Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  Jackie didn’t understand treasure hunters. The idea of camping here, when we were so close to the valley….

  Gerald popped out of the cabin of the other truck almost before it had stopped moving. “What’s the problem?” His voice echoed off the dunes and he ran to peer in at us. “Why are you stopping?”

  “My eyes,” I said. “They’re so tired I’m seeing double. And I’m cold and hungry. We have to take a break.”

  Jackie said nothing, but her hand touched my arm in appreciation.

  “But we’re almost there!” said Sebastian. “It’s a straight run from here, a child could drive it.”

  “I know, but I need rest—and so do you.”

  He turned to stare at the moon. I could see his face, and although it was tired and lined his expression was perfectly sane. “Twenty minutes,” he said after a moment. “That will give us time to eat. Then—.”

  “No.” Jackie did not raise her voice. “You can do what you like, Gerald, but I’m not going any farther tonight. And Will Reynolds should be asleep in his tent, not jolting around in a truck. If you want to go on, you’ll do it without Will and me.” There was a moment when I thought Sebastian would explode at her. Then he nodded, lowered his head, and marched without a word to the other truck.

  I could never earn a living as a fortune-teller. My premonition had told me that we were in for a grim evening. Instead it proved to be the most peaceful few hours since we had left Hong Kong.

  Will Reynolds was fully recovered. Paddy was semi-sober. And Gerald Sebastian hid any angry feelings he had toward Jackie under icy politeness. Only his eyes betrayed him. They turned, at every gap in the conversation, to the north. On the other side of those moonlit dunes, less than forty miles away, lay his obsession. I could share his feelings.

  We had halted at about eight forty-five. At nine-fifteen, when we had finished a meal of hot tinned beef and biscuits, Sebastian wandered away from the lamplight and stood looking wistfully up at the haloed moon. It was setting, and a northern breeze veiled its face with fine sand.

  Abruptly he swung around and walked back to us. “I’m going on, Sam,” he said to me. “I have to go on. You follow me tomorrow morning.”

  His voice carried the command of the expedition’s leader. Jackie looked at me to raise an objection. I could not. I knew the desire too well. All I could do was wish that I could go with him.

  “You have only one more hour of moonlight,” I said.

  “I know.” He picked up a gallon container of water and climbed into the truck that I had been driving. “You’re in charge here. See you tomorrow.”

  The truck rumbled away between the mountains of sand. We watched it leave in silence, following it with our ears for what felt like minutes. When the last faint mutter of the engine was lost, I was able to pick up in the new silence the sounds of the cooling landscape around us. It was the mingsha again, the song of the dunes as they lost their heat to the stars. There were faint, crystalline chimes of surface slidings, broken by lower moans of movement deep within the sandhills. It was easy to imagine voices there, the whistle and call of far-off sentinels.

  “The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,” said Paddy suddenly. He was gazing out beyond the circle of lamplight, and his eyes were wide. Without another word he stood up, turned, and went off to his own tent.

  We stared after him. Within a couple of minutes Will Reynolds rose to his feet. He shivered, snorted, and glared at the fading moon. “Seen that in New Mexico,” he said. “Dust halo. Sandstorm on the way. It’ll be a bugger. Gotta get some sleep.” He lurched away.

  And then there were two. Jackie and I sat without speaking while the night grew colder and the sands murmured into sleep. “Did you understand what Paddy said?” she said at last.

  I shook my head. Our thoughts had been running in parallel. “He seemed to be talking about the sea, too, but we’re in one of the driest places in the world. Will Reynolds made a lot more sense. I’ve seen that haloed moon myself in desert country. It’s caused by a high dust layer. If there’s a sandstorm on the way we have to start early tomorrow, or Sebastian may be in trouble. We have all the food and the water distillation unit on this truck.”

  We left the camp just as it stood, the lamp still burning, and walked across to Jackie’s tent. There we hesitated. “Goodnight, Sam,” she said at last. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep, but sweet dreams.”

  “And you, Jackie.” Then, as she was putting her dark head into the tent, “I have some Halcion here. Sleeping tablets. If you’d like one.”

