking. In the abstract darkness my muscles tensed and relaxed. I wasn't any place in particular, since all places were alike in the dark, and yet I moved. I was a point wandering in search of a plane.

  I was a man who wanted to see the Grail Vision—the sunbasket vision—and who had forgotten what "see
ing" meant.

  There came another adumbration, a moment when the idea of the idea of light seemed almost possible. It left me, and this time I knew I had reached my limit. I must get help from somewhere.

  This is the second of the testings of the sunbasket vision—the moment when the seeker, desperate for rescue from the blackness, must call up all his resources and review his whole life, looking for help.

  It is the same for everybody, though of course what is summoned up is individual. It means that the seeker must find the central point of his life. He must look for the one sacred, essential thing, and use it to pass the test.

  I could do no more than try.

  It was strange to be thinking without visual images. I couldn't see things in my mind as one ordinarily does, but only the dimmest of outlines, plus a kind of oral soundtrack. But I retraced my life, moving backward from Franny and the most recent days, through my training by Pomo Joe, to the books I had read as an adolescent, the girls I had made out with, Jade Dawn, and my brothers and sisters of the tribe. I didn't neglect my extra-lives, either, for they had happened as really as the other things had.

  Then I began to move forward again, stopping at things that seemed especially significant. I thought of enemies and friends, people I had loved and hated, who had helped or hindered me. I thought of Franny a good deal.

  In the end it seemed to me that the most helpful thing had been what Kate Wimbold had said when she came out of the water. I think my lips moved. For the third time I was invoking the covenants.

  ...The sunbasket, the Holy Grail, was there.

  It was simply there, without any epiphany, any slow, impressive dawning. This is the great secret, you see, what all the mystics always try to tell us; it was always there.

  The sunbasket had been there all the time. I hadn't been able to see it. I hadn't noticed it.

  The sunbasket vision existed on several levels at once. (The darkness had gone away as soon as I had perceived the basket, not so much because the sunbasket was a source of light, as because it and darkness couldn't coexist.) It was, in the first place, a magnificent sunbasket of the kind the Pomo, unequalled basket-makers, had actually made.

  The Pomo had used woodpecker feathers to make their best baskets a blaze of scarlet, and they had set off the burning scarlet with rows of vivid yellow feathers from other birds. The necks of such baskets were usually adorned with a rim of iridescent haliotis shell, and pendants of haliotis had hung down from the rim. So it was with the basket of the vision I beheld. Only all was made in effulgence and radiance. No woodpecker's feathers ever burned with such scarlet, no haliotis shell ever commanded such a range of brilliance.

  In the second place, the basket was not only a basket, it was, at times and unpredictably, a luminous silvery cup from the sides of which shone a white radiance. The reason for this was that the sunbasket vision had a collective authorship; and when people of western European origin think of a vision, they tend to think of the Holy Grail. So the vision was sometimes of a basket, and sometimes of a cup.

  But finally—and this was what gave what I was seeing it quality of vision and unveiling—the sunbasket was a woman's body, it was the starry universe, it was the curvature and naissance of space. In the vision of the basket there was no otherness. Everything was one. Beholding it—and I perceived it though the back of my head, through my skin, through my whole body, as well as through my eyes—I beheld what embraced appearances as the ocean embraces the shore. The basket was the ocean, I was the ocean, everything was one.

  From this pelagic bliss I was roused by an emotion I couldn't at first identify. It was so alien to the sense of union and completion that I couldn't for a while believe in it. Then I realized I was feeling a profound, aching grief.

  Grief? What for? I tried to push it away, to go back to blissful unity I had felt before. After all, the basket was still there, and I had no reason to grieve. But, as if my inexplicable grief had somehow triggered the happening, the sunbasket began to burn.

  It was consumed quietly, with a light of great beauty and tenderness. It was the most beautiful of any of the lights I had seen in the course of my whole visionary experience. I had no wish to delay the burning. My grief had gone, and I felt that what was happening was proper and right.

  It was over. The light died away gently. I was standing in a tranquil darkness. I had had the sunbasket vision, the vision of the Holy Grail.

