The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  Whatever his errand, it seemed one that was agreeable to him. He was beaming. "Guess what," he said in a good loud voice. "All the Dancers are dead!"

  "Hunh?" We all made the same noise, a sound of incredulity and hope.

  "Yeah, that's right," Divine Peace responded. The success of his news pleased him. "Every last one of them, all up and down the coast. They just keeled over and died last night, all at about the same time."

  "What time was that?" Franny asked.

  He looked at her. "Oh, hello, Franny. I heard you'd gone to Bodega ... They all died about the time it was getting dark."

  "Dominoes," Francesca said into my ear.

  "Unh?" I said questioningly.

  "Yes; don't you remember I told you my father said the Dancers were like dominoes? He meant a row of dominoes. There must have been some psychic tie between them, and when one of them died it killed the other ones."

  It hadn't taken Joel long to digest the good news. He was gaining self-assurance by the minute. I thought he actually looked taller than he had yesterday. To the Mandarin who was holding the dead Dancer's whip he said, in a voice full of challenge, "That's the end of the Dancers. There won't be any more of them. You won't be able to use them to keep us down."

  "Maybe not," the older man answered, trying to sound unconcerned. "But we don't really have to have a Dancer. The dance can go on anyhow."

  "No, it can't," Joel said between his teeth. "None of us is ever going to dance again. Not another step. If there's any dancing going on at Gualala, you Mandarins will be doing it."

  "But—"

  "Yes, why don't you try it?" one of the girls said. "You might be able to bring your Dancers back to life." She laughed scornfully.

  "But—" the Mandarin with the whip said again.

  "The dance has great power," Joel quoted relishingly. " 'It can heal the sick, raise the dead, make men invulnerable. It brings blessings on the individual and his tribe.' You Mandarins ought to give it a trial."

  "But—we're too old—nothing would happen—there'd be no point to it!" The Mandarin was backing away from Joel.

  Joel's hands went out toward the whip. But before he could make an actual snatch at it, there came a shriek in a child's voice, and an instant later a little girl came running from the latrine.

  "It's Bill! He's cut his throat! He's dead! There's blood everywhere, all over the seat! Yeeeeeh!" She ran to one of the women, who put a protective arm around her.

  "We'd better get another burial party together," Joel said, "unless you Mandarins want to try to bring him back to life by dancing, that is."

  He didn't wait for an answer. He went off to the latrine with most of the younger tribesmen. I followed. There was no doubt that Bill was dead, or that he had killed himself. There was enough blood for three suicides.

  Bill was buried more expeditiously than the Dancer had been. On the way back, Joel and the others held a low-voiced conference. They didn't invite me to join them, but this didn't bother me. Every tribe must handle its own business.

  When we got back to the dance circle, two of the younger tribesmen went to each of the Avengers, grabbed him, twisted his arm behind his back and took his bow away from him. The Avengers didn't offer much resistance. I suppose they were still somewhat dazed by the sunbasket vision. But power had indubitably changed hands.

  The messenger from Mallo Pass had watched the passage with interest. Now he said—addressing me, I suppose because I was with Franny—"Was the man who killed himself your Dancer's chemical-con man? His adviser?"

  "Uh-huh, but it wasn't my Dancer. I'm from Noyo," I said. "Why?"

  "Because another of them killed himself last night. It was at Russian Gulch, up in your part of the country. He left a note admitting that he'd been mixed up in some pretty raw stuff ... I guess he just couldn't stand the way it was after he climbed up out of the tree."

  This was the only direct reference to the sunbasket vision I ever heard a tribesman make. We'd all had the vision, of course. But it was too sensitive to be talked about.

  Joel and several other young tribesmen were coming toward us. They all had bows slung over their backs, and Joel was carrying the dead Dancer's whip in his hand. They looked pleased with life. The welts along their ribs had the air of medals.

  "We thought we heard you say something about another suicide," Joel said to the man from Mallo Pass. "Where was it?"

  "At Russian Gulch." Franny's fellow tribesman repeated his story. When he had finished, Joel said, "What do you mean by 'pretty raw stuff''?"

  "Well, it seems there was a sort of murder ring up and down the coast, with a good many members, though I don't suppose they all knew what was going on.