  She paused and pulled her head out of the tent. Then she held out her hand. “Just this once. Don’t get me into bad habits.”

  “Tomorrow, your first cigar.” I watched as she closed the tent, then walked back to turn out the lamp. The moon was on the horizon, a smoky, gray blur. Overhead no stars were visible. By the time that I stepped into my tent and climbed into my sleeping bag the night was totally dark.

  Sleep is a mystery, a force beyond control. The previous night, with nothing to worry about, I had been restless. Tonight, hours away from what could be the greatest event of my life, I put my head down and enjoyed the dreamless, uninvaded slumber that we mistakenly assign to small children. I did not stir until Paddy unzipped my tent and announced that I would miss coffee and eggs if I didn’t get a move on. Then I woke from a sleep so deep that for a moment I had no idea where I was.

  Neither Paddy nor Will seemed to remember anything strange about their last night’s behavior. We were in the truck before six-thirty, facing north into a cold, grit-filled wind. Visibility was down to less than two hundred yards and we would be reduced to map and compass. It promised to be slow work, and I intended to drive carefully. This truck contained a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, and no one knew why Gerald Sebastian had brought it. Plastic is safe enough without a detonator, everyone tells you so, but it makes an uncomfortable travel companion.

  I asked Will, bent over his image, for a first direction. And it was then, as I slipped into first gear and looked beyond the closest dunes to a red-brown sky, that I learned my mistake.

  Sleep had not been without dreams, and Gerald Sebastian’s vision was a strong one—strong enough to infect others. Night memories came flooding back to me.

  It was evening, with sunset clouds of red and gold. I stood next to the green statue, but it was no longer a lonely monolith half-buried in gray sand. Now it formed part of a great line of identical statues, flanking an avenue beside a broad canal. Laden pack animals walked the embankment, camels and donkeys and heavy-set horses, and I heard the jingle of metal on carved leather harnesses. A flat-bottomed boat eased along past me. The crew were tall, fair-skinned women with braided amber hair, singing to the music of a dreamy flute player cross-legged in the dragon’s-head bow. Beyond the embankment, as far as I could see, buildings of white limestone rose eighty to a hundred feet above the water. They were spired and windowless, mellow in the late sunlight. The wind was at my back. I could smell apple blossom and pear blossom from the dwarf trees that grew between the statues.

  I moved forward along the pebbled embankment. In half a mile the canal broadened to a lake bordered by lotus plants and water-lilies. Although the waters stretched to the purple haze of the horizon, I knew that they were fresh, not salt.

  On the quiet lake, their sails dipping rose-red in the evening sun, moved dozens of small boats. It was obvious that they were pleasure craft, sailing the calm lacustrine waters for pure enjoyment.

  As I watched, there was a sudden shivering of the landscape. The sky darkened, there was the sound of thunder. The buildings trembled, the road cracked, lake waters gathered and divided. The dream shattered.

  “Sam!” The shout came from Jackie and Paddy in the back seat. I found we were heading at a thirty degree angle up the side of a dune, four-wheel drive scrabb
ling to give purchase on the shifting sands. A second before we tipped over I brought us around to head down again.

  “Sorry!” I raised a hand in apology and fought back to level ground, horribly aware of our explosive cargo. “Lost concentration. It won’t happen again.”

  Will had just got round to looking up. “North-west, not north,” he said calmly. “Look, there’s his tracks. Follow them where you can.”

  To our left, almost hidden by blown sand, I saw the ghostly imprints of balloon tires. New sand was already drifting in to fill them. I followed their line and increased our speed. In full day, the temperature in the truck began to inch higher.

  After another ten miles the tire tracks faded to invisibility. But by that time we were on the final stretch, a long, north running ridge that led straight to the valley. Less than an hour later we were coasting down a shallow grade of powdery white sand that blew up like smoke behind us.