  I stood for a moment thinking, before I opened my eyes. The vision had been coauthored. All those who had ever Jived on this coast, with their aspirations, fears and hopes, had contributed to it. The vision was the distillation of an interaction between the people and the land. The land remembered its old owners. At the end, the sunbasket had burned because the Pomo had burned their splendid baskets in honor of their dead.

  I opened my eyes and looked about me. I was standing where I had been when the Dancer had died. I was still bound, and I must have been standing up all night, but I felt rested and alert.

  The Dancer lay beside the ashes of the fire. In the east light was growing. It would soon be day.

  -

  Chapter XXIII

  We had breakfasted. It had been a bang-up breakfast—abalone steaks, acorn-meal flapjacks with wild blackberry jam, and lashings of bear jerky. I have never enjoyed a meal more. The older members of the Gualala tribe seemed less elated; they were sitting about in disconsolate attitudes, with blank or shot expressions on their faces. I felt that their experiences in the course of the vision had been considerably rougher than those of their juniors. Nobody said anything about carrying out the dead Dancer's sentence against Franny and me. Bill, the chemical-conscience man, was nowhere to be seen. A new spirit was in the air.

  Joel, the young tribesman who had brought me the gourd of spiked water in the sweathouse, walked over to the body of the Dancer and gave it a contemptuous but timid kick. "We ought to get this thing buried," he said. "It'll start to smell."

  While the Mandarins looked on dourly, a burial party was formed, all members tribesmen under twenty. I went along with them, glad to see the end of at least one mature Dancer. There was only one spade, and the buriers passed it from hand to hand.

  They buried the Dancer pretty deep. While the grave was being dug, Joel said to me, "What killed the Dancer, anyhow? That bag you threw on the fire?"

  "I think so," I answered. "There was an herb in my bag, Ephedra californica, or Mormon tea. It was the smoke from that killed your Dancer." I looked at the dead android. The progress of decay had turned its skin a light lavender. It was a rather pretty color, actually.

  "We always thought they were immortal," Joel said. "That's what made us so easy to push around."

  "No, not really. The Dancers were grown from the tissues of a man called Bennet—"

  "I've heard of him," Joel said.

  "—who had survived an attack of bone-melt and whose tissues, as a result, had unique properties. The mucous membrane of his mouth consisted of cells that had entered into a symbiotic union with the virus that caused bone-melt. When the prophylaxis against the bone-melt virus, which was an application of ephedrine to the nasal tissues, got to your Dancer, it died. The smoke from the herb in my bag killed the viral component in its cells."

  "I can sure tell you're a medicine man," Joel said. "You must have read a lot of books to be able to talk like that ... Anyhow, we owe you a lot of thanks. Our Dancer's dead."

  "Uh-huh," I said. "Well, my theory will do till a better one comes along."

  Somebody had picked up the whip the deceased Dancer had used and was making its last whistle through the air. "Maybe we'd better bury it with him," one of the young men said.

  "Un-unh," Joel said. "We might need it later on." He took the whip from the other youth, and switched it experimentally as we went back to the dance circle.

  But he laid it down rather nervously on the platform where the Dancer had used to stand, when he noticed that one of the Avengers was looking at him.
The Avengers—I think he had been one of my guards—made quite a thing of the slow inspection. Then he said, to nobody in particular, "I guess we'll have to get another Dancer." He picked up the whip from where Joel had laid it and made the lash whistle through the air.

  Joel had turned red. The other young men were looking at each other. Franny and I looked at each other. Joel hadn't winced at the noise of the whip, but I thought he had repressed the movement.

  Another Dancer? Well, I supposed they might be able to borrow one from somewhere along the coast. O'Hare's growing tanks were out of commission permanently. In any case, Franny and I had better be on our way toward Bodega. But we hated to leave Gualala without knowing how matters there would turn out.

  It was only about ten minutes later that a young man came up on a motorbike. Franny gave a gasp. "It's Divine Peace, from Mallo Pass," she said. "I wonder what he wants."