  "According to the note the suicide at Russian Gulch left, the Dancers started it because they wanted to be independent of O'Hare's growing tanks for the production of new Dancers. The Dancers were all sterile males, and of course there never were any female Dancers. The man at Russian Gulch promised the local Dancer that if he'd get him a good supply of parts of human bodies, he'd be able to make new Dancers from them."

  "Did he do it?" the youngest of the lads with Joel wanted to know.

  "Naw, of course not. How could he? He didn't even try. What the murder ring did was to get rid of troublesome youngsters, anybody who hadn't been made tame enough by dancing and the Grail Journey. The Avengers furnished the muscle the ring needed. I don't suppose we'll ever know all the details. But some pretty raw stuff went on."

  "What did they do with the parts of the bodies that they got?" one of the younger women asked.

  Divine Peace spat in the dust of the dance circle. "I don't know. I don't want to know. I don't want to think about it."

  There was a silence. It was pretty much the theory I had come up with when I had seen Bill tossing up the Greek coin. It didn't explain why Bill had tried to lure Franny and me into O'Hare's matter duplicator, his "trap for love", at Point Arena. But I suppose a sadist doesn't need any particular reason for wanting a supply of helpless, docile flesh at his command.

  Everybody was looking at the Gualala Avengers. Finally a girl—I think it was the girl who had said the Mandarins might try dancing—said in a clear, indignant voice, "We knew you Mandarins didn't like us very well. We knew you wanted to keep us frightened and whipped. But we didn't know you were murderers."

  "We're not!" the Avenger called Dylan replied quickly. "Most of us had no idea what was going on!"

  "Didn't you?" the girl said scornfully. "You must have been awfully good at fooling yourselves."

  "Maybe we were," Dylan admitted. He was rubbing his mouth nervously, and from the way he talked his tongue was swollen and thick. "But we really didn't know. Now that it's explained, we see it, of course. But we didn't know it at the time.

  "We really believed that the dance was good for you young people. We thought it was the way to spiritual insight, health, long life—all sorts of goods. We thought we were doing the right thing in making the young people dance." He gulped in passionate sincerity.

  "Did you?" Joel said. "Then you'd better start dancing yourselves. We wouldn't want you to miss out on all those benefits."

  The Avengers—including those from Mallo Pass who had presented testimony at our trial—were rounded up and made to put on the dance shirts the younger men had been wearing. Then they were pushed out on the dance floor. "Get going," Joel said. "If you dance well enough, we may let you off a good deal of lashing."

  The Avengers began to stamp around in a circle. From the former Dancer's platform Joel reached out and flicked them more or less lightly from time to time with the dead android's whip. The other young men of the tribe were lined up eagerly behind him, waiting their turn to ply the whip. The Avengers were going to have some sore backs before they were through.

  "I guess that's the end of the dance as an institution," I said, watching the shuffling Avengers. "I wonder what happened at Navarro, though. Was it a part of the murder ring?"

  "We
can't be sure," Franny said, "but I think their Dancer was getting old and crazy. It was the first Dancer my father ever grew, I think. The viral component of its body was getting larger proportionately as it aged."

  "Old and crazy," I said. "Yes, but what happened to the Navarro people, Fran?"

  "I think the Dancer loaded them up with metal chains and had them dance out into the water. All of them, not just the young men. Its chemical-conscience adviser helped it whip them out."

  "Didn't they resist?" I asked.

  "I don't think so. Perhaps it promised them immortality, or resurrection or something like that. I can almost see them going out into the waves—frightened, hopeful, not daring to resist. They'd had a Dancer the longest of anybody, you know. And when they were well out, the Dancer danced out after them."

  "What happened to it?" I asked. I didn't see how Franny could be so sure about what had happened, though it sounded reasonable. But after all, she had a considerable degree of ESP. "Did it die?"

  "Not die, no, I don't think so. I think it lived on in a sort of coma, floating about in the waves. The salt concentration in the water where it was wasn't enough to kill or affect the viral component of its body. I think it died last night, when the other Dancers did." Franny tossed her hair back out of her eyes.

  I remembered the lonely beach and the bow I had found. "What happened to the chemical adviser, though? Did he go somewhere else after the tribe was drowned?"