  “Half a mile,” said Will Reynolds. “Look, all the contours are right. There’s a whole city underneath us, deep in the sand.” He thrust an image under my nose. It showed a broad pattern of streets, picked out as dark lines on a light background. I thought I recognized the curving avenues and sweep of a broad embankment, and saw again in my mind the white sails and the laden animals. But I had no time for more than a moment’s glance. Then my attention moved to the valley ahead of us.

  He was there. So was the truck. And so was the statue. When we turned the final lip of the valley I could see the green warrior standing waist-deep in a great pit. Sebastian must have been working all night to dig it clear. Now he was leaning over the back of the truck, so uniformly covered in white dust that he was himself like a stone statue. The derrick had already been swung out over the rear of the truck. Chains were clinched around the statue’s broad belly and hooked to iron cables over the pulley. Red sticks of explosive stood near it on the sand, with detonators already in place.

  Our diesel made plenty of noise but Sebastian did not seem to hear us. He was working the engine on the back of his truck. As Will Reynolds and I jumped down from the front seat there was a chattering of gears and the scrape and clatter of chains. The statue moved a little, altering its angle. The sound of the engine growled to a deeper tone. The chains groaned, the statue tilted and began to lift.

  I understood the plastic explosive now, but it would be unnecessary. The statue was not anchored at its base. It moved infinitely slowly, but it moved, inching up from the depths. Sand fell away from it, and after a few more seconds the ponderous torso was totally visible.

  Will and I slowed our pace down the slope. There was every sign that Sebastian had matters under full control. At the same time, I marveled that he could have done so much, alone, in such a short time. The valley was perhaps a quarter of a mile long and a hundred yards across. And the white sand was everywhere, a uniform layer of unguessable depth. Judging from its general level, no more than the top of the statue’s head would have peered above it when the truck first arrived. To reach the point where the chains and tackle could be attached, Gerald Sebastian must have moved many tons of dry sand.

  When we were still twenty yards away, and while Paddy behind me was calling out to the unheeding Sebastian, I looked along the line of the valley. In my mind I saw a hundred companion statues stretched beneath the lonely desert. As I stared, some final load of sand was shed at the figure’s base. There was a faster whirring of gears, the cable moved quickly, and the whole statue was suddenly hanging in midair. Suspended on the flexible cable, the body turned. The blind, angry gaze swung to meet me, then on to survey the whole valley.

  I did not think it then, but I thought of it later. And I understood it for the first time, that simple epitaph of Tamburlaine the Great: “If I were alive, you would tremble?”

  As the swinging statue completed its turn, to look full on Gerald Sebastian, many things happened at once.

  The sky darkened and the air filled with a perfume of apple and pear blossom, one moment before the plastic explosive by the pit blew up. A flash of white fire came from it, brighter than the sun. It blinded me. When I could see again, the statue was no longer hanging from the chains. It stood on the ground, eight and a half feet high, and towered into a leaden sky. As I watched, it moved. It turned, and took one ponderous, creaking step toward Gerald Sebastian.

  He screamed and backed away, lifting his hands in front of his face. But he no longer stood on powdery desert sand. He stood on a broad avenue, at the brink of a great lake bordered by apple groves. The statue took another lumbering step forward. Gerald Sebastian seemed unable to turn and run. He backed into the lake, among the lotus flowers and lilies, until the water was to his knees. Then he himself became a statue, frozen, mouth agape.

  The face of his pursuer was hidden from me, but as it bent forward to stare into Sebastian’s eyes I heard a cruel, rumbling laugh. I ran forward across the avenue to the edge of the lake, as a great green hand reached out and down. Sebastian was lifted, slowly and effortlessly. He hung writhing in midair, the grip around his throat cutting off his new screams.

  The other hand reached forward. Sebastian’s jacket was ripped from his body. Carved jade fingers stripped from beneath his shirt a ruby ring and an engraved gold tablet, and tucked them into the statue’s buckled belt. “Xe ho chi!” growled a deep voice. The meaning was unmistakable: “Mine!”

  There was a roar of triumph. “Ang ke-hi!” Then the statue was wading into the water, still holding Gerald Sebastian in its remorseless grip. I ran after them, splashing through the blooming water-lilies. Soon I was waist-deep in the cool lake. I halted. The green colossus strode on into deepening waters, still carrying Sebastian. As his head dipped toward the surface he gave one last cry of terror and despair. The statue raised him high in the air, then plunged him under with terrible violence. He did not reappear.

  The head swung to face the shore. The blind gaze focused, found me. The wide mouth grinned in challenge.

  I turned and fled from the lake, blundering up onto the embankment with its line of fruit trees. The statue was out of the water now, striding back towards me. I ran on, to cower against the shelter of a squat gray obelisk. As my soaked clothing touched its stone base there was a second burst of white light. I became blind again, blind and terror-stricken. The statue was stalking the embankment. I could hear the clanking tread of its progress.

  Where could I hide, where could I run to? Again I tried to flee. Something was clutching me, holding me at thigh level.

  Sight returned, and with it the beginnings of sanity. I saw a stone statue before me, but it stood silent and motionless. On its belt sat a ring of ruby fire and an engraved gold tablet.

  Beyond the silent effigy I saw for one moment the faint outlines of white buildings, cool green water, and a hundred tiny sails. A freshwater wind blew on my face, filled with lotus blossoms. But in moments, that vision also faded. Superimposed on its dying image appeared once more the dry, dusty valley, deep in the sterile desert. Another few seconds, and the ghostly outline of a truck flickered back into existence, then steadied and solidified. Its chains and tackle hung free, unconnected to the ancient statue beneath the derrick.

  I stared all around me. Will Reynolds had fallen supine on the sand, face staring up at the overcast sky. Paddy was on his knees in front of me (but when had he run past me?), hands clapped over his ears. And it was Jackie, also on her knees, who was clutching me around the legs. She crouched with her face hidden against my thigh.

  I began to stagger forward, pulling free of Jackie’s grip. For Gerald Sebastian had reappeared. He was thirty yards away, face down on the loose sand. But unlike Will he was not lying motionless. He was swimming, propelling himself toward me across the level surface with laborious strokes of arms and legs, striking out for an unseen shore. His breath came in great, shuddering spasms, as though he had long been deprived of air. Perhaps he had. His mouth was below th
e surface and he was choking on sand.

  A few yards from him—unexploded and untouched—lay the sticks of red plastic.

  I knelt by his side, turning his head so that he could breathe, and found that the eyes looking into mine were empty, devoid of all thought or awareness. And as I knelt there, clearing sand from his gaping mouth, sudden bright marks touched his upturned face. I heard a pattering on the dusty desert floor.

  I stared up into the sky. In that valley, in the fiercest depths of the Takla Makan Shamo, a hundred-year event was taking place. It was raining.

  Paddy Elphinstone had seen an army of warriors, swords unsheathed, sweeping down on us from across the valley. He had known that he was about to die. Jackie saw a city, perhaps the same one I had seen, but it was writhing and collapsing in the grip of a huge earthquake, while she was sliding forward into a great abyss that opened in the surface.

  Will Reynolds, God help him, could not tell what vision had gripped him. Like Gerald Sebastian, he was elsewhere, in a mental state that permitted no communication with other humans.

  When the rain shower was over I searched that valley from end to end, looking for anything out of place. There was the quiet, dusty slope, merging into the dunes in all directions. There was the truck, just where Gerald Sebastian had left it. There was the pit with the statue at its center, rapidly filling with new sand. A ruby ring and an engraved gold tablet were attached to the buckled belt. I took two steps that way, then halted. As I watched the sand steadily covered them. In the whole valley, nothing moved but the trickling sands.

  With two terribly sick men in my charge, I had no time for more exploration. We had to leave, and I had to make a decision: would we drive north or south? In other words, would Will and Gerald receive treatment in China, or would we try to get them home through Pakistan to the United States?

  Maybe I made the wrong choice, maybe it was the cowardly choice. I elected to run for home. With me driving one truck and Paddy, shocked to sobriety, the other, we set off southwest as fast as we could go. We drove night and day, cutting our sleep down as far as we dared and keeping ourselves going on strong coffee that Jackie and I brewed by the gallon.