  Franny shut her eyes. "I'm sure about this part, Sam. I really can see it happening.

  "After all the tribespeople were out in the water, the Dancer threw a coil of the heavy chain around the chemical-conscience man. It caught him by surprise. The Dancer pulled him down the beach into the shallows, and then hit him over the head with the butt end of its whip. It knocked him unconscious.

  "The Dancer pulled him on out into deep water, dancing most of the way. Then it let him go, and he sank to the bottom. He was luckier than the tribespeople. He died without regaining consciousness."

  I considered. Yes, it sounded plausible. But the main thing was that the coast had been cleansed of its burden. The Dancers were all dead, the private armies hopelessly demoralized, and the most vicious of the chemical-conscience people had committed suicide. The land was clean again.

  For Franny and me, the way was open to a new life. We could go on, not only to Bodega, but to San Francisco, if we liked. I was sure we could get jobs—the Republic was always short-handed—and have a comfortable, interesting, stimulating life. The Mendocino coast was beautiful, certainly. I had been born here and loved it. But when I thought of the long cold rainy nights of winter, my heart sank.

  Yes, we'd certainly be a lot more comfortable in the city. We'd be useful, too. To use an expression of my mother's generation, we wouldn't be copping out. And yet ...

  Suddenly I felt that the gap between the generations wasn't so wide after all. Most of the Mandarins hadn't realized what was going on, though their myopia might have been caused partly by self-interest. Stubborn and foolish, they were yet in many ways an admirable generation. They had had insights and perceptions that none of their forebearers had had. They had taught us much. We were more their heirs than they knew.

  I thought of Jade Dawn, with her earrings of Pomo Gold and her lace-curtain dress, her honesty, her foolishness, and her timid tenderness, and my heart warmed to her. I hoped that she was my mother. I felt I would be proud to be her son.

  The sunbasket vision had changed me, I suppose. I had learned from it what I had already known, that covenants exist between people and the land they live in. The Pomo had named every rock and hill in their territory, almost every spit of sand. They had felt a passionate attachment to the places where they lived. They had felt it was a sacred land.

  I was a medicine man. Now I saw that I had work to do here. There was a task of sacrering and enhallowment.

  Human beings live in a network of love and sacred-ness. My mother's generation had sensed this. If the network fails, people's hearts fail too. The holiness of what is already holy must be constantly affirmed.

  I tried to tell something of this to Francesca, stammering a little with emotion. She listened with her head bent, while the wind stirred her hair. At the end she smiled.

  "Yes, of course, Sam. You and I both learned about the covenants. If you'd wanted to go to the city to live, I don't believe I could have gone with you. I have something to do here too.

  "Let's get started. We can get more fuel at Point Arena."

  A few minutes later we were back on the motorbike, on our way to Noyo again.

  The End

  * * * * * *

  Book information

  "It won't be easy to kill them," Fran said as we walked toward the part of the lab where the tanks for growing the Dancers were. "My father made the whole system closed. From the time the clones are put in the tanks and the nutrient solution starts circulating until the time, fourteen months later, when the Dancers are mature, it's never touched. There's no way of getting in to it."

  "But there must be some way of getting into it to make repairs."

  "It never needs repairs," Franny said.

  "Why not?" I asked.

  "Because both the lines and the tanks are alive ..."

  The

  Dancers

  of

  Noyo

  by

  Margaret St. Clair

  ace books

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  THE DANCERS OF NOYO

  Copyright 1973 by Margaret St. Clair

  An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.

  First Ace printing: July 1973

  Printed in U.S.A.

  * * * * * *

  Back cover

  the

  Dancers

  of

  Noyo

  Like so many others before him, reluctant Sam MacGregor was sent on a pilgrimage for the Grail Vision by the Dancers: androids grown from the cells of one man, with the powers of hypnotism and illusion—androids who held the tribes of the Republic of California in thrall.

  But soon Sam began to doubt his own identity, for he experienced, in close succession, extra-lives in different corridors of time and space.

  And he could not know whom his search would destroy: the Dancers ... or himself.

  Table of Contents

  The Dancers of Noyo

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Book information